Introduction
The years 1919-1921 constituted the final phase of Arthur Machen’s employment at the Evening News. After returning from a brief stint at The Daily Express, he found his role at the paper greatly diminished. No longer was he a “star reporter.” The following article clarifies this new state of affairs by its brevity. Yet, in less than 300 words, Machen is able to engage and interest the reader while including a snippet of his characteristic philosophy.
The Shirt
by
Arthur Machen
September 8, 1920
“Seeing of what folly and cowardice popular opinion is compounded, I regret absolute power. The King’s weakness drives me desperate; the littleness of the great is to me a disgusting spectacle; the incapacity and dishonesty of the ministers, and the ignorance, baseness, and venality of the people’s representatives throw me alternately into fits of rage and stupor.”
There; who wrote that? If I were the examinee I think I should set it down to Dr. Johnson in his “Rasselas” vein; at all events, to some moral fabulist of the eighteenth century. So well has Anatole France caught the three-cornered hat, wig and lace ruffle manner of a former age. The passage occurs in the story of “The Shirt” in the recently issued “The Seven Wives of Bluebeard” (Lane, 7s. 6d. net).
It is a volume of fantasies, of old stories retold with the ironic twists and touches in which Anatole France has such infinite skill. “The Shirt” is the ancient fable of the sick king who can only be cured by wearing the shirt of a happy man. At last, after years of search, a happy man is found; he has no shirt!
The moral suggested is not, to be sure, a true one; but the eighteenth century morality seldom was true. The men who wore the lace ruffles and the grave wigs and the bloom-coloured silks and satins had got so tired of wig and lace and silk that they were ready to believe that happiness was to be found by getting rid of all those things and of all the institutions symbolised by them. That was Rousseau’s doctrine of the bliss of savagery, that was the French Revolution in a nutshell
The Weekly Machen
Previous: Literature for the Boy at the Tail of the Van
Next: Hornsey House of Nightmare
darklybrightpress.com 
Thanks for this! I love Rasselas, but have always been shy of trying Anatole France. Maybe I should try “The Shirt”… But I see the naughty little sausages at Project Gutenberg give a photograph of the title-page complete with “& Other Marvellous Tales”, but only transcribe The Seven Wives Of Bluebeard. Happily I find that the Internet Archive has three scans of the whole of this same edition (as well as scans of later editions). But no luck looking for a free audiobook version, alas!
LikeLike
Here’s a good-looking one, with all 98 pages of “The Shirt” clearly scanned:
https://archive.org/details/sevenwivesofblue00franrich/page/n7/mode/2up
LikeLike
And what is one of the first things I encounter on resuming reading Anton van der Lem’s excellent 1990 biography of Johan Huizinga (sadly never translated into English, as far as I can see)? – a comparison by Huizinga of the works of Joris-Karl Huysmans and Anatole France very favorable to France – quoted with reference to France’s biography of Joan of Arc (1908) – and, I presume, Huysmans’ Là-Bas (1891)!
Huysmans is someone else I have been very shy of trying ever since I knew anything about him.
A quick word-searchy check of Goldstone’s 1973 Machen Bibliography found no ‘Anatole’, ‘Huysmans’, or ‘Joan’, with the only ‘Jeanne’ not “de Arc”.
All of which also leaves me wondering – in absence of any clear recollections – what Machen may have ever said about either Huysmans or St. Joan?
LikeLike
No luck word-searching Goldstone’s 1973 edition for ‘Huizinga’, either – leaving me curious about Machen and “The Most Famous Man in Holland” as Van der Lem entitled his chapter 11, covering the years 1933-1940. (Also no ‘Machen’ in Van der Lem’s detailed index of people – but the digital online library of ‘Dutch letters’ (dbnl) has tons of Huizinga – so, running into any possible evidence that he knew Machen’s work is not impossible – but would not, I think, be easy, either!)
LikeLike