Another reference is even more brief and profoundly unimportant. “We know too that Housman read Arthur Machen and Frederick Baron Corvo.” The most significant entry is this, from another Housman letter: “Thanks to you, I believe I possess Machen’s complete works. He is always interesting (except in the Evening News) and to some extent good. Mixing up religion and sexuality is not a thing I am fond of, and in this book the Welsh element rather annoys me. The imitation of Rabelais is very clever.”
We know, at any rate, that Housman read Machen, quite a bit of him. He was not fond of the Welsh, nor of mixing religion and sexuality nor, for that matter, of mixing port and burgundy.
What we would like most to know from Mr. Richards, I think, is why it took him ten years to change his mind about The Hill of Dreams, and why he changed it when he did. Of this, unfortunately, we have no hint.
The Machen revival of the Twenties lasted through to the end of the decade and, to some, to the end of an era. Machen appeared at rare intervals in public life, preferring the countryside of Wales and the company of his friends, a great many of them Americans. Paul Jordan-Smith and Robert Hillyer and Montgomery Evans have given us sketches of Machen through this period. For the most part, however, his work was done. In the early Thirties Machen wrote a novel, The Green Round. It has not yet been published in this country nor is it very well known. Machen says it is “sorry stuff.” As for Tom O’Bedlam, it was an essay “written to order of an American.” Machen never saw the book in print.
In 1936 there was a brief revival of interest in Machen occasioned by the publication of two collections of his stories and essays. Hutchinson brought out The Children of the Pool in which there appeared seven stories not previously collected. Rich and Cowan brought out a collection called The Cosy Room, consisting of essays and stories collected over a period from the late 1880’s to the late 1920’s. Each of the pieces included in this collection is given a date—apparently the year in which it was written. Some of the dates supplied, presumably by Machen, give rise to bibliographical speculation. Most of these pieces had been published elsewhere although some of them, obviously “the wreckage of discarded and abandoned books,” appeared in print for the first time.
The dust-jacket of Hutchinson’s Children of the Pool carried an “Appreciation” of Machen, one of the finest and most admirable I have ever encountered. To find it on, of all places, a dust-jacket! This is no publisher’s blurb but an analysis that deserves to be included in this or any book about Machen. The author of the following tribute is unknown, to me at least: “Mr. Machen creates his own world. This world is a fusion of the world that is accepted in every day reality—in which events and their causes are explicable by traditional and humdrum interpretations—and one that is distinguished not only by the weird and extraordinary effects. The author does not try to present a state of affairs so topsy-turvy and bizarre that you are intrigued merely by its very madness. The supernatural insinuates itself subtly into these stories. They have an air of common reality until the author develops their mystical undercurrents. And in this blending Mr. Machen’s art is supreme. It has an infinite capacity for producing what E. J. O’Brien describes as “a willing suspension of disbelief” [this fine phrase has also been attributed to Dr. Canby, Bennet Cerf and, of course, Samuel Taylor Coleridge]. That Mr. Machen’s faculty in this direction can extend beyond the circle of sympathetic readers and convince masses has been proved by the fact that his imaginative treatment of a very famous occasion was accepted by thousands of men and women as literal description. These stories offer varied excursions into realms simultaneously unfathomable and alluring, and on that account alone they are memorable. But there is also Mr. Machen’s craftsmanship, and his style which is a delight to read. A character in the book says: ‘A man must know the grammar of his business, whatever it is; the rest, if it is to be the first order, must be the work of the hidden flame within.’”
Now and then Machen did an introduction or preface for a book or collection, none of them are of particular importance as Machen “items.” In 1937 Hutchinson brought out Philip Sergeant’s Witches and Warlocks with a preface by Machen. The book was, according to the publisher, suggested to Sergeant by his old friend Arthur Machen. In his introduction Machen quotes some of the theories expressed in The White People and The Great God Pan. He hints, in other words, and in justification of his friend’s labours, that there are more things in heaven and earth than mere hawks and handsaws.
4
In the years since the publication of the “yellow books” by Knopf and the attendant enthusiasm for his works, Arthur Machen has been very little in the public eye. The Machen vogue of the 1920’s seemed to exhaust itself almost as soon as the Knopf editions were exhausted. The Caerleon Edition, published in 1923 by Seeker in London, quickly disappeared, and we entered once again upon a lengthy period of “neglect”.