The Weekly Machen
Always the reactionary, Arthur Machen writes with both sarcasm and sorrow on the the ever-changing countryside of his native Wales in the following article. The same hills, shorelines and vanishing country lanes of Pembrokeshire will be inspirational as locations for some of his finest stories of the decade, including “Out of the Earth,” The Great Return and The Terror.
The Londoner’s Ideal Holiday
by
Arthur Machen
August 7, 1912
The other day I met a crank. We were standing together on a bridge that spans Paddington railway station and watching the mad confusion and disarray of the holiday hosts. Piles of luggage of all shapes and sorts and sizes, battalions of children, a great rushing of porters and a swirling, seething multitude made up the scene. An excursion train had just drawn up by a platform; and everybody made for it at once: it was a tremendous picture of swarming and confused activity.
The crank at my side derided the whole event; he said it was a scene of little meaning, though the words of those who barked their shins against the porters’ trucks or fell over luggage were strong.
“The fact is,” he said, “the whole thing is a superstition. People who are perfectly well have got into the notion that they must have change of air once a year, and they come back saying they feel much better. That’s what Mr. Pickwick said at Bath while he was drinking the waters; he ‘declared, in the most solemn and emphatic terms, that he felt a great deal better; whereat his friends were very much delighted, though they had not been previously aware that there was anything the matter with him.’ So it is with these misguided thousands who are all anxious to get corner seats; there is nothing the matter with them, and in a fortnight they will come back and say they feel ever so much better.”
The Crowd-lovers
He went on to demonstrate the absurdity, as he said, of the Londoner’s holiday. “Here are people who live for eleven and a half months of the year in the biggest town in the world, in the place where humanity is as tightly packed as possible, and they take holiday by going seaside resorts where they will be packed a little more tightly, where you will have to fight to get a roof over your head at all, and are happy if the landlady consents to make you up a bed in the bath-room. All these folks live amongst crowds, and they call it a ‘change’ to go to some place which is crowded to the point of suffocation.”
The fact is, I suppose, that like the bees, man is a confirmed swarmer. He swarms in the City and in his suburb from September to August; and when his holiday time comes round the thought of solitude—even of that sweet solitude à deux—appalls him. He feels that away from the rest he would be lost and unhappy, and so he crowds the lodging-houses in the popular resort, so he crowds the sands, and blackens the slope of the cliffs with his fellow-swarmers.
In my opinion, the average Londoner, rich or poor, has ingrained hatred and horror of the true country and of all the ways of peace and solitude. A deep, dark lane in Devonshire would, in his own phrase, give him the hump; the peace of a lonely shore and a still sea to him were bitterness, and those green and secret valleys, shadowed with ash boughs, which make my happiness on my Welsh holiday, would sir in my neighbour a deep fit of melancholy.
Give him sand and shingle thick, with other thousands, give him a tenth-rate music-hall entertainment for every dozen yards of foreshore, give him “attractions” where he can feel an elbow in his ribs to right and left, and so in an overheated, overcrowded room, take in enough carbonic acid gas to antidote the fresh air that he has perforce breathed during the day: thus does your average Londoner spend a happy holiday.
A Valley in the West
I am naturally a heretic as to this holiday-herding game. I think it is a horrible thing to become acquainted with the sea and to find that, not sea anemones, but pierrots are natives of the rocks. The Duchess of Argyll treasures in her mins the secret of a perfect village; I have the secret of a perfect village; I have the secret of a perfect valley in the West, and I suppose if I live long enough I shall one day find that the natural inequalities of the soil have been utilised: the “Welsh Mountain Railway” will be in full swing, and solemn peace will give place to the screaming of a happy multitude.
Well, I hope that the outrage and ruin will not come to pass in my day; but every year valley and villages and little towns where a man can rest awhile from the storm of London life, and soothe his shattered ears with deep silence, are getting scarcer and scarcer.
I am afraid to revisit my native town, Caerleon-on-Usk, the city of the Legions, the city of King Arthur, the city that has waited so long of the lost king to come forth from Avalon, and return and restore all things. Caerleon is in the hands of energetic businessmen, and they have decorated the village of the Usk with an enormous red-brick county lunatic asylum, as I am told. And a week or two ago I saw this storied town mentioned in the paper. Mr. McKenna—I believe—was laying the foundation stone of a new training college or some such nonsense there, and they are building this college in the meadow of the Roman amphitheatre called King Arthur’s Round Table. Decidedly, Caerleon-on-Usk has fallen into business hands: it only remains to rename it Chicago-on-Usk or McKennaville.
The Work of Vandalism
After all, it is the same tale everywhere. Even in remote Pembrokeshire they are getting up to date. Four years ago, I remember the beauty of an enchanting land that wandered up between high banks, beneath the shadow of cool leafage and intertwining boughs from the shore of the sea to the hills. Now that lane is a straight, broad ditch that would delight the heart of a commissioner of sewers. The trees are gone, the undergrowth on the banks has gone, all the world of flowers and ferns and greenery has been destroyed. Narrow winding lanes with hedges all wild and overgrown are not convenient for motorists; and so they must go, for this is an age of progress. I always admit the progress—but I have my own opinion as to the ultimate destination of the progressive.
So, year by year, the adventure of the man who wants to take a real holiday away from turmoil and noise and mountain railways and pierrots becomes more and more difficult. The straying delicious lane is become about as pleasant to look on as the Manchester Ship Canal, the old panelled room in the inn is a shameful and pitiable wreck, the half-timbered sixteenth century houses have been cleared away to make room for the tram-lines to the Pit—I mean, of course, to the coal-pit.
I suppose we must console ourselves as best we can with the red raw of the new County Lunatic Asylum, and with the thought that lunacy is greatly on the increase.
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Next: A Journey Through Khaki-Land
darklybrightpress.com 
I don’t find it now, but I have saved for many years with Machen material a mournful essay by Theodore Dalrymple about the littered roads of the Wales he traveled in — I think around 2006.
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Curious thought – has anyone written a book following the route of George Borrow in Wild Wales (1862), X number of years later, noting what has – or has not much – changed? Or more than one such, X, Y, Z, etc. years later? Or a film (series) for that matter? I lazily ask before investigating… noting Wikipedia has links to Project Gutenberg transcriptions of two editions from 44 and 45 years later, with the Dent ed. adding an extensive and intriguing-looking new introduction by Theodore Watts-Dunton. Come to that, what do ‘we’ know about Machen’s thoughts (if any) about this, or other works, of Borrow?
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