The Weekly Machen
We end the month of March with a series of brief notes from Arthur Machen’s reading list. Though the items are varied, Machen unites the parts of this seemingly random selection by his finely-honed attention to the wonderful and mystical in each. It is through symbol that we see reality.
Odd Volumes:
The Celtic Paradise
by
Arthur Machen
May 6, 1911
It is the sub-title of Mr. G. H. Russell’s new novel that enchants me. “Ivor” (Murray) is very well; but “A Tale of Lundy Island and the West Country” is far better.
I was looking some time ago at a book the name of which I have quite forgotten. But it had some delightful theories; among them the doctrine that when Irishmen of the nineteenth century sang “To the West, to the West; to the Land of the Free” they were really expressing enthusiasm not for the United States of America but for the ancient Celtic paradise which is called Avalon.
It is a beautiful theory; I wish I could believe in it—but I don’t. Still, I think that every Celt thrills in his heart when the West is mentioned; there lingers in his soul that desire for the paradise beyond the glassy waterfloods which drove the monks of Wales and Ireland and Scotland to embark in boats without oars or sails, trusting that the winds and the waves would somehow bear them to the blessed and happy island.
I shall never forget a beautiful story in which Mr. Buchan has expressed this idea: a young Highlander of these days sees now and again the shores of Avalon rising dim from the sea at sunset and to his nostrils comes faintly the scent of apple-blossoms. And sight and scent are given him in all fullness as he sinks dying from a Boer bullet in the South African War.
_____
Last Sunday there was a capital story in The Weekly Dispatch of a haunted house at Wynberg, Cape Colony.
It was a capital story, I say; and yet I fear I should have taken but little notice of it—being skeptical in ghostly matters—if it had not been for one phrase.
A man who saw the ghost said that “a terrific power of force seemed to have been dashed against me … it was like forcing my stomach out of my body.”
Now this last sentence is not ghost-story commonplace. That is one thing that makes it interesting. And there is another odd point. In Mr. A. E. Waite’s “Life of Louis Claude de Saint-Martin’’ (Rider), the experience of a certain Abbé Fournié is given. The abbé saw several spirits and says that he experienced a sensation “as of a hand passing through his body and smiting his soul.’’
It seems highly unlikely that the Wynberg gentleman should have read the rare treatise of the eighteenth century abbé; and there is something strange in the coincidence of their experiences.
The Frenchman’s phrase is certainly the more elegant and the more impressive; but it seems to me that the sensation described was in either case the same.
_____
Mr. Whibley, reviewing Dr. Henderson’s “George Bernard Shaw’’ (Hurst and Blackett) in the Morning Post, is a little hard both on The Master and his disciple.
Of course, Mr. Whibley has capital sport. He chronicles the abolition of the art of painting by Mr. Shaw.
“The old game is up,” said the master; “the camera has hopelessly beaten the pencil and paint-brush as an instrument of artistic representation.”
Then, Mr. Whibley cites the dread sentence about Shakespeare who, when “Ibsen comes out with a double first, comes out hardly anywhere.”
The critic seems to think that these remarks and others of a similar kind are rubbish of the worst description; and no doubt he is right.
Yet he might remember that, biologically considered, griffins and unicorns are rubbish. But, for all that, many a good knight displayed these ridiculous beasts on his helm and on his shield in the day of battle.
The sight of them cheered the warrior’s followers; and so Mr. Shaw’s followers are cheered and heartened by the utterance of the sentiments which Mr. Whibley so heartily derides.
There are some souls to whom the statement that the camera has beaten the brush brings a quite ineffable comfort; and kindness grudges no solace to simplicity.
_____
Mr. Robert Blatchford’s “My Favourite Books” (Clarion Press) is by no means a new book, but it is a book new to me; and I have seldom seen a great principle more neatly expressed than in the author’s contrast between Job’s description of a horse and the definition given by Bitzer in “Hard Times.’’
The prophet, Mr. Blatchford points out, declares that the horse’s neck is clothed with thunder; while Bitzer asserts that the horse is “Quadruped. Graminivorous,” with many other scientific particulars.
Mr. Blatchford sees that Job gives the essential truth in the matter of a horse, while Bitzer babbles nonsense. And the reason of this is, that in this valley of mortal life the real truth can only be taught and perceived by means of symbols.
_____
Here is a novelty in literary advertisement:—
There is on sale here the copy of the Noble Koran, the smallest in the world; it has arrived from the illuminated city, and in it are many benefits and great advantages to the traveller in the desert who passes, and it will protect him from every ill that harms.
This is a faithful translation of the Arabic announcement appearing in the window of Messrs. Luzac, Great Russell-street.
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The John Buchan story that Machen remembers is “The Far Islands,” one of the stories in the collection The Watcher by the Threshold (1902).
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Thanks, Dale!
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I second that: I was hoping you would know and tell us when I got that far!
By good hap, I have lately enjoyed Nora Chadwick’s discussion of such things in The Celts (1971) – and W.P. Ker’s references in English Literature, Medieval (1912) to the “land of Cockayne” as “a burlesque Paradise ‘far in the sea by West of Spain’” (ch. VI, ‘Comic Poetry’).
The GBS “camera” remark gave a new vividness to Joyce’s attention to photography and drawing and painting in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) – how lively, and/or how everyday-familiar or even ‘tired’ a subject was that, then?
The Blatchford discussion reminds me of Tolkien’s poem of some 20 years later, “Mythopoeia” (only published – in its final version – in 1988: maybe there will be much more about it in the forthcoming Collected Poems!).
I wonder where Machen got his translation of the Arabic announcement? We have a tiny printed (thick but incomplete) Bible, but the size of the copy here announced, “the smallest in the world”, and the claim that “it will protect him from every ill that harms” seem distinctly related beyond the novel delight and practical convenience of tininess.
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