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ARTHUR MACHEN
ARTHUR MACHEN
A NOVELIST OF ECSTASY AND SIN
BY
VINCENT STARRETT
WITH TWO UNCOLLECTED POEMS BY
ARTHUR MACHEN
'>•,*",» -.""'> %«
CHICAGO
WALTER M. HILL
1918
As^<^f9/t.f
Of this first edition 250 copies have been printed.
This is No. A^
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CEDAR RAPIDS
IOWA
NOTE
With singular unanimity critics for thirty
years have slighted the work of Arthur Machen.
A line suffices for him in Holbrook Jackson's
''The Eighteen Nineties," and Mr. Blaikie-Mur-
doch ignores him completely in "The Renaissance
of the Nineties"; yet those are the standard
works on the period to which, chronologically,
at least, Machen belongs. Mr. Turquet-Milnes,
with greater appreciation, gives him a half-chap-
ter in his scholarly work, ''The Influence of
Baudelaire," but even that is made up largely
of quotations from "The Hill of Dreams," to
prove Machen a descendent of Baudelaire — an
error to which I subscribed until Machen him-
self disillusioned me, although the assertion is
still partially true.
Because, in my opinion, Arthur Machen is
the outstanding artist of his time, and one of the
great masters of all time, I wrote the following
paper, which first appeared in Reedy's Mirror
for October 5, 191 7. That issue is not now
obtainable, and, as calls for it continue to come
6 NOTE
to me and to the publisher, I find ground for a
belief that Machen may, at length, be coming
into his own, a tardy phenomenon which I am
happy to hasten so far as it lies within my power.
Mr. Walter M. Hill shares this feeling and this
brochure is the result.
I am indebted to Mr. William Marion Reedy
for permission to reprint those parts of the arti-
cle which appeared in his journal.
V. s.
ARTHUR MACHEN
SOME thirty odd years ago a young man of
twenty-two, the son of a Welsh clergyman,
fresh from school and with his head full of a
curiously occult mediaevalism, privately acquired
from yellowed palimpsests and dog-eared volumes
of black letter, wrote a classic. More, he had it
published. Only one review copy was sent out;
that was to Le Livre, of Paris. It fell into the
hands of Octave Uzanne, who instantly ordered
Rabelais and Boccaccio to ''shove over" on the
immortal seats and make room by their side for
the author. The book was ''The Chronicle of
Clemendy"; the author, Arthur Machen.
Three years ago, about, not long after the
great war first shook the world, a London even-
ing newspaper published inconspicuously a purely
fictional account of a supposed incident of the
British retreat from Mons. It described the
miraculous intervention of the English archers
of Agincourt at a time when the British were
sore pressed by the German hordes. Immediate-
10 ARTHUR MACHEN
ly, churchmen, spiritualists, and a host of others,
seized upon it as an authentic record and the
miracle as an omen. In the hysteria that fol-
lowed, Arthur Machen, its author, found him-
self a talked-of man, because he wrote to the
papers denying that the narrative was factual.
Later, when his little volume, ''The Bowmen
and Other Legends of the War," appeared in
print, it met with an extraordinary and rather
impertinent success.
But what had Machen been doing all those
long years between 1885 and 191 4?
In a day of haphazard fiction and rodomon-
tade criticism, the advent of a master workman
is likely to be unheralded, if, indeed, he is for-
tunate enough to find a publisher to put him
between covers. Mr. Machen is not a new-
comer, however, as we have seen; no immediate
success with a "best seller" furnishes an incentive
for a complimentary notice. He is an unknown,
in spite of ''Clemendy," in spite of "The Bow-
men," in spite of everything. For thirty years
he has been writing English prose, a period ample
for the making of a dozen reputations of the
ordinary kind, and in that time he has produced
ARTHUR MACHEN ii
just ten books. In thirty years Harold Bindloss
and Rex Beach will have written one-hundred-
and-ten books and sold the moving picture rights
of them all.
Of course, it is exactly because he does not
write books of the ordinary kind that Arthur
Machen's reputation as a writer was not made
long ago. His apotheosis will begin after his
death. The insectial fame of the ''popular"
novelist is immediate; it is born at dawn and
dies at sunset. The enduring fame of the artist
too often is born at sunset, but it is immortal.
More than Hawthorne or Tolstoy, Machen is
a novelist of the soul. He writes of a strange
borderland, lying somewhere between Dreams
and Death, peopled with shades, beings, spirits,
ghosts, men, women, souls — what shall we call
them ? — the very notion of whom stops vaguely
just short of thought. He writes of the life
Satyr-ic. For him Pan is not dead; his votaries
still whirl through woodland windings to the
mad pipe that was Syrinx, and carouse fiercely
in enchanted forest grottoes (hidden somewhere,
perhaps, in the fourth dimension!). His med-
dling with the crucibles of science is appalling
12 ARTHUR MACHEN
in its daring, its magnificence, and its horror.
Even the greater works of fictional psychology
— '*Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," if you like —
shrink before his astounding inferences and sug-
gestions.
It is his theory that the fearful and shocking
rites of the Bacchic cultus survive in this dis-
illusioned age; that Panic lechery and v^^icked-
ness did not cease with the Agony, as Mrs.
Browning and others would have us believe.
Of Hawthorne, Arthur Symons wrote: "He
is haunted by what is obscure, dangerous, and
on the confines of good and evil." Machen
crosses those perilous frontiers. He all but lifts
the veil; himself, indeed, passes beyond it. But
the curtain drops behind him and we, hesitating
to follow, see only dimly the phantasmagoria
beyond ; the ecstasies of vague shapes with a shin-
ing about them, on the one hand; on the other
the writhings of animate gargoyles. And we ex-
perience, I think, a distinct sense of gratitude
toward this terrible guide for that we are per-
mitted no closer view of the mysteries that seem
to him so clear.
We glimpse his secrets in transfiguring flashes
ARTHUR MACHEN 13
from afar, as Launcelot viewed the San Graal,
and, like that tarnished knight, we quest vainly
a tangible solution, half in apprehension, always
in glamour. But it is like Galahad we must
seek the eternal mysteries that obsess Arthur
Machen. There is no solution but in absolution,
for it is the mysteries of life and death of which
he writes, and of life-in-death and death-in-life.
This with particular reference to Machen's two
most important books, "The House of Souls"
and "The Hill of Dreams," in which he reaches
his greatest stature as a novelist of the soul.
There are those who will call him a novelist
of Sin, quibbling about a definition. With these
I have no quarrel ; the characterizations are
synonymous. His books exhale all evil and all
corruption ; yet they are as pure as the fabled
waters of that crystal spring De Leon sought.
They are pervaded by an ever-present, intoxicat-
ing sense of sin, ravishingly beautiful, furiously
Pagan, frantically lovely; but Machen is a finer
and truer mystic than the two-penny occultists
who guide modern spiritualistic thought. If we
are to subscribe to his curious philosophy, to be
discussed later, we must believe that there is no
paradox in this.
14 ARTHUR MACHEN
But something of what we are getting at is
explained in his own pages, in this opening para-
graph from his story, ''The White People," in
"The House of Souls": *' 'Sorcery and sanctity,'
said Ambrose, 'these are the only realities. Each
is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common
life.' " And, a little later, in this: " 'There is
something profoundly unnatural about sin . . .
the essence of which really is in the taking of
heaven by storm.' "
One gathers from a general vagueness on the
subject that sin is not popular in these times.
There are, of course, new sins and advanced sins
and higher sins, all of which are intensely inter-
esting. The chief puzzle to the lay mind is why
they should bear these names, since they are us-
ually neither new, advanced and high, nor par-
ticularly sinful. I am speaking of sin as an
ofifense against the nature of things, and of evil
in the soul, which has very little to do with the
sins of the statute book. Sin, according to the
same Ambrose I have quoted, is conceivable in
the talking of animals. If a chair should walk
across a room, that would be sinful, or if a tree
sat down with us to afternoon tea. The savage
ARTHUR MACHEN 15
who worships a conjurer is a far finer moralist
than the civilise who suspects him — and I use
the name moralist for one who has an apprecia-
tion of sin.
This is not the sin of the legal code. Ambrose
I conceive to be Arthur Machen. There are
only two realities; sorcery and sanctity — sin
and sainthood — and each is an ecstasy. Ar-
thur Machen^s is the former.
Perhaps his most remarkable story — certainly
I think his most terrible story, is "The Great
God Pan," at first published separately with
''The Inmost Light"; now occurring in "The
House of Souls." It is the story of an experi-
ment upon a girl, as a result of which, for a
moment, she is permitted a sight of the Great
God, beyond the veil, with shocking consequences.
Yet it is told with exquisite reticence and grace,
and with a plausibility that is as extraordinary as
it is immoral. Here is the conclusion of that
story :
"What I said Mary would see, she saw,
but I forgot that no human eyes could
look on such a vision with impunity.
And I forgot, as I have just said, that
i6 ARTHUR MACHEN
when the house of life is thus thrown
open, there may enter in that for which we
have no name, and human flesh may be-
come the veil of a horror one dare not ex-
press. . . The blackened face, the hid-
eous form upon the bed, changing and melt-
ing before your eyes from woman to man,
from man to beast, and from beast to worse
than beast, all the strange horror that you
witnessed, surprises me but little. What
you say the doctor you sent for saw and
shuddered at, I noticed long ago; I knew
what I had done the moment the child was
born, and when it was five years old I sur-
prised it, not once or twice, but several
times, with a playmate, you may guess of
what kind. . . And now Helen is with
her companions."
There is the very quintessence of horror in the
unutterable suggestion of such passages. As for
"The Hill of Dreams," I have found its read-
ing one of the most desolate and appalling ex-
periences in literature. Reading it, himself, years
after publication, its author decided that it was a
"depressing book." That is undoubtedly true,
but spiritually as well as technically it marks
to date the topmost pinnacle of his tormented
genius. It reaches heights so rarefied that
ARTHUR MACHEN 17
breathing literally becomes painful. To the
casual reader this sounds absurd ; hyperbolical
if not hypocritical rant; but in a day when a
majority of critics find it difficult to restrain
themselves in speaking of Harold Bell Wright,
and place Jeffery Farnol beside Fielding and
Thackeray, one cannot go far wrong in indulg-
ing a few enthusiasms for so genuine an artist
as Arthur Machen.
Of the reviewers into whose hands fell this
remarkable book, in the year of its publication,
1907, only one appears to have valued it at its
real worth — the editor of The Academy, who,
carried away by the tale and its telling, turned
out a bit of critical prose which might have been
lifted from the book, itself. "There is some-
thing sinister in the beauty of Mr. Machen's
book," he wrote. "It is like some strangely
shaped orchid, the colour of which is fierce and
terrible, and its perfume is haunting to suffoca-
tion by reason of its intolerable sweetness. The
cruelty of the book is more savage than any of
the cruelty which the book describes. Lucian
shuddered at the boys who were deliberately
hanging an ungainly puppy; he had thrashed the
1 8 ARTHUR MACHEN
little ruffian who kicked the sick cat, before he
wrapped himself away from the contact of such
infamy in the shelter of his own imaginings.
For in 'The Hill of Dreams' you seem to be
shown a lovely, sensitive boy who has fashioned
himself a white palace of beauty in his own
mind. He has had time only to realize its full
beauty when disease lays its cold touch upon
him, and gathers him into her grasp, until he
lies decaying and horrible, seeing his own decay
and seeing that his decay makes the white palace
foul. The boys did not chant songs as they
looped the string round the neck of the un-
couth puppy. Mr. Machen fashions prose out
of the writhings of Lucian, who is dear to him:
and his prose has the rhythmic beat of some
dreadful Oriental instrument, insistent, monot-
onous, haunting; and still the soft tone of one
careful flute sounds on, and keeps the nerves
alive to the slow and growing pain of the
rhythmic beat. Lucian in ecstacy of worship for
the young girl whose lips have given him a
new life, pressed his body against sharp thorns
until the white flesh of his body was red with
drops of blood. That, too, is the spirit of the
ARTHUR MACHEN 19
book. It is like some dreadful liturgy of self-
inflicted pain, set to measured music: and the
cadence of that music becomes intolerable by its
suave phrasing and perfect modulation. The
last long chapter with its recurring themes is a
masterpiece of prose, and in its way unique."
After that, there w^ould seem to be no need for
further comment on "The Hill of Dreams."
But there is — there is !
Quite as important as what Mr. Machen says
is his manner of saying it. He possesses an Eng-
lish prose style which in its mystical suggestion
and beauty is unlike any other I have encoun-
tered. There is ecstacy in his pages. Joris-Karl
Huysmans in a really good translation suggests
Machen better, perhaps, than another; both are
debtors to Baudelaire.^
The "ecstasy" one finds in Machen's work
(of which more anon) is due in no small de-
1 1 have let this last assertion stand as part of the
original article, although Mr. Machen writes me that
I am in error. "I never read a line of Baudelaire,"
he says, "but I have read deeply in Poe, who, I be-
lieve, derives largely from Baudelaire." Of course, it
is the other way 'round, Baudelaire derives from Poe,
but my own assumption is rendered clear. — V. S.
20 ARTHUR MACHEN
gree to his beautiful English ''style" — an
abominable word. But Machen is no mere
word-juggler. His vocabulary, while astonish-
ing and extensive, is not affectedly so. Yet his
sentences move to sonorous, half-submerged
rhythms, swooning with pagan color and redolent
of sacerdotal incense. What is the secret of this
graceful English method ? It is this : he achieves
his striking results and effects through his note-
worthy gift of selection and arrangement. I
had reached this conclusion, I think, before I
encountered a passage from "The Hill of
Dreams," which clinched it:
"Language, he understood, was chiefly
important for the beauty of its sounds, by
its possession of Avords resonant, glorious
to the ear, by its capacity, when exquisitely
arranged, of suggesting wonderful and in-
definable impressions, perhaps more ravish-
ing and further removed from the domain
of strict thought than the impressions excit-
ed by music itself. Here lay hidden the
secret of suggestion, the art of causing sen-
sation by the use of words."
Was it ever better expressed? He defines his
method and exhibits its results at the same time.
ARTHUR MACHEN 21
And dipping almost at random into the same
volume, here is a further example of the method :
"Slowly and timidly he began to untie his
boots, fumbling with the laces, and glanc-
ing all the while on every side at the ugly,
misshapen trees that hedged the lawn. Not
a branch was straight, not one was free,
but all were interlaced and grew one about
another; and just above ground, where the
cankered stems joined the protuberant roots,
there were forms that imitated the human
shape, and faces and twining limbs that
amazed him. Green mosses were hair, and
tresses were stark in grey lichen; a twisted
root swelled into a limb; in the hollows of
the rooted bark he saw the masks of
men. . . As he gazed across the turf
and into the thicket, the sunshine seemed
really to become green, and the contrast be-
tween the bright glow poured on the lawn
and the black shadows of the brake made an
odd flickering light in which all the gro-
tesque postures of stem and root began to
stir; the wood was alive. The turf be-
neath him heaved and sunk as with the deep
swell of the sea. . ."
And:
*'He could imagine a man who was able
22 ARTHUR MACHEN
to live on one sense while he pleased; to
whom, for example, every impression of
touch, taste, hearing, or seeing should be
translated into odor; who at the desired
kiss should be ravished with the scent of
dark violets, to whom music should be the
perfume of a rose garden at dawn."
This is not prose at all, but poetry, and poetry
of a high order. And it is from such beautiful
manipulation of words, phrases, and rhythms that
Machen attains his most clairvoyant and ar-
resting effects in the realms of horror, dread, and
terror; from the strange gesturings of trees, the
glow of furnace-like clouds, the somber beauty
of brooding fields, and valleys all too still, the
mystery of lovely women, and all the terror of
life and nature seen with the understanding eye.
So much for Arthur Machen as a novelist,
It is a fascinating subject, but it is also an ex-
tensive one, and the curious, tenuous quality oi
his work may lead one into indiscretions.
The peculiar philosophy of Arthur Machen is
set down in "Hieroglyphics" and in "Dr. Stig-
gins: His Views and Principles." The first
chapter of the latter work is a scathing satire on
ARTHUR MACHEN 23
certain foibles and idiosyncracies of the Ameri-
can people — such as lynching, vote-buying, and
food-adulteration — but as it is, on the whole,
a polemical volume which, by the nature of the
subjects it treats, can have less permanent in-
terest than the author's other work, it may be
put to one side; although as a specimen of
Machen's impeccable prose it must not be ig-
nored.
In ''Hieroglyphics" he returns to those ecstasies
mentioned in "The White People" and gives us
further definitions. The word ecstasy is merely
a symbol ; it has many synonyms. It means rap-
ture, adoration, a withdrawal from common life,
the other things. "Who can furnish a precise
definition of the indefinable? They (the 'other
things') are sometimes in the song of a bird,
sometimes in the whirl of a London street, some-
times hidden under a great, lonely hill. Some
of us seek them with most hope and the fullest
assurance in the sacring of the mass, others re-
ceive tidings through the sound of music, in the
color of a picture, in the shining form of a
statue, in the meditation of eternal truth."
"Hieroglyphics" is Arthur Machen's theory of
24 ARTHUR MACHEN
literature, brilliantly exposited by that "cyclical
mode of discoursing" that was affected by Cole-
ridge. In it he promulgates the admirable doc-
trine that fine literature must be, in effect, an
allegory and not the careful history of particular
persons. He seeks a mark of division which is
to separate fine literature from mere literature,
and finds the solution in the one word ecstasy
(or, if you prefer, beauty, wonder, awe, mystery,
sense of the unknown, desire for the unknown),
with this conclusion : "If ecstasy be present, then
I say there is fine literature, if it be absent,
then, in spite of all the cleverness, all the talents,
all the workmanship and observation and dex-
terity you may show me, then, I think, we have
a product (possibly a very interesting one) which
is not fine literature."
Following this reasoning, by an astonishing
sequence of arguments, he proceeds to the bold
experiment of proving "Pickwick" possessed of
ecstasy, and "Vanity Fair" lacking it. The case
is an extreme one, he admits, deliberately chosen
to expound his theory to the nth degree. The
analytical key to the test is found in the differ-
entiation between art and artifice, a nice problem
ARTHUR MACHEN 25
in such extreme instances as Poe's ''Dupin"
stories and Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde," as Mr. Machen points out. By this
ingenious method the "Odyssey," "Oedipus,"
"Morte D'Arthur," "Kubla Khan," "Don Quix-
ote," and "Rabelais" immediately are proven fine
literature ; a host of other esteemed works merely,
if you like, good literature.
"Pantagruel" by a more delicate application
of the test becomes a finer work than "Don
Quixote," and in the exposition of this dictum
we come upon one of the mountain peaks of
Machen's amazing philosophy.
He begins the discussion with a jest about the
enormous capacity for strong drink exhibited by
Mr. Pickwick and his friends, and reminds us
that it w^as the god of wine in w^hose honor
Sophocles wrote his dramas and choral songs,
who was worshipped and invoked at the Diony-
siaca; and that all the drama arose from the
celebration of the Bacchic mysteries. He goes
on to the "Gargantua" and "Pantagruel," which
reek of wine as Dickens does of brandy and
water.
The Rabelaisian history begins: ^^Grandgou-
26 ARTHUR MACHEN
sier estoit bon raillard en son temps, atmant a
boire net,'' and ends with the Oracle of the Holy
Bottle, with the word ''Trinch . . . un mot
panomphee, celebre et entendu de toutes nations,
et nous signifie, beuvez'' ''And I refer you,"
continues Machen, "to the allocution of Bacbuc,
the priestess of the Bottle, at large. 'By wine,'
she says, 'is man made divine,' and I may say
that if you have not got the key to these Rabel-
aisian riddles, much of the value — the highest
value — of the book is lost to you."
Seeking the meaning of this Bacchic cultus,
this apparent glorification of drunkenness in all
lands and in all times, from Ancient Greece
through Renascent France to Victorian England,
by peoples and persons not themselves given to
excess, he finds it again in the word ecstasy.
"We are to conclude that both the ancient
people and the modern writers recognized
ecstasy as the supreme gift and state of man,
and that they chose the Vine and the juice
of the Vine, as the most beautiful and sig-
nificant symbol of that Power which with-
draws a man from the common life and the
common consciousness, and taking him
from the dust of earth, sets him in high
ARTHUR MACHEN 27
places, in the eternal world of Ideas.
Let us never forget that the essence of the
book (Tantagruer) is in its splendid cele-
bration of ecstasy, under the figure of the
Vine."
At this point Mr. Machen places the "key"
in our hands and declines further to reveal his
secrets. In Mr. Pickwick's overdose of milk
punch we are to find, ultimately, *'a clue to the
labyrinth of mystic theology."
By his own test we are enabled to place Ar-
thur Machen's greatest works on the shelf with
''Don Quixote" and "Pantagrucl" ; by his own
test we find the ecstasy of which he speaks in his
own pages, under the symbol of the Vine, and
under figures even more beautiful and terrible.
For minor consideration he finds in Rabelais an-
other symbolism of ecstasy:
"The shape of gauloiserie, of gross, exu-
berant gaiety, expressing itself by outra-
geous tales, outrageous words, by a very cat-
aract of obscenity, if you please, if only you
will notice how the obscenity of Rabelais
transcends the obscenity of common life;
his grossness is poured out in a sort of mad
torrent, in a frenzy, a very passion of the
unspeakable."
28 ARTHUR MACHEN
In Cervantes he finds the greater deftness, the
finer artifice, but he believes the conception of
Rabelais the higher because it is the more re-
mote. Pantagruel's ^'rnore than frankness, its
ebullition of grossness ... is either the
merest lunacy, or else it is sublime." And the
paragraph that succeeds this one in the book, per-
haps it is part of the same paragraph, sums up
this astonishing philosophy with a conclusion cal-
culated to shock the Puritanic. Thus:
"Don't you perceive that when a certain
depth has been passed you begin to ascend
into the heights? The Persian poet ex-
presses the most transcendental secrets of the
Divine Love by the grossest phrases of the
carnal love ; so Rabelais soars above the com-
mon life, above the streets and the gutter,
by going far lower than the streets and the
gutter: he brings before you the highest by
positing that which is lower than the low-
est, and if you have the prepared, initiated
mind, a Rabelaisian 'list' is the best preface
to the angelic song. ( ! ) All this may
strike you as extreme paradox, but it has
the disadvantage of being true, and per-
haps you may assure yourself of its truth by
recollecting the converse proposition — that
it is when one is absorbed in the highest
ARTHUR MACHEN 29
emotions that the most degrading images will
intrude themselves."
And so on. . . The sense of the futility
almost of attempting to explain Machen be-
comes more pronounced as I progress. You will
have to read him. You will find his books (if
you are fortunate) in a murky corner of some
obscure second-hand bookshop.
Arthur Machen was born in Wales in 1863.
He is married and has two children. That is
an astonishing thought, after reading ''The In-
most Light." It is surprising indeed to learn
that he was borii. He is High Church, "with
no particular respect for the Archbishop of Can-
terbury," and necessarily subconsciously Catholic,
as must be all those "lonely, awful souls" who
write ecstasy across the world. He hates puri-
tanism with a sturdier hatred than inspires Ches-
terton; for a brilliant exposition of this aversion
I commend readers to his mocking introduction
to "The House of Souls." That work, "The
Hill of Dreams," and "Hieroglyphics" were
written between 1890 and 1900, after which
their author turned strolling player and alter-
nated for a time between the smartest theatres
30 ARTHUR MACHEN
in London and the shabbiest music halls in Lon-
don's East End. For the last six years or so he
has been a descriptive writer on the London
EveniJig News.
His works not before mentioned comprise a
translation (the best) of the *'Heptameron" ;
''Fantastic Tales," a collection of mediaeval
whimsies, partly translated and partly original
and altogether Rabelaisian and delightful; "The
Terror," a ''shilling shocker" (his own charac-
terization), but a finer work withal than most
of the "literature" of the day, and "The Great
Return," an extraordinary short tale which may
find place some day in another such collection as
"The House of Souls."
I have mentioned "The Chronicle of Clemen-
dy," calling it a classic, and something further
should be said about that astonishing book. It
is the Welsh "Heptameron," a chronicle of
amorous intrigue, joyous drunkenness, and knight-
ly endeavor second to none in the brief muster
of the world's greatest classics. In it there is
the veritable flavour of mediaeval record. Some-
what less outspoken than Balzac in his "Droll
Stories," and less verbose than Boccaccio, Machen
proves himself the peer of either in gay, irre-
ARTHUR MACHEN 31
sponsible, diverting, unflagging invention, while
his diction is lovelier than that of any of his
forerunners, including the nameless authors of
those rich Arabian tapestries w^hich w^ere the
parent tales of all mediaeval and modern facetiae.
The day is coming w^hen a number of serious
charges will be laid against us who live in this
generation, and some severe questions asked, and
the fact that we will be dead, most of us, when
the future fires its broadside, has nothing at all
to do with the case.
We are going to be asked, post-mortem, why
we allowed Ambrose Bierce to vanish from our
midst, unnoticed and unsought, after ignoring
him shamefully throughout his career; why
Stephen Crane, after a few flamboyant reviews,
was so quickly forgotten at death; why Richard
Middleton was permitted to swallow his poison
at Brussels; why W. C. Morrow and Walter
Blackburn Harte were in our day known only to
the initiated, discriminating few; their fine, gold-
en books merely rare "items" for the collector.
Among other things, posterity is going to demand
of us why, when the opportunity was ours, we
did not open our hearts to Arthur Machen and
name him among the very great.
THE REMEMBRANCE OF THE BARD
In the darkness of old age let not my memory
fail:
Let me not forget to celebrate the beloved land
of Gwent.
If they imprison me in a deep place, in a house
of pestilence,
Still shall I be free, remembering the sunshine
upon Mynydd Maen.
There have I listened to the song of the lark,
my soul has ascended v\^ith the song of the
little bird:
The great white clouds were the ships of my
spirit, sailing to the haven of the Almighty.
Equally to be held in honour is the site of the
Great Mountain.
Adorned with the gushing of many waters —
sweet is the shade of its hazel thickets.
There a treasure is preserved which I will not
celebrate ;
It is glorious and deeply concealed.
ARTHUR MACHEN 33
If Teils should return, if happiness were restored
to the Cymri,
Dewi and Dyfrig should serve his Mass; then a
great marvel would be made visible.
blessed and miraculous work! then should my
bliss be as the joy of angels.
1 had rather behold this offering than kiss the
twin lips of dark Gwenllian.
Dear my land of Gwent: O quam dtlecta taber-
nacula.
Thy rivers are like precious golden streams of
Paradise, thy hills are as the Mount Syon.
Better a grave on Twyn Barlwm than a throne
in the palace of the Saxons at Caer-Ludd.
Arthur Machen
THE PRAISE OF MYFANWY
O gift of the everlasting:
wonderful and hidden mystery.
Many secrets have been vouchsafed to me,
1 have been long acquainted with the wisdom
of the trees;
Ash and oak and elm have communicated to me
from my boyhood,
The birch and the hazel and all the trees of
the greenwood have not been dumb.
There is a caldron rimmed with pearls of whose
gifts I am not ignorant;
I will speak little of it; its treasures are known
to the Bards.
Many went on the search of Caer-Pedryfan,
Seven alone returned with Arthur, but my spirit
was present.
Seven are the apple-trees in a beautiful orchard;
I have eaten of their fruit which is not bestowed
on Saxons.
I am not ignorant of a Head which is glorious
and venerable;
It made perpetual entertainment for the war-
riors, their joys would have been immortal;
ARTHUR MACHEN 35
If they had not opened the door of the south,
they would have feasted for ever,
Listening to the song of the fairy Birds of
Rhiannon.
Let not anyone instruct me concerning the Glassy
Isle ;
In the garments of the saints who returned from
it were rich odours of Paradise.
All this I knew, and yet my knowledge was
ignorance.
For one day, as I walked by Caer-rhiu in the
principal forest of Gwent,
I saw golden Myfanwy as she bathed in the
brook Tarogi,
Her hair flowed about her; Arthur's crown had
dissolved into a shining mist.
I gazed into her blue eyes as it were into twin
heavens,
All the parts of her body were adornments and
miracles.
O gift of the everlasting:
O wonderful and hidden mystery:
When I embraced Myfanwy a moment became
immortality.
Arthur Machen
