FAR OFF THINGS AND THINGS NEAR AND FAR

The Outlook

It is difficult to know quite what to make of Mr Machen’s two most recent books. “Far Off Things” was a rather scrappy chapter of what might have been an excellent autobiography not written in the first place for publication in book form. Like the new volume it spoiled a great deal of good material and was not organised in any way that tends to make lasting literature. For all that, both volumes are excellent reading. There is a great deal to be said for Mr Machen. And he himself has a great deal to say. He is not quite at home in the twentieth century. Spiritually he belongs to the years before the ’nineties, to Charing Cross Road as it was in the days when he translated Casanova at the rate of thirty shillings a week. The Strand is not what it was, and he paints the difference for us in no uncertain terms. Nor do the modern restaurants know their business half so well as the old chop-houses did.

So through this monstrous incursion of women with the war and nursery hours of to-day, the old tavern life has gone; utterly and for ever, I am afraid.

This is one of the chief grudges he urges against the modern age; and he can give us chapter and verse for it.

Going there (to Herbert’s) in these latter days I used to wonder why all the meats seemed to taste alike.... I had business, oddly enough, in their kitchen. One of the cooks showed me the joints roasting on the jack; and I perceived that three different meats were cooking at the one fire, while beneath, in a common pan, their juices mingled, ready for the basting ladle. It is not much wonder, I think, that veal and lamb and beef taste all much alike in this unhappy place, once so high, now fallen so low.

On another occasion, when he asked for Stilton cheese, the waiter replied that only English cheeses were supplied! And just as the food has deteriorated, so has the journalism. “Always remember that we appeal not to the cabman, but to the cabman’s wife,” said one of Mr Machen’s friends, a distinguished journalist; and Mr Machen, who, to say the worst of him, prefers the cabman, might have been a little more disgusted than he is, and that is not a little. He does his best to fix a considerable share of the blame for our present condition on this “monstrous incursion of women.”

Such things as these are not, however, the main features of Mr Machen’s confessions—for that is what his pages really are. He is most interesting when he hints at his incidental experiences at novelist, journalist, and actor. And here, at the same time, because of his brevity, he is most disappointing. Mr H. B. Irving once said to him of his book “The Great God Pan”—“You shouldn’t have done it; you destroy the illusion. Never take people behind the scenes. I never do.” Mr Machen’s great mistake in his two latest books is that he never takes us further than the stage-door. Although he is telling us about himself all the time, we learn very little about him because he does not tell us enough of other people. We enjoy his story, but always with a sense of irritation that he has not dotted more of the i’s and crossed more of the t’s. Time and again, following on some succulent anecdote, he seems almost to be about to paint for us the whole moving pageant of the ’nineties, and just as often he turns aside to trace something else into other and less interesting channels.

The truth is “Things Near and Far” is not really a book at all because it was neither conceived nor written as a book. It is a collection of amazingly good snippets, a sort of prearranged notebook that might have borne such a title as “Towards Biography.” One feels about it as about something that might have been, that almost was, but is not. One is left wondering whether Mr Machen is a good journalist or a good author, for it seems fairly evident that he cannot be both, at all events, not at the same time, as he has tried to be in his two latest books.

Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury

... It is debonair, it is graceful, it is dignified and extraordinarily at its ease, it is essentially belles-lettres; it is not much more than that; it is not specially memorable, nor does it presage very brilliantly of the book to come (in the indefinite future), where “an interior tale of the soul and its emotions” is to be told through the shapes of “hills and valleys, woods and rivers, sunrise and sunset, buried temples and mouldering Roman walls.” Mr Machen has humour, poetic sensibility, a sense of style; he is reflective, open to the influences of nature, appreciative of the town’s common and uncommon interests, readily responsive to the appeal of art and literature. What perhaps his work lacks to make it true literature is virility, and it wants substance to make it really worth while, though it is—this must be one’s last word—exceedingly pleasant.

The Morning Post

Mr Arthur Machen has his full circle of readers, who will be delighted with this sumptuous edition which Mr Secker has so ably prepared. It is limited to a thousand sets; five hundred of which have gone to America. Mr Machen loves the unusual and the mysterious. They appeal to his imagination and set him thinking on a train of thought which seems without end. Someone has said that few men can more agreeably fill a column. The remark finds justification in these volumes. This gift is the strength and weakness of his writing. It might be said of Mr Machen that he has at once too much and too little imagination. Too much, that his ideas flow on like the summer brook; too little, that his style lacks incisiveness and the power of expressing instantaneously some thought.

“The Great God Pan” is a fair example of this weakness. He tells us in “Far Off Things” that he was persuaded to write this tale of horror by a wish to “pass on the vague, indefinable sense of awe and mystery and terror” that he had received in childhood days spent in the valley of the Usk, above Newbridge. The feeling that all the best in human beings is built on a treacherous morass which may engulf it at any moment has often been expressed. Mr Machen’s effort does not compare with Stevenson’s “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” Its terror is dissipated through failure to bring any definite incident of horror before the reader. The alternative would have been to envelop the story in such a wealth of strangeness that the impression would have been created through atmosphere; the method of Poe. Mr Machen is neither sufficiently dramatic nor sufficiently keyed to the weirdness of his tale. It certainly lacks resemblance to the dark gravity of deep woods.

From a consideration of this point we notice another peculiarity in Mr Machen’s work. It is not plagiarism, but the ignoring of any reference to ideas which other men have worked upon. True, there is no monopoly of thought, but we are led sometimes right up to a thought which has been superbly expressed before. It would seem more natural if Mr Machen directed us to the poet or writer instead of enlarging in his own words on that idea. It would certainly be more effective from the point of view of art.

It may be that we are somewhat critical. There is much to enjoy and admire in these books with ever a word for the weak and distressed, and the fascinating hint of “worlds unrealised.” But library editions are becoming increasingly popular, and we wonder whether they may not be overdone. These fine books are delightful to handle, but the thought creeps in if their matter is quite up to the high standard of production; whether anything but the very best should find a home in these limited editions, which rise so readily in mere marketable value. Still, Mr Machen has his admirers. No doubt they will think nothing too good as a home for his thoughts.

Manchester Guardian

In “Far Off Things” Mr Arthur Machen describes his rambling boyhood on the borderland of South Wales and his adolescence (a rather sad affair of lonely lodging and penurious journalism in London) as far as the publication of his first book. His memories have been laid up in lavender, and they emerge rather heavily scented. The result is the praise of old and simple things in a style that has too glib an antiquarianism to be pleasing over a long stretch. The reader finds himself predicting Mr Machen’s reaction to each situation as it arises and trying to forestall the phrase which the author’s sentimental conservatism will use. For instance, when he describes how his mother made “fermety” or “frumenty” in the autumn he must allude to it as “a very honourable dish and a most ancient and Christian pottage.” One feared in advance some such pomposity. It is the more pity because Mr Machen is sensitive as well as sentimental, and when he allows his memories to flow in unprinked English he achieves a beauty apt to the object he describes, notably in his landscapes of the Usk Valley and the surrounding hills.

The Outlook

Literature and the journalist do not always rub shoulders nowadays; at all events few people look to find anything claiming to be prose in the misprinted, smudgy sheets of our raucous evening Press, unless, perhaps, in newspapers published North of the Trent. So that it does not promise well to read in Mr Machen’s preface that his new book appeared seven years ago in one of the best-known London evening papers under the title “Confessions of a Literary Man.” It sounds like Mr Bennett all over again, and misgiving increases when he adds that the confessions were written to editorial order when he was a reporter. It is an old truth that Fleet Street has ruined more good writers than Fleet Street ever made. Only at a first glance does Mr Machen appear to be an exception, for in spite of the extraordinary quality and power of his present book, though it challenges comparison with Gissing’s best work and surpasses it in parts, Mr Machen is quite clearly not the writer he might have been. “Far Off Things” is one of the most entertaining and familiar books one remembers; a vivid autobiographical chapter, condensed and complete in much less than two hundred pages, but it is without that distinctive art that makes Mr Gosse’s “Father and Son” one of the great pieces of autobiography of this or any time, and it has not just that sense for the right word in the right place which knits language into abiding literature. He cannot wrestle with the conventional:—

Now winter has its splendours; but with what joy do we welcome the yearly miracle of spring. We and the whole earth exult together as though we had been delivered from prison, the hedgerows and the fields are glad, and the woods are filled with singing; and men’s hearts are filled with an ineffable rapture. Israel once more has come out of Egypt, from the house of bondage.

That is the prose of the best journalism, but not the prose of the man who is, first and foremost, expressing the pure content of his mind with all his mind’s power through the power of words.

But the real charm of the book lies elsewhere, chiefly in the zest with which he describes the places he has loved and the people he remembers, the curious, quiet anecdotes, his sense of poetry in all things, and, especially, his literary enthusiasms. Cervantes and Scott come into his range, and even De Quincey, who “wrote in the great manner because he thought in the great manner.” He is inspiriting about Carlyle, and there is a tone of voice meant for the detractors of that great man in the quiet statement: “I know not any man of these days that is worthy to dust Carlyle’s hat or to clean his pipe for him.” But the journalist comes out badly in that sentence. The best thing in the book is his description of the Strand as it was in the ’eighties, and there is a curious parallel with one of Mr W. H. Davies’ best poems when he writes of Gwent and Twyn Barlwm. He is equally happy proving that the Rosicrucians never existed as in describing the conventional garret of authorhood’s infancy, and there is one magnificent anecdote of a lesson in Welsh pronunciation:—

I said, “Yn oes oesodd”—from ages to ages. “That is right,” said my Welsh friend, “speak it so that it makes a sound like the wind about the mountains.”

And, as he says himself, the spirit of that sentence is very near to the heart of true literature. Mr Machen knows what true literature is. There is a good critic in the man who can define realism as “the depicting of eternal, inner realities—the ‘things that really are’ of Plato—as opposed to the description of transitory, external surfaces; the delusory masks and dominoes with which the human heart hides and drapes itself.” Though he is digressive he is never garrulous, even when he writes about food and drink, and he does that well enough to whet the reader’s appetite.

“Far Off Things,” if it is not a great book, is a book too good to be read lightly. It contains a great deal of wisdom and more than a little humour. The author throws out hints of a book yet to be written, in which hills and valleys, woods and rivers, sunrise and sunset will be described so that a story is suggested to the reader; something of Wordsworth’s method, and certainly a method of poetry, though Mr Machen does not seem to realise it in that way. Such a book he has in his mind, and if, when it comes, it improves on “Far Off Things,” Mr Machen will have done his work better than he knew.

Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury

Mr Arthur Machen is a modest man: he says so himself; but his modesty is of that most profitable kind—to the world, we mean, of course—which inspired Montaigne, Cowley, “Elia,” and other famous “egoists.” In “Things Near and Far” he continues the tale he began in “Far Off Things,” published a few months ago, the tale of his life, outer and inner, public and private. He is, it is increasingly evident, a man of letters, a complete man of letters, and nothing but a man of letters. The landmarks of his life are either one or other of his books, or one or other of the events out of which a book is to grow. He has a positive flair for making literary capital out of life. He is a very appreciative collector of experiences, and always has plenty to say on any point; he is fairly fertile in ideas, though no great thinker; and he is interested and can communicate his interest—even in his own books and the reviews they called forth. That notable modesty of his takes on, by the way, in presence of those reviews, an aspect too like self-complacency to leave us quite assured of his ingenuousness. There are, however, many books less worth 7s. 6d. than this.

Daily News

“Far Off Things,” by Arthur Machen. “Heaven lies about us in our infancy.” Nevertheless, few sensitive men recall a really happy boyhood. Mr Machen is one of them. The only child of the rector of Caerleon-on-Usk, in the romantic solitudes of Gwent, he looks back on his earliest days as a secluded yet intense experience. The power of association is strong; and the vein of mysticism which characterises Mr Machen’s writings both derives from, and is heightened by, the gleam of such fond recollection. With Sir Thomas Browne, he finds those years “a miracle ... which to relate were not a history, but a piece of poetry.”

We all know that the author of such diversities in unity as “Hieroglyphics,” “The Great God Pan,” and “The Bowmen,” is a thoroughly illogical and genial spirit. The incredibly genuine sense of wonder that runs through his excursions in practical journalism somehow prevents us from being irritated as we ought to be. His new book is good, if not a “piece of poetry.” We are glad to have his apologia, it is oddly convincing. It must be a great and unbalancing thing to find miracles all the way.

When Mr Machen writes of his studies, his early yearning for London, and the hard times he knew in the capital, it is in the same untroubled spirit. His temperament is unchanged through all these years. “Omnia exeunt in mysterium”—the thought brings him the mystic’s consolation. If one loves the unfathomable, why go about to probe it? Yet he demands realism from literature: De Quincey was his first idol by virtue of this possession. The old inference is made clear again. The mystic lives not in experience, but in the aura with which he encases it. To us others this way of acceptance is an illusion, an escape from the perplexed soul. But can we make anything better of life?

The Reflections of a Man of Self-Conceit

The Boston Evening Transcript

An extremely pleasant philosophy harboured by literary folk of a certain class in regard to the stress of bread-winning is that there is monotony about such a humdrum occupation. It is not agreeable to work at something you hate when you long to be literarily productive. Nevertheless, despite Carl Van Vechten’s sympathetic explosions all over the yellow cover of this book, we wonder just how much self-respect and inclination may war with each other in a young man’s soul when the young man lives as Mr Machen did in his youth. A book called “The Anatomy of Tobacco” was an early effort. That achieved, he seems to have lived on his father, a clergyman who had no money. He speaks of the situation thus: “My mother had been a hopeless invalid for fifteen years; my father’s health had failed, and he had become very deaf; the poor living of Llanddewi Fach had grown poorer still through the agricultural smash of 1880; he was in dire and perpetual straits for money; he underwent most of the mortifications which are allotted to the poor. It makes me grieve to this day to remember with what piteous sadness he would lean his head on his hand; he had lost hope.”

Thus Mr Machen summarises his family’s situation financially. He does not appear to have been much comfort to his father. He speaks now of “grieving.” Better indeed if he had done a little honest work. He goes to London. He reads manuscripts for a bookseller. Some intelligent people like that sort of occupation. He calls it a “weary business.” In fact, this book is filled with complaints, constant, unstinted in their outgo, because he, Arthur Machen, could not do exactly what he wished to do, on all occasions. There is a good deal of what we might term the pseudo-classic touch to his style. He likes to pose as an intellectual deserving of immortality. He is not content to be one of our leading contemporaries. He prefers, as in one instance, to “abide by the verdict of M. Octave Uzanne, who is said, I believe, to be a good judge of letters. He said that it (a certain work called ‘The Chronicle of Clemendy’) was ‘le renouveau de la Rennaissance,’ and that I was sure of my place beside Rabelais and Boccaccio, on the serene immortal seats.”

We quote the above from Mr Machen because it is wholly typical of the man. Another remark in reference to George Moore’s “A Mummer’s Wife” shows his attitude toward the age in which he lives equally well. He complains because no good novel of stage life has been written. And then he adds that in the old days, the days of the Crummles Company, it would have been easier. That is nonsense. This age and generation is adequate for all, provided some effort at adaptation is made by those of us who have been too overburdened by the weight of the glorious past. A good novel can be written as well in the twentieth century as in the seventeenth, provided some one has the brains to compass it. The whole book shows the reflections of a conceited man of mediocre ability, who buries his talent in the ashes of the past, mumbles over it incessant Latin quotations, pats himself on the back because he knows so much Latin to quote and then ... is continually irritated because the world hurries by without digging into the ashes, or listening respectfully to his incantations.—D. F. G.

Maurice Hewlett in The Evening Standard

... “To be in the Strand,” he says, sighing, “was like drinking punch and reading Dickens.” So it was—but one can read Dickens the better without the punch, either within or without the pages. It was a strange chapter of literary history where human happiness could not be imagined or pictured without too much to eat and too much to drink. I will be sentimental with almost anyone, for the mingling of tears is as wholesome a vent as the chiming of laughter—but I cannot cry over the bad smells of yesteryear to save my life. When I remember Holywell Street I turn with thanksgiving to Charing Cross Road. It is nothing to write home about—but you can feel the wind in it. So much for that....