The Personal Element in Criticism

The Weekly Machen

For the month of October, we return to a favorite focus of Arthur Machen’s journalism career for readers of The Weekly: odd volumes and old books. This first article is a strange mixture of items ranging from obsolete alphabets, personal criticism of good authors who may be bad men, and the pitfalls of dining on horseflesh. Wildly discursive and entertaining, Machen gives us another glimpse into his varied and curious reading list.

The following article is not listed in the bibliography by Goldstone and Sweetser.

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Odd Volumes: The Personal Element in Criticism
by
Arthur Machen
July 17, 1912

There is an article in the current Nineteenth Century called “A Fortnight with Thackeray in 1852,” and the writer demonstrates, or thinks that he demonstrates, that Thackeray was no cynic by showing that he was a very agreeable companion on the voyage to America. And I quite agree with the author of “Literary Gossip” in Saturday’s Globe, who says, very truly, that a writer is to be judged by his writings and by nothing else. We must not appeal from the evidence of the book to the private character of the writer of the book.

As for Thackeray’s cynicism, that is, of course, all nonsense; Thackeray was a sentimentalist, though he was by no means a fool. He recognised humbug when he saw it, and said so. If anybody wants to know what true cynicism is, let him read Dean Swift’s account of the Yahoos—there is the real thing.

The bringing in of the personal element into criticism is always irritating. Some people say that Shelley wrote such beautiful poetry that he could treat his wife as he pleased; other people say that Shelley was such a bad man that they won’t read his poetry. Each point of view is purely impertinent; if Shelley had been a Borgia I should still praise his verse; and the fact that a man possesses genius gives him no license to behave like a cad and a blackguard.

Ogham

Opening the new University College Buildings at Bangor the King made a graceful allusion to “the love of learning and culture for which the Welsh people are renowned.” I suppose that it was their ancient love for scholarship and things pertaining to literature that led the Welsh—or let us say the Celts—to invent a kind of alphabet which, so far as I know, is unique. It is called Ogham, and seems more of a cipher method of writing than an ordinary alphabet. A line is presupposed—this was usually an edge of the stone to be inscribed—and a selection of letters from the ordinary alphabet is divided into four groups, each of four letters. If I remember, the first group contains the letters F, Th, R, Q. F is indicated by drawing a stroke at right angles to the line, Th is two strokes placed close together, R three strokes, and Q four. The next group places the strokes beneath the line instead of above it; in the third group the strokes go through the line; and in the fourth group the strokes are slanting and cut the line.

This, as I say, looks like a cipher, but if there ever were a secret it was divulged early, as there is a monumental stone of the fifth or sixth century in which the inscription appears in both Ogham and Roman characters.

Literary Style

“It is perfectly certain that now and then, at given intervals, the first principles of good style must, for the sake of variety, be set aside.” Thus Mr. Archibald Dunn, writing on “Style in Literature,” in the July “Author”; and it is the truth of this dictum that makes it all but impossible to give any general instructions in literary style. No sooner have you laid down a rule than you have to admit that there are no end of exceptions to it. This is true even of the rules of grammar. A subject in the plural takes a plural verb. Very true; “the wages of sin is death,” not “are death.”

And when you leave the direct and definitely ascertained laws of grammar and touch on the vague and indefinite region of style—then it is really futile to lay down any rules at all. If the teacher tells the pupil to avoid long words and words of Latin origin and to stick to short and simple Saxon, he is liable to be confronted by a whole library of beautiful English in which long words of Latin derivation abound.

            But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven, as a lamb’s fleece; but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness, and to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it bowed the head, and broke its stalk, and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces.

That is a passage of superb English, and in it there is no dearth of Latin words.

No, there is no such thing as a literary technique, hence at once the ease and the difficulty of literature. The would-be composer has to spend years in difficult and elaborate technical study; the would-be author has no such pains, but he lacks the guidance that technique affords.

­A Horse Flesh Diet

Discussing Dr. George Henderson’s “Survivals in Belief Among the Celts” (MacLehose), The Times Literary Supplement says that “Totemism may explain the English abstention from horseflesh.” I suppose the allusion is to the White Horse honoured by the Saxons and cut out by them on chalky hill sides; but I don’t believe that this sacred beast has anything to do with the fact that horseflesh is unpopular. I am very strongly of opinion that we leave horseflesh alone because it is excessively nasty. I have made two experiments in eating the friend of man. The first was at an hotel at Arles, on the Rhone; the second was on the roof of a public-house in Sidney-street, Mile End. In neither case did I know what I was going to eat. At Arles the unholy food pretended to be a beefsteak, in Sidney-street it was disguised as a sandwich. In each case my palate was aware of a horrid, sickly sweetness. Horse is quite the nastiest thing that I have ever tasted.

Mark Twain’s Earnings

I see that Mark Twain, who, like Sir Walter Scott, lost huge sums of money in the fall of a publishing house, eventually “made good” (if I may borrow an American idiom) to the tune of nearly £100,000. I do not murmur at this fortune—Mark Twain wrote “Huckleberry Finn,” and “Life on the Mississippi,” and “Tom Sawyer,” and the first of these books alone is a bargain to the world at £100,000.

There are two other Mark Twains who would be dear at a hundred thousand pence or a hundred thousand Chinese cash: the deliberately funny Mark Twain who got comic business out of the Holy Land and the Court of King Arthur, and the serious Mark Twain who fancied he understood something about the universe. In one of the books I have indicated, “The Yankee at the Court of King Arthur,” the two bad Mark Twains met together, and the result is one of the silliest and most offensive books that has ever been given to the world.

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The Weekly

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