THE SECRET GLORY

Manchester Guardian

It is a little difficult to know what kind of readers “The Secret Glory” is intended to please, and there is a temptation to believe that its author wrote it simply and solely for his own amusement. The greatest works of art are no doubt those in which an artist insists on satisfying his own standard of taste, but Mr Machen’s game on this occasion seems to have been rather that of “letting himself go.” He begins with a vivid indictment of the English public school, but does not produce either an original or a convincing picture of its faults and failings; and he then proceeds to cut the painter and to launch forth into a juvenile description of a juvenile escapade in London which his schoolboy hero, half mystic, half Bohemian, is supposed to share with a young lady of his choice, though not of his class—the whole embroidered with wonderful pæans to punch and poetry, surrounded with a sort of religious halo, and penetrated with a peculiar flavour of what one might call inebriate innocence. There are perhaps deep lessons to be drawn from the perusal of these singular heroics, but we have not succeeded in discovering or profiting by them. The narrative itself is allusive and obscure. Huge jokes are supposed to be concealed on one side, and on the other the profound, impenetrable import of things. But, judging by what is actually communicated to us, we remain in doubt whether what is withheld was either very funny or very significant.—B. S.

Punch

I have always understood that what St Paul calls “visions and revelations of the Lord” were sent to forward their recipients’ progress in virtue; and that if glimpses of the supernatural resulted in Schwärmerei, or sin, they were the work of the Devil. On this hypothesis there is no doubt whatever concerning the origin of “The Secret Glory,” a latter-day variant of the Holy Grail revealed in a Welsh farmhouse to the boy Ambrose Meyrick and his father; although its exposition is accompanied (if I may credit Mr Arthur Machen) by a vision of “The Mystery of Mysteries.” Ambrose, still harping on his mystic experiences, is sent to an exquisitely odious public school, where he becomes first a cowed and isolated dreamer and last a furtive and malicious rebel. Both reverie and rebellion are natural enough, the school being what it is, but they are not particularly creditable to a devotee of “The Mystery of Mysteries.” Nor is a liaison with a sympathetic parlour-maid, though this is set down as part and parcel of the “wonders.” Nor is Ambrose’s subsequent career, which continues a marvel of irresponsibility until his extremely unconvincing martyrdom at the hands of “miscreants” in Asia. And, talking of irresponsibility, I cannot help wishing that Mr Machen himself, who shows considerable savage humour in his guerilla campaign against the public school system, would occasionally come to closer grips with one or other of the problems his extravaganza has evoked.

Forrest Reid in The Daily Herald

In “The Secret Glory” the happenings are neither sober nor probable, yet the effect is prosaic and even tedious. Here, again, it is all a matter of treatment, or, rather, in Mr Machen’s case, of the absence of treatment, for he has left his subject a mere kernel rattling in the dry shell of didacticism. I have seldom been so disappointed in a book. What has happened to Mr Machen? Have we gained a missionary and lost an artist? His gift was always narrow, apt to lead him woefully astray when he departed from the presentation of states of abnormal, or morbid, consciousness; but it was vivid, haunting, and intensely individual. “The Secret Glory” is little more than an elaborate tract in which Mr Machen champions mediævalism and tilts at his usual windmills—the public school system, athletics, suburban life, etc.

The Outlook

In “The Secret Glory” Mr Machen attempts to describe the rebellion of a Celtic mystic against Anglicanism and the public school traditions. I say “attempts,” because neither Anglicanism nor education interests him sufficiently to make him barb his satire. But the mysticism excites his dark and fantastic imagination, and there are bursts, in the latter half of the book, of successful paradox. Ambrose Meyrick, who had seen the “Holy Chalice of Teilo sant,” and had an affection for Gothic architecture, was well whipped for absconding from football practice. Thenceforth he exerted himself to be in all things the most loyal Luptonian, but at night he walked in strange places and heard the voices that outsing the Fairy Birds of Rhiannon. After winning a Balliol Scholarship and performing some remarkable cricket at the Oval, he broke away and joined a troupe of actors, and was for ever lost to Lupton and its like. An effect of a kind Mr Machen certainly produces. He incants Welsh names, and, as so often on lighter ground, he displays a great power of giving a queer twist to the least uncanny events. Naturally, he fails to inform us what there was so remarkable in the Welsh Church which was ruined by “the Yellow Hag of Pestilence, the Red Hag of Rome, and the Black Hag of Geneva”; consequently, he fails to show why Ambrose should not have had all the spiritual experience desired in his own school chapel. True, Lupton Chapel was built in 1840, and the neighbourhood was slummy. But, then, Ambrose was capable of ecstasy in Bloomsbury and Soho. No, Ambrose’s unhappiness is too like that of Mr Bultitude when, in “Vice Versa,” this gentleman took his son’s place at Dr Grimstone’s academy, and proceeds from an intelligible dislike of small boys.

The Evening Standard

A schoolboy is also the central figure in “The Secret Glory,” by Arthur Machen. But Ambrose Meyrick is an unusual boy, not at all the sort of boy to conform to the average type turned out at such a public school as Lupton. It is to be hoped, by the way, that not many schools are like Lupton, or at least that there are not any public schoolmasters like Mr Horbury, who takes such a savage delight in using the cane.

Mr Machen’s satire on the public school system, and especially public school games, is a little too heavy-handed to be effective. Neither boys nor masters are very convincing, and now and then the story gets lost in the mystical atmosphere with which Mr Machen surrounds his hero. Altogether “The Secret Glory” is rather an incoherent and tiresome production, and certainly does not represent Mr Machen at his best. Schoolboys and mysticism do not mix.

Liverpool Daily Courier

Mr Arthur Machen has attempted an ambitious character study in “The Secret Glory.” He has also tried to give us a new version of the Grail, introducing a mystical cup preserved in a cottage in Wales. But neither the character nor the cup are very convincing, and it must be said that Mr Machen has this time failed to get into his story any deep sense of the mystical. His principal character, Ambrose Meyrick, is a queer chap, as he is meant to be, but there is no reason why he should be as irresponsible as he is, and less reason why he should finish up by getting himself crucified somewhere in Asia. These improbabilities would matter less, however, if Mr Machen had made Meyrick vital, and his adventures interesting. The story never runs with sufficient sequence to ensure this. It is all confused with propaganda, and very bitter propaganda at that, against the public schools, and criticism of Welsh Nonconformity when it combines religious revival fervour with sensuality. Mr Machen knows how to tell a story, but he does not demonstrate that capacity in this work.

Sheffield Daily Telegraph

Ambrose Meyrick said that “people who pushed ... always reminded him of the hungry little pigs fighting for the largest share of the wash”—but though a reasonable aversion to Extravertism is comprehensible, it is really unnecessary to be so exaggerated an introvert as the hero of “The Secret Glory,” by Arthur Machen. Ambrose carried his mental “Secret Doctrine” to perverse, even morbid, excesses; he lived in a paysage intérieur peopled by mystics and martyrs, and visions of the jewelled Grail hidden by the descendant of Celtic Saints in some humble cottage on the Welsh mountains; and all this was naturally incompatible with the brutal facts of life at an English public school. An unpleasant school, certainly, but not more so than most.

It is to be assumed that Ambrose possessed a sense of humour, since he could enjoy, and even parody, Rabelais, but there is scant evidence of the quality otherwise than as stated. Extracts from his famous book, “In Praise of Taverns,” are equally unconvincing.

Some of Mr Machen’s arguments on religion are interesting. “In my heart,” he says, “I have always doubted whether moderate Anglicanism be Christianity in any sense, whether it even deserves to be called a religion at all,” and he objects to Protestantism because of the fundamental heresy on which it “builds its objection to what is called Ritual. I suppose this heresy is called Manichee; it is a charge of corruption and evil made against the visible universe, which is affirmed to be not ‘very good’ but ‘very bad’—or, at all events, too bad to be used as the vehicle of spiritual truth.... Incense, vestments, candles, all ceremonies, processions, rites—all these things are miserably inadequate; but they do not abound in the horrible pitfalls, misapprehensions, errors, which are inseparable from speech of men used as an expression of the Church.”

Mr Machen is trying to present Celtic Paganism in the guise of Christianity, he confuses the Greek philosophy of restraint, “Nothing in excess,” with a mere negation. There is very little glory in the book. It is concerned with the tortuous byways of a perverse soul through which the free wind from the mountains has never blown.

The Morning Post

Though issued as fiction, this is not a novel. It is composite of story, autobiography, essay, satire, philosophy, criticism, poetry, and too formless to be brought within any literary mode. Presumably it was not written all of a piece, and that just yesterday. Spatchcocked passages point to times when there were as yet no Boches, only Boers, and “’E dunno where ’e are” was still a music-hall ditty. These were the days of Ambrose Meyrick’s youth, true; but—though this need not (and will not) trouble the shade of Mr Blackmore—the most consistent romancer, as to time and place, would not now suggest the Valley of the Doone as even a bogus field for the adventure of the Sangraal. Other times, other fashions, even in that high Quest. Pieced or wrought whole, the book nevertheless is unified by one idea. The “secret glory” of its title is the imaginative life, to which its every line and circumstance is meant as acclamation and appeal.

There are in it, among others of rare and rich beauty, a thousand absurd lines and circumstances we could willingly blot. For Mr Machen’s own purpose, Lupton School is a prejudice; like its Headmaster it is too much “commerce with mortality.” “A deeper transport and a mightier thrill” are communicated in wise, rapturous praise of wine and humorous discourse on the marriage of Panurge. Here Nelly Foran is cunningly kept with Ambrose, aloof and aloft in a fragrant old Bloomsbury whose “stinks” in reality were neither better nor worse than the Midlands’. More understanding still of its own “secret glory” would Mr Machen’s fascinating book have been had he realised that its ecstatic vision, being of the spirit and the imagination, is as likely to occur in a “Bethel with the stucco front” as in the Celtic Church with its Cup of Sacrament. But Mr Machen, in his own exclusive way, does catch it, and for that we are grateful.

Rose Macaulay in The Daily News

“The Secret Glory” is, like most of Mr Machen’s books, very odd. It is the story of a mystic, of the inner and the outer life. The outer life of Ambrose Meyrick is passed at Lupton, a typically commonplace and materialistic public school, whose masters talk of “playing the game” and write horrible school songs of the “Forty Years on” type; while his inner life, which is alone of significance or importance to him, is spent in exploring mystic realms of Celtic Christian legend with or without his dead father, a Welsh architectural enthusiast. “I do not know,” writes Ambrose in later life, “how it all happened; I had been leading two eager lives. On the outside I was playing games and going up in the school with a rush, and in the inside I was being gathered more and more into the sanctuaries of immortal things.” Ambrose’s mystical adventures are described with a good deal of beauty; it is his contacts with actuality which strike one as distorted and unreal.

Both he and Mr Machen loathe public schools and all pertaining to them with such intensity that neither of them can see straight. They set up a monstrous figure of savagery and idiotcy and call him a typical schoolmaster, adding that schoolmasters are just like schoolboys, the implication being that nearly all schoolboys also are savage and imbecile. Even public schools are not really quite as bad as all that; and Mr Machen would have been more effective if he had been more temperate. There is quite enough to be said about the savagery and stupidity of schools without resorting to distortion. Psychological accuracy is not, indeed, the strength of the book, which is full of unlikely actions. For instance, was Ambrose really the kind of boy who, in his quest for beauty, would have absconded with one of the school housemaids? Surely his dead father would have told him that this was conduct unworthy of an inquirer into spiritual mysteries. But the whole book is a fantasy, and not to be judged as a tale of real life. Its curious occurrences and characters are made odder by the difficult, obscure, and fragmentary method of narration. There is, in fact, a good deal of silliness in the book, as well as some bad taste, but there is also a good deal of beauty, and the beauty and the silliness and the bad taste are all the work of a writer.

Middleton Murry in The Nation and Athenæum

Even if we wished we could not tell the story of “The Secret Glory.” Mr Machen manages to combine an onslaught on the public school system with some watery Paterian mysticism. Personally we have an equal dislike of those who belaud and those who denigrate the public school system. Besides, “there ain’t no sich person,” there are as many systems as there are public schools. But Ambrose Meyrick, if he could have been jerked for a moment by his creator into a semblance of real existence, would justify the worst outrages wrought upon him by his equally incredible alma mater.

He is a sentimental philanderer with æsthetic Catholicisms, a mystic Celtic dreamer, a Soho Bohemian (before Soho was ruined, of course); but these crimes are as nothing compared to his incorrigible penchant for “poetic prose.” Mr Machen has encouraged him in it. He will have a great deal more to answer for in the day of judgment than the schoolmaster who tried to beat it out of him.