The Weekly Machen
In our current days, we tend to believe that the Christmas selling season begins earlier and earlier each year. While this is largely true to a ridiculous degree, the tradition of manufacturers and merchants preparing months before the holy day is not a recent one. The following article, published one mid-October long ago, perfectly illustrates the long-running trend. In it, Arthur Machen manages to ingeniously restate one of his main tenets from Hieroglyphics.
The Library Table:
The “Shadow” of Christmas in the Book World
by
Arthur Machen
October 15, 1912
Christmas throws a very long shadow before it. True; it comes but once a year, but in the world of books, at all events, its influence begins to be felt in the last days of September, and now in October the reviewer’s bookshelf might well be garlanded with holly and mistletoe.
But there are Christmas books and Christmas books. Some are little more than bright ornaments of the season, things of bright gilded bindings and coloured plates, that one man gives as another would give chocolates in a pretty box; others are for Christmas and for all the months of all the years as well.
Of this latter class the re-issue of Mrs. Gaskell’s “Wives and Daughters” (Herbert and Daniel), with a preface by Thomas Seccombe, and a delightful series of coloured plates and black and white illustrations by M. V. Wheelhouse, is an admirable specimen. It is as pretty a book, as presentable a book—“presentable” being taken to mean for this turn, “fit tor a present”—as anyone could desire; and the text is a fine example of a very fine, though modest, literary talent.
I note, by the way, Mr. Seccombe’s most suggestive obiter dictum. Trollope, he says, “gives the best superficial view of the English life of his time now obtainable. Jane Austen, within her ring-fence, does the same—what it is the peculiar faculty of the novel to do—and then comes Mrs. Gaskell.” The point is in the parenthesis; and here we have a valuable hint for distinguishing between the novelist and the writer of romance. The former deals with surfaces, the latter with that which is beneath the surface; in Coleridge’s phraseology, one exploits the world of the understanding, the other of the reason.
“Japan as I Saw It,” by A. H. Exner (Jarrold) belongs more distinctly to the gift-book class; an American book agent might describe it as a desirable addition to any “center-table.” The author gives a brief but intelligent sketch of Japanese history from Jimmu Tenno, the first historical—should it not rather be “mythological”?—Emperor down to the present day, and his text and the numerous pictures together make up a pleasant panorama of modern Japanese life. By the way, I would counsel all milliners to buy this book, and study the plate of “Male Headgear of the Time before 1869.” I believe that they would find inspiration in some of these forms for “Female Headgear of the Time after 1912.”
I suppose that Andrew Lang’s preface to “The Book of Saints and Heroes,” by Mrs. Lang (Longmans), is one of the last that we shall have from that learned and delightful pen; and so far the dead man of letters has left no heir to his rare and peculiar gifts. Take this preface to the book before us; only Andrew Lang could hare illustrated the psychology of fairyland by this instance from the South Seas.
“A native of New Caledonia, a young man named Jim, came to see him once, and stayed long, and seemed nervous and cried when he was saying good-bye.
“‘What is the matter, old man?’ asked Jim. ‘You seem to have something on your mind. Can I help you?’
“‘In three days I shall be a dead man,’ said the native.
“‘What put that nonsense into your head?’
“‘As I came here through the forest I met a fairy, who looked exactly like the girl I was going to marry, and I kissed her.’
“‘And what for no?’ asked Jim, who was a Scot by birth. ‘Any fellow would have done it. Is it what you call taboo to kiss your young woman?’
“‘No,’ said the poor fellow, ‘it is not taboo. But she was not Maluka, who will never be my wife. She was a fairy. She faded away as I kissed her, as a light morning cloud fades on the hillside.’”
The man died in the three days, therefore he was not a mere ingenious liar; he really thought that he had kissed a fairy. Here, Mr. Lang seems to suggest, may be the key to the wonder-tales of the world, especially of the Christian wonder-tales told in this volume. And the point is: what is the real nature of such experiences; what really befell to the minds of those Irish peasants, known to Mr. W. B. Yeats, who told him that they had kept a Leprecaun in a cage for a fortnight?
Mr. William O’Brien tells in “Unseen Friends” (Longmans) the story of the illustrious ladies, saints and writers, whose lives and works have chiefly influenced her. Her list is a catholic one; it includes Mrs. Oliphant, Mother Margaret, May Hallahan, Eugénie de Guérin, Christina Rossetti, Jean Ingelow, and Charlotte Brontë.
In the author’s study of the last-named writer she tells a story, which, I sincerely hope, is not in the least true. Up to the present all the evidence as to the character of M. Heger, of Brussels, has shown a man of singular goodness and nobility.
But Mrs. O’Brien has a French friend, who taught in the Hégers’ school.
My friend borrowed “Villette” and once she had read it she was intensely miserable. The truth of the picture went home to her. In these days Mme. Héger was still ruling, and her husband, when questioned as to his famous pupil, replied with insufferable vanity and self-consciousness, that he had liked his English élève, and she had experienced a warmer feeling.
I trust that the French lady is quite mistaken in her recollections.
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I’m glad to learn that Machen appreciated Gaskell’s novel Wives and Daughters. It really is a very fine novel, one I have read five times, I think.
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Thanks – this is fascinating in so many ways! Books as objects apt in different ways for presents and appearing “in the last days of September, and now in October” in plenty of time to ponder as possibilities (or spread one’s expenditures?).
With “Mr. Seccombe’s most suggestive obiter dictum” in mind, do ‘we’ know of any similar ‘top three’ or so selection by Machen of novelists and/or writers of prose romances, or of fine individual examples of their talents? (I certainly like Trollope and Austen and as much of Gaskell as I’ve read – which is not much yet, and does not include Wives and Daughters. My first thought at the phrase “writer of romance” is Hawthorne, whom I like a lot – but who else are my most likely – say, also Nineteenth-century – choices?)
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Machen claimed to reread three books on a time schedule. He read Pickwich every year, Don Quixote every two years, and the work of Rabelais every three to five years. I’m not sure that Pickwick would qualify as a romance, but a safe replacement would be Wuthering Heights. He read that book many times and considered it a work of rare genius.
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Thanks for this – fascinating! He must have been a fast reader (at least a lot faster than I – I’ve only read Pickwick once – with great delight!) – and keep meaning to embark on an unabridged Don Quixote and on Rabelais, but am awed by their lengths, ditto Barbara Reynold’s Orlando Furioso translation) – and my impression is, one with a very good memory for detail, too!
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