Chapter IV: Part 4

During the latter part of my stay in the country (1891–93) I wrote two books. I have forgotten the names of both of them. They were very bad, and I tore them up, with the exception of one episode--to put it mildly, not a very good story--which appears in “The Three Impostors” under the title of “The Novel of the Dark Valley.” And it was in the early spring of 1894 that I set about the writing of the said “Three Impostors,” a book which testifies to the vast respect I entertained for the fantastic, “New Arabian Nights” manner of R. L. Stevenson, to those curious researches in the by-ways of London which I have described already, and also, I hope, to a certain originality of experiment in the tale of terror, as exemplified in the stories of the Professor who was taken by the fairies, and of the young student of law who swallowed the White Powder. And when I had finished, with a sort of recognition that I had squeezed this particular orange to death, I remember saying to my old friend A. E. Waite: “I shall never give anybody a White Powder again.” And then I was immediately called on to do that very thing which I had vowed I would not do. I actually got an “order,” and--this shews that I was a mere intruder, not a true craftsman--I have rarely been so miserable, miserable that is, as a man of letters, in my life.

It was like this. As I have remarked, “The Great God Pan” had made a storm in a Tiny Tot’s teacup. And about the same time, a young gentleman named H. G. Wells had made a very real, and a most deserved sensation with a book called “The Time Machine”; a book indeed. And a new weekly paper was projected by Mr. Raven Hill and Mr. Girdlestone, a paper that was to be called “The Unicorn.” And both Mr. Wells and myself were asked to contribute; I was to do a series of horror stories. I won’t deny that I swelled a little and was cheered and elated by the fact of my being asked to write by anybody; nay, I really tried my best to feel important and puffed up. And then I set about writing that series of tales of horror. I was not puffed up for long. As I say, I had realised that for me the Stevensonian manner was ended. And now I was to begin all over again; to recook that cabbage which was already boiled to death! I wrote four stories in a kind of agony, my pen shrieking “rubbish!” at me with every stroke. I remember literally sobbing in a kind of hysteria of despair with my head on my hands; and this shews that there are some men who cannot be helped. The only thing that got me through at all was an endeavour to transplant the manner of Apuleius into English soil; but the four tales were sorry things when all was said. I was glad when “The Unicorn” ceased to exist after two or three numbers, before a single one of those tales of mine had appeared in it. Mr. Wells had one story in “The Unicorn,” “The Cone,” which he reprinted in the collection called “The Country of the Blind.” Such was the affair, and I think it explains the irritation which I have always experienced when I have been asked to write a continuation of “The Three Impostors,” or something in the manner of “The Three Impostors.” I knew that all this was done and ended; that, for me, the vein was worked out and exhausted: utterly. I shall always recur to the metaphor of the white road that you see from afar climbing over the hill into unconjectured regions. For me that is literature; the journey of discovery; the finding of a new world. When once I have toiled painfully up that long road, and have stood on the other side of the dark wood, and have looked upon the land beyond; then all the joy, all the delight and thrill and wonder are over for me. Columbus could not discover America twice. I never can say to myself: “Look here! Let’s pretend that we’ve never been this way before, that we don’t know in the least what’s beyond that turn of the road, that anything may happen beyond that pine tree.” It won’t do.

And that is one reason why I beg my bread in my sixtieth year.

For, all that I have written on this matter is, doubtless, very fine; but we must confess that when it is a case of literature being exchanged for the money of the publisher--and the public--the affair becomes a commercial one. And, in business, you buy a brand. Let me try to imagine it! I am a wealthy man, and I have found and my guests have found that last hamper of Champagne admirable. I go to my wine merchant and order another hamper of the same vintage. Nay, he has not got it; he will be happy to supply me with a wine of entirely different character; or, to press the analogy a little extravagantly, he no longer deals in Champagne at all, he doesn’t think much of Champagne, it is an elegant lemonade, as one of Murger’s characters expresses it, but he will be delighted to send me six dozen of a rare Château wine of Bordeaux, an infinitely finer wine, as he assures me. But I want Champagne! I am not going to stand such treatment for one moment! The man must be mad! _De me fabula narratur_; all my life I have been pressing my Bordeaux on people who had begun to think that there might be something to be said for my small Champagne.

And I quite see the point. I have never read one of the horror stories of Mr. W. W. Jacobs, though I am told that they are admirable. For me, Mr. Jacobs must speak through an everlasting Night Watchman, through an eternal countryman draining the last dregs of his beer on the settle at the _Cauliflower_: with these immortals I am happy.

“The Three Impostors” was published by John Lane some time in 1895. But before sending the manuscript to Mr. Lane, I had tried Mr. Heinemann. The firm wrote me a most delightful letter, full of the most charming things, which I had some difficulty in swallowing, though an author’s throat is capable of astounding feats where praise is concerned. I was to go and see them, and I did so, my heart beating high. I saw a member of the firm. He was better than the letter for a swelling soul. He read extracts from the reader’s report, and these were more splendid still. He outlined delightful terms; he pressed on me the necessity of my having something on account of royalties in advance: a happy possibility that had not even dawned on me in 1894–95. He hoped that the House of Heinemann might ever have the privilege of publishing my beautiful books. “Better than the best of Stevenson”; thus he read from the optimistic reader’s report. Thus elated, glorious, happy indeed, went down Mr. Arthur Machen, man of letters--now there could be no doubt of it!--from the amiable office, even into Bedford Street, seen for the first time to be a shining thoroughfare, a veritable golden pathway of Paradise, leading to the golden Strand, nay, to the golden world, where all desires were accomplished, and the faithful servant is rewarded: “Enter thou into the joy of thy Publisher.”

After all, I said to myself, the old toils, the old labours, those unhappy nights, those sick days of despair were not altogether wasted. Indeed, I tried to do my best; indeed, I grudged no labour; indeed, I was patient and tore up the sorry page; I knew that I must persevere and still persevere. And I knew that the other books were well meant but futile after all; that I had not really touched the mark, though I pretended that I had, and did my best to persuade myself that it was so. But now; “I have really written something that is good, that is, even, very good; that one of the best publishers in London praises and praises highly.” I never thought of the money that all this must mean, that never entered a moment into my mind; my only meditation was that for fifteen years I had done all I could do, and that now I was to enter into my reward. O golden Strand, that day, golden Great Russell Street when I came home to tell my news, golden happy world which rewards at last all humble faithful endeavour: golden world inhabited by good men, by publishers of all men most good.

It was a pure matter of form; the waiting for the agreement, a matter of a week or so, as the kind gentlemen in the office informed me. And in three weeks, somewhere about the middle of January, 1895, came the MS. of “The Three Impostors” back to me, with a formal, printed slip from the House of Heinemann, regretting that it was unable to accept the enclosed manuscript. Well does A. E. Waite declare that there is an element of waggery in the constitution of the universe. Never did the proud policeman in the old pantomime, foiled by the buttered slide of the clown, come down with a thump so boisterously undignified. So, rolling in the mud, I lay sprawling, my legs in the air. I was silly enough to write a somewhat exasperated letter to my friend in the office. He answered me in a befitting manner, in a tone of grave rebuke: he said that if I had realised the cares of the publisher’s life I would not have written “so caustically.”

_Chapter VIII_

“The Three Impostors” came back then from Messrs. Heinemann, and as soon as I got over the little bump I have just mentioned, I thought that I would try to make the book a bit better. One of the “novels” or introduced tales displeased me, so I am sure it must have been very bad indeed. I am not certain, but I think it was about a benevolent City man, of considerable means, who occupied an old red brick house somewhere at the back of Acton and occasionally, I suppose at the full moon, turned into a were-wolf. I can see nothing against the plot; and I believe there is a considerable body of unimpeachable evidence in favour of the hypothesis that the human consciousness is occasionally displaced by the bestial consciousness: the Malays, for instance, are apt at times to fancy themselves wild cats and to behave accordingly. But, somehow, it wouldn’t do. The transformation of the City man was highly unsatisfactory and unconvincing: so I tore up the tale, and wrote instead of it the surprising narrative of Professor Gregg and his disastrous search for the fairies among the hills of my native country. In the machinery of the story I introduced a hypothesis that was then new; I think I read of it in some paper written by Sir Oliver Lodge. The theory was, that when the lights are low, or turned out, at the spiritualist séance, and objects are found, when the lights go up, to have been brought from all quarters of the room and laid in the centre of the table; or when the people sitting in the dark round the table hear the piano near the door being played, the theory was that these marvels are not necessarily due to the presence and intervention of ghosts. I believe that it was the case of Eusapia Palladino that was engaging Sir Oliver Lodge’s attention just then; and he advanced the striking hypothesis that the piano was played and the objects fetched from the sideboard by a kind of extension of the medium’s body. I forget whether the distinguished Professor used the instance; but I know that the impression conveyed to my mind was that something happened similar to the protrusion and withdrawal of a snail’s horns: Eusapia’s arm became twice or thrice its usual length, performed the required feat whatever it was, and then shrank again to its normal size. This hypothesis was novel in those days; now it is widely known and credited amongst spiritualists. They have found a name for the mysterious substance which projects itself from the medium’s body: it is called ectoplasm. In all probability the whole theory is a pack of nonsense, and the “phenomena” are the tricks of clever cheats: still, what do we know? At all events, I worked it all into my fairy tale, mixing up the old view that the fairy tales, the stories of Little People, are in fact traditions of the aborigines of these islands, small, dark men who took refuge under the hills from the invading Celt with this view of the capacities of the human body, and my view, still newer, that the fairies may still be found under the hills, and that they are far from being pleasant little people. That was the recipe for the tale, and I give it in spite of a friendly rebuke I once received from poor H. B. Irving. He was talking to me about the Introduction I had written to “The Great God Pan.”

“You shouldn’t have done it,” he said. “You destroy the illusion. Never take people behind the scenes. I never do.”

But it really doesn’t matter. And, further, I have a suspicion that it is often much more interesting “behind” than “in front.” I have seen some very fine theatrical storms in my time; they did these things very well in the days of the elder Irving at the Lyceum, but I never enjoyed any of those tempests half so much as a storm I once watched from the wings, while Sir Frank Benson was playing King Lear. Everything, of course, was pitchy dark, save where a farthing light was glimmering in some odd corner. By this light crouched a squat form, that of the assistant stage-manager. In one hand he held the Prompt Copy of the Play, with all the cues duly indicated in it. He held it up as close as he could to the miserable glimmer, and had evidently as much as he could do to see the script with its various interlineetions and noughts and crosses, and all sorts of queer hieroglyphics which mean a great deal to a stage-manager’s eye. But in the other hand he held a drumstick, and coming nearer I saw that the big drum was beside him on the boards, and that near at hand dim figures stood ready for some mysterious service. A voice is heard from somewhere:

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow
You cataracts and hurricanes, spout
Till you have drench’d your steeples, drown’d the cocks,
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head; and then, all-shaking thunder--”

And so on. And all the while the man with the big drum was commenting on the text. At certain points, bang! would come the drumstick on the drum, and that gave the cue to the man who stood by the thunder-sheet, which he caused to waggle violently, and at the same moment “Props” released his lightnings. It was far better behind than in front, to my taste, at all events. And so a man of letters of very great distinction once said to me:

“I’ve been reading your ‘Great God Pan.’ I didn’t make much of it. Confused, it seemed to me. But when I read the Introduction, I said to myself: ‘Good heavens! Here’s a man who writes as well as I do!’”

And I may say that the literary gentleman meant this as a very great compliment; indeed so it was.

Well, we have been speaking a little of the stage. And in the earlier rehearsals of a play a good deal is taken for granted, or indicated by the gentleman in charge. I am speaking of the old days, be it understood, and of the Shakespearean Touring Company in the provinces. The company is assembling in the wings in small groups, one strolling in after another, some of them with the cheerful look of those who have partaken of refreshment. On the whole the men keep together, and the women talk to each other. The curtain is down, and by it is a deal table and a couple of Windsor chairs--or it may be a couple of golden thrones. At the table sit the stage-manager and his assistant, occupied with the prompt copies and various documents connected with the business of the morning. Above their heads burns the T-piece; piping in the shape of a capital T, with the top bar pierced and flaming with gas-jets. The stage-manager looks at his watch. “Five past eleven! All ready for the Procession! March off.”

The stage-manager has risen from his Windsor chair--or throne, as the case may be--and is looking up stage with his back to the curtain. As he says, “March off,” he indicates the music that isn’t there:

“Too-too, too-too--too-too, tootery-too, too-too,” in something like the time and tune of the music as it will be “on the night”; stamping with one foot on the stage to increase the realism of the performance. The old stage direction reads something like: “A sennet within. Culverins shot off,” and accordingly the stage-manager interrupts his “too-tooing” at intervals:

“Too-too, tootery-too! Bang!” bringing his practicable foot down on the boards with a terrific crash.

“Too-too-too, too-too: Bang!”

Then: “March over. Flourish of Trumpets. Tara-tara-tara, ta-ta-ta. Curtain up! Tara-tara, ta-ta-ta-ta-tara. Procession on.”

The Procession of Knights and Ladies which has been forming in the dusty obscurity of the wings begins to advance and cross an imaginary line which marks the place where the scenery will be on the night. They make more especially for a position up stage (L.U.E.) where there will be, at the proper time, a Gothic archway. The “taras” are still going on. They are violently interrupted.

“Where’s the Rush-strewer?” howls the stage-manager. “Mr. Machen! (fff) Mr. Machen! Lobbit! (to the hovering call-boy) Call Mr. Machen! (To the Procession) Go back. I am going to have this done properly, if we have to stay all day for it.”

The call-boy rushes violently into the darkness. His voice is heard vociferating “Mr. Machen!” in passages and on stairs. Finally, Mr. Machen appears, looking flurried or sulky, as the case may be. The stage-manager, who had been discussing beer with Mr. Machen a short quarter of an hour before, in a friendly and familiar manner, is now, very properly, distant and official.

“Mr. Machen, I wish you would contrive to be more punctual. Better be an hour too soon on the stage than a second too late. You can’t learn to act, you know, by staying away from rehearsal!”

Mr. Machen murmurs something about “ten minutes allowed for variation of clocks.” The stage-manager grunts impatiently. Mr. Machen places himself at the head of the procession with an imaginary bundle of rushes on his left arm. The too-tooing, the banging, the tara-ing are done all over again, and at last the stage-manager announces: “Flourish over”--and the play begins.

In other words, after the little difficulties and delays that I have indicated, “The Three Impostors” was published in the Keynotes Series at the Bodley Head. It didn’t do so well as “The Great God Pan.” The title was a bad one. Then, as my French colleague, the late P. J. Toulet, said to me afterwards: “_Ce livre est trop fumiste, ou pas assez fumiste_”; the farce and the tragedy in it were not well mixed. And again, there had been some ugly scandals in the summer of ’95, which had made people impatient with reading matter that was not obviously and obtrusively “healthy”; and so, for one reason or another, “The Three Impostors” failed to set the Fleet Ditch on fire.

Whereupon I began to think about my next book. I had done, as I have said, with Stevensonianism and White Powders; now we were to have something entirely new. “Tara, tara, tara!”--in the stage-manager’s manner. This time there was to be no doubt of it. “Everybody ready for the Great Romance!”

I started fair. There was to be something different from the former books: I knew that. But I hadn’t the remotest notion of what this new book was to be about. I used to go out in the morning and pace the more deserted Bloomsbury squares and wonder very much what it would be like. I got the hint I wanted at last from a most interesting essay by Mr. Charles Whibley, written by way of Introduction to “Tristram Shandy.” Mr. Whibley was discussing the picaresque in literature. He pointed out that while “Gil Blas” and its early Spanish originals represented the picaresque of the body, and “Don Quixote” was picaresque both of mind and body, “Tristram Shandy” was picaresque of the mind alone. The wandering in that extraordinary book is, in other words, noumenal, not phenomenal. I caught hold of that notion: the thought that a literary idea may be presented from the mental as well as the physical side of things, and said to myself: “I will write a ‘Robinson Crusoe’ of the mind.” That was the beginning of “The Hill of Dreams.” It was to represent loneliness not of body on a desert island, but loneliness of soul and mind and spirit in the midst of myriads and myriads of men. I had some practical experience of this state to help me; not altogether in vain had I been constrained to dwell in Clarendon Road and to have my habitation in the tents of Notting Hill Gate. I immediately marked down all these old experiences as a valuable asset in the undertaking of my task: I knew what it was to live on a little in a little room, what it meant to wander day after day, week after week, month after month through the _inextricabilis error_ of the London streets, to tread a grey labyrinth whose paths had no issue, no escape, no end. I had known as a mere lad how terrible it was on a gloomy winter’s evening to go out because the little room had become intolerable, to go out walking through those multitudinous streets stretching to beyond and beyond, to see the light of kindly fires leaping on the walls, to see friendly faces welcoming father or husband or brother, to hear laughter or a song sounding from within, perhaps to catch a half glimpse of the faces of the lovers as they looked out, happy, into the dark night. All this had been my daily practice and use for a long while; I was qualified then, in a measure, to describe the fate of a Robinson Crusoe cast on the desert island of the tremendous and terrible London. Thus was accomplished what Garrick called, much to the Doctor’s amusement, the “first concoction” of the book.

I am sorry that I cannot trace the further steps in its elaboration with a like minuteness. All this time I was getting my green-mounted review cuttings of “The Three Impostors.” I have kept them, I know, for I keep all my reviews, but I cannot lay my hands on them. I believe, though, that their general import was that I was something of a pretentious ass and that my horrors were all humbug; and for some obscure reason, which I cannot undertake to explain, these notices cheered me on immensely in my new work.

“I cannot undertake to explain”; that is the very truth. Why should a man whose only life consists in writing books feel highly elated at being told on good authority that he is utterly and entirely incapable of doing anything of the kind; that he is clever, perhaps, in a thin sort of way, but that his most prized effects at which he has evidently toiled--as the reviewer declares--with most laborious pains miss fire completely; that his endeavours to be this, that and the other are really pathetic in their utter failure; that his lightnings and thunderings are effects of the property man? I do not know why this should be so, and perhaps if I knew I should not tell; but I think I know that there are deep things in psychology, in the real psychology, not in the muck-heap of the psycho-analytical chemists. At all events, I know that when I read a review which ended, say, with: “We can only wish Mr. Machen better luck with his next bag of thaumaturgic tricks,” I would be much uplifted, and go out and pace Mecklenburgh Square and the old graveyard by Heathcote Street in a happy mood of invention, feeling that the new book lay all simple and plain before me.

So, thus cheered and highly comforted, I went on my daily tours about the Bloomsbury squares, about waste places abutting on the King’s Cross Road, about the wonderlands of Barnsbury, taking with me the problem of this great book that was to be made; this book that was to be the better part of me. Why, it was only the other day that a friend, who is curious like myself, in the remaining oddities of London, took me for a short stroll near the Gray’s Inn Road.

“I think,” said he, “that I can show you something that you will like.”

In his voice was the pride of the collector, who takes his keys, opens his safe, and draws out the rich case, containing “Pickwick” in the original numbers, with the cancelled plates, unopened leaves, all the advertisements preserved, perfect condition, autograph letter signed “Charles Dickens,” giving the source of the character of Sam Weller in separate portfolio: all the pride of one who possesses such a treasure was in the voice of my friend.

He led me round corner after corner, by turns and ways that became more and more obscure. Then, elated, he said: “There!”

In the by-street I saw a queer house, standing in a sunken yard away from the pavement. It was painted in cream colour, and grotesque heads, intended to be mediæval, were peppered over its frontage. I knew it well.

“I never expected to see that again,” I said. “I thought it would have been pulled down long ago; like the ‘Rows’ that once led from Great Coram Street. And, unless I am mistaken, we shall find Hebrew letters inscribed on plaster shields applied to the house front.”

The Hebrew inscriptions were still there; very faint, but still there. I had last seen them in ’95–’96 when I was entangled in the most intricate problems of “The Hill of Dreams.”

I have told already some of the troubles of the book: the battle of the second chapter, the notion sought in vain for three weeks: the affair of the fifth chapter when I lost my way completely and wrote many thousands of words that had to be rejected. Nearly all the journey, from the autumn of 1895 to the spring of 1897, there were doubts and trials and questionings: after all, was it not hopeless; would it not be better to tear it up and start afresh on a new book? In the summer of 1896, when I was in the thick of these perplexities, I spent a month in Provence and Languedoc, visiting places the very names of which are incantations: Arles, Avignon, Nîmes, Montpellier, Beaucaire, famed Tarascon by Rhone; and I saw how the sun can shine on the white cliff road by Marsilho--to give the city its Provençal name, which you must pronounce, as near as may be, Mar-see-yo-ho. And the changing of the colours of the sea there, as the sun sank and brief twilight gathered and the moon rose: here were marvels and beauties that sank deeply into the heart.

A wonderful land, indeed. The olive garths, of such a silvery, dim green as our northern seas sometimes put on near the land, the scented rosemary growing as a weed by the roadside, the walls of Avignon seen by sunset light, the great Roman arenas, still in use for bull-fights, a matter not remote from their original purpose, the Temple of Diana at Nîmes, no ruin, but a perfect building into which the priest of Diana might well enter as you viewed the portal from the modern street; and above all the splendour of that southern sun shining on white rocks, on the dark cypresses, on the white arch which looked as clear and fine as if it had been built a year, which was eighteen hundred years old or more: all these are Provence; not at all forgetting the Bouillabaisse which Pascal makes in the Old Port, Pascal who roasts his incomparable partridges before a fire of vine boughs. More than once I felt that I had made a journey rather in time than space, that these black cypresses and clear white walls and green and silvery olives were present not in our day but in the old Roman world.

The last few days of my visit to Provence I spent in a little hotel at a place called Roucas Blanc, not far from Marseilles. The hotel, sheltered by the white rock and the dark green woods, had been built on the very verge of the sea, and in the morning I would open the door-window of my apartment and stand on a platform, but a few feet above the water. I would lean over the low wall, and wonder at the jewelled glory of the Mediterranean blue beneath the mounting sun--and my heart was at home, in Gray’s Inn, in my old Japanese bureau, in the litter of papers that awaited me there, in the wretched book that I was struggling to make. _Aqui esta encerrado el alma del licenciado._ What have I said of the paradox of life, that its actualities are so nauseous that men will do anything to escape from them? And here was I, free to enjoy the sun on the Provençal sea and the wonder of the Roman world, hankering after the world of anguish and difficulty and disappointment that I had made for myself in grim Verulam Buildings, amidst the London fogs.

And so I got back and found that the labour of months had been wasted, and set to work to break and remake. The book was finished, somehow, in the March of 1897, and just then, as if he had come upon his cue, a new publisher, Mr. Grant Richards, wrote to me asking if I had any manuscripts that I should like to have published. I saw him and left “The Hill of Dreams” with him. He did not take long to make up his mind about it. He would have none of it, and he wrote advising me by no means to publish the book; for, he said, it would do me no credit. What he meant was that it was not in the least like “The Three Impostors,” and it took him ten years before he saw light on the subject, for it was the firm of Grant Richards that published “The Hill of Dreams” in 1907.

Some amusing reviews appeared. The “Daily Graphic” said, very truly, that the book was not of much practical interest, and the “Outlook” confirmed this dictum by stating that there was “scarcely a place for it in the widest utilitarian view.” “Will readily impress a reader of quiet tastes,” declared the gentler “Scotsman.” “Nothing that more quickly tends to tedium,” corrected the “Manchester Guardian”: naturally enough, if the “Athenæum” was right in saying that “the main matter of regret is the utter formlessness and the arid inhumanity of his work.” “Well written, but written not quite well enough,” was the fatal sentence of the “Chronicle.” And so on, and so on. I will not disguise the fact that some of the notices were very good indeed; but it has always been the other sort of review that has heartened me, and so forthwith I set about writing a book in high spirits. This turned out to be “The Secret Glory,” which was published in the spring of 1922. This book also was on the whole very well reviewed, though it is as queer as queer can be--I am afraid I must say that the bridge is not nearly so well kept now as in the brave days of old. But one reviewer stood out boldly, and him I will quote in full, and so make an end of talking about reviews, which some authors jeer at, which I treasure with reverent care.

“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 Catholicism, a mystical 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 him
out of it.”

There! That notice, which appeared in “The Nation and the Athenæum,” was signed by Mr. J. Middleton Murry, generally recognised as being one of the most eminent literary critics of the day, if he is not rather to be accounted as the most eminent literary critic of the day. He is also, as a fellow-writer assured me, regarded as “the leader of the younger intelligentsia.” Anyhow, I like a man who speaks his mind. I try to do so myself, sometimes.

And “there!” again. I think I have written enough about the manner in which I thought of my books, the manner in which I wrote my books, the manner in which I broke down more or less lamentably in the beginning, the middle and the end of my books, the manner in which they were welcomed by eager publishers, and the manner in which they finally tottered into print and were acclaimed by the Press. Enough has been said on all these topics, and perhaps a good deal too much for the patience of a weary world.

Let us now be brief on this matter. The year 1898 I spent in the service of “Literature,” a weekly journal that had just been started by “The Times.” In 1899 I wrote “Hieroglyphics” and “The White People,” and the first chapter of “A Fragment of Life.” Then a great sorrow which had long been threatened fell upon me: I was once more alone.

_Chapter IX_

It was somewhere about the autumn of 1899 that I began to be conscious that the world was being presented to me at a new angle. I find now an extreme difficulty in the choice of words to convey my meaning; “a new angle” is clumsy enough, “here in this world he changed his life” is far too high in its associations; but there certainly came to be a strangeness in the proportion of things, both in things exterior and interior. And it is in these latter that I held and still hold that the true wonder, the true mystery, the true miracle reside. There is the old proverb, of course: “Seeing is believing” and, for once, the old proverb is widely astray. All phenomenal perception is apt to be deceitful, and very often is deceitful. This is in the nature of things, as Berkeley pointed out a very long time ago. That castle tower that looks round in the distance is found to be square when you get a little nearer to it; the red and golden glory and the magic architecture of the sunset cloud would change, if you were in it, into something like a London fog. And if it be objected: “Yes, exactly; when you are far away from an object you see it incorrectly, but when you come near it you see it correctly”--that is not so. If you were near enough to the tower, with your nose within six inches of it, you only see a certain limited extent of stone surface; the tower, qua tower, has entirely disappeared. But you see the stone surface accurately? No, you don’t. The ant crawling up it has a wildly different vision and perception of that stone surface from your vision and perception; and a microscope gives yet another vision, different from either; and as magnification must be infinite in potentiality, though not _in actu_, it is quite clear that no one can ever see the truth of any external object presented to the eyes: there must always be, in theory and perhaps, eventually, in fact, another microscope of still higher magnifying power, which will entirely change the aspect of the thing seen. And thus, without tedious specification and example of all the other senses, I mustn’t even call the poker stiff, lest the man in the chair on the other side of the fire take it up and tie it into a knot before my eyes, proving that I have been talking foolishly. And get the rarest Bordeaux that money can buy, and offer Bill the navvy a glass; and watch his face as he calls for ale to wash that muck, that ... something muck, out of his mouth.

All this, of course, is mere philosophic A B C, and if I thought this book likely to penetrate into philosophic circles I should apologise for a clumsy rehash of Berkeley’s irresistible conclusions; but I do not think that the readers of “Mind” will trouble themselves about me; and I am afraid that those of us who have not been rectified by the study of philosophy are still inclined to think that seeing is believing and that some things are hard and others soft, and so on. And, no doubt, there is a kind of relative and highly inferior sort of truth in these propositions: don’t knock your head against a stone wall, for instance, is a perfectly sound bit of practical advice, since, considered in relation to your skull, the stone wall is hard and will hurt. And so with “seeing is believing”: in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand you will be absolutely correct in saying: “Hullo! There’s old Secretan walking up the garden path.” But there is that thousandth--or millionth--case in which it turns out that old Secretan was busy in Tibet or busy dying at the moment you were quite certain that you saw him approaching the hall-door of The Cedars: and then where is your “seeing is believing” maxim? I had a curious instance of this in the midst of the famous “Angels of Mons” controversy. An officer of very high distinction wrote to me from the front, and described a most remarkable experience which had been vouchsafed to him and to others during the retreat of August, 1914. The battle of Le Cateau was fought on August 26th. My correspondent’s division, as he writes--his letter is quoted at length in the Introduction to the second edition of “The Bowmen”--was heavily shelled, “had a bad time of it,” but retired in good order. It was on the march all the night of the 26th, and throughout August 27th, with only about two hours’ rest.

“By the night of the 27th we were all absolutely worn out with fatigue--both bodily and mental fatigue. No doubt we also suffered to a certain extent from shock; but the retirement still continued in excellent order, and I feel sure that our mental faculties were still quite sound and in good working condition. On the night of the 27th I was riding along in the column with two other officers. We had been talking and doing our best to keep from falling asleep on our horses. As we rode along I became conscious of the fact that, in the fields on both sides of the road along which we were marching, I could see a very large body of horsemen. These horsemen had the appearance of squadrons of cavalry, and they seemed to be riding across the fields and going in the same direction as we were going, and keeping level with us. The night was not very dark, and I fancied that I could see squadron upon squadron of these cavalrymen quite distinctly. I did not say a word about it at first, but I watched them for about twenty minutes. The other two officers had stopped talking. At last one of them asked me if I saw anything in the fields. I then told him what I had seen. The third officer then confessed that he too had been watching these horsemen for the past twenty minutes. So convinced were we that they were really cavalry that, at the next halt, one of the officers took a party of men out to reconnoitre, and found no one there.... The same phenomenon was seen by many men in our column.... I myself am absolutely convinced that I saw these horsemen; and I feel sure that they did not exist only in my imagination.”

Now I have not the faintest notion what really happened to the Colonel, to the two officers and to many of the men in the column. What concerns us for the moment is that these people were at first perfectly certain that they saw sensible objects, that is, cavalrymen, and then were perfectly certain that there were no sensible objects to see; and therefore it may be concluded from this instance and from many instances, of like sort, that the senses are deceptive; that the world of the senses is very largely a world of illusion and delusion. To give a sharp example of what I mean: I would say that the old story of the oak and the dryad is much nearer to the real and final truth about the oak than the scientific classification and description of the tree in a manual of Dendrology. Not that I believe that a spirit in the shape of a beautiful woman of another order of being to our own is somehow bound up with the life of the oak tree; but I do believe that the truth about the oak tree--as about all else--is a great mystery, which is quite beyond the purview of all sensible--that is scientific--perception and enquiry.

And so, when I speak of that singular rearrangement of the world into which I entered in the late summer of 1899, I do not desire to lay much stress on the sensible, or material, phenomena which were presented to me. I marvel, but I marvel with caution, remembering the manifold deceits of the senses, the phantasmagoria or shadow show that they are always displaying before us; remembering also that when the super-normal is manifested it is usually, in nine cases out of ten, irrelevant and insignificant. For example, in the case of old Secretan, seen walking up the path to the hall-door of The Cedars, but discovered afterwards to have an undoubted _alibi_, either on his dying bed or in Tibet. Suppose the latter case, suppose that Secretan returns and that you collar him and ask him if he remembers what he was doing about five o’clock of the afternoon of June 28th.

“What makes you ask that?” he may reply, likely enough. “I thought it rum at the time. Here’s the entry in my diary. ‘June 28th. Had rank goat and tea with rancid butter in it in the afternoon. Thought of the jolly tea and tennis parties at The Cedars and wondered how old Jones was getting on in the City.’”

And, it seems shocking, but it is probably the truth, that if Secretan had been really engaged, not in Tibet but in dying, his thought, the force which projected his shadow on that gravel path of The Cedars, Thames Ditton, was: “Beastly taste in my mouth! Wish I could get round to old Jones’s and wash it out with a glass of his pre-war whiskey. Eh?” ... and the silence.

And all this, as I say, is irrelevant and insignificant; and then again the rats and snakes and other objects seen by the delirium tremens patient; they really don’t matter--save to the patient aforesaid, who, of course, is quite sure that they are there. So, again, I distrust the senses, and though I wondered and still wonder, I make nothing much of the great gusts of incense that were blown in those days into my nostrils, of the odours of rare gums that seemed to fume before invisible altars in Holborn, in Claremont Square, in grey streets of Clerkenwell, of the savours of the sanctuary that were perceived by me in all manner of grim London wastes and wanderings. One would like to think of the Knights of the Grail who were ware of the “odour of all the rarest spiceries in the world” before the Vision was given to them: but ... if one is not a Knight of the Grail, but far otherwise?

Then, again, there was that morning, a bright, keen morning of November it seems in my recollection, when I was walking up Rosebery Avenue with a friend, and suddenly became aware of a strange sensation, and as suddenly recollected the old proverb: “walking on air.” I remember thinking at the time: “this is incredible”; and yet it was a fact. The pavement of that horrible street had suddenly become, not air, certainly, but resilient; the impact of my feet upon it was buoyant; the sensation was delicious. I may mention that that very morning I had made a certain interior resolution; but I do not venture for one moment to connect this with that; I only tell what happened to me. I make no deductions, nor do I venture to conclude anything: remembering always that neither seeing nor smelling nor feeling is necessarily believing. But so it was, exactly as I have told it.

And then there was one afternoon in my sitting-room at 4 Verulam Buildings, Gray’s Inn. I was sitting in my chair, and the wall trembled and the pictures on the wall shook and shivered before my eyes, as if a sudden wind had blown into the room. Let me hasten to say that there was no wind, no actual wind, that is; and that I knew at the time that there was no wind, and was, in consequence, not a little alarmed, not knowing what would happen next. And I must already correct my phrase: I have said that the pictures on the wall opposite to the window that looked on the garden of the Inn “shook and shivered.” It is not quite just: trembled, dilated, became misty in their outlines; seemed on the point of disappearing altogether, and then shuddered and contracted back again into their proper form and solidity: that is the closest description of what I witnessed: with a shaking heart, and with a sense that something, I knew not what, was also being shaken to its foundations. This is all wonderful? I suppose that it is; but let me here say firmly that I consider an act of kindness to a wretched mangy kitten to be much more important.

But now comes a puzzle. We are highly composite beings. We all know that a stomach-ache may make a man very miserable, and I believe that science is beginning to admit that misery may give a man a very bad stomach-ache. There are old phrases about a “sinking heart,” and a man’s heart being “in his boots.” Well, it seems that the heart does not sink, but that the stomach does, when subjected to certain emotional perturbations. Only this morning I was reading in the paper of new radiographic experiments which showed that under certain stimulations of horror or fear or grief the stomach sometimes falls from one to three inches, and the doctor who was conducting the experiments declared that there was the brighter side; that he had mentioned possible “pints of bitter” to some of his subjects, with the result that there was a perceptible and upward movement of the organ in question. And so the play goes round in a ring, with a constant action and reaction of the physical and mental--or psychical, or spiritual--and it will often be difficult to say where the prime cause resides: in the stomach, in the brain, or in the immortal spirit. I have already professed my belief that the true wonder, the true miracle are of the spirit, not of the body; I here confess that in certain cases I find it difficult to disentangle the two worlds of our apprehension, that is to say definitely that the sensible thing, the phenomenal thing, is always and invariably without any true significance.

And so with that afternoon’s work in Gray’s Inn. The shivering pictures that seemed on the point to dissolve and return into chaos, the sensible thrill of delight that accompanied this strange manifestation--I had forgotten that part of the experience--such phenomena as these may be producible, for all I know, by drugs. You can, at all events, see far more wonderful things than anything that I saw by taking a sufficient dose of Anhelonium Lewinii and then shutting your eyes. But....

I had better begin at the beginning. That afternoon I was in a state of very dreadful misery and desolation and dereliction of soul. It is strange, but the most dreadful pangs of grief are generally, I think, bearable in the moment of their impact. With the wounds of the spirit, it is as with the wounds of the body; a certain anæsthesia accompanies the actual fall of the blow. I once fell backwards from some little height, and my skull lighting on the edge of a brick, I remained unconscious for more than half an hour. And I remember distinctly that the sensation at the very moment of the crash was that of being lifted and gently laid on the softest of all downy pillows; it was only when I raised myself slowly, not in the least aware that I had been unconscious, that I felt the pain of the great bleeding wound at the back of my head, and a dismal, heavy throbbing of the brow. So with the wounds of the soul; I had borne what had to be borne with some measure of solidity and stolidity; the torture of six years of lamentable expectation had, as I supposed, seared and burned my spirit into dull, insensitive acquiescence: but I was mistaken. A horror of soul that cannot be uttered descended upon me, on that dim, far-off afternoon in Gray’s Inn; I was beside myself with dismay and torment; I could not endure my own being. And then a process suggested itself to me, as having the possibility of relief, and without crediting what I had heard of this process or indeed having any precise knowledge of it or of its results, I did what had to be done--I hasten to add without any more exalted motives than those which urge a man with a raging toothache to get laudanum and take it with all convenient speed. I suffered from a more raging pain than that of any toothache, and I wanted that pain to be dulled; that was all.