Machynlleth

“ Yet, rising from a humble sphere of life, with only the education that the traditions, the popular poetry and scenery of his native hills could afford, he has left us compositions which we would not willingly allow to perish. Highly cultivated some of his mental powers must have been. His memory was something wonderful; and yet there have been at all times in the Highlands men equally trained like Macintyre to remember and rehearse thousands of lines of poetry. Upwards of six thousand lines of poetry composed by himself have been published. ”

“ Joseph Kelly Vodrey of Canton, Ohio, a specialist in Machen bibliography, has printed and distributed to the members of the Society a booklet: There Are Some Who Mourn, written by Nathan Van Patten.
Mr. Van Patten, a distinguished professor of bibliography at Stanford University and dean of Machenites, has printed a handsome booklet, limited to fifty copies, of Arthur Machen’s The Gray’s Inn Coffee House.
There will be others. At long last something is being done to right the wrongs of which Mr. Cabell wrote so many years ago. ”

“ Many of Machen’s most telling effects are achieved through the mere portrayal of a brooding landscape, the sombre background of mountains, the deep, rutted lanes that run along between head-high hedges, solitary hilltops shimmering in heat waves, old grey houses that sit somberly at the edge of the forest and rivers that coil in slow esses through forests and skirt the walls of mountains. There is no doubt that the wild Welsh countryside had this effect upon Machen himself. ”

“ Indeed, Machen had advanced the idea that “all impartial judges will allow that if Welsh literature were annihilated ... the loss to the world’s grand roll of masterpieces would be insignificant.” Yet he concedes a certain literary feeling that does not exist in the Anglo-Saxon ... an appreciative rather than creative faculty, lacking, perhaps, in the critical spirit but still, a delight in the noble phrase ... the music of words. And so—Machen tried, as a young man will, to write. ”

“ Whether one was introduced to Machen by Cabell or Starrett or Van Vechten, or made the discovery for one’s self becomes a matter of some importance, at least to those who have come to know Machen and who regard him, as I do, as one of the greatest living writers in English literature. Yet it might seem that these personal recollections and this high regard, however deeply felt, are not quite reason enough for a book about such a man, nor significant enough to serve as an introduction to such a book. ”

“ Curses be on Cairnburgmore! and curses be on the freight his galley carried! But I will be revenged on these MacKenzies! Here I swear,” continued he, drawing his sword and striking it against the banner of the MacDonell that was then floating at the upper end of the hall. “Here do I solemnly swear to [186] make so terrible a reprisal on the MacKenzies, that men’s flesh shall creep upon their bones as they listen to the tale of it; and yet shall it be but as an earnest of what I shall inflict on that accursed clan for the grief and sorrow they have so lately wrought us!” ”

“ Well then, here was Machen in a hot-bed of the occult and the devilish, surrounded by books of all sorts, especially the strange, the weird and the curious. His room in the Clarendon Road held as many books as it could accommodate along with its occupant—the overflow was stacked between the rungs of a ladder on the landing outside. He was busy with notebooks once more, and writing furiously as ever—but in despair rather than the fine frenzy and high spirits of a few years before. For now he was deep in Rabelais and Balzac—and these books cast a spell upon him. ”

“ It is amazing, in a way, that a pleasant little group in a country rectory should decide over a little pamphlet written “about” the pagan rites at Eleusis, that their youthful relative was destined for a career in journalism. Of course, relatives are proud of one’s books and equally proud of one’s pamphlets, even if they do not read them. And so, perhaps, the rector and his family never bothered too much about the contents of the rarest Machen item of them all. Doubtless more than one of the ninety-nine copies slowly disintegrates in a Welsh garret to this very day. ”

“ In actual life writers, and artists of other sorts, are particularly susceptible to this form of cosmic accident—or at least many of them prefer to think so. It is, somehow, heartening to meet one who was pleased with the place of his birth.
“I shall always,” wrote Arthur Machen, “esteem it as the greatest piece of fortune that has fallen to me, that I was born in that noble, fallen Caerleon-on-Usk, in the heart of Gwent.... ”

“ She came into the market-place early on the Saturday morning in a state of some excitement, and as soon as she had taken up her usual place on the pavement by the churchyard, with her ducks and eggs and a few very early potatoes, she began to tell her neighbours about her having heard the sound of a great bell. The good women on each side smiled at one another behind Mrs. Parry's back, for one had to bawl into her ear before she could make out what one meant; and Mrs. Williams, Penycoed, bent over and yelled: "What bell should that be, Mrs. Parry? There's no church near you up at Penrhiw. ”

“ Machen does not often write of white magic; he is a negromancer; the baneful, the baleful, the horrendous are his subjects. With Baudelaire, he might pray, Evil be thou my good! Consider the theme of The Great God Pan, a psychic experiment, operation, if you will, on a pure young girl, and its consequences. Again a theme which another writer, any other writer, would have cheapened, filled in with sordid detail, described to the last black mass. But Machen knows better. He knows so much, indeed, that he is able to say nothing. ”

“ A young man, trying to write, almost never permits himself to indulge in a fancy for the light [21] essay, the brief episode. It is epic or it is nothing, usually the latter. Doubtless the Freudians have an explanation for this. It would be, one supposes, a very long and very complicated explanation.
Machen had his own explanation—for his own case. He attributes it to his Celtic blood. Not that Machen thought the Celt, or the Welsh Celt at any rate, had contributed much to the world’s literature. ”

“ Dr. Macloghlen advised that we should tell our sheikh we meant to return part of the way to Geergeh that evening by moonlight. I quite agreed with him. It was the only way out. Besides, I didn't like the looks of the people. They eyed us askance. This was getting exciting now. I felt a professional journalistic interest. Whether we escaped or got killed, what splendid business for the Daily Telephone!
The sheikh, of course, declared it was impossible to start that evening. The men wouldn't move—the camels needed rest. But Dr. Macloghlen was inexorable. ”

“ For the older I grow the more firmly am I convinced that anything which I may have accomplished in literature is due to the fact that when my eyes were first opened in earliest childhood they saw before them the vision of an enchanted land.”
There is no doubt that the simple fact that Arthur Machen was born in Caerleon-on-Usk has had a tremendous influence upon his style, his thinking, his writing, his philosophy and his life. ”

“ Machen was, at this time, living the literary life, not quite as it was lived by the swish young men who were then breaking into print and whose names appeared in the more sensational evening papers and on court writs, but still, it was the literary life and still—a noble profession.
The Japanese bureau, its cubbyholes and compartments jammed with notes and notebooks and scraps of paper, had yielded up many tales and articles that appeared in this or that journal. Machen had already written The Holy Things, Psychology, Witchcraft, The Rose Garden, The Ceremony, Midsummer and many other. ”

“ That thirty years’ neglect has almost doubled—and indeed one might say with perfect truth that Arthur Machen has suffered a lifetime of neglect, and, in perfect truth, it must be added that the loss has been the world’s which so blindly accorded neglect to the uncanny genius of Arthur Machen. ”

“ There were many other composers of one or a few songs or poems which may be found in various collections of whom we know little or nothing more than their mere names. To this class belong Donald Macintyre of North Argyll, George Morison of the far North, William MacMurchie of Kintyre, Alexander Macinnes of Glencoe, Maclachlan of Kilbride, and some female composers who are only known as the wives or daughters of men described as of certain localities. There does not appear to have been a parish or clachan in the Highlands and Isles that has not brought forth its own singer. ”

“ He dared not approach the fort again; he lingered in the road to Caermaen that passed behind it, but a mile away, and separated by the wild land and a strip of wood from the towering battlements. Here he was looking over a gate one day, doubtful and wondering, when he heard a heavy step behind him, and glancing round quickly saw it was old Morgan of the White House.
'Good afternoon, Master Lucian,' he began. 'Mr. Taylor pretty well, I suppose? I be goin' to the house a minute; the men in the fields are wantin' some more cider. Would you come and taste a drop of cider, Master Lucian? ”

“ But I may say this, that you yourself have penetrated at least the outer husk of the mystery," and he laughed again.
"Pray do not jest with me," I said. "What have I done, que sais-je? I am so far ignorant that I have not the slightest idea of how my next meal is to be provided."
"Excuse me. You ask what you have done? You have met me. Come, we will fence no longer. I see you have self-education, the only education which is not infinitely pernicious, and I am in want of a governess for my two children. I have been a widower for some years; my name is Gregg. ”

“ Mackintosh began to see the real man, and under the boisterous good-humour he discerned a vulgar cunning which was hateful; he was vain and domineering, and it was strange that he had notwithstanding a shyness which made him dislike people who were not quite of his kidney. He judged others, naïvely, by their language, and if it was free from the oaths and the obscenity which made up the greater part of his own conversation, he looked upon them with suspicion. In the evening the two men played piquet. ”

“ Hector MacLean, who lived in the seventeenth century, was bard and senachie to Sir Lachlan MacLean of Duart. The Chief’s Elegy is the subject of a special poem by the bard.
Lachlan MacKinnon, who lived in the seventeenth century, was a native of Strath, Isle of Skye. He was a bard of real power, and a good many of his pieces have come down to us. Mackenzie, collector of “The Beauties of Gaelic Poetry,” who delighted in unearthing and publishing all the moral dirt he could lay his hands on, relates a story about Mackinnon which does not represent the bard’s character in a very attractive light. ”

“ The most significant entry is this, from another Housman letter: “Thanks to you, I believe I possess Machen’s complete works. He is always interesting (except in the Evening News) and to some extent good. Mixing up religion and sexuality is not a [189] thing I am fond of, and in this book the Welsh element rather annoys me. The imitation of Rabelais is very clever.”
We know, at any rate, that Housman read Machen, quite a bit of him. He was not fond of the Welsh, nor of mixing religion and sexuality nor, for that matter, of mixing port and burgundy. ”

“ Few descriptive poets excel Macintyre in his representations of external things, whether animate or inanimate. Everything he touches he invests with the glow and the beauty of poetry. The hills with their mist and deer, the streams and lochs with their teeming inhabitants, and all the natural inhabitants of his native glens and mountains, were congenial themes of his muse. ”

“ But in regard to ordinary education it must be remembered that Macdonald was for some time at a University, while Macintyre was never able to write. In their descriptions of outward nature their poetry shows very much like equal power, while the note of the one is not always distinguishable from that of the other. But the passionate depth of the one has no echo in the sweeter and gentler nature of the other. Each in his own way is a mighty singer of whom any country might be proud. And it is remarkable that both should be Argyllshire singers. ”

“ It is sometimes fascinating to compare different reactions to certain of Machen’s tales. Basil Davenport writing in the Saturday Review some years ago noted: “... there are some stories which portray a non-moral fall into a moral gulf; someone’s foot quite innocently slips, and there is no stopping above the bottom of hell ... that is what makes Mr. Arthur Machen’s stories supreme of [183] their kind ... and such a story of irrational, irresistible temptation as Mr. Machen’s The White People ... ”

“ Far west, in the outer Hebrides, he had faithful votaries. On the island of Grimisay, close to North Uist, a chapel styled Teampull Mhicheil was built in his honour towards the close of the fourteenth century. It was the work of Amie, otherwise Annie, wife of John of Isla, first Lord of the Isles, and was used by her as an oratory when prevented by rough weather from crossing the Minch to visit her friends in Lorne. That the archangel should have had wells named after him is therefore not surprising. ”