of the latter work is a scathing satire on certain foibles and idiosyncracies of the American 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 interest 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 ignored.
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 rapture, 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, sometimes 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 receive 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 literature, brilliantly exposited by that “cyclical mode of discoursing” that was affected by Coleridge. In it he promulgates the admirable doctrine 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 dexterity 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 differentiation between art and artifice, a nice problem 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, Le Morte D’Arthur, Kubla Khan, Don Quixote, 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 was the god of wine in whose honor Sophocles wrote his dramas and choral songs, who was worshipped and invoked at the Dionysiaca; 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: “Grandgousier estoit bon raillard en son temps, aimant à boire net,” and ends with the Oracle of the Holy Bottle, with the word “Trinch… un mot panomphée, celebré 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 Rabelaisian 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 significant symbol of that Power which withdraws a man from the common life and the common consciousness, and taking him from the dust of earth, sets him in high places, in the eternal world of Ideas. Let us never forget that the essence of the book (Pantagruel) is in its splendid celebration 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 Arthur Machen’s greatest works on the shelf with Don Quixote and Pantagruel; 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 another symbolism of ecstasy:
“The shape of gauloiserie, of gross, exuberant gaiety, expressing itself by outrageous tales, outrageous words, by a very cataract 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.”
In Cervantes he finds the greater deftness, the finer artifice, but he believes the conception of Rabelais the higher because it is the more remote. Pantagruel’s “More 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, perhaps it is part of the same paragraph, sums up this astonishing philosophy with a conclusion calculated 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 expresses the most transcendental secrets of the Divine Love by the grossest phrases of the carnal love; so Rabelais soars above the common 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 lowest, 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 perhaps you may assure yourself of its truth by recollecting the converse proposition—that it is when one is absorbed in the highest emotions that the most degrading images will intrude themselves.”
And so on… The sense of the futility almost of attempting to explain Machen becomes 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 Inmost Light. It is surprising indeed to learn that he was born. He is High Church, “with no particular respect for the Archbishop of Canterbury,” and necessarily subconsciously Catholic, as must be all those “lonely, awful souls” who write ecstasy across the world. He hates puritanism with a sturdier hatred than inspires Chesterton; 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 alternated for a time between the smartest theatres in London and the shabbiest music halls in London’s East End. For the last six years or so he has been a descriptive writer on the London Evening 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 characterization), 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
