Introduction
This week, the reader will find the first installment of Arthur Machen’s long-running column, “Gossip About Books and Authors.” It finely sets the tone for the entire series: brief, light-hearted and varied. And, as with Machen’s many articles and reviews on books, each example gives a record of the writer’s extensive reading list and recommendations for interesting volumes that ought be tracked down and read for oneself.
Gossips About Books and Authors
by
Arthur Machen
October 20, 1917
“And when Sir Ector heard such noise and light in the quire of Joyous Gard. . . . ” We should not dare to hear light; but to the great masters all things are lawful. Æschylus speaks of “extinguishing” the sea; and Æschylus and Malory and their great companions can say what they will and remain magnificent.
I am quoting from a new and very excellent edition of the Morte d’Arthur, “The Romance of Knights of the Round Table,” abridged from Malory by Alfred W. Pollard (Macmillan, 10s. 6d. Net). The text is illustrated by Arthur Rackham, who succeeds very well in portraying the grotesque elements in the great legend, but not so well with the solemnities of its enchantment. The illustration of “Hero in the Castle of Corbin a maiden bare in Sangraal” strikes me as both weak and derivative.
Mr. Joseph Conrad disagrees very distinctly with Tolstoy’s dictum that the populace forms the final and only court of appeal in matters of art. Mr. Conrad writes a “Foreword” – I wish he and everybody else would call it a Preface – to Mr. Edward Garnett’s Study of “Turgenev” (Collins, 6s. Net), and he contrasts the perfect serenity and sanity of Turgenev’s work with the violence of the criticism directed against him.
“Every gift,” says Mr. Conrad, “has been heaped on his cradle: absolute sanity and the deepest sensibility, the clearest vision and the quickest responsiveness, penetrating insights and unfailing generosity of judgement, an exquisite perception of the visible world and an unerring instinct for the significant . . . and all that in perfect measure. There’s enough to ruin the prospects of any writer.”
And Mr. Conrad ends his preface by telling Mr. Garnett that if he were showing Antinous in a booth of the world’s fair he would not draw one per cent. of the crowd. The populace would rush to see the Double-headed Nightingale or “some weak-kneed giant grinning through a horse collar.”
It this a true statement? Is humanity in the mass deaf and blind and insensible to all that is beautiful in art? I am afraid that this or something very like this is the truth. Sometimes we do admire a great artist in his lifetime; but usually for the wrong reason. Dickens’s contemporaries spoke with reverence of those plots which are a stumbling block and hindrance to the judicious Dickens-lover.
Bill Sikes’s murder of Nancy was, no doubt, regarded (by Bill) as a measure of self-defence, and really there is more to be said for this point of view than for the German argument that they went to war in self-defence against an Anglo-Russian-French conspiracy. “The Crime,” by the anonymous (German) author of “J’Accuse” (Hodder and Stoughton, 10s 6d. Net) is a full and “documented” history of the true causes of the war. “Worldpower or downfall” was the watchword of Bernhardi; and the rulers of Germany thought in July, 1914, that the great moment that would secure for the German nation the lordship of the whole earth had come.
One gathers – dimly – from “The Middle Years,” by Henry James (Collins, 5s. Net) that the distinguished American was a little disenchanted by his meeting with Tennyson. Tennyson loved to disenchant the adoring visitor. One can imagine him growling out gruff chuckles of inward entertainment after the adoring visitor had departed.
Forty years ago, I remember, an old lady in the country told me with horror what Tennyson said as he entered the Great Exhibition – people still believed in the Great Exhibition in the ‘seventies.
“He came into that wonderful building,” said the old lady, “and just glanced about him, and said:–
“Have they got any decent Bass here?”
The Weekly Machen
Previous: Gossip About Books and Authors (1/12/1918)
Next: Gossip About Books and Authors (7/13/1918)
darklybrightpress.com 
Thanks – this is delightful!
The Malory quotation is on page 507 of the scan of the Pollard abridgement (=”582/598″ of the scan), and if one compares the first sentence of the last chapter of the unabridged work in an edition of the Caxton text – Book XXI, chapter XIII (for example in the Project Gutenberg “eBook #1252”) – the sentence is identical, with that striking example of synaesthesia just as Machen quotes it. (In the splendid scan of the Winchester manuscript in the Internet Archive, one sees “that ‘the text is imperfect, as the manuscript lacks the first and last quires and few leaves'” – permitting no comparison!)
I can’t see a text of the book when I follow the link to “J’Accuse” (one of those HathiTrust ‘transatlantic things’?), but searching the Internet Archive for the name of the author given there, Richard Grelling, turns up quite a number of scans of it. (Do we know if Machen knew any version of the famous Abel Gance movie of the same title? I wonder if Charles Williams did, and had it in mind in writing “Divites Dimisit” (1939) – revised into “The Prayers of the Pope” in The Region of the Summer Stars (1944)?)
I find that James refers to Tennyson in chapter VI of The Middle Years. Wikipedia’s “Bass Brewery” article does not have any details about the Great Exhibition or 1851, but does include this passage: “The opening of a railway through Burton in 1839 redoubled Burton’s pre-eminence as a brewing town. In the mid-1870s, Bass, Ratcliff and Gretton accounted for one-third of Burton’s output. A strong export business allowed Bass to boast that their product was available ‘in every country in the globe’. By 1877, Bass was the largest brewery in the world, with an annual output of one million barrels.”
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I apologize about the issue with the Hathi link. Perhaps it does have to with foreign access. It is unlikely that AM watched the Gance film, since he had a poor opinion of the “flickers” and generally avoided movies altogether.
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Thanks for this prompt reply!
No apology necessary!
International copyright law (however fascinating) is largely beyond me, but for older books in practice there is usually some easy ‘work around’ (never, I hope, technically criminal!) with other sites which scan things which are out of copyright (or for which they have some formal permission). It can be frustrating, though, in isolated cases.
I had not realized until encountering its Wikipedia article what a lot of attention Gance’s “J’accuse” seems to have gotten in London in 1920, which does not mean Machen or Williams necessarily paid much attention themselves, but they may have been aware of the public and press attention.
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I just followed up the Conrad “Foreword” reference – which is a lot more curious than Machen’s precis, as it includes “you know very well, my dear Edward, that if you had Antinous himself in a booth of the world’s-fair, and killed yourself in protesting that his soul was as perfect as his body, you wouldn’t get one per cent of the crowd struggling next door” to see the other oddities quoted. Wikipedia’s article, “Antinous”, includes “Antinous’s body was probably embalmed and mummified by priests, a lengthy process which might explain why Hadrian remained in Egypt until spring 131” – probably not very “perfect” if it could be produced after 1886 years, and perhaps a London crowd would be a bit mummy-jaded by the wealth of examples easily available in the British Museum, but it might have competitive freak-show appeal. His Wikipedia article does not lead me to believe it would be easy to convince anyone that “his soul was […] perfect”, either.
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I’ve had Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951) heartily recommended by a Classics-teacher friend, and picked up a second-hand copy of it in translation, but am shy of trying it.
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