HIEROGLYPHICS

A. B. Walkley in The Morning Leader

I do not know whether Mr Arthur Machen is to be described as an actor who amuses his leisure with writing books or as an author who fills up his evenings by appearing on the stage. He was a member of the Benson Company and is now to be seen in a small part in “Paolo and Francesca.” He wrote some years ago a clever, disagreeable book, “The Great God Pan.” He now publishes “Hieroglyphics,” which has attracted me (it is just as well to confess frankly the queer reasons which prompt one to take up new books) by its quiet binding and clear type. Unfortunately the type is clearer than the matter. The book proves to be a discussion, in the form of a monologue, of the question, What is Literature? But the monologue is verbose and the reasoning circuitous—Mr Machen prefers to call it, after Coleridge, a “cyclical mode of discoursing”—indeed the question is not so much argued as begged. It would be unfair to Mr Machen to compare him with Tolstoy, who in putting a similar question, “What is Art?” has been as lucid and logical as Euclid himself. Apparently Mr Machen does not want to be logical. He says that there are only two parties in the world, the Rationalists and the Mystics, and as he happens to “plump for” mysticism, he despises logic as one of the vain shibboleths of the other party.

Now it is this partisan attitude, this desire to see only one side of the truth, which I think spoils Mr Machen’s book. There is room in this world for both rationalists and mystics (as well as for rationalist mystics and mystical rationalists), and neither side can claim all literature for its own. Being a mystic, Mr Machen finds the touchstone of all real or, as he calls it, fine literature, as distinguished from mere reading-matter, in “ecstasy.” What does he mean by that? “Substitute, if you like, rapture, beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown, desire of the unknown. All and each will convey what I mean; for some a particular one term may be more appropriate than another, but in every case there will be that withdrawal from the common life and the common consciousness which justifies my choice of ‘ecstasy’ as the best symbol of my meaning. I claim, then, that here we have the touchstone which will infallibly separate the higher from the lower in literature, which will arrange the innumerable multitude of books in two great divisions, which can be applied with equal justice to a Greek drama, an eighteenth-century novelist, and a modern poet, to an epic in twelve books, and to a lyric in twelve lines.” Well, of course, “higher” and “lower” here are mere question-begging terms. If you choose to call what appeals to the sense of the mysterious “high” and what appeals to some other sense “low,” there is nothing to prevent you. But all that you have established by your classification is the fact that you, being what you are, prefer one sort of thing to the other sort. This is not criticism, it is mere personal whim.

The essential whimsicality of Mr Machen’s classification comes out when he proceeds to illustrate it by specific examples. “Pickwick,” it seems, is literature, while “Vanity Fair” is not. Homer and Dickens are on the same shelf—the shelf labelled “literature”—while Jane Austen and George Eliot are on a lower shelf, labelled “reading matter.” Why? Because the authors in the second class only give us pictures of life, adroit rearrangements of what we know; they do not appeal to our sense of the miraculous, our craving for the unknown, like the writers of the first class. “Pickwick” is not a representation of life; “the book is rather the suggestion of another life, beneath our own or beside our own, and the characters, those queer, grotesque people, are queer for the same reason that the Cyclops is queer, and the dragons and dwarfs of mediæval romance are queer. We are withdrawn from the common ways of life; and in that withdrawal is the beginning of ecstasy.” What is here said about “Pickwick” is true, so far as it goes, though the comparison with the “Odyssey” is rather forced. All picaresque novels—“Gil Blas” or “Roderick Random” or “Pickwick” or “Lavengro”—have something in common with the “Odyssey,” but not much. The “Odyssey” still remains noble poetry, and these others still remain rather ignoble prose. And no parallelism between the “Odyssey” and “Pickwick” will persuade me that the true differentia of the latter is its sense of mystery. It is for the fun of the book that the world cherishes it. But, like other mystics—notably M. Maeterlinck—Mr Machen seems to be somewhat lacking in a sense of humour. For proof of that, you have only to read him complaining of the “limitations” of Miss Austen’s characters or complacently calling the creator of Mrs Poyser “poor draggle-tailed George Eliot.”

One imagines for the moment that Mr Machen is really a humorist of a very subtle kind when he compares the brandy-and-water drinking in “Pickwick” with the Dionysiac orgies from which Greek tragedy sprang. He drags in Rabelais with his dive bouteille. “After all, what does this Bacchic cultus mean? We have seen that under various disguises the one spirit appeared in Greece, in the France of the Renaissance, and in Victorian England, and that in each instance there is an apparent glorification of drunkenness.... We are to conclude that both the ancient people and the modern writers recognised Ecstasy as the supreme gift and state of man, and that they chose the Vine and the juice of the Vine as the most beautiful and significant symbol of that Power which withdraws a man from the common life and the common consciousness, and taking him from the dust of the earth, sets him in high places, in the eternal world of ideas.” The “symbolism” of Mr Pickwick’s milk-punch! The “ideas” of a drunken man! Into such absurdities do writers fall when, like Mr Machen, they set out with the preconceived notion that all great literature is a form of mysticism, instead of quietly examining the question without any preconceived notions at all.

The truth is Mr Machen’s new dichotomy of Literature and Not-Literature is simply the old dichotomy of Romanticism and Realism. Pater defined the Romantic as the element of strangeness in beauty, and what Mr Machen is in fact pleading for is the recognition of nothing but Romantic Literature as great or fine literature. In other words he wants to narrow down recognised terms to fit the limitations of his particular tastes. Well, it won’t do. He calls himself, somewhat obtrusively, a Catholic, and says that “literature is the expression, through the æsthetic medium of words, of the dogmas of the Catholic Church.” Keeping the word “catholic” untainted by any sectarian meaning, I should be inclined to say that “catholicity of taste” is precisely what Mr Machen lacks.

The Academy

... Enter Mr Machen in the part of Boswell to a talker both “literary” and “obscure,” who offers a test whereby to separate literature from “fine” literature or, in effect, talent from genius. One listens respectfully to a reading hermit, because, on the face of it, a hermit’s opinions should be matured by study and conceived in the calm of one who rolls no logs and grinds no axes. But, to get an unpleasant thing said once and for all, Mr Machen’s hermit is an indolent person, careless of accuracy, who has grudged the labour of justifying some extraordinary depreciations. He is, in fact, for all his anonymity, an egoist, whose object seems to be brilliance rather than elucidation....

The Bristol Mercury

“Hieroglyphics” is a somewhat figurative title for the latest book of Mr Arthur Machen, author of “The Great God Pan.” It reproduces a series of monologues by and conversations with a kind of philosophical literary hermit whom the author discovered in a quaint old house at Barnsbury, an almost mythical region lying between Pentonville and the Caledonian Road. Now and again one discerns a faint and far-away flavour of Coleridge and Lamb in the dissertations, but the philosophy is not of the most profound....

The Globe

It is to be hoped that the title of this book, by no means a happy one, will not deter anybody from making its acquaintance. For it is a very readable book—at least, it will be found so by all who take any interest in things literary. It might very well have been called, “What, really, is Literature?”—a large question, which the author, Mr Arthur Machen, does not succeed in answering convincingly. His main theory is summed up in one of his sentences, early in the volume: “If Ecstasy be present, then I say there is fine literature; if it be absent, then, in spite of all the cleverness, all the talents, all the workmanship and observation and dexterity you may show me, then, I think, we have a product (possibly a very interesting one), which is not fine literature.” How this theory works out in practice is seen in another sentence: “Here is ‘Pickwick,’ and here is ‘Vanity Fair’; and, applying my test, I set ‘Pickwick’ beside the ‘Odyssey,’ and ‘Vanity Fair’ on top of the political pamphlet.” It is impossible to treat with seriousness such propositions; but that is no reason why “Hieroglyphics” should be neglected. There is a good deal in it, mostly incidental, with which we quite agree—such as, for example, the judgment passed on “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” The book is suggestive and therefore interesting. Mr Machen ascribes it to an “obscure literary hermit,” whose conversations he professes to reproduce; but there is no apparent necessity for such machinery. Mr Machen should have the courage of his opinions—if they are his. Anyway, “Hieroglyphics” can be recommended to the well-read and the thoughtful.

The Daily Mail

Mr Arthur Machen, after diligently applying a microscope to sundry literary reputations, has detected a number of spots, which he enumerates in “Hieroglyphics.” This sheaf of essays is undeniably clever; but it leaves an impression of cynical iconoclasm, which sees false gods in books which have fallen under the curse of popular approval. Mr Machen finds, for instance, that Jane Austen’s works are not literature, and that Dickens reeks of Camden Town. Nevertheless, the book is piquant reading, and contains some shrewd pieces of analysis.

Pilot

The device by which vendors of patent wares tempt curiosity by giving them some curious name is hardly worth the imitation of men of letters, and we admire neither Mr Machen’s title nor his other artifice of throwing what he has to say into the form of monologues delivered by a Coleridge-loving hermit in Barnsbury. His theme is the old one of “What constitutes Literature?” and his answer is given in the single word Ecstasy. The process by which the answer is reached has the merit of simplicity. Literature is explained to mean “fine literature” and (in an unguarded moment) “imaginative literature.” “Ecstasy” is “the withdrawal, the standing apart from common life,” and it is obvious that this is only our old friend “imagination” under a new and less happy name. Thus only imaginative literature deserves to be called literature, and what constitutes imaginative literature is the quality of imagination, a conclusion which we can reach without going to Barnsbury, but which yet, ere it is attained, gives Mr Machen occasion for passing some excellent criticisms on the books he reviews. Thus he illustrates his axiom, “Only the Idea is pure art; with Plot and Construction and Style there is an alloy of artifice,” by some admirable remarks on Stevenson’s “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” and comes near the root of the matter in his criticisms of Mr Hardy and Mr Meredith. That he recognises his quality of “ecstasy” in “Pickwick,” despite its cockney atmosphere, is creditable to his generosity. That he adopts “Vanity Fair,” which he never tires of reading, as the supreme instance of “observation expressed with artifice” (and, therefore, outside his definition of “literature”), shows some blindness. Take away Thackeray’s deep religious feeling, and the criticism would be true, but by the same process the “Agamemnon” may be reduced to the rank of a bad French novel, and the “Œdipus Rex” to a tale of horrors. To blunder thus seems the Nemesis of the straining after novelty which has made Mr Machen attribute the worth of literature to its possession of “ecstasy,” and the ambiguous definition he has given to this word. To stand apart, not from common life, but from the common view of life, is surely the criterion of true literature, and we are surprised that Mr Machen should come so near as he does to making the subject rather than the vision (we are careful not to say the “treatment”) of it the main test.

The Morning Post

... He talks (like the Walrus) of many things, of office boys, of Coleridge, of words that end in “ings”; of Homer and of Dickens, of literature, of art; of books that bore and “lonely” books, which have “a soul apart.” ...

The Star

“By what rule are we ... to judge exactly in the case of any particular book whether it is literature or not?” When I read that question in Mr Arthur Machen’s new book “Hieroglyphics” I pricked up my ears. Here at last, I thought, is the divining rod for which I have yearned. No longer need I vex my soul over the judgments delivered here every Saturday. Fancy a rule which will make me infallible! What is it? “A single word.” Out with it! “Ecstasy.” Is that all? “Substitute, if you like, rapture, beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown, desire for the unknown”—Stop! these words are not “substitutes” or synonyms. They are, I suspect, merely amplifications of another word, romance. Your solution, in fact, is merely a statement of your attitude. You are a romanticist, and I like you, for I am one myself. But your golden rule does not help me, for it leaves me still under the necessity of questioning my own soul. By “ecstasy” you mean your ecstasy, not my ecstasy. For every man has his own private ecstasy. When you get to work I find that your ecstasy is whimsical. You earmark words and use them in a Machenian sense. You prefer to speak of “feelings” when you mean “the things of life,” and you reserve “emotion” for “the influence produced (sic) in man by fine art.” I challenge the distinction. It is arbitrary. “Thus it will be with emotion that we witness the fall of Œdipus, the madness of Lear, while we feel for our friends and ourselves in misfortune.” This will never do. “Emotion” is simply a poor Latin synonym for the fine Saxon word “feeling.” How on earth can I confine my “emotions” to literature and my “feelings” to life? No, Mr Machen, your sophistry won’t help me to discover masterpieces for the readers of that “great pale bird,” The Star.

And, really, your “ecstasy” leads you a mad dance. It makes you rate “George Egerton” above George Meredith. Mr Meredith, you say, “not only fails in the body of art but even more conspicuously in the soul of it.” Clearly, your ecstasy is not mine. While you shut Meredith out of literature you let “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” scrape in! After that, nothing you say surprises me. Indeed, it is a relief when you damn Thackeray with Meredith, and canonise Dickens with—Miss Wilkins. For by this time I realise that you have gone must. Your “ecstasy” is merely the motor-car in which your preferences go out for a nocturnal ride without a light at seventy miles an hour. It is a very good vehicle if safely used. It is by no means new either. Mr Watts-Dunton has been employing it for a quarter of a century. Why, his famous discovery of “the renascence of wonder” has become a critical commonplace. Indeed, so thoroughly has it permeated criticism that the phrase is used as literary shorthand for the great generalisation which it connotes. You have, indeed, turned the shorthand into charming “Hieroglyphics,” but you go astray in the application. Your “ecstasy” over that “thick white cloud” in the Tale of Gabriel Grub is quite funny. And if you identify the brandy-and-water scenes in “Pickwick” with the Bacchic cultus, what about Jos Sedley’s rack punch? What about Mr Meredith’s glorifications of old port? But much shall be forgiven you because you are a good Pantagruelist, though I think it is a mistake to identify Pantagruelism either with Dionysus and the Greek drama on the one hand or with Dickens and “Pickwick” on the other. Falstaff is the only piece of real Pantagruelism in our literature. And now, let me advise everybody to read “Hieroglyphics.” It is brilliantly written, it bubbles over with pugnacities, and it is alive in every line.

Glasgow Herald

... The author’s main desire seems to be to utter a series of elaborate paradoxes, and he does utter them in a somewhat conceited fashion. Mr Machen has no doubt got hold of part of the truth, for it is indubitable that the sense of ecstasy, or whatever else one chooses to call it, is a main cause of æsthetic charm. As certainly, however, it is not the whole secret of literature, which admits much more of the pure intellect than Mr Machen will acknowledge. If there were nothing more in fine literature than he will allow, then our masterpieces of prose and poetry would be nothing more than so many pieces of music; but fine literature and fine music are of course very different things. One judges theories by their results, and there must be something radically wrong about a doctrine which excludes Pope and Thackeray from the fine literary canon—which makes them “artifice” and not “art.” There is something wrong also about the critic who permits himself such trivial impertinences as “the egregious M. Voltaire,” “poor draggle-tailed George Eliot,” “our great false prophet Bacon, a wretch infinitely more guilty than Hobbes.” Even dramatically, as the utterances of an obscure literary hermit, such things are not witty—nor yet funny, except in an unconscious way. There are, indeed, better things in the book, and the author succeeds at times in saying a clever thing, as in truth, considering the earnestness of his efforts in that direction, it were hard if he did not. But, on the whole, the essay is the expression of a thoroughly false, unwholesome, and effeminate theory of literature.

The Graphic

Mr Arthur Machen’s attractive-looking volume with above quaint title is a little difficult to understand—namely, why was it written and why published? It purports to be records of conversations listened to by the author during many visits to the house of a friend in Barnsbury. In the society of this friend, and in an “old mouldering room,” art in general, and the art of literature in particular, seem to have been very thoroughly discussed. This unnamed friend may have been an author, though Mr Machen confesses himself ignorant, but “he was always ready to defend the thesis that, all the arts being glorious, the literary art was the most glorious and wonderful of all.” Mr Machen has now constituted himself the Boswell of this Barnsbury friend, whose existence we take leave to doubt, and the result is a discursive volume of opinions, given conversationally, on literature and art—on what constitutes literature and what constitutes art, with some smashing of idols (as, for instance, George Eliot, George Meredith, and the already chipped Stevenson), all set forth with a certain amount of affectation in style by the author. Mr Machen, in point of fact, requires what he is pleased to call “ecstasy” in a book before it pleases him. He has found it in the Mr Hardy of “Two in a Tower” days, but not in the Mr Hardy who wrote “Jude,” any more than in the work of the other writers mentioned above. It is well to know, though, that he fancies he detected this quality in “Keynotes,” which circumstance may comfort Mr Meredith for his lack of it, unless, perchance, he admires that curious work. Those who would know more, however, of the ecstatic in literature must turn to the book itself.

The Pall Mall Gazette

Mr George Gissing’s “George Ryecroft,” in the Fortnightly, deals with a subject so like that of Mr Arthur Machen’s “Hieroglyphics,” that for a time one thinks that both authors must be writing of the same person. Both take as spokesman a sort of literary hermit, whose only companions are his books, and who therefore gives forth his views on men and their works with a real or assumed air of detachment. The setting, however, is a little different; for, while Mr Machen’s protagonist is a gentleman with a past, not uncomfortably buried alive in lodgings at Highbury, Mr Gissing’s is an ex-literary hack, who has been left an annuity by a thoughtful friend, and has retired to Devonshire to spend what fag-end of life the newspapers and the publishers have left to him. Yet both gentlemen prose a good deal, and awake in a contentious mind the doubt whether the general public really care so much for the opinions of literary men about books as they seem to imagine. Outside a certain circle the reign of the old favourite seems to be pretty well established, and although a new one is now and then adopted into the dynasty, the admission is always due to his own merit, and not to that of his backers.