The Weekly Machen
At a now long-forgotten show, Arthur Machen found much that he admired on display, and so, he described the beautiful items admirably in the following short article. However, one is struck by an uncharacteristic show of fascination and awe he displayed for an old manuscript. Before our eyes, the seasoned author transforms into a reverent student upon studying a set of handwritten pages from his favorite book.
The following is not listed in the bibliography by Goldstone and Sweetser.
The Red-Cross Treasure House
by
Arthur Machen
April 9, 1915
One thing must be lacking to anyone who tries to celebrate the wonderful collection of rare, curious, and beautiful things which are now being exhibited by Messrs. Christie, Manson, and Woods at their Great Rooms in King-street, St. James’s-square. And this one thing missing is one of the objects to be sold for the benefit of the British Red Cross Society and the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem in England.
It is a small writing desk, classed as Jacobean in the catalogue. It is made of stout English oak which has grown shiny with years and beeswax, and its legs are pleasantly knobby. And it is just the desk at which I feel I ought to sit, and I would deal fitly with these cabinets of rarities, this spectacle of the curious work of man’s hands in all regions and ages of the world. Sir Thomas Browne, seated at such a desk, would, I am sure, have moralised the show, and have shown how the art and craftsmanship of man has endeavoured to mirror in six thousand years the beauty of that work of creation which was perfectly concluded in six days, he would have drawn lessons from the Eastern lacquers and singular parables from the Japanese sword with figures of animals and flowers graven on its hilt.
The Splendour of the East
It was to the Oriental collection that I went first; attracted, I think, by the sight of the gorgeous stuffs hanging on the wall. There are splendid Chinese robes of blue and flame-coloured silk, adorned with dragons in raised gold; there are robes of pure white, embroidered with glowing flowers and the blossoms of a far earlier summer. Here is a vase of turquoise and one blossom on it, as though it had been stayed while falling from the tree. There are carven things in agate and in pale jade, there is rich red lacquer exquisitely worked, there are gold figures of Indian deities.
The “Pickwick” Papers
Among the autograph manuscripts, there were certain pages that I looked on with reverence. These were five leaves from the original manuscript of the immortal “Pickwick.” They are from one of the choice places of the masterpiece, the description of the picnic at which the hero drank too much punch, and the MS. includes Sam Weller’s story of the pieman who made his pies of little tabby kittens. It is interesting to note the interlineations and deletions. Most of the latter are done so thoroughly that it is impossible to detect the author’s first thought. But when Mr. Pickwick drank his first glass of the potent punch, it is so that the satisfaction of his countenance after drinking it “bore testimony” to the sincerity of his reply “with pleasure” at Wardle’s invitation. One can just see that Dickens wrote in the first place “bore witness.”
And it struck me that there was a link that united nearly all the objects in Messrs. Christie’s “Great Rooms,” whether they came from medæval China, the France of the Regency, or seventeenth-century England. They are beautiful, all of them, because they were “made for fun”; not because they were made for use. I have no doubt, for example, that that wheel-lock rifle presented by the King was an excellent sporting rifle in its day and brought down plenty of game for its owner, Frederick William, Duke of Saxony. But is does not interest us because it was a capable gun in its day; but because its maker adorned it and inlaid it so curiously and exquisitely. And the lacquer boxes from the East are part of the show not because of their usefulness in keeping tea in good condition, but because they are a sight to behold.
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Chapter 19 of The Pickwick Papers – but who bought those five leaves, and where they ended up, I cannot easily discover… My quick search for for ‘Pickwick Papers manuscript’ only turned up a link to a photo with description of a page from chapter 28 in the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library. But their online post “About the Berg Collection” notes “The most heavily represented authors” include “Dickens (104 items, counting as single items the books-in-parts, and several collections of individual prints and drawings), who had been Albert’s favorite since his days as a page in the stacks of the Cooper Union library” – so, maybe these leaves ended up there, too, as it also notes that among “the Berg’s most extensive manuscript holdings” are “Charles Dickens (including the 1867 diary of his second tour of America, most of his periodical contributions, and several collections of drawings and plates by his illustrators)”. One of the delights of my youth was the 1971 Dover Books edition of the 1967 Heineman publication of a facsimile of the manuscript of A Christmas Carol in The Pierpoint Morgan Library – now to be seen on the fadedpage website! I get the impression from this quick check that lots of Dickens manuscripts have survived and made it into great libraries….
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The histories of manuscripts can be curious. It could be that the pages that Machen witnessed were bought by a collector and then later bequeathed to a library or university. Many documents have been saved this way.
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Indeed! I used to work at the Houghton Library at Harvard (as a ‘graduate assistant’), where, among other things, they had a wide-ranging collection of editions of Samuel Johnson’s novel, Rasselas.
Later, I encountered a copy of Rasselas in shorthand (I think it was Pittman), and asked them if they already had a copy of that edition, and they didn’t, so I had the fun of being a donor.
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