The Weekly Machen
The following article is the seventh in a series by Arthur Machen for The Daily Express.
The Domestic Hun
Horrors at Home as Well as in the Field
by
Arthur Machen
October 4, 1918
A year or so before the war I had to read a German novel. I forget the name of it, but it was a novel of “fast” German life.
I read on until I came to the account of a little dinner-party. The guests were terribly lively—and they prefaced their meal by drinking port as an apéritif.
Then I closed that novel of gay life in Germany.
“No more of this,” I said to myself. “A nation that drinks port before dinner is capable of any villainy; it is fit for murders, treasons, stratagems, and spoils.”
The events of the last four years seem to show that my conclusion was legitimately drawn from the premises.
Now here is a new book of fast life in Germany. It is called “Martin Schuler” (Methuen, 7s. net). It is so absolutely German that I should have thought it a translation; but as the publishers announce it simply as “by Romer Wilson,” I suppose it must be considered as an original work. That being so, Romer Wilson is to be highly congratulated on having got utterly into the Teutonic hide.
Our silly people should read it; by “silly people” I mean those who suppose that the Germans are only horrible when they are at war, I think that, at the whole, they are still more loathsome when they are a peace—guzzling, and swilling, and blubbering because a man is playing the fiddle rather well, and kissing each other on both cheeks and spitting our cherrystones on the drawing-room carpet.
In “Martin Schuler” they eat duck and green peas with a sauce made of oysters, apricots, and Moselle. From that dish to the assassination of whole communities the descent is slight and easy.
When the fashionable and artistic Berlin audience heard a Beethoven sonata played:
“Ah,” they thought, “how I could rise from the ground in long leaps, how I could overcome the waves with long strokes of swimming, how I could glide over the breasts of hills on invisible wings!”
Boswell once told Johnson how he felt when he heard music.
“Sir,” said the doctor, “I should never hear it if it made one such a fool.”
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Thanks for this! Wikipedia tells me Romer Wilson was born Florence Roma Muir Wilson in Sheffield, studied law at Girton College, Cambridge, and became Mrs. Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien in 1923: the first sentence of his article describes him as “an American writer, poet, editor and anthologist”. It reports that this was her first novel – and the Internet Archive has scans of American and English editions: the latter is a 1919 second edition, which includes the note “First Published . . . October 3rd, 1918” (when she was 26) – a day before this article appeared! Wilson’s second novel, If All These Young Men (1919), is also set during the Great War, this time in England – it’s first sentence begins “Upon Good Friday in the year nineteen hundred and eighteen”. Interestingly, in the context of Machen’s culinary accents, here, Wikipedia says “During the First World War she sold potatoes for the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries.” I wonder if Machen later encountered her All Alone: The Life and Private History of Emily Jane Brontë (1928) – of which the Archive has a Digital Library Of India scan (uploaded twice). Given the musical accents, I also wonder what Machen thought of Fritz Kreisler’s autobiography of his Austrian Army service, Four Weeks in the Trenches: The War Story of a Violinist (published in the U.S. in 1915) – of which the Archive has scans of various copies – if he ever encountered it: I thoroughly enjoyed the LibriVox audiobook of it!
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Thanks! Given his respect for Wuthering Heights, it would be interesting to discover if AM had read her book on Emily Bronte. We know that he had read Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte (which he loved) and E. F. Benson’s work on the Bronte family, which he regarded with some disapproval. So, it would not be a stretch to assume that read additional examples of secondary literature such as this one.
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