Arthur Machen

“ Science, of course, has not uttered her last word; it is possible that that which now seems incredible may be demonstrated in a thousand laboratories; but in the meanwhile let us beware how we estrange the least of these little ones, of these timid and doubting, but earnest and devoted spirits who merely ask us not to confound supernaturalism with religion. Let us remember that, so far, no man of science has pronounced in favour of the resurrection of the dead; let us not, then, turn anxious and enquiring souls away by passionately insisting on belief in such a dogma. ”

“ The tendency of modern thought goes to show that the people are everything. To them the wisdom of the nation has given the supreme power; from them, we believe, all inspiration in things political and ecclesiastical proceeds. We scoff, and we scoff rightly, at the old aristocratic-sacerdotal idea that all good gifts are from above, that the universe is a hierarchy, an ordered system of graded functions and powers, in which there are varied excellencies and functions, one star exceeding another star in glory, the oak having one splendour, the daisy another. ”

“ How vain is it for us to preach the wickedness of war from every pulpit, if with our next breath we bid our children study such a play as Henry V. We proclaim aloud at every opportunity the blessings of peace, we denounce militarism in high places and in low, we clamour for the reduction of the bloated armaments which suck the life-blood from the English People, and keep the rest of the world in a continual state of irritation and alarm. ”

“ On every side the busy hum of labour; to our ears more solemn than the rolling organ, holier than the sound of the harps in the strange vision of the Jewish fakir which closes our Bibles; more solemn and more holy because every rattle of the improved machinery tells us that some supporter of enlightened policy and Liberal religious organizations is getting richer and richer every moment. Here, indeed, we have the true City of God; and this is the city which, as I observed, is made glad by those inky rivers which flow through the columns of a free press. ”

“ Is it any wonder that amongst earnest Christians such terms as "art" and "classic" are at least terms of suspicion? Is it any wonder that when we hear people singing the praises of the "exquisite art" of this or that volume, when play or poem or picture is awarded the palm of "classic merit," is it wonderful, I say, that we simple Puritans are apt to take alarm, to imagine, and not, as you will confess, without reason, that "classics" are mostly museums of indecency, and that "art" means either Popery or immorality, or both? ”

“ Unless this be our doctrine nowadays, I am at a loss to understand our attitude towards the Cæsar of Russia and his oppressed and downtrodden people, I am at a loss to understand our sympathy with Garibaldi and Mazzini, with the heroes of the French Revolution, with the Fathers of the great Republic of the United States, and finally with our ancestors, the men who judged and put to death Charles Stuart. ”

“ Have they the self-sacrifice, the moral strength, the confidence in Liberal principles that are requisite in such a crisis? Can we not imagine them declaring that if democracy implies the poisoning and adulteration of every conceivable article of food and drink they would rather be without democracy? Here, they may say, is a great free nation, a great commonwealth of sovereign citizens; without king or lords or Established Church; a government for the people, by the people, through the people. ”

“ With the utmost stretch of my imagination, I cannot conceive of a minister of any respectable denomination drinking in a common public-house, with actors, painters, authors, or musicians, who, I am afraid, are rarely men of very sober habits; nor can I for a moment admit that it would be possible for myself, or for any of my brethren, to cultivate the society of the unhappy women who have been branded with the shameful stigma of the Divorce Court. ”

“ How can that be right in art which is admittedly wrong and monstrous in life? If I am not to gaze at the nude and exposed forms of the lady Sunday School teachers, why in heaven's name should this great Protestant and Christian nation subsidize exhibitions which contain dozens of such forms, forms, moreover, which in many cases add to the offence of their nakedness by the representation of lascivious and alluring attitudes and gestures? ”

“ Military habits—the smartness, the rigid carriage of the body, the prompt obedience to a superior—all these we consistently look down upon and deride, for they are at once provocative and contrary to the principles of democracy. Nay, as I have said, we have found it our duty in almost every case in which a dispute has arisen between Englishmen and those of another nation to declare our own people absolutely in the wrong, to paint them as a race of savage, sordid, and barbarian robbers. ”

“ All this need not surprise us, for the world was then drunk with the wine of the fornications of Rome; but that so-called men-of-letters, men of education and presumably sharers in the enlightenment which since those dark old days has blessed the earth should deliberately put forward such a theory in modern times is more than surprising; it would be unthinkable if it were not, unhappily, true. Life is real, life is earnest, said the poet; life is a futile but amusing jest say the apologists for these dreadful plays. ”

“ Indeed, it is impossible for the most casual observer to avoid the impression that mischief is in the air; as one passes along the streets one sees church doors open on every side, the mutter of the confessional sounds like the hiss of some venomous snake through the wholesome turmoil of business, and only the other day a friend of mine pointed out to me that a piano organ in the street was playing a Popish anthem called Gloria in excelsis. Are we not to strike a blow for our homes and hearths? Are the men of England asleep? ”

“ I love to think of these men who guide the great destinies of English Literature as interested in all the details of innocent child-life, as more learned, perhaps, in the shape and uses of the tiny garments of extreme infancy than in the arid history of the masterpieces, as taking a greater interest in Nelly's doll than in the author of Don Quixote, as giving greater thought to the quarrel between Phillis and Jacky (who is always naughty) , than to the debates of the Tassoists and Ariostoists. ”

“ You have heard my little son's vision—for so I dare to call it—and you must have been struck, I think, by the total absence of dogma, of that passion for definition which has been the plague of Christianity in the past, and is so still. God sits on a great throne, good men inculcate the duties of citizenship, all raise the voice of praise to the accompaniment of rare and exquisite music, there are services which delight the emotions and instil a knowledge of Bible History. ”

“ We know that the Church is and always has been a conspiracy against the human race; we are confronted with documents shewing how the Church fed the hungry and clothed the naked. Nay; the minds of the people are poisoned from the same source with tales of old time merriment, of kindly traffic between rich and poor, of days when there were more spires than factory chimneys, of charity given with love and received without shame.
I say, once for all, in the words of our classical professor, Delenda est Carthago—history must be abolished. After all, our part is in the future, is it not? ”

“ If I may parody a passage from a very different writer, Miss Yonge has painted for us an eternal tea-table, and the hissing urn seems to whisper that the tea is not too strong. And then note the landscape which serves as a background to these deeply interesting events. There are no bottomless vales and boundless floods, no shoreless seas or sacred rivers, no cedarn caves or Titan woods—none of the distorted and unhealthy landscapes that presented themselves to the opium-drugged minds of the unhappy Edgar Poe and the ill-fated Coleridge. ”

“ Can I imagine such an utterance being received with "loud and continued applause" at a Liberal meeting? Would this doctrine satisfy the ethical demands of a modern man of science? Can I conceive of such a rite as this suggesting itself spontaneously to a representative assembly of Free Churchmen? And perhaps best of all—the final and conclusive test—Is this a doctrine on which the party could go to the country, with the certainty of being returned by a triumphant, a "thumping" majority? ”

“ We are not placed in this world to delve in the graves of the past, that our minds may be enslaved by ghosts of the bad old days that are gone for ever, that in poring over the inflated records of an imaginary chivalry we may forget our Burns and our Bannerman, our Clifford and our Macnamara. Let us take example by our brothers across the ocean, who have given the world such a wonderful lesson in progress and virtue. The American child's lessons in history are simple enough; he is briefly taught that all Kings are bad, that all aristocrats are bad, that all priests are bad ”

“ It is a strange, a solemn thought that in a hundred years' time man may find expression for all his feelings of awe and adoration by attending Liberal meetings, and the proceedings of the House of Commons may become the supreme worship of the nation. Then, perhaps, for the first time men will understand the vision of John, who saw the Heavenly City, like a Bride, descending upon earth. ”

“ What do we call the parent who suffers his infants to have their own way in all things; to torment animals, to annoy the neighbours, to swear, to drink, to steal? Surely such parents are not friends to their children, but rather their deadliest foes; and surely we do well not to keep silence over the misdeeds of our wandering sons. Which is the worse, think you; to pull the kitten's tail or to cut off the heads of the hapless Mahdi, of the deeply-wronged Bambaata, victims both of English lust for gold? ”

“ But what are we to say of a man who seems to have deliberately set himself to make a living by the ostentatious reproduction and exhibition of all that sane and decent people are willing and desirious to forget, who, week by week, is willing to pocket his wages, knowing that they have been earned by this needless and offensive resurrection of the buried plagues of heathendom, and Popery? ”

“ There is a point at which all modern peoples divide the endurably coarse from the intolerably indecent and abominable. Every civilised man has a limit beyond which he will not permit himself to be carried; and, what is of at least equal importance, he has a limit beyond which he will not knowingly allow those innocences, ignorances and inexperiences which are under his guardianship or control to travel. I say that this limit is overstepped when in defiance of every principle of modesty and decency our eyes are confronted with this spectacle of nudity. ”

“ I declare to you that the reading of history makes my blood boil: century after century tells the same story, in sickening monotony illustrious name follows illustrious name on the slavish page, saint and hero, king and poet and knight, in an endless repetition, till one is forced to cry out in indignant remonstrance, to ask the historian whether he has forgotten that the English People ever existed. ”

“ It is not hatred which causes the surgeon to cut off the gangrened limb, it is not hatred which makes me caution my little ones to shun the fever-stricken slum, and it is not hatred which impels us to denounce the horrors and the indecency of the so-called "classic" drama, and to take care that those we love shall not enter the halls of so deadly a contagion.
But before I pass from my consideration of the Drama to that of other forms of art, I should like to say a word on the outrageous licence which some persons who write for the public press seem to allow themselves. ”

“ I make no fight for prudery, but I stand for cleanliness and decency, and there are certain dark places into which I would never have my children introduced. And yet, let us consider one of the so-called "classics" of the English Stage, a piece which, I am sorry to say, seems to enjoy an infamous immortality. Its plot (I do not care to name it) turns on the unsavoury topic of an old man married to a young wife—a theme which, as I daresay you are aware, has always been a favourite with the purveyors of indecency and moral garbage. ”

“ What is true Patriotism?—Our Corrupt Stage—Superstition in the Newspaper.
HAVE you ever noticed the strange persistence with which a calumny, oft-times refuted, is again and again repeated? How often, to take a modern political instance, has it been boldly, nay, shamelessly asserted that the advanced wing of the great Liberal Party (to which I have the honour to belong) is indifferent, or indeed, hostile to the British Empire, its fame and its prosperity. ”