Clues to Wisdom: Later Writings by Arthur Machen

Clues to Wisdom in Some Later Writings by Arthur Machen
by
Dale Nelson

“The Great God Pan,” “The Black Seal,” “The White People” – these famous Machen stories are standards for weird fiction anthologies. Like Machen’s best-known novel, The Hill of Dreams, they date to the first half of his life. The clichéd view is that, sure, Arthur Machen (1863-1947) kept writing into old age, but his later work isn’t very interesting.

On the contrary! Some of Machen’s most intriguing work came after publication of “The Bowmen” in 1914, which could be considered the midpoint of his writing career. He was in his early fifties then.

In the post-1914 phase of his career, Machen became, one could argue, a proto-Inkling, in that he was to write several stories of mythopoeic fantasy that can actually convey wisdom to his readers. He also wrote some casual-seeming essays that ought to provoke serious reflection.

Let’s review a group of Machen pieces that support this claim.

“The Great Return” (1915) is a mighty wonder-tale. Here Machen succeeds in combining the style of an early 20^th-century reporter with the evocation of a marvelous survival of Britain’s ancient Christian past, with manifestations of nothing less than the Holy Grail. Into our own time irrupts the sacred Vessel that – for the time of its brief visitation – will bring transcendent beauty, reconciliation, healing, and adoration.

Machen makes the reader “believe” this. Let us consider his accomplishment.

Sir Thomas Malory told how King Arthur’s Round Table knights set forth to achieve the vision of the Holy Grail. In the end, only Sirs Bors, Percival, and Galahad fully achieved it (while, conversely, the violent and lustful Sir Gawain became disillusioned with the quest, unable to find even the tenth part of the adventures he would have expected to have, and many other knights fruitlessly died).

In Machen’s 1915 Faith Press novella, the Grail returns to our world (presumably from “the spiritual place” of Sarras, as Sir Thomas Malory called it). The three glorious men who accompany it are three Welsh saints, or the Rich Fisher and two companions, or perhaps the three best Grail knights. Even if the Grail itself isn’t clearly seen, its manifestations bring freely-given divine blessings to a Welsh coastal town, including holy peace, supernal joy, and healings of body and soul, especially the miraculous restoration to radiant health of a consumptive girl who had been at the very point of death.

As the story opens, the London-based narrator gets wind of strange things in Llantrisant, a Welsh town that he had visited before. Llantrisant means “Place, or Parish, or Church, of Three Saints,” and David Mills’s Dictionary of British Place-Names identifies the three saints as Dyfodwg, Gwynno, and Illtud, but maybe Machen thought too of the Arthurian trio Bors, Percival, and Galahad.

Anyway, before he goes to the little town, the story’s narrator is puzzled. Can it be that the rector really has taken to High Church ritualistic practices? The narrator – we might as well call him “Machen” – can hardly believe that such a big change in the area’s religious norms could have happened. Curiosity impels him to visit the seaside town again. He discovers that things even more remarkable have evidently occurred there.

“Machen” eventually learns much — but it’s at second-hand. He himself doesn’t see the marvels. Eventually, he realizes that, for all his knowledge of languages, history, and obscure lore, “the clue had been offered to me, and I had not taken it, I had not even known that it was there.” The “right way” to perceive “was outside all my limits of possibility” (Chap. 3).

It isn’t Machen’s intention to make the narrator’s failure the chief thing in the story, and so he cannily reveals it early on, in order that the story may culminate instead in the greatest wonders, before a few bemused concluding lines let us down gently into our familiar world again.

The folk who did experience the wonders may have formerly been squabblers and their religious practices may have been (up till then) a Low Church Anglicanism and a sectarian Methodism. Yet it transpires that, in these religious forms and in their legends, they retained a living connection with the ancient Celtic Church, established long before the mission of Augustine of Canterbury and the Synod of Whitby. For the story’s narrator, the long-ago Celtic church has been the object of antiquarian study, but not something that inspired him to a devout life. But it is suggested that the Sacrament of the Altar has not failed throughout the centuries — however lacking in beauty the celebration may have become, to the exasperation of aesthetical observers such as the narrator has been.

In Malory the failed knights were likely to be rebuked for their sins by holy hermits. In this story, the narrator – presumably Artthur Machen himself — is confronted by the elderly Llantrisant rector: “’I know you are a railer. You are a railer and a bitter railer; I have read articles that you have written, and I know your contempt and your hatred for those you call Protestants in your derision….You see nothing but the outside and the show. You are not worthy of this mystery that has been done here.’” Machen acknowledges that he has been “rebuked indeed, and justly rebuked” (Chap. 2).

That is a literary masterstroke. It does a great deal to make this wonder-tale real to the reader. It is perhaps the most remarkable passage in Machen’s fiction, since the narrator must be Machen; it sure looks like being a public confession of personal fault.

On the Sunday after Olwen Phillips’s healing, the whole town had turned out for the wonderful Mass of the Holy Grail (Chap. 7). And then the Grail was again withdrawn, and the narrator halfheartedly offers rationalistic hypotheses for what he has heard about, as having happened in Llantrisant. He always arrived on the scene too late. The closest he came (Chap. 5) to the glorious manifestation of the Grail was to catch, in what to the eye was just the “typical example of a Welsh parish church,” the lingering fragrance of Paradisal incense.

Let’s consider the artistry and wisdom of this story by lingering over its passing reference to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. It turns out that the story’s remark, so easy to overlook, is itself a clue to great realities we might miss.

In “The Great Return,” the senses of the inhabitants of Llantrisant are transfigured by the Grail.  To evoke the sublime wonder that opened upon them, Machen’s narrator tells us that, among other manifestations, sailors in the area heard “the creak and whine of their ship on its slow way” as being “as exquisite as the rhythm and song of a Bach fugue” when heard by a lover of music. 

Conversely, to express his scorn of trends in modern education, the recluse of Machen’s essay in literary criticism, Hieroglyphics, had imagined hapless pupils being asked to write on assigned topics as follows: “What do you mean by ‘music’?  Give the rational explanation of Bach’s fugues, showing them to be as (1) true as Biology and (2) useful as Applied Mechanics.” 

There are so many ways to miss the point, as my grad school mentor, a wise Christian scholar, said.

Machen’s Hieroglyphics expounded the difference between mere artifice and genuine art.  “Artifice is explicable.”  Artifice may amuse and delight us, “but we have no sense of miracle, of transcendent vision and achievement” such as is imparted by truly fine art. It’s the latter, of course, that Machen seeks to evoke in “The Great Return.”

James Gaines’s Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment (2005) gets at something similar to Machen’s distinction between artifice and art.

Gaines explains that an Enlightenment-era composer wrote to please his audience.  As a Dresden Kapellmeister of that time said, music is supposed to be “popular and pleasing to the reasonable world” (cited on p. 220).  Hence the agreeable galant style, which is still nice for background music on a relaxed Saturday morning along with freshly-brewed coffee and a croissant. 

But for those steeped, like Bach, in the pre-Enlightenment “elaborated codes and principles” of counterpoint, in canon and fugue, the Pythagorean and Boethian quest of music was a far more searching endeavor.  Gaines relates it to alchemy (p. 46), the symbolism of which interested Machen, as we know.  Gaines writes: the “learned composer’s job was to attempt to replicate in earthly music the celestial harmony with which God had joined and imbued the universe, and so in a way to take part in the act of Creation itself” (p. 47). That is what Bach did.

Gaines says that (by its contrast with perhaps charming but superficial Enlightenment music) “Bach’s Musical Offering leaves us… a compelling case for the following proposition: that a world without a sense of the transcendent and mysterious, a universe ultimately discoverable through reason alone, can only be a barren place; and that the music sounding forth from such a world might be very pretty, but it can never be beautiful” (p. 12).  Conversely, what “is greatest about Bach’s work is literally impossible to talk about, a characteristic that perhaps more than any other distinguishes his music from the galant” (p. 240). 

It’s ineffable, as Machen would say.

In “How the Rich Live” (collected in Dreads and Drolls), Machen passed on a story that Bach told of himself.  As a very poor lad, Bach walked a long journey to hear a Hamburg organist.  On the way back, almost penniless, weary and very hungry, Bach rested on a bench by an inn.  “Suddenly, a window was opened, and two herring heads fell at Bach’s feet.  He picked them up,” since there might be a little flesh left to eat.  “And behold!  he found on examination that in each head was a piece of gold.  He never found out how it had happened, but, refreshed, he went back and heard the great [organist] again, and [thereafter] was able to go on his way home at ease and rejoicing.” 

And that tale could stand as a parable of Machen’s own conviction, whereby the sometimes drab forms of the visible world conceal something of great worth. The narrator of “The Great Return” had grumbled (“railed”) about the unsatisfactory aesthetics of the church services he was used to. He comes to realize that he had missed the mystery that, nevertheless, was happening.

Machen also mentioned Bach in the mysterious story “7B Coney Court” and the so-so “Out of the Picture.” Clearly the great Lutheran composer was, in Machen’s mind, a touchstone of the highest art.

At the same time that I reread “The Great Return” in order to write the present paper, I reread a short article by D. B. Hart, “Therapeutic Superstition,” from the November 2012 issue of First Things. It may be available online. Is there anywhere a more “Machenian” short piece that was not written by Machen himself? And it is nonfiction.

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“The Great Return” is not Machen’s only outstanding wartime story. In 1917 appeared the short novel The Terror. Like “Return,” it provides clues to profound truths.

The Terror is a “secret history” from the Great War. I use the term “secret history” deliberately.

The Byzantine chronicler Procopius wrote The Secret History about the corrupt court of the Emperor Justinian.  Ronald W. Clark’s Queen Victoria’s Bomb (1967) is a fictional secret history, in which a 19^th-century British scientist invented the first atomic bomb, which was tested in the Crimean War. Tim Powers’ Declare (2001) is likewise a fictional secret history, this time the history of the Cold War, revealing the unholy traffic with malevolent supernatural powers that went on in the innermost Russian circles, and that played a part in the Soviet purges and Stalin’s state-engineered Ukrainian famine, the Holodomor.

Several pieces of Machen’s wartime fiction could be considered from the angle of being, like the books by Clark and Powers, glimpses of the secret history of the war. “The Bowmen” was the first such. Two other such short stories are “Munitions of War” and “Out of the Earth.”

The Terror, a long 1916/1917 piece of supposed investigative reporting, unveils one of the most frightening secrets of the Great War. It explains a bewildering series of home-front deaths that occurred during late May or early June 1915 and ended in the winter of 1915-1916.  News of the deaths, we are told, was vigorously suppressed by wartime censorship.  These widespread and dreadful incidents impaired the Allies’ campaign against Germany, particularly because munitions factories were among the places attacked.  

The narrator concludes that domestic and wild animals were immediately responsible for the bizarre deaths. But he suggests that the responsibility ultimately lay with man; “the subjects revolted because the king abdicated.” Humanity has been defecting from its spiritual superiority to animals, and, instinctively sensing this, the animals lashed out — and may do so again. The implications are apocalyptic.

Now there’s some serious thought going on here. The narrator explicitly refers to the truth of “tradition.”  What tradition? It seems that he’s thinking of the traditional levels of being, specifically the four-level ontological hierarchy that E. F. Schumacher later expounded for modern people in A Guide for the Perplexed (1977).  That book has some problematic material, but its discussion of the classical levels is valuable.

The levels of being are discontinuous; they don’t blur into one another.  The lowest level of being is the mineral; rocks exist, but have neither life nor agency.  Plants exist and possess life, and can be agents, doers, such that they may break down their immediate environment, e.g. as when tree roots break up a sidewalk.  Animals exist, have life, have sensation, and exhibit agency such that they may build up their immediate environment for their use, as when birds build nests, beavers construct dams and lodges, etc.  And mankind exists, lives, feels, and exhibits agency — even to the amazing extent that human beings may refashion not only the world around them, but their inner world, as when a person decides to learn something or to break a bad habit. 

Those are the four levels of visible being.  There’s an inverse correlation between abundance and agency; the more abundant, it seems, the less capacity to be an agent. Rocks, which comprise nearly all of the world’s mass, have no agency, while at the other extreme, people, much less abundant than plants or animals, possess agency far transcending that of any other inhabitant of the visible creation.  Thus human beings were appointed steward-priests of the visible creation.

Tragically, our culture has lost the awareness of man’s divine vocation and of the dignity rightly belonging to our nature, even in its fallen state.  In Machen’s story, the consequences are calamitous, with the implied threat of worse to come.

Something to think about! A lot more is going on in The Terror than thrill-mongering. It offers to us a traditional understanding of man’s place in the universe that we desperately need, even if the consequences do not include an uprising of domestic animals and harmless moths.

Munch more will be said on the meaning of The Terror in the Darkly Bright edition expected in the near future.

By the way, John Jeremiah Sullivan’s 2011 essay collection Pulphead contains what is, in effect, a Gaia-hypothesis variation on The Terror, an admitted hoax called “Violence of the Lambs.”  The New Yorker reviewer found it the weakest piece in the book…)

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In the very late (published 1936), and enigmatically-titled, “N,” Machen wrote another wonder-story like “The Great Return.” Once again he avoids the ham-handed approach typical of pulp writers. He sets us up quite carefully, gets us in a receptive mood. Let me explain how he uses the late 19^th-century/early 20^th-century device of snug conversation. Like this: “Two men in a smoking-room were talking of their private-school days” (M. R. James’s “A School Story”).  

In innumerable tales, two gentlemen have a chance encounter on a London pavement and slip into the club to which one of them belongs for a long evening’s talk, or there’s a party of men sitting around a big fireplace in a country house, or a man boards a train and seats himself opposite a stranger and they start talking after a while. 

Chekhov wrote a little trilogy of stories in which men tell one another accounts of their lives  – “The Man in a Case,” “About Love,” and “Gooseberries.”  Stories are told on two successive evenings and during a rainy afternoon in between.  Wells’s Time Machine begins in a “luxurious after-dinner atmosphere” replete with fireplace and drinks.

Generally in the stories I have in mind, the location is snug and the evening ahead can give way imperceptibly to night as people talk.  There’s no hurry and there are no serious distractions.  The characters are almost always men — bachelors, widowers, or husbands temporarily away from their families. 

Eventually one of the men tells a long story (or hands over a manuscript that another man takes with him for the night or till next week).  In Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata,” Pozdnyshev makes his painful, protracted confession of sexual jealousy and murder on a train journey in a compartment shared with a stranger.

When we are reading “The Kreutzer Sonata,” we don’t object that it’s unrealistic that Pozdnyshev holds forth at such length.  Likewise, we might suppose that Conrad’s Marlow possesses astonishing stamina as he relates the story of Heart of Darkness during a long night on a boat anchored in the Thames estuary, but this objection only occurs to us after the story is over.  Nor are we troubled by these narrators’ ability to recall long-ago conversations verbatim.  In fact, the situation is irresistible and we relish it. 

In this kind of fiction, the framing scene invites us to be receptive to the gradual development of a mood and to become well-prepared for the main story’s final catastrophe.

So now let’s recall the delectable opening of Machen’s wonder-tale “N” (from as late as 1936!):

“They were talking about old days and old ways and all the changes that have come on London in the last weary years; a little party of three of them, gathered for a rare meeting in Perrott’s rooms.”

Yes, they talked, and all through their evening no one fetched out his phone from his pocket or checked his iPad. In our time, such conversation as theirs must seem to be as rare and long-ago as the arts of Atlantis. 

The wonder-tale that develops continues to intrigue readers. In “N,” Machen brings out a Greek term from Christian theology, περιχώρησις perichoresis (a one-word English translation is “interpenetration”). It is related to the concept of multidimensionality that George MacDonald worked with in his astonishing late romance Lilith. In Machen’s tale, a clergyman, filling in for a priest who had to be away for a few weeks, visited one Glanville, who lived in a nondescript residence in a London suburb. On his last visit, he was invited to look out Glanville’s window, and a scene of staggering depths of beauty met his eyes. Chris McCabe thinks Machen’s real-life inspiration might be London’s Abney Park (Buried Garden: Lockdown with the Lost Poets of Abney Park Cemetery). But it what Machen imagined, and the story he wrote, that matter.

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Like snug conversation, another once-familiar opening gambit that Machen uses effectively is the letter written by one friend or acquaintance to another, out of the blue, or as follow-up to a conversation. Take a brief story that many Machen fans have never read, “Dr. Duthoit’s Vision,” also known as “The Little Nations” (1915). Here it is indeed not Machen the heir of Poe and Stevenson, but Machen a kind of precursor of Jorge Luis Borges, who entertains us.

In Machen’s brief tale, Duthoit, clergyman, bookworm, and rose grower, had befriended the young Machen and remained in touch as the latter became a middle-aged man.  Alluding in passing to his famous World War I-era composition “The Bowmen,” Machen says that the elderly Dr. Duthoit wrote to him about his own strange wartime experience.

An exasperated Duthoit had been staring at the mess of miniature “hills and valleys” that had replaced his beautifully level garden plot.  As he peered intently, he realized that the plot had been transformed into a bizarre  miniature of the Gallipoli peninsula!  Duthoit saw red ants fighting black ants across what seemed to be hill-ranges and precipices.  Individual ants committed seeming acts of heroism.  Then Duthoit was called away.  Later, he returned to the scene to find that the gardener had raked up a lot of dead ants.

Granted, it’s not one of Machen’s great stories.

But there’s a clue for us. Duthoit ended his letter with a Latin sentence meaning “That which is above is as that which is below.”  Machen muses that the Great War then raging “is a world battle in the sense which we do not appreciate.  There have been some who have held that the earthly conflict is but a reflection of the war in heaven.  What if it be reflected infinitely, if it penetrate to the uttermost depths of creation?  And if a speck of dust be a cosmos – the universe – of revolving worlds?  There may be battles between creatures that no microscope shall ever discover.”

Now, did Machen have in mind a certain philosophical classic? It deserves to be more widely read than it is. The Pensées (Thoughts) of Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), scientist and devout Christian, contain a memorable passage that is virtually an expansion of Machen’s final paragraph, though without Machen’s focus on war.  If we will read the whole passage, Pascal will provoke our wonder as follows (from Krailsheimer’s translation, Penguin Classics, 1966, pp. 89-90):

Let man….contemplate the whole of nature in her full and lofty majesty, let him turn his gaze from the lovely objects around him; let him behold the dazzling light set like an eternal lamp to light up the universe, let him see the earth as a mere speck compared to the vast orbit described by this star, and let him marvel at finding this vast orbit itself no more than the tiniest point compared to that described by the stars revolving in the firmament.  But if our eyes stop there, let our imagination proceed further; it will grow weary of conceiving things before nature tires of producing them.  …Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere.  In short it is the greatest perceptible mark of God’s omnipotence that our imagination should lose itself in that thought.

Let man, returning to himself, consider what he is in comparison with what exists; let him regard himself as lost, and from this little dungeon, in which he finds himself lodged, I mean the universe, let him learn to take the earth, its realms, its cities, its houses and himself at their proper value.

What is a man in the infinite?

But, to offer him a prodigy equally astounding, let him look into the tiniest things he knows.  Let a mite show him in its minute body incomparably more minute parts, legs with joints, veins in its legs, blood in the veins, humours in the blood, drops in the humours, vapours in the drops; let him divide these things still further until he has exhausted his powers of imagination, and let the last thing he comes down to now be the object of our discourse.  He will perhaps think that this is the ultimate of minuteness in nature.

I want to show him a new abyss.  I want to depict to him not only the visible universe, but all the conceivable immensity of nature enclosed in this miniature atom.  Let him see there an infinity of universes, each with its firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportions as in the visible world, and on that earth animals, and finally mites, in which he will find again the same results as in the first; and finding the same thing yet again in the others without end or respite, he will be lost in such wonders, as astounding in their minuteness as the others in their amplitude.  For who will not marvel that our body, a moment ago imperceptible in a universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, should now be a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, compared to the nothingness beyond our reach?  Anyone who considers himself in this way will be terrified at himself, and, seeing his mass, as given him by nature, supporting him between these two abysses of infinity and nothingness, will tremble at these marvels. …For, after all, what is man in nature?  A nothing compared to the infinite, a whole compared to the nothing, a middle point between all and nothing, infinitely remote from an understanding of the extremes; the end of things and their principles are unattainably hidden from him in impenetrable secrecy.

Sense of wonder indeed! Omnia exeunt in mysterium, as Machen was given to recalling.

Incidentally, Pascal’s word (as translated by Krailsheimer) colossus in this particular context will have reminded some readers of Donald Wandrei’s Astounding story from 1934, “Colossus.”  That “thought experiment” story, in turn, provided some inspiration for C. S. Lewis’s fantasy The Great Divorce; Lewis was certainly thinking of that story when he acknowledged his debt to American “scientifiction.”  In Lewis’s book, hell exists, but as something smaller than a pebble relative to our universe, and therefore as scarcely a point, relative to heaven.

“Dr. Duthoit’s Vision” is also known as “The Little Nations.”  It should be noted that Machen speculates about an infinite series of worlds, in all of which, perhaps, war is occurring, with each world in the series reflecting “war in heaven” – which is on a different plane.  Lewis seems to imagine one “series” in which hell is at one extreme, as close to nonentity as possible, and heaven at the other, a sublime plenitude of being, with this present terrene existence in a qualitative “midpoint” between them.  But Lewis expressly says, in his preface, that he is writing a fantasy and that he is not attempting to satisfy curiosity about the facts of the afterlife.  The Wandrei-Lewis connection is discussed in my article “A ‘Scientifiction’ Source for Lewis’ The Great Divorce.”  CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 36 [sic; actually 37]:3 (May-June 2006; Whole Number 413): 18. In Orson Welles’ The Third Man, the corrupt and nihilistic Harry Lime, looking down from the top of a Ferris wheel, sees men as being like mere ants.  But in Lafcadio Hearn’s “Dream of Akinosuke” and in Machen’s “Dr. Duthoit’s Vision,” ants are seen as men or as like men.  The espionage movie and the two weird tales jostle our habitual perspective regarding ourselves. It can be good for us to be shaken a bit, if we are drowsy and our sense of wonder has gone to sleep.

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Other fiction from Machen’s later years is also of interest. I’ll mention just one last item, about which I have mixed feelings. It’s a short, discursive novel, The Green Round. This 1933 book may show signs of weariness in Machen due to his advanced years and long decades of pen-labor; certainly it has much repetition. Its impressiveness for us today is compromised by Machen’s reference to a once-famous account of two English ladies seeming to experience a time-slip adventure in France,* which Machen believed in, but which has been explained; and one is not happy about his concluding his novel by reproducing an anecdote from a Spiritualist magazine.

Still, The Green Round draws me to read it yet again every few years. In it, the everyday world proves vulnerable to glimpses of preternatural beauty but also encounters with baleful imps. The novel’s main character, Hillyer, dreams of his lodging house being transformed into a palace of supernal light, and another character, a passerby in the road one night, actually saw the place inexplicably and gloriously illuminated. A repeat visitor to a charming little Welsh resort town is dismayed by a garish and vulgar amusement park that has sprung up, complete with blaring jazz band; he goes home and complains in a newspaper letter, and no one can find there a trace of what he saw and heard.

I particularly like the novel’s passages about the Reverend Mr. Hampole, the Victorian author of A London Walk: Meditations in the Streets of the Metropolis.

Now, is it significant that Machen choose “Hampole” as the surname of his invented clergyman? I think so. I’ll bet that Machen was thinking of a medieval mystic, Richard Rolle of Hampole, a 14^th-century hermit, author of one of the classic works of what people now call spirituality: The Fire of Love. Machen might have learned of Rolle by reading Evelyn Underhill’s opus Mysticism (1911); he reviewed that book. There was also a flurry of interest in Rolle in the 1920s. Without question, Machen knew of Richard Rolle of Hampole in plenty of time to use his name in “N” and The Green Round.

I liked the way Machen made his Hampole a likely reader of Thomas Traherne’s visionary classic Centuries in manuscript – a real book of the 17^th century that was only printed in the early 20^th. C. S. Lewis recommended Centuries. To his old friend Arthur Greeves he wrote in 1941, “At present I’m re-reading Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations which I think almost the most beautiful book (in prose, I mean, excluding poets) in English.”

Other fans will like Machen’s characters of Dyson and Meyrick more, but Hampole’s my favorite person in Machen even though he never appears, is just cited. I would happily read a good long story about him, and perhaps I will try to write one someday.

So really, after “Hampole,” which brings the mystic Richard Rolle to mind, and the reference to the visionary Traherne, and certain related passages, the novel’s concluding pages reprinting an anecdote from David Gow’s Spiritualist magazine Light are bathetic, not only for the anecdote itself, but especially for being from such a source. (If the “light” that is in thee be darkness, then how great is that darkness!)

It’s not just the rare and mystical Traherne who’s mentioned in The Green Round, it’s Dickens, on page after page. London would have been a different city for Machen if he had never read Dickens, and this is a London book although some pages are set in a Welsh resort town.

Also, The Green Round belongs with a number of other late Machen stories in which the malign Little People are not the troglodytes of “The Black Seal,” with its Darwinian explanation, but rather some kind of poltergeist or malevolent “fairy.”

The Green Round tries to unite in one leisurely novel the malign Little People of “Out of the Earth” and the wonder-tale quality of “N.” It is not Machen’s best work, but I have read it six times so far; and I like the clues it sprinkles for further reading.

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Machen was a prolific essayist as well as writer of fiction. I find a clue in “The Merry Month of May” (in Dog and Duck, 1924) that leads me to place it with pieces by Inklings, including C. S. Lewis’s “On the Reading of Old Books.”

Machen believes that once upon a time English people – for all the physical hardships they might have experienced and even though they knew the human race was spiritually fallen – felt that the world was basically right, and so they spontaneously did things like morris dancing and dancing around the maypole and gathering flowers on May Day. They might not have had a sophisticated sense of humor but they readily experienced mirth because they were relatively light-hearted as compared with modern people. Conversely, authors from Shakespeare to our own day may delight us with humorous literary creations such as Falstaff and Pickwick, but underlying them there is a quality of sadness because the authors, and their readers, felt the world to be out of joint.

I used to think of asking students: “If you could pick one material object to represent how different we are from other times, what would it be?” They might be expected to say something like, “A smartphone.” But what would I suggest? An adolescent suicide note. Ours is the time in which well-fed young people in good physical health, with no anxieties about war, with great amounts of leisure time, with liberty of travel, with even white teeth, decide that what they want to do more than anything else is cease to be, maybe after killing a few people first. (On 27 March, remember the six martyrs of Covenant School in Nashville: the three nine-year-olds: Hallie Scruggs, Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kenney – and the three adults: Katherine Koonce, Cynthia Peake, and Mike Hill.) We are used to this. The world is terribly out of joint.

Machen’s essay is brief, but he may well be right. In his Preface to “Paradise Lost”, Lewis devotes a short chapter to criticizing the “doctrine of the unchanging human heart,” which holds that “the things which separate one age from another are superficial.” Innumerable teachers and students think accordingly; so do many pastors. We all thus attain a quick (but bogus) sense of understanding people of long ago, just as today “multicultural education” provides students with a quick, and bogus, sense of understanding people from other parts of the globe even though the students know no language but their own, have only the vaguest ideas of history (even their own), etc. (as Eric Adler pointed out in “The Hypocrisy of English-Only ‘Decolonization’” in a 2023 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education). Rather, real understanding of a different culture is often an arduous process. In the same way, only much alert, well-informed reading outside our own time will help us to begin to understand those who came before us.

A great benefit of such reading is that we might begin to see how weird we are, over against other times, places, and cultures.

Lewis’s “On the Reading of Old Books” was originally his introduction to a lively translation of St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation. There, Lewis pleads with readers of religious books not to limit themselves to their own contemporary period. He said that every age has its unspoken, even unconscious, areas of agreement – so that there are assumptions even between, say, Hitler and Roosevelt; and the only way to escape a chronological rather than geographic provincialism is to read old books as well as recent ones. By “old” he means old, too, not just a few decades old. Doing so may help us to listen to the Logos rather than being captives of the Zeitgeist, because, when the old writers, say Dante, are in error, their errors are not likely to be ones that deceive us – say, an error about a breathable atmosphere hundreds of miles above the surface of the earth. But they might help us to get free of our time’s characteristic errors – say, about love.

Machen did read old books. Hence he was better equipped to write truly mythopoeic fiction than today’s writers who read nothing but social media and the books written by their immediate contemporaries. In this article I’ve shown Machen’s lively imaginative handling of several elements of the traditional understanding of things. You can see, too, his honest enjoyment of old books in “Farewell to Materialism.” He erred about Conrad; I wonder if he had read that masterpiece of irony, The Secret Agent. But Machen seems to have been about right as regards the rest. Many decades after Machen wrote that essay, people are still reading Sophocles, Sir Thomas Malory, Shakespeare, Swift, and Dickens with real enjoyment — but those authors whose longevity Machen doubted — Corelli, Galsworthy, Bennett – are they still read and with enjoyment?

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Machen’s later stories include some work of little interest. But then, some of his early stories would be forgotten (“A Double Return”!) if not for the attention paid them by Machen completists. In any event, from the second half of his career come – as I hope the reader will agree – some stories of uncommon interest. Likewise, some of his essays are well worth reading even if one is not a Machen completist. These works may be more valuable now than when they were first published.

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Note

This article draws extensively on some work by me published by the Wormwoodiana blog.

* The book to which Machen’s story alludes, An Adventure (1911 and subsequent editions) by the Misses Jourdain and Moberly (“Morison” and “Lamont”), was once a favorite of readers interested in the paranormal.  They thought they had seen Marie Antoinette and her friends or maids. Their Versailles experience was subjected to gentle debunking in Dame Joan Evans’s “An End to An Adventure:  Solving the Mystery of the Trianon” in Encounter for Oct. 1976, pp. 33-47.  A noted historian, Dr. Evans knew the two ladies well and they gave Evans the copyright of their book.  After their deaths, she declined to authorize further reprints. But she was certain they had never intended to deceive their readers.

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This essay: copyright 2023 by Dale Nelson