BOOKS AND WRITERS
IN his Hill of Dreams, an early novel, Machen tells the story of one Lucian Taylor, of his genius, of his garret-starvation, - of his hallucinated walks through the streets of London and of his death through an overdose of laudanum. His hero is a smudgy enough figure, and would have no life in him at all were it not clear, from a hundred coincidences of place and detail, that he is in fact a self-portrait, conventionalised to suit the ninetyish fashion and toned to the background.of the day, on which the lilies of art are somewhat monotonously twined with the poppies of some vice unspecified. Yet even in the slough of his Yellow Book discipleship Machen had moments of self-criticism. One of these is recorded in The Hill of Dreams itself. Lucian Taylor has sent his masterpiece of laboured prose to a rascally publisher, who has rejected it. Some months later, however, he recognises, in a story under this same publisher's imprint, his own work amended and ex- panded by an old literary hand by the name of Ritson ; and, to his surprise, he discovers that the parts which Ritson has added are often very good ; " spoilt here and there for some tlistes by the cataloguing method, a somewhat materialistic way of taking an inventory of the holy country things ; but, for that very reason, contrasting to great advantage with Lucian's hints and dreams and note of haunting."
Now the great virtue of Machen's Far ofi Things and Things Near and Far—written twenty years after The Hill of Dreams, and now reprinted in a single volume as The Autobiography of Arthur Machen*—is that it is the product of a Ritson-Taylor collaboration. Both sides of Machen's talent are here fused for the first and last time in his career as a writer, and the architect of this fusion was the enlightened editor of the Evening News, on which Machen was employed for many of his middle years, and who asked him to write his literary reminiscences for the paper. What he produced was, in the words of Morchard Bishop, who introduces the present reprint, " a picture, fresh, precise, timeless." The influences of Oscar Wilde and Alfred Harmsworth had come to preside jointly over a book which may well find a permanent place on the shelf of minor English classics.
Machen was born at Newport, Monmouth, in 1863. His father, an impecunious clergyman, was unable to send him to the university, A i and in the loneliness of a remote and desolate hill-country which half-fascinated and half-frightened him, the boy dedicated himself to the goddess of art, a divinity whom he quickly came to identify with the degenerate Venus of the Roman' legions which had once been quartered at Isca Silurum, close to his own home. Like his character Lucian Taylor he " took all obsolescence for his pro- vince." He haunted the ancient sites of the country, which he writes of under its old name of Gwent, and when he went up to London to take a job he almost immediately threw it up and retired to a series of lodging-houses in which to write. " In the spirit," he says of Taylor, " he made a singular study of corruption," and certainly there is a period nastiness about The Great God Pan, the only considerable success of his early years. But the chief shortcoming of the young Arthur Machen is that, although he devoted himself to the art of writing, he had very little experience to express ; the result is a contrived prose that fails even within its own convention by relying too heavily on a few evocative adjectives, of which "fairy " is the most unfortunate.
But there was all the time another Arthur Machen who took no part in his writing and whose favourite books were Rabelais, Don Quixote and Humphrey Clinker, a querulous, lively, convivial fellow with a fund of dubious scholarship, a keen eye for landscape and a wry pleasure in the quirks of character and roguery he found in his fellow men. This second Machen did not become dominant until, at 39, with his little family inheritance exhausted, he abandoned his prolonged apprenticeship to the writing of studied prose to tour with the Benson company in minor Shakespearean parts. From the stage to journalism was a step from a profession Machen respected to one that he despised. Yet if he had learned the art of direct ;writing somewhat earlier, if he had visualised a public fascinated neither by black magic nor by curiously disguised fantasies, who did not see the brass lamps swinging outside pubs as so many 1." infernal thuribles," he would have - given us more writing as good as the autobiography. Here we are very far from the lurid prose of The Hill of Dreams. The medium which Machen evolved in his fifties is capable of • 4 The Autobiography of Arthur Machen. With an introduction by Magazine Post) Id. Atforchard Bishop. (Richards Press. 15s.) infinite variations ; with it he can convey a clear sense of the past, throw up a telling detail without overstressing it, pass from a curious digression on the subject of alchemy to a nostalgic grumbli against the shoddy age in which he wrote, turn from there to a reminiscence of London in the 'eighties, and then to a description of that Monmouth country which inspires the very finest passages in the book.
" On the one side, then, the steep dark ascent of St. Julian's Wood ; on the other the swift fall of the bank to the yellow river, where, likely enough, there would be a man in a coracle fishing for salmon. And then there came a certain turn, where suddenly one saw the long, great wall of the mountain in the west, and the high dome of Twyn Barlwm, a prehistoric tumulus ; and down below, an island in the green meadows by the river, the little white Caerleon, shining in the sun. There is a grey wall on one side of it, a very old and mouldering wall to look at, and indeed it is old enough, for it is all that remains of the Roman wall of Isca Silurum, headquarters of the Second Augustan Legion. " But there white in the sun of some summer afternoon of fifty years ago or so, Caerleon still stands for me shining, beautiful, a little white city in a dream, with the white road coming down the hill from Newport, down out of St. Julian's Wood, and so to the level river meadows, and so winding in a curve and coming to the town over the bridge."
That vision of the place where he was born Machen had been trying in vain to write down through -all the years of his yellow- bookishness. Lucian Taylor would po doubt have found him somewhat materialistic in his - way of " taking an inventory of the holy country things." But this is one of the best pieces of auto- biographical writing of the century, a book in the tradition of de Quincey yet with a crispness of outline all its own. Machen touches on all the Edwardian themes ; he celebrates food and wine, the country of Touraine and the Fleet Street taverns ; he speculates with the theosophists and curses the radicals ; yet always with a difference. For he is at heart a regionalist, an inhabitant of the Silurian border with the blood of the last legions in his veins.
J. M. ConEtt.
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