The Weekly Machen
Continuing our review of reviews by Arthur Machen, we find three books given his consideration in the following article. However, in this case, the books serve merely as starting points for digressions into Machen’s world view. All these instances are welcome, of course, but I would emphasis his defense of Eden Phillpott’s approach to descriptive narratives. Here we may glimpse Machen’s own desires in the art of the fiction writing and detect his rationale for the secondary role of “action” in some stories such as Fragment of a Life. His suggestions are intriguing.
“Love and Unrest”
“The Praying Girl” and Dragging in the Deity
by
Arthur Machen
February 24, 1913
Should one publish one’s private prayers? I suppose that most of us would answer with a brisk and decisive “No” and on the face of it, it seems somewhat of an indecency to make public the most secret and intimate thoughts of the heart, the communings of the spirit with the Eternal. It is as if a man printed his love-letters, making bare and open to the whole world the emotions which should have been veiled from all the world save one alone.
That, I should think, would be the general view, and in the main it is the right view. The secrets that are between God and man, and between the lover and the beloved should be kept secret; prayers and love-letters should not be made general property, at all events while the composer of them is alive. And there some secrets which should always be kept, even after death, even for ever and ever.
And yet, I can conceive an ingenious man, a well-graced casuist, objecting that this law of the veiled mystery would cut at the roots of all the finest literature and make it impossible. “No romance, no poem,” it might be said, “is worthy to stand in the very highest class unless it is an intimate revelation of the author’s inner nature; nay, of that nature at its white heat of ecstasy. And what is such work but at once a prayer and a love-letter; the translation of the heart of hearts into words. Take Wordsworth’s Ode on Intimations on Immortality: that is a prayer, an Act of Faith, as the theologians would call it. And what are the sonnets of Shakespeare, the amorous poems of all the poets who have written on love, but love-letters?
The contention is plausible enough, and it falls in with R. L. Stevenson’s whimsical theory of the man of letters as an essentially immoral person, exposing his virtue—that is his heart—for sale in the marketplace. But I believe that the argument is fallacious; because it fails to take account of the gulf between nature and art, between the naked and the nude. Anyone who finds the Venus of Milo an offence to modesty and decency had better take ghostly counsel as soon as possible; he is in a very bad way indeed. But, on the other hand … well, it is sufficient to say that clothes have their uses.
All this is apropos of a book called “The Praying Girl,” by Ceres Cutting (Duckworth). The author says in “A Necessary Note” that she is a girl of twenty-two years, and the contents of the volume are supposed to be her prayers on various occasions, these occasions begin chiefly connected with her betrothed lover. But they are not really prayers; they are, innocuous little essays on “Fame,” “Work, “Ink,” “Servants,” “Sleep,” and such like topics, and the addresses to the Deity are accidental rather than essential. Thus at the end of “Love and Unrest” the author says: “I will seek no curves of beauty; a true heart and a return of warm love will suffice. If I ask too much, pity and forgive me.” I think we may find her not guilty of printing her prayers, but I fear that she must suffer the extreme penalty under the poetic statute, “neu deus intersit”—don’t bring in the Deity unless the occasion be worthy of so high a Name.
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“It has been brought against me repeatedly, in lectures and reviews,” says Mr. Eden Phillpotts in the “Foreword” to “Widecombe Fair” (Murray) “that I make my scenery as important as the people who move through it, and often delay action for the purpose of describing the theatre of action.” A preposterous accusation, indeed, and I am glad to see that the author defends himself stoutly against it.
If I deem a forest or river, a wild space, a hill-top, or the changing apparitions of inanimate nature as vital as the adventures of men and women, and as much a part of the materials which I handle, then to these things must be apportioned the significance and desire for them. If I choose to make a river a protagonist, or lift a forest, in its unknowable attributes, into a presence more portentous than the human beings who move within it, none has the right to deny me.
There certainly are novels which confine themselves strictly to the action without wasting time over descriptive passages; they are mostly tenth-rate stories about detectives.
But this new rule—that a novel is to be concerned only with “action”—must be squashed with all convenient firmness and despatch. The great benefit and charm of the novel form is that it can be—almost—about anything, and may be managed—almost—anyhow. I can imagine a beautiful, an exquisite book written in which the human figures are but indicated, or little more indicated. One would see them as it were reflected in still deep pools by moonlight, their footsteps would stir the grass in summer meadows; their love would be signified by the scent of meadowsweet, by the drooping of the wild red roses from the hedge; their desolation would be made evident by a dim hillside, brown with dead bracken, on a still October afternoon.
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“The Way of Contentment,” written 300 years ago in Japanese by Kaibara Ekken, and translated and arranged by Mr. Ken Hoshino, is to be the next volume in Mr. Murrays’s “Wisdom of the East” series. It is said to be “as fresh to-day as it was in the seventeenth century when Ekken wrote.” The really fine things, as distinguished from the merely clever things and the smart things, never grow stale or out of date, nor ever show wrinkles of weary age.
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