Literary Ecstasy
A review of Machen’s Hieroglyphics
by an anonymous critic
St. James’s Gazette
May 9, 1902
Mr. Arthur Machen has joined the critics of Literature (as distinguished from printed matter of that name) with a very entertaining ramble in argument that practically is an attempt to define the indefinable for the benefit of the spiritually intelligent. For those of us who have ears to hear will understand and agree from the first page to the last, enjoying the cleverness and subtlety with which the case is put, and the beauty of the style—but not open to conviction because already convinced. Whereas for the others, so unmercifully convicted of approaching literature as Johnson approached “Lycidas,” they are about as likely to recognise “desire of the unknown, sense of the unknown, rapture, adoration, mystery, wonder, withdrawal from the common life” when they meet it in literature as they are to hear the horns of elf-land blowing in an April wood at sundown. “Ecstasy,” “withdrawal,” is Mr. Machen’s one supreme test of what shall stand as literature—or, if you like, “fine literature.” Neither human interest, nor local colour, nor moral purpose, nor fidelity to common life, nor polish of style, nor clearness of expression shall save it if it have not “ecstasy,” the thing apart. He gives “Lycidas” as one example. “An unimportant lament over an unimportant personage, constructed on an affected pseudo-pastoral plan, full of acrid, Puritanical declamation and abuse, wantonly absurd with its mixture of the nymphs and St. Peter; it is not only wretched in plan but clumsy in construction; the artifice is atrocious. And it is also perfect beauty. It is the very soul set to music; its austere and exquisite rapture thrills one so that I could almost say: he who understands the mystery and the beauty of ‘Lycidas’ understands also the final and eternal secret of art and life and man.”
The weak point in the test, when it is carried down to the poems that sing with a more uncertain music, the books that do not carry their immortality, as it were, on the first random page, is that the ecstatic quality may be brought by the reader to the book, and not by the book. If not, how account for the fact that many (not of the “very bad” who are materialists, either!) will reverse Mr. Machen’s decision in one of his favourite test cases? “The Tragic Comedians” he finds a mere story of a socially unequal love affair between a German baroness and a Jew, with—incidentally—a portrait or two of actual people thrown in. By more discerning critics the Jew-baroness element, with its social incongruity, is entirely forgotten in the passion of the lovers. Whereas Mr. Machen’s contrasted example—Hardy’s “Two on a Tower”—fails utterly to communicate the same feeling of dramatic intensity. Since therefore one reader finds “ecstasy” and another none, who is to say which has the touchstone?
The book is interesting, fascinating, perverse—an admirable testimony to its own cause. Reading it, you catch more than a glimpse of “certain fabled happy islands, and Avalon that is beyond the setting of the sun.”
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