The professor devotes a full page to Machen, which is not at all bad, and well above the average, for lesser late Victorians! Machen’s great fault, the professor finds, is that he is not a story-teller, he has not taught himself the craft. He has little sense of the creation of character and his own life is, obviously, very narrow. As an essayist, however, concedes the Professor, Machen is often a bringer of delight. The Hill of Dreams, on the other hand, is saved from futility only by some good writing. So sayeth Professor Weygandt.
Wagenknecht, in his Cavalcade of the English Novel, is much more to my taste than the austere professor. He introduces Machen as “one of the most remarkable examples of sustained devotion to creative work in literary history.” He finds that Machen reveals a gift for breathless narrative to match LeFanu’s, but he feels that this quality is lacking in the book generally regarded as Machen’s masterpiece—The Hill of Dreams. Nevertheless, Wagenknecht considers Machen “important,” he rates him with Blackwood and de la Mare, and has included Machen’s The Terror in his collection Six Novels of the Supernatural published a few years ago by Viking.
3
The student of Machen is not content to have read everything Machen has ever written (and there are few who have), he must also read everything that has ever been written about Arthur Machen. He may begin, naturally enough, with a study of the period in which Machen first appears. There have been quite a few books written about the Nineties, these unaccountably yield but little material on Machen. Richard LeGallienne, Holbrook Jackson and Osburt Burdett, whose studies of that period are very carefully written and copiously annotated, scarcely mention Machen at all.
One then moves on to memoirs and biographies of the men who lived and wrote in this period, and even consults the critical studies on the whole vast subject of English literature. One picks up dozens of such books and soon develops the habit of examining them from the back cover forward, for a glance at the index reveals whether the book is worth while, from this viewpoint, or not. Too often one finds mention of Macaulay, Lord; MacCarthy, Desmond; MacLeod, Fiona; even Mackenzie, Compton—but few are the mentions of Machen.
One finds too that the index of a book can be a very revealing thing indeed. We have before us, for example, the memoirs of a Literary Figure of, let us say, the 1890’s and the early 1900’s. The index indicates that our man knew everyone worth knowing. We find Shaw and More, Shelley and Kelley, Shakespeare, Rossetti and Donne, Keats and Yeats, Whistler and Wilde, Moore and Hardy and a generous sprinkling of the nobility. It would seem, from the index, that our man lived a very full and eventful life, that he was close, as they say, to the heart of things.
The book itself is rather likely to be pretty dull stuff—mostly about our man’s preoccupation with his public school and his dislike of games, the amazing and discouraging tenacity with which his great aunt in Bath clung to life, the duplicity of publishers and the simply astonishing things that can and do befall an Englishman in Naples, Nice or Florence. Throughout the book, however, one encounters reports of what Whistler said to Pennell or Pater or both; what G.B.S. wrote to the brash American journalist and how Lord Lymph responded to a quip tossed out by Lord Lissom. Hence the index. One can only conclude that reviewers, and possibly publishers, read the index more carefully than the book itself.
Occasionally, however, the slow unrewarding progress through the shelves of the public library does yield a choice bit or two and these, be it noted, more frequently in books by Americans than by Englishmen.
Mr. Grant Richards who wrote in 1895 to Arthur Machen asking if he had anything he would care to have published, has written at least two books of his experiences as one of England’s most enterprising publishers. Neither of them contained a single mention of Arthur Machen although Richards published several of Machen’s books, and at a time when Machen’s name was certainly an asset to any publisher’s list.
The index of Richards’ book about A. E. Housman (Oxford, 1942) arouses hope. There are three references to Machen. The first of these is contained in a letter from Housman to Richards. The context, in full, follows: “I don’t think Machen ought to drink port on the top of Burgundy.” One may wonder, one is tantalized, by the implications of that brief note. Does it imply that Machen did drink port on top of Burgundy—or that he merely contemplated doing so or sought advice on the advisability. If he did, were the results memorable, and in what respect? Does it imply that Housman is a purist in these matters? A Tory in tippling? Does it hint at “an incident”?