Literary Forbears of Arthur Machen

[Extollager]

Arthur Machen, commonly called a horror writer and mystic, will need no introduction, for many Chronsfolk.

Herewith I invite discussion of the following authors, seen as writers from whose works Arthur Machen drew nourishment. If necessary I will just talk to myself here, but I hope very much that some others will join me.

Sir Thomas Browne, author of Religio Medici and other books of curious intellection and rich prose; there is a handy Penguin Classics gathering of Browne's writings, edited by C. A. Patrides in 1977, and I'm sure much of Brown is available online at no cost

Dr. Samuel Johnson, essayist, editor, poet, conversationalist

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet and polymath; one must read the five autobiographical letters to Tom Poole and the "Theory of Life" essay

Thomas de Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater, "The English Mail-Coach," "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth," etc.

Coventry Patmore, Victorian poet, essayist, and reactionary

Patmore is best known as author of The Angel in the House, a poetic sequence about courtship and married love, but his shorter poems, as found in The Unknown Eros, and his aperçus in The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, plus his essays in Courage in Politics, Religio Poetæ, and Principle in Art will commend themselves to the Machenian inquirer. Patmore's essay on "The Point of Rest in Art" is, I think, the key to Tom Bombadil.

I don't suppose it will be necessary for everyone to read the same things at the same time. As people (I hope the plural shall be justified) share their findings, others will want to read the sources for themselves.

Poe and Hawthorne are also important for Machen.

However -- for my part, I propose to read or reread soon Browne's Religio Medici, the Coleridge letters (below), and some Patmore.

These will be tonic for the soul.

Samuel Johnson's short Life of Sir Thomas Browne:
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/browne_bio/jlife.html

Coleridge Letter 1:
Coleridge's Letters, No.174
Letter 2:
Coleridge's Letters, No.179
Letter 3:
Coleridge's Letters, No.208
Letter 4:
Coleridge's Letters, No.210
Letter 5:
Coleridge's Letters, No.234

Patmore's "Point of Rest"
https://archive.org/details/principleinarte02patmgoog

 

[Extollager]

I read again Dr. Johnson's little biography/critique of Sir Thomas Browne (link in previous message). Johnson quotes Browne on himself: "His life has been a miracle of thirty years; which to relate, were not history but a piece of poetry, and would sound like a fable."

It seems to me that Machen quoted that somewhere -- I wonder if that was in the London Adventure. One could discuss whether Machen didn't think that, rightly perceived, something like that statement could and should be said of many or all people.

Coming up soon (I propose), something on those five autobiographical letters written by the young Coleridge, who in one of them tells how his father acclimated the boy to "the Vast."

(not an illustration, but relevant)

 

[Extollager]

STC's father was a pastor and schoolmaster, 1770s. From Coleridge's 4th autobiographical letter:

My Father (who had so little of parental ambition in him, that he had destined his children to be Blacksmiths &c, & had accomplished his intention but for my Mother's pride & spirit of aggrandizing her family) my father had however resolved, that I should be a Parson. I read every book that came in my way without distinction -- and my father was fond of me, & used to take me on his knee, and hold long conversations with me. I remember, that at eight years old I walked with him one winter evening from a farmer's house, a mile from Ottery ---- & he told me the names of the stars -- and how Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world -- and that the other twinkling stars were Suns that had worlds rolling round them -- & when I came home, he shewed me how they rolled round -- / . I heard him with a profound delight & admiration; but without the least mixture of wonder or incredulity. For from my early reading of Faery Tales, & Genii &c &c -- my mind had been habituated to the Vast ---- & I never regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions not by my sight -- even at that age. Should children be permitted to read Romances, & Relations of Giants & Magicians, & Genii? ---- I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative. -- I know no other way of giving the mind a love of 'the Great', & 'the Whole'. -- Those who have been led to the same truths step by step thro' the constant testimony of their senses, seem to me to want a sense which I possess -- They contemplate nothing but parts -- and all parts are necessarily little -- and the Universe to them is but a mass of little things. 1 -- It is true, that the mind may become credulous & prone to superstition by the former method -- but are not the Experimentalists credulous even to madness in believing any absurdity, rather than believe the grandest truths, if they have not the testimony of their own senses in their favor? -- I have known some who have been rationally educated, as it is styled. They were marked by a microscopic acuteness; but when they looked at great things, all became a blank & they saw nothing -- and denied (very illogically) that any thing could be seen; and uniformly put the negation of a power for the possession of a power -- & called the want of imagination Judgment, & the never being moved to Rapture Philosophy!

----I relish the juxtaposition of astronomy and fantastic tales in this passage as STC describes his youthful imaginative development. The bringing together of astronomy and the Arabian Nights reminds me of Lovecraft's boyhood (but I admit I rank STC higher than HPL).

 

[Extollager]

The fifth of those five Coleridge letters takes us up to the time that STC was a boy at Christ's Hospital in London -- about which Charles lamb wrote a famous essay (the third essay at the link below); and surely Lamb was important to the Machen who collected his own essays in Dog and Duck, with pieces on the bygone era of London fogs and so on.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10343/10343-8.txt

Next here: something about Patmore's essay "Ancient and Modern Ideas of Purity" from Religio Poetæ.

http://books.google.com/books?id=L4AqAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA102&lpg=PA102&dq=patmore+%22ancient+and+modern+ideas+of+purity%22&source=bl&ots=w557HbRoev&sig=YEpc048UiSvIzSXO94EUaHKLAic&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KcQ5U5m7N8X02QXV9YGgCQ&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=patmore%20%22ancient%20and%20modern%20ideas%20of%20purity%22&f=false

This essay is the source of the anecdote of the young lady, brought up in an English convent school, who, hearing her father praise marriage, exclaimed, "Why, papa, I thought that marriage was rather a wicked sacrament!" -- I can hardly doubt that Machen, author of A Fragment of Life, had read that, or that he relished it when he did read it.

 

[SevenStars]

Forgive my lack of knowledge, I am wondering if you would consider posting a brief synopsis of the life and important works of Arthur Machen?

I must confess that apart from reading The Great God Pan a long time ago, I am unfamiliar with any more of his work.

What caught my attention about this post was the mention of the great and wonderful STC. What was his influence on Machen? Were his poetic years influential, his later years as critic and philosopher, or the man himself in general terms?

Coleridge has always been one of my literary heroes and I find him utterly fascinating. Kubla Khan and Frost At Midnight are my favourite Coleridgean poems.

 

[Extollager]

SevenStars, Arthur Machen (1863-1947) wrote his best-known weird fiction, such as The Great God Pan, relatively early in his writing career, during the years when he was struggling to establish himself as a London-based writer (he was born in rural Wales) and to clarify for himself his own literary ideals. After a period as a member of an itinerant Shakespearean troop, he became basically a hack writer for newspapers in order to support himself and his family. My impression is that there were many newspaper articles by Machen published probably anonymously and that no one has tried to locate and reprint. In the 1920s something of a Machen fad occurred, especially in America, with his earlier work being praised and reprinted, at least one novel (the not good Secret Glory) being published many years after it was written, and with Machen writing some autobiographical works that, for readers like me, are favorites. He wrote Far-Off Things, Things Near and Far, and, as a sort of pendant, The London Adventure. He wrote also, relatively late in his career, some workmanlike stories of the macabre, and one of my favorites of his stories, the visionary "N." He wrote many essays and introductions, and one full-length book of literary theory, Hieroglyphics. A number of his essays are polemical, but his effectiveness in this vein is sometimes compromised by self-indulgence.

You might try "A Fragment of Life," "Out of the Earth," "N," and Far-Off Things.

I would think that all sides of Coleridge mentioned by you could have mattered to Machen: certainly the poet; as for the literary criticism and philosophy, I suppose that Machen would have appreciated things that STC had to say, but he might have connected with it second-hand. In some instances where Machen could seem to be showing the influence of Coleridge, he might be reflecting rather an author who was ready by STC too -- e.g. they both had some acquaintance with the writings of Jakob Boehme and his English disciple William Law, etc.

Thanks for identifying yourself as an admirer of STC! He's a great one, in more than one way.

Link to A Fragment of Life:

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/machen/arthur/fragment-of-life/

Link to Out of the Earth:

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/machen/arthur/out-of-the-earth/

Link to N:

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/machen/arthur/n/

Here's Far-Off Things:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35153/35153-h/35153-h.htm

 

[Extollager]

I read Patmore's "Ancient and Modern Ideas of Purity," as mentioned and linked above. It's only half a dozen paragraphs and I hope some Chronsfolk will ponder it. I am certain that Machen would have strongly affirmed this essay.

I think, too, that it may give a clue for the interpretation of Machen's "Great God Pan." Note in particular the third and sixth paragraphs of Patmore's essay, then consider the violations evidently conducted, or sponsored, by Helen Vaughan in the Machen story.

Machen was not a prude, but nor did he intend to spoil his story by a prosaic exposition of its meaning. If many readers didn't perceive, or only partially perceived, his meaning, so be it. It may have been misread in one way by the late Victorians, in another by critics today.

Next I may comment on "Love and Poetry," also in Religio Poetæ, where we find "Let not my heart forget the things my eyes have seen" quoted -- cf. Machen's saying "Let us not forget in the darkness what we have known in the light."

 

[Extollager]

...Yes, I think Patmore's "Love and Poetry" is relevant to Machenian studies, but I'd say the "Ideas of Purity" one is more obviously germane.

PS to SevenStars -- you'll find some references to Coleridge in the Note at the beginning of Machen's Hieroglyphics --

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40241/40241-h/40241-h.htm

 

[SevenStars]

Extollager thank you so much for the Machen references.

I'm going to have to dip back into my Coleridgean files to refresh myself with his essays, theories, letters. I found him terribly exciting as a writer, philosopher and thinker.

What fascinated me when I studied him as an undergraduate was the evolution of his theory of imagination. It is amazing how he and Wordsworth concurred on such matters at a point, it is even more astounding how quickly and radically Coleridge moved away from this and expressed his own theories of imagination and poetics. As I recall, (please correct me as necessary as my engagement with Coleridge over recent times has been purely for the pleasure of reading his poetry), his original understanding of imagination and fancy followed a neoclassical route. Again, I'm working from memory here; but I think that little hints of his dissatisfaction with such explanations became apparent in a letter to a John Wickstead or Wicksteed (memory fails me), these became more visible in the Slave Trade lecture which contained glimpses of what would become his theory of Primary Imagination. I hope to discuss these theories further once I have re-familiarised myself with the details - if that would be appropriate on this thread? Perhaps you would let me know your thoughts on that.


The 4th autobiographical letter to Thomas Poole that you mentioned was, in my opinion, a most beautiful piece of writing. The imagery of planets, stars and fairytales captured my imagination immediately and drew me further into study of this man of many talents.

I digress back to the Wordsworth connection here. Please excuse my wanderings, there is so much to consider with STC and I am finding random thoughts jumping into my mind. As an undergraduate, my explanation of the difference between the two was simply this; if they were both asked to write a poem about death / burial, Wordsworth might have sat in the graveyard whereas Coleridge would have asked to be buried alive for as long a possible to actually experience - as near as is possible - the sensations associated with death and its rituals. I might add at this point on a more personal note that my undergraduate thesis was concerned with the spiritual, theological aspects and imagination associated with the theory of Womanism and was actually inspired by Coleridge, a story for another day perhaps.

 

[Extollager]

Next I may comment on "Love and Poetry," also in Religio Poetæ, where we find "Let not my heart forget the things my eyes have seen" quoted -- cf. Machen's saying "Let us not forget in the darkness what we have known in the light."

I misremembered. In Machen's Things Near and Far (Chapter IX), he says:

--As Coventry Patmore says, quoting from an earlier writer: "Let us not deny in the darkness that which we have known in the light."--

This ninth chapter is the one in which Machen tells of his experience of "many days" of bliss. His description much reminds me of the testimony of a friend who lives in south Australia, with one, at least, important difference. Machen made "an experiment" during a time of grief (I think, probably after his first wife's death). My friend's experience came upon him all of a sudden while he was walking around a Sydney shopping district.

I think he would resonate with what Machen says earlier, of another unusual experience:

--This is all wonderful? I suppose that it is; but let me here say firmly that I consider an act of kindness to a wretched mangy kitten to be much more important.--

 

[Extollager]

I'm going to have to dip back into my Coleridgean files to refresh myself with his essays, theories, letters. I found him terribly exciting as a writer, philosopher and thinker.

I hope that you will and that you'll tell us about your findings.

I'm rusty on my STC except for the Rime, Christabel, Kubla Khan, etc.

Have you read E. F. Schumacher's A Guide for the Perplexed, perhaps? This little book seemed to me to have affinities with some of STC's thought.

I should reread a rich book I read over 25 years ago, Owen Barfield's What Coleridge Thought.

Any chance you'd like to have a go at STC's Theory of Life?

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24346/24346-h/24346-h.html

I think it would be worthwhile for the admirer of Coleridge and the Machen fan to read some William Law (1686-1761), too. Machen refers to Law in that wonderful story "N" and perhaps also in the late "novel" The Green Round, which the prolific S. T. Joshi describes as "a drearily verbose and unfocussed rehashing of old themes." For myself, it is a book to return to every few years for refreshment.

And -- Machen refers to Robert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights. Has anyone here read that? I may have read some of the stories, but not all. Could be a worthwhile book to take up!

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/839

 

[j d worthington]

I did read the New Arabian Nights, back in junior high school, though I fear I remember absolutely nothing about them. (Fat lot of help that is, ain't it....)

SevenStars: I think I would also add a couple to Extollager's list: The famed "The White People", "The Shining Pyramid", and the quirky, uneven episodic novel The Three Impostors.

Dale: Anent The Secret Glory -- have you read the Tartarus Press edition of this one? I've not got around to it yet, though I do own it; but my understanding is that it includes material Machen chose to leave out of the original, and which makes a considerable difference in the structure and resolution (if the original could be said to have such) of the book....

 

[Extollager]

SevenStars, you asked about Machen references to Coleridge -- another is in Far-Off Things, where Machen writes that Coleridge and de Quincey were "two main agents of the 'renascence of wonder' at the beginning of the nineteenth century."

Coming up soon, I propose to say something about Machen and de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2040/2040-h/2040-h.htm

JD, I haven't read the edition of The Secret Glory that you mention, although the university library owns it. I last completed a reading (2nd) of the familiar edition all the way back in 1990, and jotted some remarks about it (slightly edited): "the style carries one along, but what a self-indulgent book it seems! Ambrose Meyrick has to have a tell-tale light in his eyes marking him off from the common herd; although free of the base impulse to revenge, he gets to deck a schoolboy tormentor; as a boy he astonishes everyone by his scholarship papers, and as soon as he leaves Lupton, the odious public school, he pens a Rabelaisian pastiche in Old French that stumps most of the teachers, but which proves to be 'diabolically clever' and obscene in its send-up of one of the masters, his particular foe; he is granted visions, including one as he bows before the Holy Graal, and goes around with a mysterious joy no one can fathom; he enjoys sexual raptures with Nelly Foran, a maidservant, virtually under the nose of her employer; while in London with Nelly, at age 18 he makes notes for his Defense of Taverns, 'a book which is now rare and much sought after by collectors'; he becomes knowledgeable about wine and food, and scores off a literary critic who is a partisan of Machen's bête noire George Eliot; he discovers the hidden, lost Celtic Church, and laughs to himself through the conventional Anglican services at school; a Frenchman encounters Ambrose in London and can tell at a glance that he is an artist and mystic, but warns him that 'the populace always hates the artist'" -- etc. So I have my doubts about whether I would complete a third reading, even with the bait of the two additional chapters at the end of the Tartarus Press edition that you mention. In this book especially, Machen seems to be in love -- wearing his heart on his sleeve -- and it's the image of himself as the neglected artist that he's in love with.

 

[Extollager]

Here, by the way, is a piece on The Secret Glory from the New York C. S. Lewis Society, whose bulletin features a continuing series on books in Lewis's life. This was #22.

Arthur Machen’s TheSecret Glory​

Thecatalogue of Lewis’s library compiled in 1969 listed this novel. Its author, who subsisted largely onjournalism throughout much of his life, underwent a few years of celebrity,particularly in the U.S. In the 1920s,Knopf and other publishers issued or reissued almost anything they could gettheir hands on that had Machen’s name on it, and after languishing inmanuscript for many years, The SecretGlory was published (1922). In 1924,a small British publishing house, Spurr and Swift, went so far as to issue aselection, made by Machen himself, of reviews of Machen’s books, sardonicallycalled Precious Balms – sardonicbecause the majority of the reviews were unfavorable. I thought it would be amusing, for this entryin the Bookshelf series, to rely on PreciousBalms.​

Punch reveals that the Secret Glory isthat of the Holy Grail, “revealed in a Welsh farmhouse to the boy Ambrose Meyrick and his father.” The mystically-initiated boy “is sent to anexquisitely odious public school, where he becomes first a cowed and isolateddreamer and last a furtive and malicious rebel.” Ambrose runs off with “a sympatheticparlour-maid” after Machen has gratified his “savage humour” against the publicschool system. Unfortunately Machennever really comes to grips with the targets he satirizes. The EveningStandard found the book “incoherent and tiresome” since schoolboys andmysticism “do not mix.”

The Manchester Guardian mentions the“escapade” in which Ambrose goes to London with the “young lady of his choice,”detecting in the treatment a quality of “inebriate innocence.” Rose Macaulay in The Daily News says that while Ambrose’s mystical experiences aredescribed “with a good deal of beauty,” Machen’s attempts at reporting hishero’s “contacts with actuality” are “distorted and unreal”; there’s “a gooddeal of silliness” and “bad taste” in the book. The Sheffield Daily Telegraphdidn’t find the material relating to Ambrose’s writings, such as In Praise of Taverns, to beconvincing. The Liverpool Daily Courier was dissatisfied with the conclusion, inwhich we learn that Ambrose went to Asia and was crucified. “Mr. Machen knows how to tell a story, but hedoes not demonstrate that capacity in this work.”

Lewiscould have relished a book expressing detestation of the bullying and falsevalues of the public schools and opposing to them the wonder of the Grail – ifthese elements had been handled with the right kind of imagination and literaryskill. As far as we know, The Secret Glory may have been one ofJoy’s [Lewis's wife's] books brought from America, not a book he bought. If he gave it a try, it’s likely that The Secret Glory’s flavor would havecontrasted unfavorably with that of Charles Williams’s Grail thriller War in Heaven – even though that book isnot one of Williams’s best.

Machen’sautobiographical Far-Off Things is betterthan The Secret Glory -- although The Boston Evening Transcript characterizedit as “the reflections of a conceited man of mediocre ability, who buries histalent in the ashes of the past, mumbles over it incessant Latin quotations,and .. is continually irritated because the world hurries by without digginginto the ashes, or listening respectfully to his incantations”! Machenis best known for a handful of horror stories, and I like hisantiquarian-flavored wonder-tale “N.”

 

[GOLLUM]

I understand that Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde influenced Machen. I suppose that is a fairly likely example but still of interest.

I recently purchased an Oxford abridged edition of Samuel Johnson's collected works. I knew only a few scattered facts about Johnson and have read almost nothing by him. Anything specific other than what you pointed out here by Johnson I should be focusing on?

Confessions of an English Opium Eater is the only de Quincey book I've read and that was quite a while ago whilst with Coleridge I've read a little.

Patmore I've never heard of? Anything further you can post here would be appreciated.

 

[Extollager]

I understand that Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde influenced Machen. I suppose that is a fairly likely example but still of interest.

See Machen's "Psychology" for a short piece that will remind you of Jekyll/Hyde:

Holy Terrors, by Arthur Machen

 

[Extollager]

I recently purchased an Oxford abridged edition of Samuel Johnson's collected works. I knew only a few scattered facts about Johnson and have read almost nothing by him. Anything specific other than what you pointed out here by Johnson I should be focusing on?

I suspect that the Dr. Johnson who meant most to Arthur Machen was the LONDON tavern/coffee house conversationalist memorialized by Boswell, rather than Johnson's essays, biographies, prefaces, poems, and definitions. Probably Machen fancied that, when he first came up to London in the late 1800s, something of Johnson's world of hobnobbing journalists and theatre people survived -- including physical remains in the form of old buildings. Machen writes evocatively of two outdoors worlds: the Gwent of his boyhood, and London. A third locale was France (Touraine, etc.), but on this topic I haven't read much more than passing references in Machen.

You might get hold of an indexed edition of Boswell's Life and look up topics that interest you, to get started.

Penguin Classics used to have a useful abridgement of the Life. That's what I've read -- never yet read the entire work, though I have a copy.

http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2010/janfeb/manofsorrows.html

Machen's identification with Johnson the conversationalist went even to the point of performing as the Great Cham.

 

[Extollager]

Patmore I've never heard of? Anything further you can post here would be appreciated.

I'm a beginner with Patmore. I intend to delve into his essays and short poems as we go along. I read his long narrative poem The Angel in the House years ago, but not yet its sequel, The Victories of Love. My sense is that he has almost nothing to say to people who are quite comfortable with the prevailing mores and folkways of our own time. As the youthful drug addict, the suicide, the automobile crash victim, the spendthrift, the debtor, the rootless person, the political poseur, the chatterer, the educator who is obsessed with quantification of "outcomes," the cheapener, the reductivist, the hypester, the voyeur, the selfie-poster, etc. are characteristic products of our time, it seems to me something worth reacting against.

 

[Extollager]

A copy of Patmore's Courage in Politics just arrived. "Minding One's Own Business" prefigures a recent item:

News is bad for you

Patmore's essay is available online here:

Courage in Politics: And Other Essays, 1885-1896 - Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore - Google Books

It sure is countercultural as compared with today's mores, whether the individual's frittering away time by reading text messages that are not really his/her business, or writing the same; or governments making it their business to monitor the lives of subjects; or educators purveying "global education" while sealing kids off, behind cement walls, from the community; or...

It's one of Patmore's pieces for the St. James Gazette. As I mentioned before, Machen regarded with wonder the fact that Patmore could publish such work as he did in the pages of a newspaper... back in the day.

 

[Extollager]

Patmore's essay "Cheerfulness in Life and Art" (in Principle in Art) is worth reading and rereading for its own sake. Patmore writes, "Life, unhindered by the obstruction of vice or the outward obscurations of pain, sorrow, and anxiety, is pure and simple joy; as we have most of us experienced during the few hours of our lives in which, the conscience being free, all bodily and external evils have been removed or are at least quiescent."

This reminded me of a passage that I'm unable to quote at the moment in Machen's The Green Round. Perhaps I can post it here later. That book has obvious weaknesses as a conveyance of thrills, but I suspect there's more wisdom in it than in the complete works of....
http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=...iFHibd5Ni0n1YVRpr846UFpw&ust=1397058514354288
The Arkham House edition