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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78106 ***
+
+
+
+
+_THINGS NEAR AND FAR_
+
+
+
+
+                          BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+
+  THE TERROR
+  THE BOWMEN
+  DR. STIGGINS
+  THE GREAT RETURN
+  HIEROGLYPHICS
+  THE HOUSE OF SOULS
+    Including THE GREAT GOD PAN and THE THREE IMPOSTORS
+  THE HILL OF DREAMS
+  THE CHRONICLE OF CLEMENDY
+  WAR AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH
+  THE SECRET GLORY
+  FAR OFF THINGS
+
+
+
+
+                          _THINGS NEAR & FAR_
+                          _BY ARTHUR MACHEN_
+
+
+                        _LONDON: MARTIN SECKER_
+
+
+
+
+                      _Printed in Great Britain_
+
+                   LONDON: MARTIN SECKER LTD. (1923)
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter I_
+
+
+The road from Newport to Caerleon-on-Usk winds, as it comes near to
+the old Roman, fabulous city, with the winding of the tawny river
+which I have always supposed must be somewhat of the colour of the
+Tiber. This road was made early in the nineteenth century when
+stage-coaching came to perfection, for the old road between the two
+towns passed over the Roman bridge--blown down the river by a great
+storm in the seventeen-nineties--and climbed the break-neck hill to
+Christchurch. Well, this new road as I remember it was terraced, as
+it were, high above the Usk to the west, and above it to the east
+rose a vast wood, or what seemed a vast wood in 1870, called St.
+Julian’s Wood, of some fame as a ghostly place. It was cut down long
+ago by an owner who thought timber of high growth better than ghosts.
+
+On the one side, then, the steep dark ascent of St. Julian’s Wood;
+on the other, the swift fall of the bank to the yellow river, where,
+likely enough, there would be a man in a coracle fishing for salmon.
+And then there came a certain turn, where suddenly one saw the long,
+great wall of the mountain in the west, and the high dome of Twyn
+Barlwm, a prehistoric tumulus; and down below, an island in the green
+meadows by the river, the little white Caerleon, shining in the sun.
+There is a grey wall on one side of it, a very old and mouldering
+wall to look at, and indeed it is old enough, for it is all that
+remains of the Roman wall of Isca Silurum, headquarters of the Second
+Augustan Legion.
+
+But there, white in the sun of some summer afternoon of fifty years
+ago or so, Caerleon still stands for me shining, beautiful, a little
+white city in a dream, with the white road coming down the hill, from
+Newport, down out of St. Julian’s Wood, and so to the level river
+meadows, and so winding in a curve and coming to the town over the
+bridge.
+
+That is my vision of the place where I was born; no doubt the
+recollection of driving home beside my father on some shining summer
+afternoon of long ago; but of later years another vision of the same
+white town and white road has come to me. I have “made this up,” as
+the children say, though, no doubt, it is all true. The time now
+goes back from the early ’seventies to the early ’fifties, and two
+young ladies are setting out from the Vicarage--it stood practically
+in the churchyard, pretty well in the position of that other, that
+illustrious Vicarage at Haworth, and my Aunt Maria could never see
+any reason why a vicarage should not be in a churchyard--the two
+young ladies closed the Vicarage door, and made their way down the
+deserted street, where the grass was green between the cobble-stones,
+and so passed over the bridge and into the Newport road. They were
+going to meet John, home from Jesus College, Oxford; and no doubt
+they talked eagerly of how well John was doing at Oxford, and
+wondered when he would be ordained, and where his first curacy would
+be, and what a good clergyman he would make, and how they hoped he
+would marry somebody nice, and what a pity it was that John was not
+at home when Mr. Tennyson came to Caerleon and stayed at the Hanbury
+Arms, and smoked a black clay tobacco pipe with his feet on the
+mantelpiece; very odd, but poets always were odd people and “Airy
+Fairy Lilian” was very pretty. The Vicar had called of course, and
+had been a little shocked at the pipe; still, Papa was always so
+amiable and ready to make allowances.
+
+“Your grandfather,” Aunt Maria said to me years afterwards, “was
+a most amiable man, but he could not bear radishes or the _Adeste
+fideles_.”
+
+Well, the two young ladies, Anne and Maria, shading themselves from
+the heat of the sun with their fringed parasols, pace decorously
+along the Newport road discussing these and many other matters;
+parish-matters, of helping poor people and old people and sick
+people; county matters, the great doings that there would be at the
+Park when Sir (?) Hanbury Leigh was to have a great party from London
+on August 12th to shoot grouse on the mountain; Church matters; how
+a Mr. Leonard had just been given the living of Kemeys Commander and
+had actually been heard to say, “I call myself a Catholic priest”
+and, in spite of the Creeds, wasn’t that going rather far? And what
+would John say to that? And, somehow, I fancy the talk came circling
+again and again back to John, and how glad he would be to be at home
+again, and how lucky it was that Mrs. Williams Pantyreos had come in
+that very morning because John always said that he never got butter
+like the Pantyreos butter anywhere, and how it was to be hoped that
+the weather would keep up till Wednesday when they were all going to
+drive to Aunt Mary’s at Abergavenny--except Mamma, who said, “Young
+gadabout ne’er won a clout”--and how this beautiful sunshine must be
+doing Cousin Blanche’s cough a great deal of good: John would like to
+see Cousin Blanche again.
+
+And so on, and so on, and the two sisters walk along the white
+limestone road, picking a flower now and again, for Anne paints
+flowers and Maria is much interested in Botany--I am not sure whether
+she had acquired Miss Pratt’s three-volume work on the subject at
+that date. And the evening draws along, and the sun hangs over the
+huge round of Mynydd Maen in the west, and the scents of St. Julian’s
+dark, deep wood fill the stilled air; till Maria says suddenly:
+“Anne! here is the omnibus at last, and, there! I believe I can see
+John’s face.”
+
+The old dim yellow and faded chocolate omnibus from the Bull--I
+remember it in its last days just before they made the line, and
+never will I speak of _this_ omnibus as a ’bus--comes lumbering on
+its way, and the old driver, recognising the “two Miss Joneses the
+Vicarage” and knowing that Master John is inside, causes it to stop.
+John, a mild-looking young man with little side whiskers, gets out
+and kisses his sisters; and the three then get in, and the omnibus
+lumbers down the hill towards Caerleon, the three chattering of
+Oxford, of plans and prospects, of Caerleon news and how happy Papa
+looked at breakfast. And so the evening draws on and the shadows
+deepen and the walls of white Caerleon glimmer and grow phantasmal
+like the old grey Roman wall as they cross the bridge and the Usk
+swims to high tide, the tawny yellow tinged with something of the
+sunset redness that glows over the mountain. The three are talking
+and chattering all the while, making plans for holidays and happiness
+and long bright years and the joy of life--a correct joy, but still
+joy--before them, and John is enquiring eagerly after Cousin Blanche
+and nodding and smiling to the Bluecoat boys and girls and saying:
+“I’ll unpack my box to-night and show you my prizes--Parker’s ‘Gothic
+Architecture,’ in three volumes, and Hooker and a lot more,” and they
+are hoping again and again that Wednesday will be fine, and Blanche
+is sure to be quite well by this, and John is feeling his young
+cheeks grow a little red when--it is night.
+
+Alas! They are all dead, years and years ago. The kind Vicar and his
+grim, good wife are dead. Poor Cousin Blanche perished of consumption
+in her fresh youth; no summer sun could allay the racking of that
+cough of hers. Anne followed her, by the same way to the same end: I
+have the “Holy Dying” that John, my father, gave her. There are two
+inscriptions in it; one facing the rubricated title-page, now “foxed”
+with time. This runs:
+
+                           To Anne E. Jones
+                         from her affectionate
+                          Brother John Edward
+                        On her Birthday, and in
+                        remembrance of the 29th
+                          September, 1857[A]
+                           April 16th, 1858.
+
+     [A] The date, I think, of their father’s death.
+
+The other, on the recto of the leaf, is as follows:
+
+                       Johannes Edvardus Jones,
+                         In memoriam A.E.J.J.
+                         Quæ obdormivit in Jesu
+                         29 mo Martii MDCCCLIX
+
+And those of the party that lived longer knew more of sorrow, and
+more of broken hopes and of dreams that never came true. And thus,
+advisedly, I begin this second chapter in the story of a young man’s
+dreams and hopes and adventures. _Ego quoque_--I am forgetting my
+Latin tags--I, too, have walked on the white road to Caerleon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To walk a little faster, to comply, in fact, with the request of the
+whiting in Lewis Carroll’s beautiful Idyll, the end of 1884 and the
+beginning of 1885 found me in something of a backwater. “The Anatomy
+of Tobacco,” the book I had written in the 10 by 6 cell in Clarendon
+Road, Notting Hill Gate, had been published in the autumn of 1884,
+and soon after I had set about the translating of the “Heptameron.”
+Every evening I worked at this task till it was ended; and now it
+was done, and there seemed nothing to do next. I wandered up and
+down the country about Llanddewi Rectory in my old way, lost myself
+in networks of deep lanes, coming out of them to view woods that
+were strange and the prospect of hills that guarded undiscovered
+lands. Thus on my wider and more prolonged travels, but I had haunts
+near home, nooks and retreats where nobody ever came. There was an
+unfrequented lane, very dark, very deep, that led from a hamlet
+called Common Cefn Llwyn--the Ridge of the Grove--to Llanfrechfa,
+used scarcely at all save by labouring men going to their work in
+the early morning and returning in the evening. All the length of
+this lane there was only one house in sight--the farms in Gwent are
+mostly in the heart of the fields, remote even from the by-ways--and
+this one house must have fallen into ruin eighty or a hundred years
+ago. From what remained one judged that it had been the _petit
+manoir_ of some dead and forgotten race of little squires; it was
+of grey stone, of fifteenth-century workmanship, and the corbels
+supporting the chimney were still sound and clean cut. All about
+the old broken house were the ruins of the garden, apple trees and
+plum trees run wild, hedges that had become brakes, a confusion of
+degenerate flowers; and by the tumbledown stile that led to this
+deserted place I would linger for an hour or more, wondering and
+dreaming and setting my heart on the hopeless endeavour of letters.
+Weather made no difference to my goings; a heavy greatcoat, boots
+with soles an inch thick, and leather gaiters up to the knee, made a
+wild wet winter’s day a thing to be defied and enjoyed; and indeed I
+loved to get abroad on such days and see all the wells of the hills
+overflowing and rushing down to swell the Soar or the Canthwr, red
+and foaming, and making whirlpools of barmy froth as they fell into
+the brooks. And then, when the rain changed to snow, what a delight
+to stand on some high, lonely place and look out on the wide, white
+land, and on the hills where the dark pines stood in a ring about
+some ancient farm: to see the wonder of the icy sunlight, of the
+violet winter sky. These were my great adventures, and I know not
+whether in reality there are any greater, since it is a great thing
+to stand on the very verges of an unknown world.
+
+So the winter of ’84–85 went on and I dreamed and wondered and did
+nothing, though I was nearing the age at which many a young man has
+produced his first novel with success and acclaim. I never could
+do these things, and still I cannot do them. I knew that I had no
+business to be loafing and mooning about the rectory, a burden on my
+poor father--the “John” of that happy return of the ’fifties had by
+this time experienced sorrows and pains and miseries of all sorts.
+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; nothing had
+any savour for him any more. And seeing this, I was distressed to be
+an additional weight in the heavy pack of sorrows and trials that he
+bore daily, and I tried to get all sorts of employments for which I
+was utterly unfit, which would not have harboured me for twenty-four
+hours. Nothing came of these attempts, and so the time went on till
+we were in June, 1885. Then there was a letter from the publisher
+of “The Anatomy of Tobacco” to the effect that he thought he could
+find me some odd jobs of work if I would come up to London; and so I
+returned again to the well-remembered cell in Clarendon Road.
+
+With mixed feelings. I was glad indeed at the prospect of doing
+something for myself and so removing a little from the weary burden
+at the rectory: but, I had not forgotten the _peine forte et dure_;
+the dry bread, enough and no more than enough, the water from a
+bitter runnel of a sorrowful street, the heavy weight of perpetual
+loneliness. “Alone in London” has become a phrase, it is a title
+associated, I think, with some flaring melodrama; but the reality is
+a deadly thing. I was only twenty-two; and I shuddered a little one
+June night when I went out and bade farewell to the brooks and the
+woods and the flowers; to the scent of the evening air.
+
+All sorts of odd jobs and queer jobs awaited me. I was given a
+big folio book full of cuttings on a particular subject, and the
+publisher asked me to make a selection from these and so compile a
+book of oddments. Then, there were novels submitted to him that I
+was to read and advise upon: a weary business when the said novels
+were as a rule foolish things written in varieties of straggly and
+scraggy scripts. But the principal business was the making of the
+Catalogue. For the publisher of York Street was also a second-hand
+bookseller. He had a mass of odd literature stored in a garret in
+Catherine Street, and on these volumes I was let loose; my main
+business being to write notes under the titles, notes describing the
+content of the books and setting that content in an alluring manner
+before the collector.
+
+It was as odd a library as any man could desire to see. Occultism
+in one sense or another was the subject of most of the books. There
+were the principal and the more obscure treatises on Alchemy, on
+Astrology, on Magic; old Latin volumes most of them. Here were books
+about Witchcraft, Diabolical Possession, “Fascination,” or the Evil
+Eye; here comments on the Kabbala. Ghosts and Apparitions were a
+large family, Secret Societies of all sorts hung on the skirts of the
+Rosicrucians and Freemasons, and so found a place in the collection.
+Then the semi-religious, semi-occult, semi-philosophical sects and
+schools were represented: we dealt in Gnostics and Mithraists, we
+harboured the Neoplatonists, we conversed with the Quietists and
+the Swedenborgians. These were the ancients; and beside them were
+the modern throng of Diviners and Stargazers and Psychometrists
+and Animal Magnetists and Mesmerists and Spiritualists and Psychic
+Researchers. In a word, the collection in the Catherine Street garret
+represented thoroughly enough that inclination of the human mind
+which may be a survival from the rites of the black swamp and the
+cave--or an anticipation of a wisdom and knowledge that are to come,
+transcending all the science of our day.
+
+Which? It seems to me a vast question, and I am sure it is utterly
+insoluble. Of course, an enormous mass of occultism, ancient and
+modern, may be brushed aside at once without the labour of any
+curious investigation. Madame Blavatsky, for example, her coadjutors
+and assessors and successors need not detain us. I do not mean that
+every pronouncement of Theosophy is false or fraudulent. A liar is
+not to be defined as a man who never by any chance speaks the truth.
+A thief occasionally comes honestly by what he has. I mean that
+the specific doctrines and circumstances of Theosophy: the Mahatma
+stories, the saucers that fell from the ceiling, the vases that were
+found mysteriously reposing in empty cupboards, the Messiahship of
+a gentleman whose name I choose to forget: all this is rubbish, not
+worth a moment’s consideration. And so with Spiritualism; though
+in a less degree. For I am strongly inclined to believe that very
+odd things do sometimes happen amongst those who “sit,” that some
+queer--and probably undesirable--psychic region is entered; and all
+this quite beyond and beside the intention or understanding of those
+present at the séance. You never know what may happen when a small
+boy pokes his fingers carelessly among the wheels and works of a
+clock. But as to the profession of the Spiritualists; that they are
+able to communicate with ghosts, _that_ need not trouble us. Their
+photographs of fairies need not trouble us. Their revelations as to
+the life of the world to come as given through the Rev. Vale Owen
+need not trouble us. Though here is a “phenomenon” which seems to me
+of no little interest. How can a man who is confessedly perfectly
+honest and straightforward conjure himself into the belief that when
+he takes up a pencil an intelligence apart from himself guides his
+hand as he writes? I suppose the answer involves the doctrine of
+dual or multiple personality; and _that_ is mysterious enough in all
+conscience. Yet, apart from all the nonsense, apart from the state
+of mind of the average Spiritualist--one of them, a very eminent
+one in his day, said that the clause of the Creed: “I look for the
+Resurrection of the Dead” meant “I expect to see some physical
+manifestations of the departed”--apart from all this I still think as
+I have said that very strange and inexplicable things do sometimes
+happen. Here is nothing to do with ghosts: but the evidence that the
+famous medium Home rose into the air, floated out of an open window
+high on a Scottish castle tower and floated in again at another
+open window: the evidence here is good; that is, if levitation,
+as they call it, were a criminal offence and Home had been put on
+his trial he would have been convicted. It will be seen that I am
+not exactly a fanatical Spiritualist: but I had rather be of the
+straightest sect of Rappers and Banjo Wielders than of that company
+which understands all the whole frame and scheme of the universe
+so thoroughly and completely that it is absolutely certain that
+levitation is impossible, that a man cannot rise into the air unless
+he is mechanically and materially impelled and supported, that no
+evidence, however direct and unimpeachable, can establish this for a
+fact. I do not understand the universe; consequently I do not dare to
+advance any such proposition. And further; let me diminish a little a
+proposition that I have only just dared to make. I have said that all
+the ghost business, all the Vale Owen sort of business, is rubbish
+and foolery. Well, I believe most heartily and profoundly that it
+_is_ rubbish, nonsense, unveridical to the last degree; in fact, and
+in the proper sense of the word, a lie. Yet; let us beware. Not one
+of us understands the universe. Even in the Higher Mathematics, the
+Queen of profane sciences, very odd things are reported to happen.
+So, possibly, the following account may really correspond with the
+truth of things.
+
+The room is in total darkness. One of the sitters proclaims with
+exultation that his nose has been tweaked by _Joey_, who, on
+this side, was a clown. _John King_, understood to have been a
+master-mariner, sings “Tom Bowling” in a falsetto voice through a
+speaking trumpet. On this, Cardinal Newman, known to be a lover of
+music, is gratified and utters the word “Benedictine.” There is a
+sudden scream of joy in a female voice: “Oh! darling Katy, thank you,
+thank you, _thank you_! Oh, _please_, may we have the lights turned
+up for a moment? Katy promised me a lock of her beautiful golden
+hair, and I am _sure_ I felt it float down on my hand.” The lights
+are turned up. A strand of yellow hair is, sure enough, reposing
+on the lady’s hand. It had evidently been treated with spiritual
+peroxide, made, no doubt, of Ethers, like the ghostly whiskey and
+sodas in “Raymond.” Then the room is darkened and the Medium takes up
+the tale.
+
+“This spirit’s name is Milton. Henry--no, John Milton, the author of
+the ‘Faery Queen.’ He says that he is very happy. He spends most of
+his time with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Shakespeare has confessed
+to him that all his plays were written by Bacon. The evidence will be
+found in a brass box under the Tube station at Liverpool Street. Pope
+often has tea with him. He says they don’t use alcohol there.”
+
+There is a sudden crash. “Avast!” comes with a roar through the
+trumpet. _John King_ has returned, bringing with him an _American
+Indian_ who speaks in the idiom of a Nigger Minstrel practising in
+the East End of London and will call the Medium his “Midi.” Whereupon
+Katy puts a beautiful warm arm round the neck of a gentleman
+sitter and the gramophone plays “Abide with me.” All repeat the
+Lord’s Prayer, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle expresses his intense
+gratification.
+
+Well; it may be so. But I hope it isn’t, and I shall never believe
+that it is so.
+
+Well; there I laboured in the Catherine Street garret amidst all
+this, and much more than this. Down below were the publishing
+offices of old Mr. Vizetelly, who was issuing English translations
+of Zola at the time, and was at last sent to gaol for publishing an
+English version of “La Terre,” an obscene book that every judicious
+Bishop of Central France should put in the hands of newly ordained
+priests--if it is to be accepted that the physician ought to have
+some knowledge of the constitutions of his patients and of the
+diseases from which they are suffering. It was a sumptuous and rich
+garret--a street now passes over the site of the house--filled with
+that mysterious odour that used to prevail in oldish London houses
+that were not too carefully swept and washed and polished, and there
+day after day I worked, reading and annotating, and all alone. Now
+and then in the older books I came across striking sentences. There
+was Oswaldus Crollius, for example--I suppose his real name was
+Osvald Kroll--who is quoted by one of the characters in “The Great
+God Pan.” “In every grain of wheat,” says Oswaldus, “there lies
+hidden the soul of a Star.” A wonderful saying; a declaration, I
+suppose, that all matter is one, manifested under many forms; and,
+so far as I can gather, modern science is rapidly coming round to
+the view of this obscure speculator of the seventeenth century; and,
+in fact, to the doctrine of the alchemists. But I would advise any
+curious person who desires to investigate this singular chamber of
+the human mind to beware of over-thoroughness. Let him dip lightly
+from the vellum quarto into the leather duodecimo, glancing at a
+chapter here, a sentence there; but let him avoid all deep and
+systematic study of Crollius and of Vaughan, the brother of the
+Silurist, and of all their tribe. For if you go too far you will be
+disenchanted. Open Robert Fludd, otherwise Robertus de Fluctibus,
+and find the sentence: _Transmutemini, transmutemini de lapidibus
+mortuis in lapides philosophicos vivos_--Be ye changed, be ye changed
+from dead stones into living and life-giving stones. This is a
+great word indeed, exalted and exultant; but beware of mastering
+Fludd’s system--if confusion can be called a system--of muddled
+alchemy, physical science, metaphysics and mysticism. Get Knorr von
+Rosenroth’s “Kabbala Denudata,” vellum, in quarto, and find out a
+little about the Sephiroth: about Kether, the Crown; Tiphereth,
+Beauty; Gedulah, Mercy; Geburah, Justice or Severity. Really, you
+will discover very curious things, and the more easily, if instead
+of Knorr von Rosenroth, you choose A. E. Waite’s “Doctrine and
+Literature of the Kabalah.” It is odd, for example, to discover that
+the side of Mercy is the masculine side, that Justice or Severity
+is feminine; and that all will go amiss till these two are united
+in Benignity. Again, it is interesting from another point of view
+to discover that three of the Sephiroth are called the Kingdom, the
+Victory and the Glory. Is there any connection between these and the
+ancient liturgical response to the Pater Noster: “For Thine is the
+Kingdom, the Power and the Glory”? And then that matter of Lilith and
+Samael and the Shells or Cortices, the husks of spirits from a ruined
+world that brought about the Fall of Man; the strange mystery of
+that place “which is called Zion and Jerusalem”--duly here comparing
+Böhme on the Recovery of Paradise when innocent man and maid are
+joined in love--all this is a wonderful and fascinating region of
+thought. And beautiful indeed is the saying of one of the Fathers
+of Kabbalism: that when the lost Letters of Tetragrammaton, the
+Divine Name, are found there shall be mercy on every side. And here,
+perhaps, but not certainly, light may be thrown on certain obscure
+matters of Freemasonry. Dip then, and read and wander in the Kabbala;
+but do not become a Kabbalist. For if you do, you will end by
+transliterating your name and the names of your friends into Hebrew
+letters and finding out all sorts of marvellous things, till at last
+you back Winners--which turn out to be Losers--on purely Kabbalistic
+principles.
+
+And here, by the way, I may remark that I have long meditated writing
+an article called “The Aryan Kabbala,” keeping the requirements of
+occult magazines strictly in view. It would make a pretty article. I
+should begin by a brief note on the Hebrew Kabbala, explaining how
+the Sephiroth tell in a kind of magic shorthand the whole history and
+mystery of man and all the worlds from their source to their end.
+The Tree of Life--as the Sephiroth arranged in a certain scheme are
+called--is, in fact, I would point out, at once an account of how
+all things came into being and a map and an analysis of all things
+as they now are. As an occult friend once said to me by my hearth in
+Gray’s Inn: “The Tree of Life can be applied to that poker.” The Tree
+of Life, then, is a key to the secret generation and being of all
+souls and all heavens; it will also analyse for you the little flower
+growing in a cranny of the wall.
+
+Well; this made clear, I would go on to say: “But what if there be a
+Kabbala and a Tree of Life of the Aryans as well as of the Semites?
+What if it tells all the hidden secrets of our beginning and our
+journey and our ending? What if its august symbols are known to all
+of us, in every-day and common use amongst us, remaining all the
+while as undiscerned as the most sacred and mystic hieroglyphics?
+What if the office boy and the grocer handle every day the signs
+which tell The Secret of Secrets?”
+
+And then, after all due amplifications and ponderous circumnavigations
+it would all come out. The Aryan Kabbala is, in fact, the Decad; the
+ten first numbers. They embody an age-old tradition dating from the
+time when the ancestors of the Greek and the Welshman, the Persian
+and the Teuton were all one people. They contained the secret mystery
+religion of this primitive race, they sank by degrees from their
+first august significance to become instruments of common use and
+commercial convenience, just as vestments became clothes. The proof
+is easy enough. Take the first number of the Decad: one in English,
+ἕν (in the neuter) in Greek, unus in Latin, un (pronounced “een”) in
+Welsh, ein in German. And then compare another series of words in
+these languages: wine, οἶνος, vinum, gwin, wein. Then: two, δύο, duo,
+dau, zwei; and compare with: water, ὕδωρ, udus, wy (and dwr) wasser.
+I drop the other terms, or Sephiroth, of the Decad--in Mrs. Boffin’s
+presence--and come to the last two numerals: nine, ἐννέα, novem, naw,
+neun, compared with new, νέος, novus, newydd, neu. Then finally ten,
+δέκα, decem, deg, zehn: compare with deck (bedeck) δόξα, decor, teg,
+schön.
+
+The conclusion, I hope, is evident: we (and all things) proceed from
+Unity, which is wine, decline to Duality (or a weakened, fallen
+nature), which is water. Then, after passing through many changes,
+adventures, transformations, transmutations--undescribed for the
+reason given--we are renovated, made New--“I will make all things
+new”--in the last number but one of the Decad, and, in the final
+term, which is Ten, are reunified in Beauty and Glory.
+
+There! It seems to me wonderfully plausible, and I really think I
+should have written the article and sent it to some suitable quarter.
+It is all nonsense, of course, but ... does that matter?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, all that business of the Aryan Kabbala is an absurd digression,
+but it illustrates well enough the frame of mind likely to be
+induced by the study of a good many of the books in the Catherine
+Street garret. Take the interlude and add to it the rich odours of
+the frowsy, neglected room stuffed with confusions of old books and
+pamphlets, add to it the old, delightful, picturesque London that
+was undisturbed in those days. Holywell Street and Wych Street were
+all in their glory in 1885, a glory compounded of sixteenth-century
+gables, bawdy books and matters congruous therewith, parchment
+Elzevirs, dark courts and archways, hidden taverns, and ancient
+slumminess. There were no great, blatant Australia Houses or Colonial
+Edifices of any kind about the Strand in those times: instead, we
+had the beauty and the green lawns of Clement’s Inn and the solemn
+square of New Inn, and Clare Market communicating tortuously
+with Great Queen Street by the most evil-smelling by-ways that I
+have ever experienced--and something of jollity in the air that
+seems to me to have vanished utterly. Take all these elements and
+things; and you have me as I worked high up in the vanished house in
+Catherine Street, preparing the Catalogue that was to be called: “The
+Literature of Occultism and Archæology”--when the gas lamps in the
+Strand shone with a brighter light than the arc lamps of to-day.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter II_
+
+
+Such was the scene of my life in the summer of the year 1885. By my
+odd jobs; a little “reading,” a little compiling and a good deal of
+catalogue making, I just managed to live, earning perhaps as much
+as a pound a week, one week with another. I do not remember exactly
+the precise terms on which I worked, but I know that I had a good
+deal of time on my hands. Part of this time I spent in trying to
+learn shorthand. I can’t think why, for at this period of my life I
+had no newspaper or secretarial employment in view. I am inclined to
+think that trying to learn shorthand had become a mechanical habit
+with me. Then, I resumed my old mooning walks out of London, going
+westward usually or always, sometimes Acton way and sometimes through
+Brentford--that curious, dirty, and most fascinating place--to
+Osterley Park, where in those days you could walk and wander anywhere
+you pleased, so long, I suppose, as you did not glue your nose to the
+windows of that mansion. And then I fell to writing again.
+
+Now here is a mystery. It is held, and very properly, that people
+should keep their mouths shut unless they have something to say;
+similarly that a man has no business to write unless he has something
+in his heart which, he feels, cries out to be expressed. But here
+was I not knowing in the least what I wanted to say, but resolved,
+even at the cost of much pain and misery, to say it; that is, to
+write it. There are, of course, people who are said to talk for
+talking’s sake; and so, I suppose, I was suffering from the analogous
+vice of writing for writing’s sake, otherwise known as the _cacoethes
+scribendi_. I fancy a volume of Hazlitt had fallen into my hands;
+it had strayed, very likely, into the Catherine Street library, and
+at first I began to try to write essays, more or less in imitation
+of this inimitable author. I need scarcely say that I made sad work
+of it; and happily, no scrap of manuscript survives. And then I
+fell on Rabelais and on Balzac’s “Contes Drolatiques,” and wondered
+and admired hugely and studied both deeply in my long night watches
+under the gas-jet in the little room in Clarendon Road. I would dine
+sumptuously on half a loaf of dry bread, green tea made as I liked
+it, without milk or sugar, with plenty of tobacco by way of dessert;
+and then to my books and to my wonder. It was not a bad life on the
+whole, sweetened as it was by the enthusiasm for letters; but the
+loneliness was an oppression and sometimes a horror. Weeks passed
+without any human converse beyond brief business dialogue; still,
+since then I have known far worse days. Poverty and loneliness;
+these are doubtless evils hard to bear; but they are light indeed;
+nay, they have their dignity, and the gas-jet of Clarendon Road is
+not altogether without a halo--when I weigh all this and set it in
+the balances beside the intolerable degradation of the service of
+Carmelite House. I often thought in those latter and most hideous
+days that my case was somewhat that of a man who had been captured
+by a malignant tribe of anthropoid apes or Yahoos and was by them
+tormented and unspeakably degraded; and there was this additional
+shame and horror: that my degradation and misery were witnessed by
+rational creatures like myself. I remember how in my last year in
+the employment of “The Evening News,” I was out on some idiotic
+errand which led me up Wellington Street, past York Street, where
+George Redway, the publisher of “The Anatomy of Tobacco” and of “The
+Literature of Occultism and Archæology,” had his place of business.
+In a line, pretty well, with York Street I could see that new street
+which runs over the site of old Vizetelly’s office where the famous
+fusty garret was. The streets--Wellington Street, Bow Street, York
+Street--are not much changed in the last forty years, and the gap
+formed by the new street made me see myself a cloudy young man
+of twenty-two up in the air labouring amongst the dusty ancient
+books; all this and all the recollections of the days of dry bread,
+tea, tobacco and the hopeless but not dishonourable endeavour of
+literature; all this contrasted with the shameful circumstances of my
+life as a weary old man of fifty-eight, a man who had known struggles
+and sorrows and losses; all this, I say, overwhelmed me suddenly. It
+was almost more than I could endure.
+
+But we go too fast. We are still in the days of the cloudy young man,
+who is clear that fine literature is an infinitely noble thing, but
+is not clear upon any other subject whatever. I had my queer books
+in the mornings and my long lonely walks in the afternoons, and my
+great books in the evening and far into the night. I remember reading
+Dante in Longfellow’s translation, from beginning to end, and though
+I could not by any manner of means lift up my heart and mind to the
+mountain-peak of the Paradise, I divined the majesty I could not
+comprehend. Don Quixote was always with me, and good company and meat
+and drink and lights and fire always to me; and so I pass along the
+dim London streets revolving all these mighty works, a ghostly man
+amidst the hurrying multitude of the living, and go far afield under
+dim trees in the West, or sit solitary on a bench near the river in
+Kew Gardens, looking towards Syon; all the while in a lonely but not
+an unhappy dream.
+
+It came suddenly to me one night. I was lying awake in my bed; and
+then it came to me that I would write a Great Romance. A Great
+Romance! I know it is funny; but it is sorry too. I didn’t in the
+least know what the said Great Romance was to be about; save this,
+that Rabelais was to have something to do with it, and that my own
+county, beloved Gwent, was to have much more to do with it. That does
+not sound very definite; but I believe it is more definite than the
+actual vision which appeared to me, for this was rather a warm and
+golden and wonderful glow and radiance than any scheme for a book. I
+know I lay happy and trembling for a long time and fell asleep happy
+and awoke happy in the morning, and went out forthwith to buy pens
+and paper. I had both already, but I felt that the occasion was more
+than a special one and called for very special purchases. So, at
+the stationer’s shop, near the Holland Park end of Clarendon Road, I
+got ruled quarto paper, and “Viaduct” pens, and two penholders, and
+I am pleased that I am writing all this with a surviving penholder
+of those two; a poor old thing chewed to a stump and battered
+grievously in its metallic parts. So here was paper, here was pens
+and penholders; and of course the rest was easy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was only this little difficulty. The golden and glowing vision
+of the night, the announcing of the Great Romance, declined to be
+more specific. It had no hints to give, it seemed, as to plot; it
+still veiled the subject of this wonderful book in the dimmest, most
+religious obscurity. The paper and the pens were ready; but how to
+begin writing the first line? I had not the faintest notion, so I
+proceeded to write Prologues and Epilogues, with commentaries on
+the _magnum opus_ which was not even begun. Two of these oddities
+survive, the Dedication to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, as the
+Patron of men of letters; a dreadful quip founded on the old saying
+about “dining with Duke Humphrey,” which meant that you had not had
+any dinner. This was worked out with all elaboration and with an
+attempt at the great manner of Bacon in his most magistral mood. It
+ran in this vein:
+
+     Truly, then, do we poor folk (men of letters) owe what
+     service we are able to pay Your Grace, who in spite of mean
+     dress and poverty (justly accounted by Mr. Hobbes for
+     shame and dishonour) is pleased to entertain us at that
+     board, where so great a multitude of our brotherhood has
+     feasted before. For your illustrious line hath now for many
+     generations made it a peculiar glory to supply the needs
+     of lettered men; and as we sit at meat it seems (methinks)
+     as if these mighty men of old did sit beside us and taste
+     with us once more the mingled cup we drink. The ingenious
+     author of Don Quixote de la Mancha must, I suppose, have
+     often dined with the Duke of his age, Mr. Peter Corneille
+     and Mr. Otway, Senhor Camoens, Rare Old Ben, Signori Tasso
+     and Ariosto not seldom: while young Mr. Chatterton the poet
+     did not only dine, but break his fast, take his morning
+     draught, and sup with Your Grace’s great-grandfather, till
+     at last he died of a mere repletion.
+
+There! Very solemn and portentous fun, indeed; but what is so solemn
+as a youngster of twenty-two? Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster
+Abbey seem gay and light and airy by comparison. _I_ like it still,
+to be sure; but then I am prejudiced, and indeed, there is one
+sentence that still affects me; that phrase about “the mighty men
+of old” who seem “to sit beside us and taste with us once more the
+mingled cup we drink.” For in that sentence I see something of the
+spirit which sustained me, the cloudy young man, the dreamy and
+obscure and inarticulate young man, of those long-ago days, all
+through the fire and the darkness of poverty and loneliness and
+weariness and disillusion. Let us still, if you please, ride the
+high horse and be as magnificent as we can: I saw myself and, to be
+frank, I still see myself, as the youngest novice in a great and
+noble monastic house. The novice is by no means a promising member
+of the congregation, the Abbot and the Prior and the Master of the
+Novices have the gravest doubts as to his vocation: the other novices
+are inclined to indulge in remarks of a jocular and contemptuous
+kind. But the little, obscure and despised candidate for the triple
+cord sits in his low place at the board and looks at the pictures
+on the walls: on the faces where torment and exultation shine with
+twin fires: on Blessed Bernardus a Baculo, who was beaten to death
+by the Danes in the ninth century, on the Venerable Servant of
+God, Marcellinus, who was impaled by the Turk, on St. Eugenius de
+Compostella, who was shut by the Moors in a horrible dungeon of filth
+for forty years and at last his visage shone and gave light to the
+tormentors when they came to end him, on Venerable Raymondus Anglus,
+who was slowly sliced into little pieces in Cathay, on Blessed
+Gregory Perrot, whom the ministers of the Virgin Queen attended to
+at Tyburn in 1590: on all these brilliant successes of the convent
+does the little novice gaze with admiring wonder. Well he knows
+that his picture will never hang on the wall; still, and after all,
+he is a member of the congregation to which these, the lucky and
+happy, belonged; in a faint sort they are his brothers; they are
+_commensales, cohæredes, et sodales_.
+
+Very fine, indeed; but in the meantime I am scratching with
+a somewhat hopeless pen under Clarendon Road gaslight, taking
+difficulties for solution to lonely places such as Perivale, to the
+unfrequented parts of Hampton Court; or else, by contrast, to the
+long black High Street of Brentford, with its creeks and backwaters
+of the river, where grass and flowers grow on the decks of derelict
+barges. I find no oracles to help me in any of these promising
+quarters; there are some very sad nights in the little room over
+the dry bread, tea and tobacco and the helpless pen. Finally, in a
+kind of despair, I begin something of which the first scene is to be
+laid in Gwent, which, later, is to have a voyage in it--there is a
+great voyage in Rabelais to the Oracle of the Holy Bottle. I read the
+first chapter. It is quite hopeless; and yet I do not give up hope; I
+resolve to try again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But all this time, while the Great Romance refused to move, my
+worldly affairs were moving fast, and decidedly in the way of
+destruction. I suppose, having finished the Catalogue, I had done
+all that the publisher wanted of me. At all events, the stream of
+employment, never auriferous to any great extent, dwindled and dried
+up. I had a little, a very little money in hand, I could not possibly
+call on those poor people at home for help; my landlady in Clarendon
+Road had a hard struggle of it, I fancy, and I would not cadge on
+her kindness, even though my board and lodging were far from being
+luxurious. It seemed to me that at the end of the week I must just
+walk out of 23 Clarendon Road and go on walking towards the West
+till I couldn’t walk any longer. I admit that the plan was vague,
+as vague as the plot of the Great Romance, but I could think of no
+other. And in the meantime--I had three or four days before me--I
+would write the Epilogue for my book: which was not yet begun.
+
+I set about this task with the utmost relish and enjoyment. For once,
+I knew what to write about; that was my own position; not in a plain
+and literal manner, but after the fashion of a decorated fantasy.
+It would never do to say: “Here am I, a stupid lad who is not worth
+twopence to anybody, who thinks he can write and can hardly get half
+a dozen words to stagger on the paper; here am I going out to die in
+a ditch or to live in a ward of the workhouse”: that would never have
+served. I agree with Mr. Sampson Brass in holding that the truth is
+often highly unpleasant and inconvenient. Hence the Epilogue to the
+unwritten book, which survives in the written book, “The Chronicle
+of Clemendy,” a work which is neither great nor a romance, but which
+answers the description admirably in all other respects. And as the
+Dedication was made to Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, so the Epilogue
+is concerned with the same nobleman. So here we are:
+
+     A few days ago His Grace did take me aside into his
+     cabinet, and looking kindly upon me (though some call him
+     a stern and awful noble) said: “Why, Master Leolinus, you
+     look but sickly, poor gentleman, poor gentleman, I protest
+     you’re but a shadow, do not your Abbreviatures bring you
+     in a goodly revenue?” (Note the elegant reference to my
+     mysterious shorthand.) “Not so, Your Grace,” answered I,
+     “to the present time I have abbreviated all in vain, and
+     were it not for the hospitality of your table, I know not
+     how I should win through.” “How goes it then with your
+     Silurian Histories?” (The Great Romance.) ... “With them,
+     may it please Your Grace, it fares excellently well, and
+     this morning I have made an end of writing the First
+     Journey, containing many agreeable histories and choice
+     discourses.” “I believe indeed it will be a rare book, fit
+     to read to the monks of Tintern while they dine. But yet I
+     will have you lay it aside a little, since I have a good
+     piece of preferment for you, an office (or I mistake you)
+     altogether to your taste. What say you, Master Scholar, to
+     the Lordship of an Island and no less an Island than Farre
+     Joyaunce in the Western Seas? How stand you thitherwards?
+     Will you take ship presently?” At hearing this, I was, as
+     you may guess, half bewildered with sudden joy, that is apt
+     to bring tears into the eyes of them that have toiled in
+     many a weary struggle with adversity: I could but kneel and
+     kiss His Grace’s hand, and say “My Lord.”
+
+Of course, the allusions to “First Journeys” and “Silurian Histories”
+were put in months later, when I had at length found out what my book
+was about; at the time, October, 1885, I had not written one word of
+it. So the Epilogue went on its mellifluous way, and thus ended:
+
+     But here is my Paumier, with his parchments, to advise with
+     me concerning a grant of Water Baylage to the Abbey of St.
+     Michael, and also concerning the ceremonies observed in the
+     island at Christmastide. He tells me that the voyage will
+     surely be a rough and tempestuous one, but with the captain
+     of the _Salutation_ there need be no fear. And so farewell,
+     till the anchor be dropped in the Sure Haven of Farre
+     Joyaunce.
+
+And indeed, as I was writing the last page of the Epilogue, a letter
+came for me. I had written to Mr. Quaritch, stating my experience
+in cataloguing, and asking for employment. Mr. Quaritch wrote very
+civilly stating that he did not want any cataloguers, but people
+who knew how to sell books. And I wrote on to my final flourish,
+with all the more relish. “Ceremonies observed in the island at
+Christmastide,” indeed! Ceremonies observed at Reading Workhouse,
+more likely!
+
+But the next morning came a letter from Aunt Maria, that Maria who
+had walked with Anne to meet John on the white Caerleon road. My
+mother was dying; and they sent me the money for the fare, that I
+might come home.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter III_
+
+
+It is a debatable point, I suppose, whether life, taking it all
+round, by and large, as Mr. Bixby said, is a horrible business. On
+the one hand, most of us are excessively sorry to quit this world,
+so, clearly, there must be something to be said for it. But, on the
+other hand, how endless are the devices which we find to give a
+seasoning to a dish which is, perhaps, rather insipid than nauseous.
+I have eaten cold mutton with relish--after smothering it in about
+half a dozen different condiments, sauces, relishes and salads. So
+look at all the games we play with desperate earnestness, with a
+vigour and delight and, sometimes, an asceticism which we give to no
+office routine or serious employment of our lives. Perhaps we may try
+and define what “life” means a little later; but, under all ordinary
+and respectable conventions, I presume that the business of which
+I have been dimly aware on this day of writing can in no wise be
+classed as one of the serious employments of life; as, in any sense,
+a vital part of life according to accepted doctrine, religious,
+scientific or philosophical. The business of which, I say, I have
+been dimly aware; for all I have seen of it has been Grove Road,
+Grove End Road, and Circus Road and all the roads adjacent lined on
+both sides with motor cars of all sizes, splendours and miseries;
+the affair being the last day of the Oxford and Cambridge Cricket
+Match. And, looking at all this fairly, it comes to this: here are
+two wickets placed at a certain specified distance from one another
+on a stretch of turf, and here are men with bats and here are men
+with balls. Will the men with balls succeed in hitting the wickets,
+or will the men with bats succeed in hitting those balls away to
+remote parts of the turf? And on the whole: are the eleven young
+men of Oxford or the eleven young men of Cambridge the smarter and
+more skilled at these pursuits and in the subsidiary pursuit called
+“fielding,” or the art of stopping the ball which the man has hit
+with the bat from going to a remote part of the stretch of turf?
+That, in the very rough, is cricket; and I want to ask the clergy
+(if they have any time to spare from their self-appointed tasks of
+meddling in politics, “disapproving” of bookstall novels, and serving
+tables) what they honestly think Saint Paul would have said, if he
+had seen twenty-two of his most promising young converts engaged in
+this cricket business, applauded by a vast multitude of the saints?
+I desire to put this question not with a wish to “score”--to use an
+idiom of the game which we are discussing--but with an honest longing
+for information. That is: will theologians maintain that the ’Varsity
+Match and First Class County Cricket generally is a part of serious
+life, or a serious part of life? Or, will the scientific people or
+the philosophical people declare that this game, played as it is
+played at Lord’s with desperate earnestness, is a necessary part of
+the bodily and mental well-being of the human race? I say the game
+as played at Lord’s, that is the great game; for the case of the
+old-fashioned, village cricket on the green was somewhat different.
+Then you had a number of people with two or three hours of leisure
+before them who found a good deal of fun and relaxation and amusement
+in bowling balls and hitting balls and running after balls, with
+intervals of supping of ale, sitting on the bench under the shady
+tree in front of the village inn; this is a very different matter
+from the high cricket of our times, just as diverting yourself with a
+ball, a racket and a net is remote from Mdlle. Lenglen’s game at lawn
+tennis.
+
+And these are the comparatively mild forms of sport. What of
+rowing till you are blue in the face, what of climbing frightful
+mountain-peaks, with half an inch of rock between you and a fall of
+a thousand feet? Why do people do all these things, voluntarily,
+gladly, enthusiastically? I can only suppose that they do these
+things to make life tolerable, even entertaining, just as I add
+tomato sauce, Worcester sauce, pickles, beetroot, cucumber and salad
+to the cold mutton, to make _that_ tolerable and even appetising.
+It would seem indeed that life must be an awful business, if you
+have to plaster yourself on the walls of a sheer Alp before you can
+endure it. This is “drowning” your cold mutton in strong sauce with a
+vengeance.
+
+And all this by way of a tentative explanation of why I ever wrote
+anything at all, and still more why I have gone on writing, with
+brief remissions, ever since the autumn of 1880. This problem, as
+I have hinted already, is a profound mystery. For, taking first
+the plain view of the man in the street, and applying his plain and
+simple test, I have just been running through a list of my books from
+1881 to 1922, and reckoning--it was an easy task--how much money I
+have made by them. The list contains eighteen titles. Of these, the
+“Heptameron,” “Fantastic Tales,” “Casanova” represent more or less
+laborious translations--“Casanova” runs to twelve sizeable volumes.
+And my total receipts for these eighteen volumes, for these forty-two
+years of toil, amount to the sum of six hundred and thirty-five
+pounds. That is, I have been paid at the rate of fifteen pounds and
+a few shillings per annum. It seems clear, then, that my literary
+activities cannot be adequately accounted for on the hypothesis of
+mere greed and money-grubbing.
+
+And, then, taking another side of the question: consider the debit of
+toil and endeavour and mortification and disappointment that these
+forty-two years of book-writing have cost me. I believe that business
+men, engaged in manufacture, always “write off” a considerable sum
+for legitimate wear and tear and depreciation of plant. What about
+the wear and tear of mind and heart and that T,e,a,r, which is
+pronounced in another manner; what about the depreciation of the
+plant--a highly important one--of self-confidence that my writing
+has inflicted on me? I have described some of the pains I endured
+when I set out to write the thing which afterwards became the
+“Chronicle of Clemendy,” and that was only the beginning of months
+of hard and agonizing labour. And then I remember another occasion.
+The “idea” which turned into “The Great God Pan” came to me; again
+that delicious glow of delight. Now at last I had got hold of a
+real notion; I had a curious tale, a rare fantasy set in a rarer
+atmosphere to work upon: I thrilled at my heart as the explorer
+must thrill as he comes suddenly to the verge of the dark forest,
+or to the summit of the high mountain and sees before him a new
+and wonderful and undiscovered land. Well I remember how all this
+exquisite bliss was bestowed on me, one dark and foggy afternoon of
+1890–91, in rooms in Guilford Street, not far from “The Foundling.”
+The foul air shone bright, the dingy street, the dingy room were
+irradiated: here was happiness almost too keen to be endured. With
+no delay I got notebook and pencil and proceeded to “lay out” the
+story; that is, to set down the various scenes and incidents by which
+the plot was to be developed. Afterwards; the writing, and on the
+whole I was not altogether so ill-contented--though I daresay that I
+ought to have been disgusted--till it came to the last chapter. And
+that simply would not be written. I tried again and again; it was
+impossible. I could hit on no incident that would convey the required
+emotion; and at last I put away the uncompleted MS. in despair; I was
+within an ace of tearing it to bits. But think of the suffering, the
+misery, the bitter disappointment of those evenings. True it was all
+a silly thing, a toy; but an authority quoted in “The Water Babies”
+says that one of the saddest sights in the world is a child crying
+over a broken toy. My scheme was all silly, I allow; but I had set my
+heart on it, I had glowed with pride over it: and here it was all
+broken to pieces in my hands, a sorry, spoilt, piteous thing. True,
+I found some sort of an ending six months later; but that was not
+the same. There was no fun in that. You remember the party in the
+cabrioily that called on Mrs. Bardell? There was a dispute about the
+precise situation of Mrs. Bardell’s house, and finally the driver,
+who had dismounted, led the horse by the bridle to the house with the
+red door.
+
+     Here was a mean and low way of arriving at a friend’s
+     house! No dashing up with all the fire and fury of the
+     animal; no jumping down of the driver; no loud knocking at
+     the door; no opening of the apron with a crash at the very
+     last moment.... The whole edge of the thing had been taken
+     off; it was flatter than walking.
+
+So with me and my story: I got to the house with the red door
+eventually; but the whole edge of the thing had been taken off. And
+so it has been with most of my books; I get, somehow or other, to the
+house with the red door, or to a house which I try to persuade myself
+is just as good; but on the way in the cabrioily I have suffered so
+many disappointments that I am in no condition to enjoy the pleasure
+of Mrs. Bardell’s society. I remember that, in writing “The Hill of
+Dreams,” I sat down every night for three weeks with blank paper
+before me, trying to get the second chapter. On some nights I wrote
+half a dozen lines, on other nights a couple of pages--before the
+evening’s work went, hopeless, into the drawer. A few months later,
+having fallen on the wrong path, I had the pleasure of casting aside
+about 30,000 words that I had written; and by the time the book was
+at last ended there were two neat piles of MS. in my drawer; the one
+a little higher than the other. The bigger pile consisted of the
+folios that I had written and had been forced to reject. And think of
+what that means: a heartbreak to every other page and the comment of
+the author on himself and to himself: “You fool! Why do you pass your
+life in rending your heart, in trying to do the thing that you can’t
+do? Why weren’t you brought up to sit by a brazier in the streets, to
+see that nobody steals the planks and railings and the wood pavement:
+to do something that with an effort you might be able to do?” Or, to
+return to our former metaphor: “Don’t you see that you haven’t the
+knack of the toy maker? Then why will you persist in trying to make
+toys which always break in your hands, while you fill the air with
+lamentable boohoos?”
+
+And yet, as I have said, such has been my employment, with
+intermissions, from 1880 to 1922. It was like that in 1885–86. Night
+after night, when my father had knocked out his last pipe at eleven
+o’clock, did I draw out my papers from the table-drawer and set them
+under the lamp. Winds came from the mountain of the west and shook
+the trees about the house and sighed and wailed; snows came from
+the mountains of the north and whitened the terraced lawn, black
+clouds drifted over Wentwood, the winter rains scourged the land; and
+still I wrote on in the silent house; struggling against the bitter
+conviction of my incapacity, as a man struggles and claws at the
+crumbling earth when his foot has slipped and he is over the edge of
+the cliff. Yet, stubborn, I wrote on late into the night, far into
+the morning, and as the year advanced I often drew the heavy crimson
+curtain and looked out after I had put away my papers in the drawer,
+and saw a red or golden dawn streaming above the forest in the east.
+And as to the work itself? Let us not enquire too curiously; though I
+have always been proud of my parody of the terms of an ancient writ.
+_Diem clausit extremum_, he has ended his last day, was the title of
+the writ, which is moved now and then even in these days: my writ was
+called _Cyathum hausit extremum_: he has drained his last cup. And
+then there is the _merum et mixtum cervisium_, and the Charter of
+_Terra Sabulosa_ or Sandy Soil, and the offices of Tankard Marshal
+and _Clericus Spigotti_, or Clerk of the Spigot; all choice jests--to
+adopt the manner of the work in question. But, as I say, let us not
+enquire too curiously into the merits of “The Chronicle of Clemendy.”
+I am content to abide by the verdict of M. Octave Uzanne, who is
+held, I believe, to be a good judge of letters. He said that it was
+“le renouveau de la Renaissance,” and that I was sure of my place
+beside Rabelais and Boccaccio, on the serene, immortal seats. I am
+surrendering my judgment wholly to that of M. Octave Uzanne.
+
+By the way; I do not know how it was, but the only copy sent out
+for review was addressed to “Le Livre,” which was then edited by M.
+Uzanne. Somehow, no review copies found their way to the English
+papers. But the MS. had been shown to a pushing young literary
+gentleman, and he said that if it were properly “cut” it might make a
+good Christmas book for boys.
+
+And then, again, the question returns: why did I compel myself to
+undergo all the toil and misery and disappointment that the writing
+of this “Chronicle of Clemendy” involved? It was my own choice,
+nobody stood over me with a stick to force me to do it. Why? Why
+do men row themselves into blueness and incipient heart disease at
+Henley and Putney? Why do men expose themselves to horrors, miseries
+and the instant risk of death on all the most desperate mountains
+of the world? The answer is the same in all these cases: that cold
+mutton (or life) is in itself intolerable; that _Le Gigot de Mouton
+froid, sauce Cyanide de Potasse_ is better than the same dish
+_nature_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And, going further, the reason of this odd state of things is plain
+enough. The fact is, that what we commonly call life is not life
+at all. All the things that are considered serious, important and
+vital: the faithful earning of a living, the going to the City every
+morning to copy letters, keep accounts or float companies; the toils
+of the Chancery barrister, of the factory hand, of the doctor, of the
+shop-keeper, of the mining engineer, the affairs of all the serious
+and necessary employments of life; these things are not life at all.
+They are the curse of life, or, as it is sometimes called, the curse
+of Adam; as the theologians might have told us if they had not
+been too busy over the “curse of alcohol,” over the dubious moral
+influence of “the pictures,” over the decidedly frivolous character
+of the lighter fiction of the day, and the demoralising effects of
+putting a bob on the winner--this dreadful offence, I believe, is
+held to “harden the heart” more quickly and thoroughly than any other
+method. But this curse of getting a livelihood remains profoundly
+unnatural to man, in spite of his long experience of it: hence his
+frantic efforts to escape from what he erroneously calls life by
+running himself red in the face at Lord’s, by rowing himself blue in
+the face at Henley, by drinking methylated spirit, by “putting on”
+those criminal bobs, by playing mind-torturing games like chess, by
+knocking small balls into small holes, by climbing Alps--and even by
+writing books. He will do anything to get away from what are called
+the serious facts of life and follow any track however desperate,
+trivial, perilous, or painful, if only those serious facts can be
+evaded and forgotten, though it be but for a few hours. And so I
+wrote on, night after night, till the August of 1886 saw my task
+ended; and I immediately began to think of what I could write next.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter IV_
+
+
+I have just been trying to reckon up the various quarters which
+I have occupied in my forty-two years on-and-off life in London.
+When I first came up to town in 1880--the year when the play was
+the thing--I stayed at Wandsworth in an old Georgian house near the
+ugly Georgian church. I looked for it a few years ago, but I could
+not find it; I suspect that shops now flourish on its site and on
+the site of its grave old garden. Then, in 1881–82 I was domiciled
+in a house fronting Turnham Green; here, too, were ample lawns and
+gardens which, for all I know, may remain still. Clarendon Road,
+as I have mentioned once or twice, entertained me in ’83, ’84, and
+again in ’85, and when I returned to London at the beginning of ’87
+I lodged for a time in Upper Bedford Place, Russell Square. This
+place I left for an amusing reason. I had been out rather late. The
+festivity was not furious; simply a little and most informal dance
+given by Mrs. Augusta Webster, in those days an admired poetess; and
+I suppose that it was half-past one when I got home from Hammersmith.
+I was moving softly up the stairs, and was a good deal puzzled to
+hear the clanking noise of metal on metal, as I passed the door of
+the first-floor bedroom. However, I supposed that somebody was ill
+and that the fire was being kept up. But the next morning, the
+landlady addressed me gravely. She said that Mr. and Mrs. Sogden
+had been very much alarmed by hearing footsteps in the middle
+of the night, and had made preparations for receiving burglars;
+and on the whole the landlady thought that I should be much more
+comfortable at her sister’s in Great Russell Street, where no ladies
+were taken and things “were more Bohemian.” And, indeed, she was
+quite right. The garret--a real garret, with a sloping roof and a
+dormer window--looked out on Dyott Street, the last remnant of the
+old rookery of St. Giles; the house was late seventeenth century or
+quite early eighteenth, and the room, with tea and bread and butter
+breakfast included, only cost ten-and-six a week. Later in the year,
+I moved across the street and lived for a while over a stained-glass
+business; then I crossed again and lived over a tailor’s shop.
+January, 1890, found me in two rooms in Soho Street--undoubted
+seventeenth century, panelled, with beautifully deep wooden cornices.
+And here took place the battle of the fleas.
+
+I had moved in, as I say, early in the year, in cold weather. The
+rooms seemed quite all right, and the black tom cat of the premises
+was a remarkable and consistent character whom it was a privilege
+to know. His daily plan of dining with every one in the house,
+from his own family in the basement to the people in the attics,
+finally welcoming the cat’s-meat man with loud shrieks, shewed, I
+thought, Mind. And, as I say, the cornice; well, I wish that I had
+been draughtsman enough to draw a section of it. Well, everything
+was as pleasant as it could be; and there, at the door, was all
+Soho to explore and investigate, and I suppose I need not say that
+Soho offered then, and still offers, I am glad to note, a large and
+curious field wherein the contemplative mind loves to expatiate.
+
+Very well; but the weather got warmer: and the fleas appeared.
+At first as single spies; and then in battalions. They swarmed
+everywhere. They made life hideous and intolerable. I did not see
+what was to be done. My furniture, such as it was, occupied the
+rooms; it would be highly inconvenient for me to move. The advertised
+specifics were useless. I isolated a flea--they were fair, large
+fleas--with a little of the powder, under a wine glass and watched
+his behaviour. He seemed happy, though perhaps a little torpid; he
+reminded me of a stout, red-faced old gentleman who has had two or
+three glasses of “hot Scotch,” and is inclined to fall asleep by
+the tavern fire. Clearly, such mild measures were useless against
+the busy multitudes which swarmed all over my rooms. Then, I had
+a notion, a much more brilliant notion than anything that I have
+known in the region of literature. I have an odd and random vein of
+practicality within me, and it came out in the Soho Street emergency.
+I took a large sheet of newspaper and brushed it over with treacle
+and laid it on the bedroom floor and waited for an hour or two. At
+the end of that time, a dozen or so of fleas were sticking fast to
+the treacle. I experienced the happy glow of the inventor; and now
+there was no dismal reaction. By the evening, there were at least
+six dozen fleas captured and out of action. I thought I might say,
+Eureka.
+
+But then there came a difficulty. I discovered a certain property
+in treacle, which, so far as I know, is not recorded in scientific
+text-books. The matter of the work--to use the term of alchemy--was,
+I found, susceptible to weather. In certain states of the atmosphere,
+in place of being sticky, it became crystalline and as hard as glass.
+I do not know whether this interesting property of treacle can be
+utilised for forecasting purposes. But this hardness rendered it
+useless for my immediate end. The large, fair fleas hopped on to the
+trap and hopped away. I surveyed the problem anew. Again the flash
+akin to genius. I thought of fly-papers and bought half a dozen. The
+battle was over in a few weeks. I kept a careful daily account, and
+in a month, or perhaps five weeks, I had captured over three thousand
+fleas. And I had purged the first floor of 12 Soho Street utterly of
+all the race. I recollect well one night’s bag. I had been to see “A
+Pair of Spectacles” at the Garrick, and when I came home I found I
+had got 120 fine fleas.
+
+And then, having won this notable victory, a very odd distaste for
+London came upon me. I am not joking; the sentiment had nothing to do
+with the insects whom I had defeated; but, somehow, London sickened
+me. Its faint, hot summer airs were an oppression, its swarming
+streets a tribulation; I thought of cold wells in the hills and
+running brooks and the breath of the wood and the mountain in the
+early morning--and I resolved to be a countryman again. So I took a
+cottage high up on the Chiltern Hills, and while certain alterations
+were being made, I left for Tours, Touraine, France.
+
+The Rabelaisian enthusiasm was still upon me. I had just issued a
+translation (called “Fantastic Tales”) of that extraordinary and
+enigmatic book, “Le Moyen de Parvenir,” by Beroalde de Verville, who
+was a canon of Tours Cathedral. So to Touraine I went; to see the
+land of Rabelais, of Beroalde, of Balzac. And the odd thing is, that
+my first Sunday afternoon in Tours--I got there on a Saturday--was
+a severe disappointment. The fact was that I had taken Doré’s
+wonderful illustrations to the “Contes Drolatiques” for granted.
+I supposed that the enchanted heights, the profound and sombre
+valleys, the airy abysses of these amazing plates represented, with
+a little exaggeration, perhaps, the veritable scenery of Touraine.
+You remember the picture showing how that sinful little page
+climbed the heights of Marmoutiers to confess his sin to the Abbot?
+Well, that Sunday afternoon, early in September, 1890, I set out
+from the Faisan, in the Rue Royale, to see the tremendous ascent
+of Marmoutiers. I crossed the bridge over the Loire, most of it
+sand with a swift stream here and there, and arrived at Portillon,
+where the conductor of the steam tram was calling out “Marmoutiers,
+Rochecorbon, Vouvray” in a melodious chant. But I walked along the
+road to Marmoutiers. Alas! there were no terrific heights, as in the
+picture. Imagine something like the high ground near the river at
+Henley; nothing higher, nothing as high. Instead of the dark green
+woods of Henley, golden rocks and golden earth shining in a very
+happy sun; little villas, larger villas, everywhere with gardens
+that were gardens indeed. Green walled closes, with rich green
+lawns; fountains in the midst of them, flowering shrubs and flowery
+creepers blossoming and trailing everywhere; kitchen gardens where
+the peaches glowed and burned dark against the hot white walls, where
+the pears on the dwarf trees were as shapes of golden honey: at
+last the old _clôture_ of the Abbey of Marmoutiers with pepper-pot
+turrets at intervals, close to the road, and inside the enclosure,
+the modern buildings of a convent school: and the mellow, river cliff
+behind all. It was delightful; but it was not a bit like Doré. I
+confess, my heart sank. And then going on by the river road, I got
+to Rochecorbon. Still the warm cliff overhung the road, underneath
+it a small hamlet with a tavern, “A la Lanterne de Rochecorbon,” and
+perched on the edge of the cliff the Lantern, an odd structure which
+looked something like an ancient factory chimney, and was, I suppose,
+the sole relic of the ancient castle celebrated by Balzac. It took me
+some time before I could get Dora’s Touraine out of my mind and enjoy
+the Touraine of actuality on its own merits. And these are many.
+There were great moments on this first visit to the garden of France.
+
+I was staying at the Faisan in the Rue Royale--that street which
+Balzac, who was born in it, praises as being “always royal, always
+imperial,” which in these later days has taken to calling itself the
+Rue Nationale--a delicious inn indeed. I got the recommendation from
+Thackeray. Philip stayed there once. He calls it the “Faisan d’Or.”
+It had three courtyards, or rather a courtyard and two gardens,
+both closed in by the hotel walls. You entered the courtyard under
+the archway in the Rue Royale; to the left was the dining-room hung
+with tapestries depicting in an ancient mode the famous castles of
+Touraine; on the right was the kitchen, all bright with glowing
+copper pots, and the big round cook standing at the open door or
+bending over his furnace, occasionally shaking one of his pots
+knowingly and beaming on you as you sat at your little table in the
+courtyard as much as to say: “You will find it good.” Around this
+great man were four or five boys, all in white like their chief, who
+seemed to be busy all day long in washing vegetables, in chopping
+meat and herbs fine for _farses_, in manifold culinary employments,
+running out now and again and shaking showers from bags full of
+wet lettuce or endive leaves. At the back were the stables, and on
+market days the yard of the Faisan was full, like an English inn
+yard, of all manner of queer traps and shandridans from the country.
+And beyond this courtyard, at the back of the house, were the two
+gardens, secret, retired and delicious. Such green turf was there in
+these chosen places, so pleasant a music in one of them of a singing
+fountain, so glowing the flowers about it with the water drops
+glittering on them, so sweet the shade of overhanging boughs--there
+are here and there gardens that address the heart and spirit and not
+the florist, as Poe knew well.
+
+And thinking of the Faisan at Tours and of its curious delights,
+how is it that much money--one may say the wealth of the whole
+world--cannot buy anything like this in London? Money will get you a
+set of rooms thirty feet or so in height from floor to ceiling, it
+will buy you the use of suites of furniture that make you wonder when
+you wake up in the morning whether by any chance you can have turned
+into Louis XV in your sleep; it will buy you bathrooms all marble and
+tessellated pavement, dining-rooms as marblous and Louisquinzious as
+your private suites; but delights such as are afforded by the Faisan
+at Tours it will by no means buy. It is a pity; at least I think so.
+But then I can never fancy that I am Louis XV even for a moment, and
+that, I suppose, is the reason why I don’t like living in the style
+of that monarch, why I don’t even like lunching or dining in palatial
+halls built and furnished in his favourite manner. And I doubt
+whether the grandest of all grand hotels in our London could furnish
+you with a bottle of Vouvray Nature of a named _clos_, for any money
+that your millionaire’s purse could proffer.
+
+And the mention of that admirable amber wine of Vouvray, the wine
+wherein an argent bead rises at intervals through the mellow gold,
+reminds me of my first night at the Faisan. All down the tables were
+portly decanters of wine, red and white. I chose red, and found it
+a new sensation in wine vastly to my taste. It was, of course, an
+ordinary wine, and a little wine, I think of the kind called Joué
+Noble, from the place of its growth, a parish by the Cher river. It
+was scented like flowers in June; it was in its entirely unpretending
+way quite exquisite. I drank it with relish, and towards the end of
+dinner I had accounted for about three-parts of the decanter. Swiftly
+came the head waiter and bore it away and as swiftly put another and
+a full decanter in its place. It was almost too much; “temperance”
+enthusiasts would say a great deal too much. I thought solemnly to
+myself as I smoked a grateful pipe after dinner in the courtyard:
+“This night I have had as much good red wine as ever I could drink.”
+And this was one of the great moments of my visit to Touraine.
+
+And then there was Chinon. The train passes through the deep darkness
+of Chinon Forest, and you leave the station and come out into the
+sunlight. Here is a narrow river valley: the clear Vienne in the
+middle of it; to the left a gently rising land, rich with vines;
+to the right a long, golden, precipitous cliff, golden in such a
+sunlight as we never see in England. As in the backgrounds of the old
+Italian masters, the trees stand out clearly, vividly, distinctly
+against the sky; so was it at Chinon. That long, mouldering and
+golden cliff was surmounted by the walls of the old castle, golden
+and mouldering also, irradiated; and from the river to the cliff the
+town climbed up; narrow ways, winding ways, steep ways, and every
+here and there the grey-blue _tourelles_ of the fifteenth-century
+houses piercing upwards; and the dark mass of the forest stretching
+far and far away beyond. And then the thought that the man who had
+received one of the great visions of reality once walked these ways,
+and looked on a scene that had not much changed since his time; that
+the golden and rich sunlight had shone on him also, in the hour when
+the amazing, terrible, tremendous figures and symbols of the vision
+of Pantagruel, Panurge, Friar John, the three who are yet one came to
+him, we must conjecture, in clouds and darkness and uncertainties,
+as he listened to the new song of the vineyards, and the vine and
+the outpoured wine: all this was made a great moment also. I sat
+on a sort of bridge--if I remember--joining the two parts of the
+ruined castle, sat on golden stones, and looked down on the Chinon
+of the grey-blue _tourelles_, on the shining Vienne, and the gentle
+vine-covered slope, and I thought of the cloudy young man stumbling
+over that hard French of Rabelais far into the night, in obscure
+Clarendon Road, long ago. It was not long ago; this was of ’90 and
+that was of ’85, but hard pains make long years. I went down the hill
+again, past the fountain, and drank the red wine of Chinon solemnly,
+reverently in a dark tavern in one of the dark, narrow streets. It
+was called “Le Caveau de Rabelais.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I came back to London in the autumn and took rooms in Guilford Street
+till that cottage on the Chilterns should be ready for occupation.
+Then from 1891 I lived in the country, and found it nothing, and
+came back to London in the autumn of 1893, to an “upper part” in
+Great Russell Street, a little westward of the British Museum. It was
+then that I began to explore London, and to realise its vastness,
+its immensities. Things are relative; I began now to appreciate
+the fact that if you set out, without a map, from your house at 36
+Great Russell Street and walk for an hour eastward or northward
+you are in fact in an unknown region, a new world. Continually you
+stand on a peak in Darien, and look out on undiscovered territories,
+inhabited by peoples of whom you know nothing. I would go along
+Great Russell Street, and turn up into Russell Square, and then go
+by Guilford Street, crossing Gray’s Inn Road, and so find myself,
+like the knight in the song, “ten leagues beyond the wide world’s
+end.” I would go northward, up the Gray’s Inn Road, and then turn
+to the right, descend into a valley and climb a height and so come
+to a region which was to me as the ultimate parts of Libya, and the
+lands of the Mountains of the Moon. I shall never forget the awe with
+which I first came upon the other Baker Street, the Baker Street
+which would enter no taxi-driver’s mind; those houses climbing up the
+hill into Lloyd Square, stucco houses with classic pediments, but
+all tottering, askew, and falling into decay; the jerry building of
+1820–30. And, I remember, seeing on one of the leaning and doubtful
+doors here the brass plate of someone who said that he was a “Buhl
+Maker.” I wonder. Did someone really labour in this forsaken,
+climbing street in that rich eighteenth-century art of brass and
+tortoiseshell, fashioning curious cabinets and escritoires! How
+unlikely it seemed; more unlikely than another announcement on a
+modest door in the recesses of Camden Town, to the effect that here
+were made Shell Boxes.
+
+Often I went up Baker Street and stood in Lloyd’s Square and looked
+down on London, on Gilbert Scott’s horrible, villainous sham-Gothic
+St. Pancras Station and on all the vague, smoky, weary streets
+about it. Here, one evening, the sun flamed suddenly and struck the
+windows of a school below and lit fires in them: hence the lines--in
+“A Fragment of Life”--entitled: “Lines written on looking down from a
+Height in London on a Board School suddenly lit up by the sun.”
+
+And here I would say that the matter of Wonder--that is the matter of
+the arts--is everywhere offered to us. It is, I am sure, true, as the
+feeble though pious Keble wrote, that:
+
+    The daily round, the common task
+    Will furnish all we need to ask.
+
+And it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe,
+the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by
+the Gray’s Inn Road will never find those secrets elsewhere, not in
+the heart of Africa, not in the fabled hidden cities of Tibet. “The
+matter of our work is everywhere present,” wrote the old alchemists,
+and that is the truth. All the wonders lie within a stone’s-throw of
+King’s Cross Station.
+
+I remember that when, later on, I wrote a book on the principles
+of literary criticism called “Hieroglyphics,” a good many of the
+reviewers found grave fault with my dictum that all fine literature
+is the work of ecstasy and the inspirer of ecstasy. “In other
+words,” said these clever fellows, “a good book is a book that you
+happen to like. But other people may have very different tastes
+and likings; no doubt many people experience ecstasy in reading a
+newspaper feuilleton. Is the feuilleton therefore fine literature?”
+The objection, I hasten to say, is perfectly legitimate. Tens of
+thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people, I have no doubt, read
+the newspaper feuilleton in an ecstasy of delight. I once found
+myself, to my dumb, almost awestruck horror, in a drawing-room where
+a number of tolerably well-educated people were engaged in taking
+the works of ... well, Miss Thingumbob, seriously. Doubtless, then,
+there are many people who find rarities and wonders in matter that
+you and I pronounce to be contemptible or detestable or just nothing
+at all: my reviewers were perfectly right. But if you accept their
+ruling you put an end to criticism of all sorts. I could form a large
+company of coalheavers, financiers, sporting noblemen, gardeners,
+journalists, ladies of quality, actors, scavengers--I was going to
+add bishops, but they rarely speak the honest truth--and myself who
+had very much rather not see the famous Primavera and the famous
+Monna Lisa Gioconda than see them, who had rather--again I include
+myself--listen to George Robey’s songs and gags and wheezes than to
+“Hamlet.” But what does that prove? Simply, I suppose, that so far
+as the pictures and the play are concerned my friends and myself
+cannot rise to these particular heights. As an old friend of mine
+once observed very well, “We all of us have some windows that are
+darkened.” My friend is a musician, and remembering his maxim, I
+was much diverted one day by hearing him speak with easy contempt
+of the composer of “Acis and Galatea.” But it is true that each one
+of us has some darkened windows: Oscar Wilde confessed to me once,
+with shame be it said, that he thought absinthe a detestable drink.
+But no inference can be drawn from this undoubted fact. It always
+stirs in me a certain feeling of impatience when I see the solemn
+correspondence, the more solemn leading articles under the dread
+heading, “What is Wrong with the Church?” It is alleged, I am sure
+with complete truth, that a great many people do not go to church;
+and the conclusion is drawn that the Church must be very gravely
+at fault. Now this may be true also--I think it is--but it is a
+conclusion not to be deduced from the minor premiss, the sole premiss
+stated. Scholastic logic, the only logic that is worth twopence, the
+“new logic” being, as an Oxford graduate once very sensibly observed
+to me, merely “nonsense about things,” is now unfashionable, so,
+I suppose I shall be thought somewhat boorish for exhibiting the
+newspaper syllogism at full length, supplying the suppressed major.
+But here it is:
+
+That which is unpopular is worthless.
+
+The Church is unpopular.
+
+Therefore, the Church is worthless. In other words, as one of the
+ladies in the cabrioily--to which I have already alluded--observed:
+“Most Votes carries the day.” Very well; but how does the attendance
+on the pictures in the National Gallery compare with the attendance
+at “the pictures”? And shall we try the experiment of “knocking”
+the music-halls, the revue houses and the musical comedy houses by
+running Bach’s Organ and Clavier Fugues at popular prices? Perhaps
+the purse of Rockefeller might survive the experiment; certainly
+no other purse would hold anything after a year of it. Mr. Walkley
+of “The Times” proposes to solve the difficulty of criticism by
+making the critic address himself to ὁ χαρίεις, the well-graced and
+accomplished man. But who is he? Each one of us is a good judge--in
+his own judgment. And technical instruction is nothing. No one in his
+senses would seek anything vital as to Greek or Latin poetry from a
+classical don at Oxford or Cambridge. Keats, poor, shabby John, who
+had only been to a commercial academy, knew more about Greek poetry
+than a wilderness of classical tutors.
+
+But, I was going to say, all these considerations apply to the known
+and recognised arts, to literature, music, painting, architecture.
+In all these I am willing to admit I may be hopelessly wrong--I
+have said that I had much rather hear Robey than “Hamlet”--but I
+will listen to no objections or criticisms as to the Ars Magna of
+London, of which I claim to be the inventor, the professor and the
+whole school. Here I am artist and judge at once, and possess the
+whole matter of the art within myself. For, let it be quite clearly
+understood, the Great Art of London has nothing to do with any map
+or guide-book or antiquarian knowledge, admirable as these are; and
+indeed Peter Cunningham’s “London” is to me one of the choicest of
+books. But the Great Art is a matter of quite another sphere; and
+as to maps, for example, if known they must be forgotten. How would
+the Odyssey have read, do you imagine, if Ulysses had been furnished
+with Admiralty Charts, giving the soundings in fathoms, even to the
+exact depth of water in the harbourage of Calypso’s isle? And all
+historical associations; they too must be laid aside. Mr. Pickwick
+at Bury St. Edmunds has nothing to do with the history of the famous
+abbey. Of all this the follower of the London Art must purge himself
+when he sets out on his adventures. For the essence of this art is
+that it must be an adventure into the unknown, and perhaps it may be
+found that this, at last, is the matter of all the arts.
+
+And it was this art of London that I followed, while I lived in
+Great Russell Street between ’93 and ’95, and still more earnestly
+afterwards when I was living at Verulam Buildings, Gray’s Inn.
+Sometimes I took a friend with me on my journeys, but not often.
+The secret of it all was hidden from them, and they were apt to
+become violent. On one grey day that I remember I had personally
+conducted a man on a most interesting exploration of the obscurer
+by-ways of Islington. He grew silent as the streets grew greyer
+and the squares dimmer and the remoteness of the whole region from
+any conceivable London that he knew filtered through his soul. His
+London was Piccadilly, the Haymarket, St. James’s, and the many
+polite neighbourhoods where there are flats and calls are paid and
+tea is taken and literary and theatrical and artistic circles meet
+and gather. But this London that was a grey wilderness, these streets
+that went to the beyond and beyond, these squares which nobody that
+my friend could ever have known could ever inhabit: it was all too
+much for him. His face darkened with terror and hate, and with a
+poisonous glance at me he struck his golden-headed cane violently on
+the pavement, and stopping dead, exclaimed: “I wish to God I could
+see a hansom!”
+
+So, of course, I never took him to Barnsbury. As for Brentford,
+that is the Great Magisterium, the Hidden Secret. There is a Secret
+Society of those initiated in Brentford, and so darkly is the mystery
+kept that there have been cases in which members have known each
+other intimately for twenty years before the passwords have been
+exchanged.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter V_
+
+
+I have been talking of rooms in Gray’s Inn, of trips to Touraine; and
+I suppose it will have become evident that the days of the Clarendon
+Road cell, of dry bread and green tea meals were over. This was, in
+fact, the case. Between ’87 and ’92 I “came into money,” that is,
+into what I called money. My mother died in 1885, my father in 1887;
+distant and ancient relatives in Scotland who had lived to fabulous
+ages died at last, and thus moneys that should have come to my
+mother came to me. And I was no longer the lonely man of the earlier
+chapters.
+
+Reckoning up the various sums which I inherited, I calculate that
+if they had been invested I should have had enough whereon to live
+narrowly and meanly for the next thirty years. Somewhere about 1921
+a long lease would have fallen in, and two-thirds of my income would
+have disappeared. I should then have been left with sixty pounds
+a year at the outside, and even with the “aconomy” recommended by
+Captain Costigan, there is very little to be done in these days with
+£60 per annum. But I did not invest my fortune in sound securities.
+Perhaps I might have done so if it had fallen in a lump on my lap;
+but this was not the way of it. It came in bits and parcels: £700
+one year, £500 eighteen months afterwards. So I adopted the simple,
+manly course of putting my money as I got it into a box, as it were,
+and dipping my hand into the box when I needed a few gold pieces. I
+wish it were possible to do this literally: it must be magnificent
+to live on a chestful of gold; but I compromised by getting a
+cheque-book.
+
+And I have always been glad that I made this business-like
+arrangement. By it I was enabled to live for eleven or twelve
+years under pleasant and humane conditions. Not in luxury, be it
+understood, for luxury has always been utterly detestable to me.
+Detestable to me, I say with emphasis; I do not say that luxury is
+detestable in itself. If men like to have it so, by all means let
+them dwell in marble halls, with vassals and serfs and wine-stewards
+at their side. Let them be as Louisquinzious as ever they please in
+their homes and at their hotels; for all I care, they may take their
+ease in snuggeries, all gold and mirrors and marbles, fifty feet
+high, a hundred feet high, if they like it so. But to me, a poor
+clerk, all this has ever been nauseous. When I plied my sorry trade
+of journalist, I disliked most things involved in that vile business,
+but I hated my occasional missions to the Hôtel Splendide and the
+Hôtel Glorieux. I would be sent to these places to find out, say, the
+exact method employed by the new chef, M. Mirobolant, in cooking red
+herrings for the famous Joy Teas in the Venetian Hall--everybody has
+heard of the Joy Teas at the Splendide, and of the Joy Band of twenty
+kettle-drums, fifty tea-trays, ten trombones and thirty bassoons.
+Well, I would be sent to the Splendide on this errand; or, perhaps,
+to the Glorieux to find out whether it were true that the principals
+of the Russian Ballet sucked their morning tea through raspberry jam
+and declared that this was necessary to their art. I would visit
+one or other of these establishments and sit down on Louis Quinze
+or Louis Seize chairs and wait there in my dingy old cloak, while
+“Reception” and “Enquiries” smiled to see such an incongruous figure
+before them, while the guests of the hotel smiled also as they
+went in and out, till at last the manager arrived, fretful enough,
+usually, at being dragged from his business or his leisure to answer
+idiotic questions. I used to wonder on these Splendide or Glorieux
+days what I had done to deserve such humiliations. The only thing
+that somewhat consoled me was the thought that, whatever pains the
+Doctor may have suffered, while he waited in Lord Chesterfield’s
+outward rooms or was repulsed from that nobleman’s door, my case was
+more humiliating still, since an English nobleman of race is a much
+greater personage than the shiniest of hotel managers. And perhaps,
+also, I fancied that I was beginning to follow a little in the
+faithful steps of Venerable Raymondus Anglus, who was slowly sliced
+into little pieces in Cathay.
+
+Rather, I am afraid, in the steps of a relative of my own, some
+distant Cousin Machen, whom business, I suppose, took to Cathay in
+the ’fifties and ’sixties of the last century. It so fell out that
+while this gentleman was in China we declared one of our infamous
+Opium Wars against the Dragon Throne and the Vermilion Pencil.
+Promptly the local mandarin seized Cousin Machen and put him in a
+cage. They then travelled him round the Chinese “Smalls.” When the
+cortège got to a village or town, my cousin’s custodians touched him
+up smartly with their spears. Cousin Machen would then dance with
+anguish, and, I am sure, most ungracefully, and the happy villagers,
+howling with mirth, and voting Cousin Machen good goods, would pelt
+the poor man with undesirable matters. He got away from them, but I
+have heard my relations say that in extreme old age the mere word
+“China” was enough to bring a sweat of horror pouring down his face.
+And I am in a position to sympathise fully with Cousin Machen----
+
+Well, I was saying, I think, that I never cared for luxury, and
+so did not waste my bit of money on it. But if luxury tempts me
+not at all, I care a great deal for homely comfort, and I lived in
+considerable comfort in the days of which I am speaking. I think that
+my annual budget was between four and five hundred a year, and let
+me tell an amazed generation that for five hundred a year or rather
+less two people could live very sufficiently in the ’eighties and
+’nineties. Your saddle of mutton and your sirloin of beef were of
+the best, lamb at Easter--is there anything better than spring lamb
+with its skin roasted to a golden-brown?--was easily attainable;
+fowls and ducks, grouse and partridges and pheasants, with now and
+then that most delicious bird the woodcock, were no rarities. And
+asparagus might well appear quite early in the spring, and green peas
+in advance of the main crop. And sometimes one felt that it would be
+amusing to go out to dinner for a change: well, the bill of the Soho
+restaurant never gave an indigestion afterwards. Sometimes the Soho
+dinners were quite good, they were always amusing; and in those days
+there was such a thing as decent Chianti. It came to the cheerful
+table in flasks of very thin glass, and between the cork and the wine
+was a stratum of olive oil. This the waiter flicked off on to the
+linoleum with a swift gesture. The last Chianti of this order that I
+tasted was in 1902. I saw great gallon flasks of it standing in the
+window of a small shop opposite the stage door of the Palace, and
+bought one of these flasks--it cost six shillings, if I remember--and
+bore it tenderly to my dressing-room at the St. James’s Theatre. It
+was the last night of “Paolo and Francesca,” and we drank the Chianti
+merrily in trunk hose and armour when the play was done. And Herbert
+Dansey, who was really a noble Florentine, “degli Tassinari,” vowed
+you could get no better Chianti in all Tuscany.
+
+Or again, one didn’t fancy roast beef, and yet one didn’t want to
+go out dining. There was the middle course; Salame or Mortadella,
+half a round of ripe Brie and a bottle of a sufficient red or white
+wine. And a half-bottle of Benedictine only cost four-and-six. And
+the whole of the small banquet ran into very little: they were
+cheap days, and the Income Tax was inconsiderable then. But I was
+forgetting. I had no income, so I saved the expense of the tax.
+And under these conditions, living very pleasantly, with a month
+in France every year, I cultivated literature between 1890–1900.
+I refrained, utterly, I am glad to say, from the impious folly of
+wondering what would happen when the money should have come to an
+end. When that day came, why, that day could see to it.
+
+Living very pleasantly; that is, apart from my chosen sport of making
+books. I have already discussed the strange paradox of writing, of
+writing, that is, when it is entirely divorced from all commercial
+considerations. I wrote purely to please myself; and what a queer
+pleasure it was! To write, or to try to write, means involving
+oneself in endless difficulties, contrarieties, torments, despairs,
+and yet I wrote on, and I suppose for the reason which I have given,
+the necessity laid upon most of us to create another and a fantastic
+life in order that the life of actuality may be endurable. Look at
+the golfer: observe how he toils and frets in that fantastic world
+that he has made for himself, a world wherein he who can say, “I did
+the fourth hole in two” is happy; while the wretch who had to hit the
+little white ball six or seven times before it finally popped into
+that fourth hole goes out wretchedly into the night. It is fantastic
+nonsense; but for all that the golfers are in the right.
+
+Still, there may be a little more in the sport of literature; and
+if the golfers feel hurt by this remark, let them remember that a
+man always praises his own game. We understand so little of the real
+scheme of things that, for all we know, golf may be the end for which
+man was made, as, according to Coleridge, snuff was the final term of
+the human nose. But waiving this possibility--I think a remote one--I
+would contend that literature has more in it on the whole. Being an
+art as well as a sport, there is a question of making something, and
+very occasionally of making something that will divert or enchant
+others, besides the maker; whereas the sport which is nothing but
+a sport has no such by-products as “Don Quixote” or “Pickwick.” Of
+course the man who plays a game, such as golf or cricket, often gives
+pleasure--or amusement, at all events--to many spectators; but when
+the match is over and the last ball bowled nothing permanent remains.
+So far as others are concerned the player of games is much in the
+position of the player of plays. The actor thrills the house or rocks
+it with laughter; but the curtain falls and all is over. We know that
+the best judges of the eighteenth century found Garrick natural,
+simple, affecting; but we know no more. We have pictures of Garrick
+in his favourite situations; but I at least have no distinct image in
+my mind of what it was really like to be in the front row of the pit
+at Drury Lane and see and hear Garrick play.
+
+And, this apart, I cannot help thinking that the pleasures of the
+literary game are more intense and more exquisite than the pleasures
+of the other games. I know this is a very difficult question; there
+is no final answer to it. But I feel sure that the happiness of
+Charles Dickens on writing the last words of “David Copperfield” was
+greater than the happiness of the cricketer at Lord’s who carries
+out his bat for a faultless innings of two hundred against the most
+difficult bowling and the best fielding in England. I do not know
+that this is so, but I conjecture that it is so, chiefly because
+the joys of the writer of a great romance are so varied and so
+complex in comparison with the joys of the man who has played a
+perfect innings. In a sense, perhaps, the first-rate cricketer has
+achieved the more perfect performance: he has met every difficulty
+splendidly, his judgment as to running has been impeccable, he has
+not given a single chance. The writer, on the other hand, is--I think
+we may say--never perfect: consider those last chapters of “Don
+Quixote”; consider Steerforth and that infernal ... woman, Agnes; the
+Grandfather and Little Nell. Yet the man of the book has traversed
+such an infinitely wider region than the man of the bat and ball:
+he has perhaps rectified the work of the Creator and made himself
+anew and made himself much better; and so he has worked with all
+the world, fashioning a new life, discovering wonders where before
+there were no wonders, shewing secrets that had been hidden from the
+foundation of things, peering now and again, as Poe and Hawthorne
+peered, into the places of thick darkness, and, above all, voyaging
+into the unknown, perpetually climbing the steep white track that
+vanishes over the hill.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter VI_
+
+
+We are, I think, in the period 1890–1900; or, perhaps, to be more
+accurate, let us say 1889–1899. Between these dates I made a
+translation of “Le Moyen de Parvenir,” an early seventeenth-century
+book by an odd follower of Rabelais. I wrote “The Great God Pan,”
+“The Inmost Light,” “The Three Impostors,” “The Hill of Dreams,”
+a short collection of experiments called “Ornaments in Jade,”
+“Hieroglyphics,” “The White People,” the first part of “A Fragment of
+Life,” and “The Red Hand.” As I have said, I had inherited a little
+capital and spent it, and at ample leisure wrote these books and
+tales, instead of doing honest work. In the words of some character
+in “The Three Impostors,” I regarded my various legacies as an
+endowment of research.
+
+Now, as to the first title on this list, I was inspired to translate
+“Le Moyen de Parvenir” by that earlier Rabelaisian enthusiasm, which
+had lasted on. I found the book (in the original edition, I think),
+a little dumpy volume, while I was in the employment of a firm of
+second-hand booksellers who lived not far from Leicester Square. I
+have been called a modest man in an after-dinner speech, and I hope
+I am one; but I am sure I was modest in 1888. For, finding that I
+could not get a “rise” on the £60 a year which York Street afforded
+me, I tried Leicester Square and asked as much as £80; thirty
+shillings a week. I think the firm were amused; but they gave it me,
+and I set about cataloguing books for them.
+
+I did this under odd conditions. When I made my application, the
+Brothers--let us say--took me down to the place in the basement where
+my work would have to be done. Once, I suppose, it had been the
+underground back-kitchen of the house. The kitchen was occupied by
+two other employees of the firm. One of them kept the accounts; the
+other treated “foxed” plates and pages in baths and made them fresh
+again, and “grangerised” and packed up books that had been bought.
+And the kitchen had the illumination from the solid glass over which
+people walked as they passed the shop, and some sort of air from the
+outer world. But my workshop had neither one nor the other. Save for
+gas, it was in total darkness. Its air was dead. And the House asked
+me very fairly whether I thought I could stand it. I said I could,
+and so I went to work.
+
+I was never any good at cataloguing, real, technical cataloguing. I
+was explaining the other day to a friend of mine, a most accomplished
+and learned cataloguer, how I despised his work. “This business,”
+I said, “of putting little slanty lines between the words of a
+title-page. A pitiable job,” I proceeded, “it must be so since I
+could never make anything of it.” But, the truth is, I never had any
+heart for the work. I don’t care twopence whether a book is in the
+first edition or in the tenth; nay, if the tenth is the best edition,
+I would rather have it. To me it appears mere childishness to
+consider whether Lowndes--I think that is one of the authorities--has
+seen three copies of some particular book or three hundred; the
+only question being: is the book worth reading or not? Then, when
+it comes to measuring an Elzevir, say, with a graduated rule, and
+pronouncing a little book three inches and a half high to be a “tall
+copy,” my common sense revolts. In other words, I am sure that
+Bibliography is a capital game, but it is not my game. I disliked
+my work of cataloguing; but I loathed another branch of my work,
+that was indexing. Everybody knows about “grangerising.” You take a
+book, say, Smith’s “Life of Nollekens.” In it many eighteenth-century
+personages are mentioned, and many London streets and public places.
+The indexer has to read through the book, noting every person, every
+place, and compile an index. And on this index the grangeriser, the
+bookseller, goes to work hunting his stock of plates, hunting certain
+well-known sources for pictures with which he can stuff the original
+work. He will destroy a dozen or a hundred or a thousand other books
+of less value to produce a kind of monster: “The Life of Nollekens,”
+by Joseph Smith, 1 vol., 8vo., 17--. Enlarged to 3 vols. quarto, and
+furnished with 250 extra illustrations, comprising portraits, views,
+plans, maps, and original and facsimile letters from Blank, Dash,
+Chose, and other famous persons of the period. Purple Levant Morocco
+Jansenist; in watered purple silk case, gilt. Price: A great deal.
+
+There. I am afraid I have forgotten the trick of the business and my
+friend the expert cataloguer will say that it is a good thing indeed
+that I have changed my trade; but it is something like that. Well,
+indexing is a horrible job; a weariness, a nuisance; a matter of
+covering the table with innumerable little slips of paper that flow
+over on to the floor; and one must be careful and accurate, and I
+have always hated being careful, and accurate--unless I happen to be
+interested in what I am doing. Besides, I hold that “grangerising”
+is both barbarous and silly. So I didn’t like my work, but I liked
+the Brothers. They were always most courteous. Near our establishment
+was a shop where a very old gentleman sold precious things. His
+shop windows were made of small squares of glass. Above them was
+an inscription to the effect that the firm were “Goldsmiths and
+Silversmiths to Their Majesties the King and Queen and to Her Royal
+Highness the Duchess of Kent.” And the old gentleman who kept this
+shop wore what we call evening-dress all day long, and advanced to
+meet his customers with an inclined head, his hands clasped together.
+The Brothers were a good deal younger, but they were of the same
+school. They had a way of putting things. For example, Brother
+Charles was trying to teach me how to catalogue their very beautiful
+collection of French eighteenth-century illustrated books, the sort
+of books that have illustrations by Fragonard.
+
+“And if, Mr. Machen,” said Brother Charles, “if it strikes you that
+any of these plates are brilliant impressions--well, we have no
+objection to your saying so.”
+
+It may be mentioned that the firm dealt occasionally in works which
+would not be suitable for the “center table” of a New England
+parlour. For themselves, for their own private taste, they read
+George Eliot and thought her by far the greatest novelist that the
+English Nation had ever produced. I am sure that they would have held
+“Peregrine Pickle”--save in the rare first impression--to be a low
+book, and Dickens, I conjecture, would have struck them as funny and
+vulgar. But, still, selling books was their business, and it was not
+their affair as booksellers to censor the morals of the works they
+sold. They dealt in rare books.
+
+Well, one morning as I walked down from Great Russell Street to the
+shop, I was reading of the trial and conviction of a minor bookseller
+of Charing Cross Road. This Mr. Jackson, or whatever his name was,
+had been found guilty of selling obscene books, and had been sent
+to gaol, for nine months, if I remember. I mentioned the matter to
+Brother Ned as I entered.
+
+“You’ve seen about Jackson?” I said.
+
+“Yes, Mr. Machen,” said Brother Ned, with a certain moral austerity
+of demeanour that was new to me. “We _have_ seen about Mr. Jackson,
+and we wish to state at once that we have no sympathy with Mr.
+Jackson; none whatever. There is a _right_ way, Mr. Machen, of doing
+these things and a _wrong_ way.”
+
+Mr. Jackson, I may say, did not deal in rare books. His prices were
+low, he appealed to the general public. I hasten to add that on the
+whole I sympathise with the Brothers on this matter. And I add also:
+that after more recent experiences of mine I am very loath to find
+fault with any persons who treat those in their employment as human
+beings, with the decent civilities, courtesies and considerations
+that are befitting between man and man. In those days I had no
+knowledge of the anthropoids; still, I appreciated the pleasant
+treatment I received.
+
+Yet, with all their pleasant manners, I am afraid that the Brothers
+did not find in me the ideal cataloguer. Anyhow, one day Brother Ned
+came down to my darksome place with a queer little quarto in his
+hand, a quarto in a dull paper wrapper. He had it open, marked with a
+slip of paper, at a certain page, and so far as I remember, without
+any particular preface or explanation, he asked me to begin making
+a translation of the work from that point. I said: “Certainly, Mr.
+Edward,” and began to translate without more ado.
+
+And here I may say that my career as a French translator has always
+struck me as highly humorous. At the good old grammar school where
+I was educated and educated very well, I think that the headmaster
+thoroughly agreed with the boys that Foreign Languages were a
+silly game that, for various reasons, one had to play. Education
+was Latin and Greek, but a notion had arisen in these late days
+that one ought to learn French, and so there was a French master.
+But he wore neither cap nor gown, and so he was not a real master,
+and so, again, his language was not a real language. Therefore:
+poor M. Ménard! And I am afraid that he was a very bad master. If
+his authority had been supported, and if we had tried our best, I
+do not think we should have learned much; as it was, the French
+lessons, three times a week, were a farce. I knew no French when I
+left Hereford Cathedral School in 1880, that is, I could not have
+conjugated the verb _Aimer_ to save my life. I had read no French to
+speak of. Then, in my desolation in Clarendon Road, I had somehow
+come across “Gil Blas” and had managed, being interested, to get
+through it. Then, the York Street publisher had sent me down the
+sixteenth-century “Heptameron” and had ordered me to translate it,
+and I did so, somehow. And now, Brother Ned ordered me to translate
+from the dumpy quarto which he handed me; and forthwith I set about
+translating, not troubling what it was, what it was about, not caring
+two straws that I had not the thread of the narrative, nor worrying
+over the fact that I knew nothing whatever about the enigmatic
+“M.M.” or the mysterious “C.C.” into whose singular adventures I now
+plunged gaily. Thus I began the translation of the famous “Memoirs
+of Casanova,” and I think the money balance between the Brothers
+and myself was readjusted. For if I had been dear as a cataloguer,
+at thirty shillings a week, I was decidedly cheap as a translator.
+Casanova is a work that runs into twelve sizeable volumes, and the
+task of turning it into English took me a year, and I think the cost
+to the firm will be held to have been strictly moderate.
+
+And what about these strange Memoirs of the charlatan adventurer?
+Well, not long ago I was called upon to write an introduction to a
+reissue of the version I had made in the ’eighties. I found this an
+extremely difficult task. The obvious solution of the difficulty,
+the writing a sort of _précis_ of the book and calling it an
+Introduction, did not appeal to me. It was some time before the
+“moral” of the Memoirs disengaged itself. The Introduction when
+written proved to be an essay on the futility of trying to tell the
+whole truth about the relations between men and women. This is what
+Casanova, who was highly qualified, in a certain sense, for the
+undertaking, tried to do; and the more “frank,” the more “outspoken”
+his page the more the secret escapes from it; the more openly he
+reveals, the more deeply he conceals the mysteries. For the fact is
+that all the real secrets are ineffable; the secrets of love, and
+the secrets of the wood; the secrets of the flower and the secrets
+of the flame; and the secrets of the Faith. As I point out in my
+Introduction, you can enumerate the scientific facts--such of them
+as are known--relating to any subject. You can define a horse, for
+example, as Bitzer defined it in “Hard Times.”
+
+“Quadruped. Gramjnivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders,
+four eye-teeth and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in
+marshy countries sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be
+shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.”
+
+And so you may discourse of the pistils and stamens of the lilies of
+the field, and divide the fowls of the air into genera and species
+and sub-species and count the teeth of Keats: and when all is done,
+you know--nothing. Nothing that is of the essence of your matter,
+nothing of its “quiddity,” a word that we have ceased to use, I
+suppose, because we have no use for it, having forgotten that there
+is such a thing as that essence which is present in all things,
+which indeed makes them to be what they are, which is nevertheless
+unsearchable and ineffable. And all this is true, not only of the
+matters which the plain man, the man in the street, is inclined to
+sniff at, but of all things, of man himself and of the universe of
+noumena and phenomena which is presented to him. If you talk to the
+plain, practical man about Mystic Theology, Mystic Love, Poetry,
+Romance, he will, very likely, brush you aside with his “In my
+opinion that’s all imagination”--and serve you right for talking to
+him on such subjects at all. The dear fellow has no notion of the
+fact that he has never seen a point, a line, a square, or a triangle,
+and that he never will see any one of these things--in this life
+at all events. He has seen black marks on paper which he has been
+told are lines and squares and triangles. Being at heart thoroughly
+credulous, he believes what he is told, but if he will dig up his old
+“Euclid” and read the definitions, he will find that no mortal eyes
+can ever see a square or a circle, since a line is length without
+breadth and a plane surface is length and breadth without thickness.
+There is nothing in the nature of things to prevent a man from seeing
+a dragon or a griffin, a gorgon or a unicorn. Nobody as a matter of
+fact has seen a woman whose hair consisted of snakes, nor a horse
+from whose forehead a horn projected; though very early man most
+probably did see dragons--known to science as pterodactyls--and
+monsters more improbable than griffins. At any rate, none of these
+zoological fancies violates the fundamental laws of the intellect;
+the monsters of heraldry and mythology do not exist, but there is no
+reason in the nature of things nor in the laws of the mind why they
+should not exist. But no man hath seen a line at any time, since the
+manifestation of length without breadth is a contradiction in terms.
+And the plain man is probably inclined to believe in the existence
+of vulgar fractions; he may tell you that he makes use of them daily
+in his calculations. But let him study the story of the race between
+Achilles and the Tortoise, and note to what monstrous results his
+belief in elementary arithmetic inevitably conducts him; results
+which are more intolerable than a madman’s dreams.
+
+And then, again, there are wider, more universal conceptions than
+anything contained in the geometry and arithmetic books. In a little
+book of mine with the bad title of “War and the Christian Faith”--the
+publisher chose the title--I speak thus of Space and Time:
+
+     “Take two insistent and unavoidable examples (of the things
+     which are unsearchable and indefinable), space and time.
+     No man who strolls from his arm-chair to the mantelpiece
+     and watches the hands of the clock move round can deny
+     the existence of either, since he has walked from point
+     to point in one and seen the other measured before his
+     eyes. But as to understanding space and time, what highest
+     philosophy can attain to such a pitch? The limitless cannot
+     so much as be imagined in the mind, nor imagined in a
+     nightmare: but that space which you have traversed of some
+     eight or ten feet is limitless, and must be so.
+
+     “It is a sea without a shore. And time, that which your
+     two-guinea clock ticks off for you, as you watch the dial:
+     it had no beginning that you can picture; it can have no
+     end save with God. You cannot understand; you must believe;
+     and so on your very hearth-rug the infinites and eternities
+     are before you and confront you, as truly as the clock face
+     confronts you.”
+
+And the conclusion of the whole matter is that we live and move in
+a world of profound and ineffable mystery; that all things from the
+most abstract to the most concrete are involved in this mystery,
+and, _therefore_, that Casanova as an exponent of love is a futile
+fellow. He was a Voltairean; he approached the question as he would
+say without prejudices, as the foolish among us would say, without
+any nonsense, or, as the still more foolish among us would say,
+in a scientific spirit. And the result is exactly what might be
+expected: nothing. Love is defined and expounded in the spirit of
+Bitzer defining a horse; and one perceives that science misapplied is
+just gibberish, nothing more or less. Otherwise, taking Casanova’s
+Memoirs from a lower standpoint, they are in many places vastly
+entertaining. He knew all Europe from Petersburg and Constantinople
+to London and Madrid; he was familiar with the palace and the gutter;
+he was the friend of Kings and philosophers and popes--and also of
+the scum of the eighteenth-century earth. One cannot understand the
+period as a whole without knowing Casanova.
+
+So I translated and translated day after day; but in a few months’
+time the black hole in which I worked began very violently to
+disagree with me. I got ill, and it was clear that some change must
+be made. The Brothers, as always, were courteous and considerate: why
+not do the work at home? I assented very willingly, worked at the
+task for five hours every day, and every Saturday took my parcel of
+copy to the shop and got my thirty shillings, the week’s wages.
+
+And here I must make a boast, which is not wholly a boast: the second
+part of this sentence I shall explain no farther. I finished the
+translation of the Memoirs, but the book was not immediately issued.
+On the completion of my job the Brothers needed me no more. I imagine
+that they wanted a real, expert, technical cataloguer, not a literary
+man of sorts; and my having worked for them for some months at my
+own home and not in the shop made it easy for them to get rid of me
+quietly; rather, to let me fade away, without the least suspicion of
+firmness, much less of harshness. And they were always very glad to
+see me when I chose to look them up, either on business or merely as
+a friendly caller. I remember, for example, that when I had finished
+the translation of “Le Moyen de Parvenir” and was “subscribing” the
+book with “the trade,” I called at the shop and was received with
+a genial and kindly courtesy that I have not forgotten, though it
+is a long time since 1890; but then I do not forget. And lest it
+should be suspected by some persons that under a veil of benignity
+I am “getting at” the Brothers all the time, I hasten to say that
+this is not so; to say this in the strongest manner possible. True,
+thirty shillings a week was not good pay for decent French-English
+translating, even in 1889; but it was the wages that I had asked
+myself, having been thoroughly convinced by my experiences of the
+six preceding years that I was such a dismal and incapable ass that
+if I just managed to escape the Governorship of the Island of Farre
+Joyaunce--otherwise the ditch or the workhouse--it was as much as I
+could expect. So I asked my thirty shillings a week and hoped in my
+heart that it was not too much; and I am not blaming the Brothers in
+the least because they did not press more upon me. And, however that
+may be, they were always courteous and kindly in all communications
+that passed between us; and for that they shall be in my grateful
+memory so long as I live. I have said already, I think, how once
+during the last year of my employment on the “Evening News,” finding
+myself in old haunts of long ago, Wellington Street, Bow Street,
+York Street, anguish possessed me as I remembered how I had once
+starved and had known something like happiness while I toiled over
+the ancient occult books in the Catherine Street garret; anguish
+possessed me as I recollected the happy time in misery. And, as
+I said to a friend soon afterwards: “In those days I was getting
+considerably less money in a whole year than I am now getting in a
+month; and yet....”
+
+Again, I say, if our clergy would but mind their business. If instead
+of enquiring into the exact cut of bodices, instead of passing
+anxious hours as to the pernicious corruptions of the Fox-Trot and
+the Bunny Hug, instead of working with all their hearts and souls to
+make sure that no one can possibly get a glass of bitter beer after
+ten o’clock, instead of unmasking the inferno of the race-course, the
+utter levity of much of our railway literature; if, instead of all
+this accursed drivel, cant and imbecility, they would but say Mass
+and preach the Gospel, and otherwise quite abide in peace! Let them
+go to the Book, and there they will find that the most horrible sin
+denounced in it is neither gambling, drinking nor wantoning, but the
+sin of shaming a man, of bitterly insulting him, of making him mean
+in his own eyes, of making him despise his own self as something
+unutterably fouled and scorned and bewrayed. What is the text?
+Something like: but he that sayeth to his brother, “Thou fool,” shall
+be in danger of hell fire.
+
+I am drawing a contrast between 1889 and 1921, and hence I say that
+the Brothers always treated me with the common decency due from one
+human being to another, though they were rich and I was poor, though
+they were men of business and I an idiot in all matters of business,
+though they were masters and I was man.
+
+And now as to the famous boast. As I said, I ceased to be in the
+employment of these good men. I went into the country, up on the
+Children Hills. We neither saw nor heard anything of each other. But
+all the while those legacies of which I have spoken came dropping
+slow, and in 1893, when I had made up my mind to return to London,
+I think I must have had in bank something between three and four
+thousand pounds. I was assailed by an unworthy pang of prudence, by
+one of the foolish notions that the world’s people take for wisdom.
+It struck me that this living on capital, taking the pieces of eight
+by fistfuls out of the chest, would never do; that the money ought to
+be invested, preferably in some business in which I could contribute
+work as well as money. I looked about me, I advertised, I saw some
+people in the City and found nothing promising from my point of view,
+though I found here and there such curiosities as London, I believe,
+only affords. For example, in a very dim sort of cock-loft in an
+old house in the heart of the City, I hit upon a firm of general
+agents who had answered my advertisement. There were two of them:
+one, a young, rosy, out-in-the-open sort of man, the other elderly,
+frock-coated, with a kind of dissenting beard on his chin. He talked
+of the version of Horace’s odes that he was shortly bringing out at
+his own expense, and discussed with me the true pronunciation of the
+Latin language with much intelligence. The junior partner’s talk was
+of trawling, and indeed he said that the firm was a sort of trawling
+concern--in City waters.
+
+But nothing came of it, and at last I bethought me of the Brothers.
+Brother Charles was as genial as ever. He saw my point. He said: “We
+are going to issue Casanova at last; why not put a thousand pounds
+into that for a start?” I agreed, and the matter was settled. And
+then, very nervously, with a good deal of hesitation, with a certain
+difficulty in the choice of words, Brother Charles said:
+
+“Of course, Mr. Machen, we quite recognise the ... er ...
+circumstances in which you made your most admirable translation
+of the book. It was ... er ... in a manner ... er ... task-work;
+yes, _task-work_. Well ... the case is now, to a certain degree ...
+altered; you have an interest in the prosperity of the venture, and,
+in short, we rather wondered whether you would like to ... to ...
+_revise_ your manuscript.”
+
+“Mr. Charles,” I replied, “I did the job as well as I could; and I
+don’t think I can make it any better.”
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter VII_
+
+
+Beroalde de Verville proved to be what the elder members of the
+theatrical profession used to call “a pill.” Only the other day I
+was reading a French account of this author. The critic said in the
+course of his remarks that many people who had gone to the “Moyen
+de Parvenir” in search of unpleasantness had turned back from the
+quest, deterred by the difficulty of the language. And I don’t
+know that it is more difficult for a modern Frenchman than for an
+Englishman. It is written in a sort of Babylonish dialect which is
+not exactly French though it looks like it; as Meredith looks like
+English to the casual glance. And then, it is not only difficult,
+but obscure; not only are the sentences queerly constructed, but the
+subject-matter is of a highly dubious and cloudy character: when you
+have found out what Beroalde is saying, you begin to wonder what he
+is saying it about. And, then, there are bits of old dialect peppered
+about this excessively odd volume. I remember coming upon two words:
+“iquent hesne.” I sat down in front of them, and looked at them
+from every angle. I don’t know how I found out at last that “iquent
+hesne” was a sort of seventeenth-century French “Zummerzet” for
+“cette chêne”--“thicky oāk.” Again the “Moyen” is thick with puns,
+of the kind that used to be called in the golden days of Burlesque
+“outrageous”: and the time I wasted in trying to turn these silly
+French tricks into sillier English contortions! On the whole, I would
+say that “Le Moyen de Parvenir” in literature is as a cathedral
+constructed entirely of gargoyles would be in architecture. Rabelais
+is full of gargoyles, “apes and owls and antics,” as he calls them,
+on the outside of the jar. But within, as he rightly claims, there
+are precious medicines, aromatic balms of singular power and virtue.
+And so far as I can judge, Beroalde is all oddity and nothing else.
+He cost me a year’s hard labour; the version was issued and is now
+valued by collectors; and that is all that need be said.
+
+And now--in 1890--I began to try a little journalism of the more or
+less literary kind. I began, I think, by writing “Turnovers” for the
+“Globe,” and miscellaneous articles for the “St. James’s Gazette,”
+and at length stories for the latter paper, which was then edited by
+Mr.--now Sir--Sydney Lowe. The “Globe” is extinct, the “St. James’s
+Gazette” is merged and submerged in the “Evening Standard”; there
+are no papers of such metal now in existence. The difference between
+them and the evening papers of the day is a very simple one: the
+former were meant to please the educated, the latter are designed to
+entertain the uneducated, and the uneducated may be equated, very
+largely indeed, with women. It is an odd paradox: there is no doubt,
+I suppose, that the instruction--or, if you like, education--of women
+has made immense strides in the last thirty years; and yet it is true
+that when a newspaper editor says to himself: “We have an immense
+number of women readers and we must see that they get what they
+like,” the result is drivel. This sort of thing:
+
+     Madame has just discovered a new craze. Jewelled clay
+     pipes and shag tobacco delicately sprinkled with gold-dust
+     are now quite _démodés_ when once we cross the borders of
+     Balham; but my lady prides herself on her collection of
+     hookahs, the water-pipes of the gorgeous East.
+
+     It is quite the thing, I hear, amongst really smart women
+     to give “Hookah Teas.” Everybody wears Oriental costume,
+     and sits on cushions piled on the floor, and delicately
+     draws in the aroma of the rarest Turkish Tobacco, scented
+     by its passage through rosewater or lavender-water. At Lady
+     Clarinda Belsize’s Hookah Tea last Wednesday, two native
+     musicians played the tom-tom and the _guzla_ behind a
+     curtain, or _purdah_, as I am told it is called. Of course
+     _yashmaks_ were worn by all the guests.
+
+There; it is not worth parodying. And there is another sort of
+terrible tosh which deals with the doings of “The Summer Girl” and
+“The Winter Girl” and “The Marathon Girl”: all of it a very feeble
+imitation of the cheapest American journalism. In the ’nineties
+this kind of thing existed, but it was confined to the columns of
+one or two ladies’ papers. In those days, I would not say that the
+editors of evening papers brought out their journals exclusively for
+the benefit of the members of the best clubs of St. James’s and
+Pall Mall; but I certainly should say that they had the clubs in
+their mind’s eye; that they presumed a certain standard of education
+and culture in their readers. All that ended when the evening
+“Westminster Gazette” came to an end.
+
+But indeed there would be little harm done if a column or two
+columns or three columns were reserved for the “Hookah Tea” stuff
+and the “Caravan Girl” stuff and all similar stuff. You could skip
+these columns if you didn’t like them, just as I skip the racing
+columns, in which I am not interested. But “the women” rule the whole
+paper. Not only must the editor put in matter which he knows they
+will like, he must keep out matter which he knows they won’t like.
+And the result is ... the result as we know it. As the “literary
+editor” of a big London paper acutely observed to me not long ago,
+the case of the newspaper article is exactly as the case of chops
+and steaks, beefsteak puddings and saddles of mutton that were of
+old. “The women” have spoilt all. What do they know or care about
+man’s food? To them there is nothing to choose between a chop fried
+white and hard and greasy in the frying-pan and a chop which has
+been purged of all excess by the ardent heat, beneath the gridiron,
+which beneath a coat half black, half golden-brown, preserves its
+delicious juices, which sizzles on the plate as William or Charles
+serves it, which, opened by the eager knife, shews within a hue like
+that of a blush-rose in June. These are not matters to enchant the
+wayward heart of a young girl, and when once she sets foot inside
+the tavern coffee-room, farewell to all such solid merits. There was
+once a noble tavern called Herbert’s, famous for two generations. Men
+who had spent half a lifetime in Africa or India or in the islands
+of the South Seas were sustained by the thought of the beefsteak
+pudding at Herbert’s. The times changed and the old tavern with them.
+Going there in these later days, I used to wonder why all the meats
+seemed to taste alike, why there was no distinctive and peculiar
+relish about any of the dishes. I found out the reason why one day.
+I had business, oddly enough, in Herbert’s kitchen. One of the cooks
+shewed 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.
+One night I was dining there, and a member of the party asked the
+waiter to bring him some Stilton. “I beg your pardon, sir,” said the
+man, “we only have _English_ cheeses.” It sounds impossible; but I
+heard this with my ears. In the old days Herbert’s was exclusively
+masculine in its custom; I do not know what would have happened to
+that waiter then. I hardly think that his death would have been an
+easy one.
+
+But to “the women” all this is of no account. They know nothing about
+man’s food, as I say, and they care less. I do not blame them; I do
+not blame myself for being ignorant of the difference between Hopsac
+and Gaberdine: but how would _they_ like it if I poked my nose into
+their Oxford Street shops and insisted on these shops being carried
+on to suit my taste?
+
+So through this monstrous incursion of women, with the war and the
+nursery hours of to-day, the old tavern life has gone; utterly and
+for ever, I am afraid. A good thing has gone. The old mahogany boxes
+with bright brass work and green curtains, the light twinkling in the
+dark polished surfaces that were all about the room, the flaming fire
+with the plates warming by it, the plain food, the best of its kind,
+cooked in the best possible manner, the mighty tankards of mighty
+ale, the port that _was_ port afterwards, in itself a great gift
+and a curious grace, and later--say about eleven o’clock--Charles
+appearing with a large china bowl and a bottle under his arm,
+following up these things with lump sugar, lemons, and the hot water:
+it is all over. And it is not only the good material things that have
+been taken away: the good meats and the good drinks, the glowing
+mahogany and the cheerful blaze and crackle of the fire: with them
+has gone, I suspect, a certain genial habit of the mind and soul
+which was congruous with all the circumstances of the old-fashioned
+tavern, which was congruous also with good men and good books and
+choice poetry, with all the rich zest and relish and unction which
+made the Victorian age of letters a great age; and, in its measure,
+a worthy successor to three other illustrious tavern ages: the
+Shakespearian, the Caroline, and the Johnsonian. Think of Falstaff
+and his tavern bill and his warning against thin potations, think of
+Herrick and his address to Ben, his fond remembrance of the taverns
+“where we such clusters had as made us nobly wild not mad,” think
+of Johnson squeezing the orange into the bowl with antick gestures,
+saying “Who’s for _poonsh_?” think of Tennyson and that blest pint of
+port at the vanished Cock Tavern, think of Dickens, that great lover
+of tavern feasts and immortaliser of them: think of all this, my poor
+young man, and beat your breast. There are no jolly taverns for you,
+and your favourite authors do not write like men--“my son Cartwright
+writes all like a man,” said Ben Jonson--but like psycho-analytical
+chemists.
+
+And as I was saying, as with the taverns, so with the papers. When
+I wrote a little for them, in 1890 or thereabouts, it was allowable
+to assume a certain amount of literacy, a certain knowledge in
+the reader. Now that is over. I know the case of a man who, I am
+certain, pretends ignorance that he may continue to be employed. As
+it happens, he is an expert in food and drink; but I have known him
+number Beaujolais with the wines of Bordeaux in a newspaper article,
+and speak of curry powder and pickles as ordinary ingredients in veal
+and ham pie. I believe he knows much better; but he has probably
+found out that a misstatement or two gives an easy careless air that
+is much admired. Nobody can call a writer of this kind a pedant. A
+highly accomplished journalist said to me a few years ago: “Always
+remember that we appeal, not to the cabman, but to the cabman’s
+wife.” And another instance, though I am afraid it is somewhat tinged
+with self-praise. I had written a brief article for the “Evening
+News” on a topic that had been given to me; I was to explain _why_
+it is that a “mean street” of to-day is, generally, hideous and
+appalling, while a row of sixteenth-century cottages is, generally,
+a delight to see. I did as I always do when I can, I took the
+particular instance and placed it under a general principle. I said
+the chief horror of the modern street was not to be sought in the
+poverty of the design, though that was, doubtless, bad enough, but
+in the fact that in the street of to-day each house is a replica of
+the other, so that the effect to the eye is, if the street be long
+enough, the prolongation of one house to infinity, in an endless
+series of repetitions. And I pointed out that even if you admired
+some particular picture or statue immensely, it would be rather awful
+to traverse a long gallery in which the picture or the statue were
+repeated again and again as far as the eye could see. And then, on
+the other hand, I shewed how the sixteenth-century cottages were
+each of them individuals, each with some slight difference from
+the cottage next door, each with its variety in door or window or
+pent-house. And hence, I urged, a continual slight surprise to the
+beholder, and taking the supposed row as a whole, that strangeness in
+the proportion which Bacon declared, most profoundly, to be necessary
+to the highest beauty. Well, I got this with difficulty into the
+prescribed 500 words--“nobody will read anything over 500 words”--and
+said to myself: “Now that Patmore is dead, nobody else could have
+written that article. But ... there will be a row.” There was. Lord
+Northcliffe gave the little essay the honour of a special mention
+in one of his famous _communiqués_--as I believe they were called.
+He spoke of it with venom as “a wiseacre article.” I am sure he was
+perfectly right from his point of view. The fault was mine. “When I
+am in Rome, I fast on Saturdays,” said one of the Fathers.
+
+Things have changed indeed. I was mentioning Coventry Patmore. In the
+Introduction to the “Religio Poetæ,” a collection of short essays of
+the profoundest wisdom, he acknowledges his obligations to Greenwood,
+once editor of the “St. James’s Gazette.” Some of these essays had
+appeared in that journal: the fact is quite stupefying considered in
+the light of the journalism of to-day. Education increases; ignorance
+grows deeper.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let me not be understood as claiming that my newspaper work of
+thirty-two years ago was characterised by the profoundest wisdom.
+Very far from it; my articles were harmless and agreeable enough, I
+think, in a small way; and writing them, I first began to get a hint
+of my true subject; the country of my childhood and my youth. And I
+thus began to move away from the exotic Rabelaisian influence, both
+as to manner and to matter: to perceive that not the splendid Loire
+but the humble Soar brook, winding and shining in deep valleys and
+obscured by dark alder thickets, was my native stream. I began to
+see that I was a citizen of Caerleon-on-Usk, and not of Tours or of
+Chinon, and that the old grey manor-houses and the white farms of
+Gwent had their beauty and significance, though they were not castles
+in Touraine. There was something of all this, of course, in “The
+Chronicle of Clemendy,” the Great Romance which was neither great nor
+a romance; but in this everything was viewed and everything expressed
+in an exotic medium: now I saw that a blossoming thorn bush in the
+valley of the Soar and the nightingale singing in it and the river
+level about Caerleon and the red fires of sunset over the mountain in
+the west were all in themselves and by themselves fit matter for the
+work; that they needed not to be disguised in a French literary habit
+of four hundred years ago.
+
+It was in this summer of 1890 that I wrote the first chapter of “The
+Great God Pan.” I have told the whole story in the Introduction to
+the latest edition of that fantasy, which is published by Messrs.
+Simpkin, Marshall, and whether I should weary my readers I know
+not, but I do know that I should weary myself if I told it all over
+again. The tale was written in bits, in the intervals between severe
+literary cramps, as I have mentioned in this present volume, and it
+was published by Mr. John Lane, of the Bodley Head, at the end of
+1894, when yellow bookery was at its yellowest. And it aroused a
+certain amount of attention. There was a storm--in a doll’s teacup.
+
+The other day a friend of mine said genially to me:
+
+     “I have just been reading that ‘Great God Pan’ of yours
+     over again, and I really don’t see that there’s much in it
+     to make a sensation of.”
+
+I am sure he was quite right. But a sensation there was, of a minor
+kind. It had some mysterious property in it, this little book, which
+caused good men to froth at the mouth, greatly to my delight. I have
+quoted a good many of the reviews in the Introduction to the Simpkin,
+Marshall edition: things like this:
+
+     “We are afraid he only succeeds in being ridiculous. The
+     book is, on the whole, the most acutely and intentionally
+     disagreeable we have yet seen in English. We could say
+     more, but refrain from doing so for fear of giving such a
+     work advertisement.”--“Manchester Guardian.”
+
+     “This book is gruesome, ghastly, and dull ... the majority
+     of readers will turn from it in utter disgust.”--“Lady’s
+     Pictorial.”
+
+     “These tricks have also their ludicrous side.”--“Guardian.”
+
+And so forth. It is very well, but I cannot help saying, as an old
+craftsman and an old reviewer, that it might have been better. I
+have no fault to find with the technique of the “Guardian”; but
+the “Lady’s Pictorial” should have left out the “gruesome” and
+the “ghastly” and also, I am inclined to think, the “disgust.”
+There are readers who like the gruesome and the ghastly; there are
+readers whose curiosity is stimulated by the term “disgust.” I am
+afraid, for example, that if the account of legal proceedings, civil
+or criminal, is headed “Disgusting Details,” there are minds so
+prurient as to be rather attracted than repelled, and I am sure that
+the gentle scribe of the “Lady’s Pictorial” did not wish to paint
+my little book in attractive colours. And so with the “Manchester
+Guardian.” “Ridiculous” is admirable; but “acutely and intentionally
+disagreeable” is something of a signal set to attract those prurient
+readers whose existence I have regretted; and the last sentence
+says too much. Mr. Harry Quilter, something of a figure in those
+days, did better. He pointed out in an article in the “Contemporary
+Review”--also something of a figure in those days--that the only
+explanation he could give of such favourable notices as the book
+had received was that the author must have a great many friends
+engaged in journalism. I wrote a temperate letter to Mr. Quilter in
+which I said I was very sorry, but I didn’t know any journalists at
+all--which happened to be the truth. He wrote back to remind me, as
+he said, that there was “an Inmost Light to which you may yet be
+true”--“The Inmost Light” is the title of a tale which was included
+in the first edition of “The Great God Pan.”
+
+--One of the saddest books in the world is Mrs. Gaskell’s wonderful
+“Life of Charlotte Brontë.” But there is one tragi-comical touch.
+Poor valiant, simple, stricken Charlotte was being entertained in
+town by Mr. and Mrs. Smith. There was a dinner-party, given, I
+suppose, in her honour, and she writes to an old friend:
+
+“There were only seven gentlemen at dinner besides Mr. Smith, but of
+these five were critics--men more dreaded in the world of letters
+than you can conceive. I did not know how much their presence and
+conversation had excited me till they were gone, and the reaction
+commenced. When I had retired for the night, I wished to sleep--the
+effort to do so was vain. I could not close my eyes. Night passed;
+morning came, and I rose without having known a moment’s slumber.”
+
+Who were these terrible five? We do not know, and it is possible
+enough that if we heard their names we should not have heard of their
+names, though, likely enough, George Henry Lewes was one of them. It
+is odd and pathetic too to think that a great woman such as Charlotte
+Brontë should have allowed the brilliant repartees and tremendous
+reputation of George Henry Lewes to break her rest. And just before
+this passage there is another, as strange and as pathetic. A severe
+review of “Shirley” appeared in “The Times.” Mr. and Mrs. Smith
+kindly “mislaid” the paper. But Charlotte insisted on pressing the
+thorn to her bosom. She would see “The Times.”
+
+     “Mrs. Smith took her work, and tried not to observe the
+     countenance, which the other tried to hide between the huge
+     sheets; but she could not help becoming aware of tears
+     stealing down the face and dropping on the lap.”
+
+And all over a review, an unfavourable review! It is very strange,
+or, at least, it seems so to me, since, like Jim the nigger, I don’t
+never cry ska’sely over reviews, and I have always contrived to get
+my usual sleep.
+
+But I have left out one curious specimen of the “Great God Pan”
+reviews, a specimen which leads up to a curious passage. The
+“Westminster Review” said:
+
+     “It is an incoherent nightmare of sex and the supposed
+     horrible mysteries behind it, such as might conceivably
+     possess a man who was given to a morbid brooding over
+     these matters, but which would soon lead to insanity if
+     unrestrained ... innocuous from its absurdity.”
+
+I was talking over old literary doings and the affairs of the
+’nineties with a friend one day in the spring of 1921. My friend was
+asking me about my early books and their reception. I gave him a
+lurid account of the castigations which I had received on account of
+“The Great God Pan.”
+
+“Why,” said I, “the ‘Westminster’ practically told me that if I
+didn’t take care I should end up in a lunatic asylum.”
+
+“Well,” replied the man, meaning to be funny, “haven’t you? I
+understood you were at Carmelite House?”
+
+“No,” I returned, also meaning to be funny, “I haven’t. All the
+lunatic asylums that I’ve heard of have been managed by a _doctor_.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+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.
+
+Well, I made my experiment, expecting, very doubtfully, almost
+incredulously, certain results. The results that I obtained were
+totally different from my expectations. I couldn’t have hypnotised,
+or “magnetised,” or mesmerised, or suggested, or Couéd, or in any
+way bedevilled myself into the obtained condition for the good
+reason that I had never heard of it, had no faintest notion of it,
+and was, in fact, as I have stated, not a little alarmed by it,
+half-thinking, if the truth be told, that I was very near to death.
+I may state, by the way, that in the course of a pretty extensive
+acquaintance with “occult” company, I only once heard of anything at
+all comparable with this strange adventure of mine. A man was running
+on, foolishly and uncritically enough, about his various occult
+experiences--they were of little interest as a whole--and talked at
+last of some sojourn that he had made amongst the Moors of Northern
+Africa. Here, he said, he had met a man who had known wonders, and he
+proceeded to tell them. There was nothing very wonderful, so far as
+I can remember; but the Moor or Arab of the story had an experience
+like enough to mine--I need not say that I had not mentioned it nor
+so much as hinted it to my occult acquaintance. The African also had
+seen the walls shiver and prepare for dissolution, had felt that
+the world was shaken, and that his heart was shaken within him.
+Mr. Jones-Robinson told the tale without any sense, apparently,
+that it had any special significance; it was part of his occult
+pack, that was all; and he went on to some sick rubbish about the
+“correspondence” of the Tarot Trumps with the letters of the Hebrew
+Alphabet; and this nonsense he discussed with real relish and a
+high sense of its infinite importance. I think that he alone knew
+the real “attribution” of the aforesaid Tarot Trumps, but he “had
+received it under pledge and was not at liberty to speak”--for which
+inhibition I was deeply thankful, having little patience for solemn
+hanky-panky or Abracadabras of any sort. But in ending his story of
+the Enchanted Moor, he said that this man, who had seen the material
+world quivering and fading before his eyes, had received, in some
+manner not indicated, a command or an intimation that he must “leave
+everything”; and this he could not do, having a wife and children.
+And I must say at once that being pretty well acquainted with
+Jones-Robinson and all his type, I should have paid no more attention
+to his story of the Moor than I paid to his story of the Tarot
+Trumps--if it had not been for something which I knew and kept to
+myself. As it was, I heard the tale and the injunction, and wondered
+deeply, and still wonder.
+
+But now to our point: the connection between material or sensible
+things and spiritual things, the question whether the former are
+ever of any real consequence or significance. As I have said before,
+the evidence that Home the medium rose “miraculously”--to adopt a
+convenient shorthand--into the air seems to me good; but is such
+a phenomenon of any more true consequence than the phenomenon of
+Hydrogen gas rising into the air from the admixture of water, zinc
+and sulphuric acid? And so, were the incense clouds that came to my
+nostrils in places where, assuredly, no material incense smoked, of
+consequence? Was the billowy and resilient pavement of detestable
+Rosebery Avenue of consequence? Were the pictures that shivered and
+wavered on the unstable wall of consequence? I do not know; but
+I am sure that the state which followed this last experience was
+of high consequence. For when I rose, afraid, and broke off the
+process in which I had been engaged, I found to my utter amazement
+that everything within had been changed. Amazement; for the utmost
+that I had hoped from my experiment was a temporary dulling of the
+consciousness, a brief opium oblivion of my troubles. And what I
+received was not mere dull lack of painful sensation, but a peace
+of the spirit that was quite ineffable, a knowledge that all hurts
+and doles and wounds were healed, that that which was broken was
+reunited. Everything, of body and of mind, was resolved into an
+infinite and an exquisite delight; into a joy so great that--let
+this be duly noted--it became almost intolerable in its ecstasy.
+I remember thinking at the time: “There is wine so strong that no
+earthly vessels can hold it”: joy threatened to become an agony, that
+must shatter all. Emily Brontë, describing the state of Heathcliff
+soon before his death, has described just such a condition; I have
+often wondered how she knew of it.
+
+But this was later. For that day and for many days afterwards I was
+dissolved in bliss, into a sort of rapture of life which has no
+parallel that I can think of, which has, therefore, no analogies by
+which it may be made more plain. The vine and the exultation of the
+vine are solemn and ancient and approved figures of the joys of the
+interior life, but these are not quite to my purpose. I can only fall
+back on little things, and quite material things. My chambers in
+Verulam Buildings were towards the northern portion of the Inn, and
+the traffic of Theobald’s Road was distinct enough, distinct enough,
+often, to be an annoyance. But this night, the “ping, ping!” of the
+omnibus bell, the grind of the many wheels upon the cobble-stones
+sounded to me as marvellous and tremendous chords reverberating
+from some mighty organ; filling the air, filling the soul and the
+whole being with rapture immeasurable. And another trifle, as
+insignificant, even more insignificant, perhaps. In the ordinary
+state of existence the sense of touch is exercised constantly, but
+almost unconsciously. Now and again it is used with intent; the
+buyer of old furniture acquires a sort of thumb-and-finger craft;
+he passes the tips of his fingers over the edges of the bureau or
+cabinet, and they help him to decide whether the object is an antique
+or a novelty. And so, I suppose, a woman choosing stuffs uses her
+fingers in much the same manner, learning something about the silk
+or velvet by the process. But in general, and very conveniently, you
+take up pen or pencil, or place your hand on the back of the chair
+without any distinct consciousness of the impact of your flesh on
+these exterior objects: unless, that is, your hand encounter some
+unexpected object which insists on notice, such as a pin point or a
+rusty nail. But in these strange days of which I am speaking touch
+became an exquisite and conscious pleasure; I could not so much as
+place my hand on the table before me without experiencing a thrill
+of delight which was not merely sensuous, but carried with it,
+mysteriously and wonderfully, the message of a secret and interior
+joy.
+
+And one more instance. I had always been subject to headaches which
+visited me at intervals of five, six or seven weeks, and invariably
+lasted for twenty-four hours. The pain was distressing, and any
+movement of the head raised it into a racking, throbbing agony; I
+should imagine that I suffered from a kind of migraine or megrims.
+Late one night during the time of which I am speaking I felt the
+first approaches of one of these tiresome attacks. I said to myself:
+“I wonder whether I can stop it,” and I placed the tip of the
+forefinger of the left hand upon my forehead. I felt the sense as of
+a dull shock: and the pain was gone. And though I have had my share
+of pains and aches since then, I have never been revisited by that
+particular kind of headache from that day to this.
+
+And there was yet another matter. In a little book of mine called
+“The Great Return,” which nobody has heard of, I have told how the
+Holy Grail came back for a brief while to Britain after long years.
+And describing some of the things that were seen and known during
+that happy visitation, I have written:
+
+“The ‘glow’ as they call it seems more difficult to explain (than
+certain other matters duly related). For they say that all through
+the nine days, and indeed after the time had ended, there never was
+a man weary or sick at heart in Llantrisant, or in the country round
+it. For if a man felt that his work of the body or the mind was going
+to be too much for his strength, then there would come to him of a
+sudden a warm glow and a thrilling all over him and he felt as strong
+as a giant, and happier than he had ever been in his life before, so
+that lawyer and hedger each rejoiced in the task that was before him,
+as if it were sport and play.”
+
+Thus in the story, and thus it was with me in fact, in that autumn
+and winter of 1899–1900. It was with a singular surprise that I
+read, in St. Adamnan, many years afterwards, how St. Columba’s
+monks, toiling in the fields, experienced now and again the very
+sensation--if it be just to speak of it as a sensation--that I have
+described. They, too, weary with their work of reclaiming the barren
+land of their isle, would know that sudden glow of joy and strength
+and courage; and they believed that it was the prayer of their Father
+in God, Columba, strengthening them and inspiring them, as he knelt
+before the altar of the Perpetual Choir. And lest it be said that
+I had read Adamnan when I was a boy and had forgotten all about it
+consciously though I had retained it subconsciously, I must solemnly
+declare that this was not the case; and that when this strange
+experience first befell me, I was overwhelmed with astonishment,
+and could scarcely credit that which was actually happening. I
+have hesitated as to whether it should be, in strictness, called a
+sensation, and I still hesitate. It seems to me, and I think that I
+can trust my recollection, that the two worlds of sense and spirit
+were admirably and wonderfully mingled, so that it was difficult, or
+rather impossible, to distinguish the outward and sensible glow from
+the inward and spiritual grace. _Magnum vere sacramentum._ And all
+this, be it remembered, would fall out in dim Bloomsbury squares, in
+noisy, clattering Gray’s Inn Road, in a train on the Underground,
+amongst hustling crowds in common streets. I mention this, not
+forgetful of a pretty severe rebuke which I received from a very high
+literary quarter on account of that little book, “The Great Return,”
+which I have just cited. The critic noted the fact that in my book
+the Holy Grail was manifested to the common people, to common modern
+people, to Welsh tradesmen and farmers. He seemed to think this very
+low. It may be low, but perhaps things happen in this way sometimes;
+and so with me: I, by no manner of means a knight, received joys and
+knew wonders while the trams clanged along the Clerkenwell Road in
+the grey winter afternoon. So it was, and it appears to me necessary
+to tell the truth. As Coventry Patmore says, quoting from an earlier
+writer: “Let us not deny in the darkness that which we have known in
+the light.”
+
+And beyond all this, beyond these experiences in which things of the
+body and things of the spirit were mingled, there was a better world
+of which I saw the verges. There was no more grief; there was no more
+resentment, there was no more anger. The griefs that flood the heart
+with agony, the great sorrows of life, these were seen to be but
+passing trifles of no moment, like the sorrow of a little child which
+is past and forgotten before its tears are dry. I remember tearing up
+an old diary which I had kept in the bitter days of Clarendon Road,
+a record of struggles and starvings and desolations; I tore it up
+because it no longer signified anything to me. The words, I daresay,
+were strong enough, but the tale had become of no meaning at all. I
+glanced at one page and another of the tattered old notebook before I
+rent it, with a kind of mild curiosity as to the state of mind of the
+silly stranger who had written all this, and had whined so dismally.
+At all events, it had nothing to do with me, and so it went into
+fragments and into the fire. If it could be restored to me now, I
+should read it all with interest and whine again and foam again _sæva
+indignatione_; but then I have long returned into that darkness in
+which, I suppose, most of our lives are spent.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is one thing that I hope I may be spared, that is the comment
+of the Oriental Occult Ass. I confess that I have written all this
+with difficulty, and with doubt as to the decency of writing it at
+all, especially when the tale, if it is to be a true tale, makes
+it necessary for me to seem to compare, for one little moment, the
+saints of the company and following of St. Columba with myself. But
+I do hope that nobody will say: “Why, this is only Ruja-Puja! You
+get it all in the first chapter of the Anangasataga Raja! It’s all
+perfectly elementary. Little Hindu children learn their A B C out of
+it in the Svanka Visatvara. Why, when the Swami Vishnakanandaram Jam
+Ghosh was over here last summer he mentioned all these phenomena as
+things you have to forget before you set out on the Way. As he put it
+so beautifully: ‘The sun arises. It gleams on the Lotus. The petals
+of the _bhulji_ flower expand. The stars are no longer seen.’ Yes,
+isn’t he wonderful? Fancy anybody still bothering about Keats and
+those silly people!”
+
+I hope, I say, that I shall be spared that. I can bear better I think
+the (more or less) Occidental Idiot, who will speak of Shin--the
+letter of the Hebrew Alphabet, not the delicate portion of our
+anatomy--attribute it to the Tarot Trump called the Fool, and just
+throw in a reference to Salt, Sulphur and Mercury.
+
+As for me, I make no deductions, I infer nothing, I refrain from
+saying “therefore.” Like Sancho Panza: “I come from my own vineyard;
+I know nothing.” Perhaps I may venture to say that I have seen a
+lousy, lazy tramp drinking from a roadside stream that drips cold and
+pure from the rock in burning weather. Then the wastrel passes on his
+ill way, refreshed indeed, but as lousy and lazy as ever.
+
+_De torrente in via bibet: propterea exaltabit caput._
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter X_
+
+
+MR. CHARLES O’MALLEY, Castle O’Malley, Co. Galway.
+
+That was the inscription of a card which had just been placed in my
+hand, as I walked along Southampton Row--on which I found myself
+stupidly gazing in real old Southampton Row, not the staring, blatant
+street that bears the name now--one fine day in the summer of 1900.
+
+Ten minutes or so before I had been taking my morning stroll in the
+company of my bulldog, Juggernaut. I was accosted very politely by a
+stoutish, youngish, clean-shaven gentleman, well dressed, with the
+mere suspicion of an Irish accent.
+
+He had said without preface of any kind:
+
+“A fine dog you’ve got, sir. I should be very glad if you’d come up
+with me and show it to a lady I know who lives in the flats opposite.”
+
+I assented at once, feeling thoroughly in the scene, as they say
+on the stage. I followed him and we displayed the dog Juggernaut,
+certainly a noble specimen of his noble race, to the lady who, I
+may say at once, was a lady, and appeared to be on terms of polite
+acquaintance with the gentleman. Jug was admired, and the gentleman
+and I went down into the street again. The lady had not evinced the
+faintest astonishment at the introduction of a total stranger with
+a bulldog into her flat. When we were both down on the pavement of
+Southampton Row, the amateur of bulldogs gave me his card, and told
+me that I should be welcome and more than welcome if ever I found
+myself near Castle O’Malley, in County Galway. And so he vanished--if
+he ever were there, as to which I held and still hold, in a fantastic
+sort of way, vague doubts.
+
+No, the flat was a perfectly quiet and unostentatious one. Nothing to
+drink was produced; there were no K.O. drops. The lady did not ask me
+to look in again some evening for a quiet game of cards with a few
+congenial friends. Mr. O’Malley did not say that he had salvaged a
+Spanish galleon wrecked beneath the rocks on which Castle O’Malley
+was built, and that in consequence he had more money than he knew
+what to do with. And I missed nothing from my pocket. That is one of
+the reasons why I hate rationalism, since, when it is called in, in
+a little difficulty or perplexity, its advices and explanations are
+always so stupid, so wide of the mark, so absolutely futile. Finally,
+from that day to this, I have never seen Mr. Charles O’Malley,
+of Castle O’Malley, Co. Galway, nor have I heard of him. I have
+forgotten to say that he did not so much as ask me my name.
+
+I only wish that I had kept some kind of note of the very strange
+period which I had entered. It came about gradually, the merging
+of Syon into Bagdad; and I have a much dimmer recollection of the
+latter city. For its essence, as will be seen in the anecdote of
+the O’Malley, was lack of purpose, a certain fantastic confusion, a
+sense that something without any ratio might happen at any moment.
+Nothing began, nothing ended: strange people were apt to separate
+themselves from the crowd, to engage in queer discourse without
+intelligible motive or meaning, and then to sink back again, leaving
+no trace behind. And when events lack logical sequence or connection,
+it is difficult to retain them in the memory. But I believe that
+I do remember that on this very day of the O’Malley incident ten
+total strangers addressed me, without any very manifest reason and
+to no discernible end. We encountered in all sorts of places, in
+the street, in the restaurant, in the vanished Café de l’Europe in
+Leicester Square; the strangers uttered their mysterious messages,
+which to me were as incomprehensible as if they had been in cipher,
+and so vanished away. Indeed, looking back, I begin to wonder whether
+I were constantly being mistaken for someone else, who must have been
+exactly like me; this Someone Else being evidently a prominent member
+of a secret society, who would be aware of the signs and passwords of
+the order. For all I know, when Mr. O’Malley praised poor old Jug--he
+has long years ago gone to be a gargoyle on the parapet of some great
+Gothic church of the skies--I should have answered: “Yes, he is a
+fine dog, but green bulldogs with blue spots are finer.” Then, it may
+be, the interview would have become coherent, and tending to some
+end, and the lady in the flat would have pressed the secret panel and
+have disclosed ... I really don’t know what.
+
+That very day, I mean the day of the incident of the Bulldog, Mr.
+O’Malley and the Lady in the Flat, I was sitting in the Café de
+l’Europe with a friend, discussing various matters, when, as we
+rose to go a young man of a somewhat colourless and unpretending
+appearance, who had been sitting at the other side of the table,
+suddenly observed:
+
+“I have been very much interested, sir, in your conversation, and I
+should very much like to hear more of it.”
+
+Again, I was in the scene. I gave him my address in Gray’s Inn, and
+he called to see me several times, always coming at night and staying
+pretty late, asking me many questions about interior things. I think
+it was only on his last visit that I found out his odd manner of
+leaving the Inn, when he went away at one or half-past one in the
+morning. He was ignorant of the fact that the Raymond Buildings Gate
+and the Holborn Gate have watchers by them who will open the portals
+all the long night; and so when he left me he would climb the spiked
+wall which separates Verulam Buildings from Gray’s Inn Road and make
+off into the gaslight. He, too, vanished, and I saw him no more.
+
+It was some time earlier in this year that I became conscious of
+a very odd circumstance. It will perhaps have been noticed that I
+have become insensibly Stevensonian in my diction, as I have spoken
+of the Incident of the Bulldog, or of this or of that. That is so
+because the atmosphere in which I lived was becoming remarkably like
+the atmosphere of “The Three Impostors,” which, as I have remarked,
+is derived from the “New Arabian” manner of R. L. Stevenson. Not
+only did strange and unknown and unexplained people start up from
+every corner, from every café table, and engage me in obscure mazes
+of talk, quite in the Arabian manner, but I presently became aware
+that something very odd indeed was happening: certain characters in
+“The Three Impostors” showed signs of coming to life, a feat which,
+perhaps, they had failed to perform before. I was once talking to a
+dark young man, of quiet and retiring aspect, who wore glasses--he
+and I had met at a place where we had to be blindfolded before we
+could see the light--and he told me a queer tale of the manner in
+which his life was in daily jeopardy. He described the doings of a
+fiend in human form, a man who was well known to be an expert in
+Black Magic, a man who hung up naked women in cupboards by hooks
+which pierced the flesh of their arms. This monster--I may say that
+there is such a person, though I can by no means go bail for the
+actuality of any of the misdeeds charged against him--had, for some
+reason which I do not recollect, taken a dislike to my dark young
+friend. In consequence, so I was assured, he had hired a gang in
+Lambeth, who were grievously to maim or preferably to slaughter the
+dark young man; each member of the gang receiving a retaining fee of
+eight shillings and sixpence a day--a sum, by the way, that sounds
+as if it were the face value of some mediæval coin long obsolete. I
+listened in wonder, for there are some absurdities so enormous that
+they seem to have a stunning effect on the common sense, paralysing
+it for the moment and inhibiting its action. It was only when I got
+home that it dawned upon me that I had been listening to the Young
+Man in Spectacles, and that he came out of “The Three Impostors.”
+And soon Miss Lally, another character from the book, appeared, and
+like her prototype discoursed most amazing tales, was the heroine
+of incredible adventures, would appear and disappear in a quite
+inexplicable manner, relating always histories before unheard of, a
+personage wholly diverting, enigmatic and enchanting.
+
+And the odd thing is that it was as if these two had parts to play
+for a season, and played them--till the prompter’s bell sounded,
+and the curtain fell and the lights went out. Both Miss Lally and
+the Young Man in Spectacles still live; but they have become useful
+members of society and eminently successful, as I believe, in their
+several employments. Thus do the King and Queen in the play go home
+to their flats or their lodgings after the show and enjoy cold beef,
+pickles and a comfortable bottle of beer.
+
+And now I am going at last to say a good word for literature. I have
+said, again and again, even to tedium, that the only good that I can
+see in it is that it is one of the many ways of escaping from life,
+to be classified with Alpine Climbing, Chess, Methylated Spirit and
+Prussic Acid. The way I have always seen it is like this: I go out on
+a Sunday afternoon in March with the black north-easter blowing to
+take a walk up Gower Street. I say to myself: “O come! I can’t stand
+this,” and go home and write--or try to write--a chapter in “The Hill
+of Dreams.” Many people will say that the chapter is much worse than
+the street, and I daresay that they are right; but, anyhow, it was
+different: it was, for me, the nearest way out of Gower Street and
+the black north-easter. But I believe that there may be a little
+more in literature than this. It is certainly the escape from life;
+but perhaps it is also the only means of realising and shewing life,
+or, at least, certain aspects of life. Here is an example to my hand.
+Here am I, not trying to write literature, but doing my best to tell
+a true tale, and I find that I can make nothing of it. I can set
+down the facts, or rather such of them as I remember, but I am quite
+conscious that I am not, in the real sense of the word, telling the
+truth; that is, I am not giving any sense of the very extraordinary
+atmosphere in which I lived in the year 1900, of the curious and
+indescribable impression which the events of those days made upon
+me; the sense that everything had altered, that everything was very
+strange, that I lived in daily intercourse with people who would have
+been impossible, unimaginable, a year before; that the figure of the
+world was changed utterly for me--of all this I can give no true
+picture, dealing as I am with what are called facts. I maintained
+long ago in “Hieroglyphics” that facts as facts do not signify
+anything or communicate anything; and I am sure that I was right,
+when I confess that, as a purveyor of exact information, I can make
+nothing of the year 1900. But, avoiding the facts, I have got a good
+deal nearer to the truth in the last chapter of “The Secret Glory,”
+which describes the doings and feelings of two young people who are
+paying their first visit to London. _I_ never bolted up to town with
+the house-master’s parlour-maid; but truth must be told in figures.
+
+There is one episode of this period of which I may say a little
+more, that is the affair of the Secret Society. Putting two and two
+together, a good many years after the event, I am inclined to think
+that it was a mere item in the programme of strange and Arabian
+entertainment that was being produced for my benefit: the Secret
+Society was of the same order as the Incident of Mr. O’Malley and
+the Adventure of the Young Man who always left by the Spiked Wall,
+only of a more gorgeous and elaborate kind. And I must confess that
+it did me a great deal of good--for the time. To stand waiting at
+a closed door in a breathless expectation, to see it open suddenly
+and disclose two figures clothed in a habit that I never thought to
+see worn by the living, to catch for a moment the vision of a cloud
+of incense smoke and certain dim lights glimmering in it before the
+bandage was put over the eyes and the arm felt a firm grasp upon it
+that led the hesitating footsteps into the unknown darkness: all this
+was strange and admirable indeed; and strange it was to think that
+within a foot or two of those closely curtained windows the common
+life of London moved on the common pavement, as supremely unaware of
+what was being done within an arm’s length as if our works had been
+the works of the other side of the moon. All this was very fine; an
+addition and a valuable one, as I say, to the phantasmagoria that was
+being presented to me. But as for anything vital in the secret order,
+for anything that mattered two straws to any reasonable being, there
+was nothing of it, and less than nothing. Among the members there
+were, indeed, persons of very high attainments, who, in my opinion,
+ought to have known better after a year’s membership or less; but the
+society as a society was pure foolishness concerned with impotent
+and imbecile Abracadabras. It knew nothing whatever about anything
+and concealed the fact under an impressive ritual and a sonorous
+phraseology. It had no wisdom, even of the inferior or lower kind, in
+its leadership; it exercised no real scrutiny into the characters of
+those whom it admitted, and so it is not surprising that some of its
+phrases and passwords were to be read one fine morning in the papers,
+their setting being one of the most loathsome criminal cases of the
+twentieth century.
+
+And yet it had and has an interest of a kind. It claimed, I may say,
+to be of very considerable antiquity, and to have been introduced
+into England from abroad in a singular manner. I am not quite certain
+as to the details, but the _mythos_ imparted to members was something
+after this fashion. A gentleman interested in occult studies was
+looking round the shelves of a second-hand bookshop, where the works
+which attracted him were sometimes to be found. He was examining a
+particular volume--I forget whether its title was given--when he
+found between the leaves a few pages of dim manuscript, written
+in a character which was strange to him. The gentleman bought the
+book, and when he got home eagerly examined the manuscript. It was
+in cipher; he could make nothing of it. But on the manuscript--or,
+perhaps, on a separate slip laid next to it--was the address of a
+person in Germany. The curious investigator of secret things and
+hidden counsels wrote to this address, obtained full particulars,
+the true manner of reading the cipher and, as I conjecture, a sort
+of commission and jurisdiction from the Unknown Heads in Germany to
+administer the mysteries in England. And hence arose, or re-arose, in
+this isle the Order of the Twilight Star. Its original foundation was
+assigned to the fifteenth century.
+
+I like the story; but there was not one atom of truth in it. The
+Twilight Star was a stumer--or stumed--to use a very old English
+word. Its true date of origin was 1880–1885 at earliest. The “Cipher
+Manuscript” was written on paper that bore the watermark of 1809 in
+ink that had a faded appearance. But it contained information that
+could not possibly have been known to any living being in the year
+1809, that was not known to any living being till twenty years later.
+It was, no doubt, a forgery of the early ’eighties. Its originators
+must have had some knowledge of Freemasonry; but, so ingeniously
+was this occult fraud “put upon the market” that, to the best of my
+belief, the flotation remains a mystery to this day. But what an
+entertaining mystery; and, after all, it did nobody any harm.
+
+It must be said that the evidence of the fraudulent character of the
+Twilight Star does not rest merely upon the fact that the Cipher
+Manuscript contained a certain piece of knowledge that was not in
+existence in the year 1809. Any critical mind, with a tinge of occult
+reading, should easily have concluded that here was no ancient order
+from the whole nature and substance of its ritual and doctrine. For
+ancient rituals, whether orthodox or heterodox, are founded on one
+_mythos_ and on one _mythos_ only. They are grouped about some fact,
+actual or symbolic, as the ritual of Freemasonry is said to have
+as its centre certain events connected with the building of King
+Solomon’s Temple, and they keep within their limits. But the Twilight
+Star embraced all mythologies and all mysteries of all races and all
+ages, and “referred” or “attributed” them to each other and proved
+that they all came to much the same thing; and that was enough! That
+was not the ancient frame of mind; it was not even the 1809 frame of
+mind. But it was very much the eighteen-eighty and later frame of
+mind.
+
+I must say that I did not seek the Order merely in quest of odd
+entertainment. As I have stated in the chapter before this, I had
+experienced strange things--they still appear to me strange--of body,
+mind and spirit, and I supposed that the Order, dimly heard of, might
+give me some light and guidance and leading on these matters. But, as
+I have noted, I was mistaken; the Twilight Star shed no ray of any
+kind on my path.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was towards the end of 1900 that I perceived that as I had lost
+sight of the admirable Syon, so Bagdad was wearing badly enough. I
+have seen from the train the architecture of the “White City” in
+these recent years. It was never anything at its best, assuredly;
+never anything save foolishness. Still, lit up on a summer night,
+with its extravagant towers and walls, pavilions and domes and
+minarets, with all its fretted and fantastic work, with its still
+lakes and pouring waterfalls; in those old days before the war I have
+no doubt that it symbolised joy and enchantment to young and simple
+hearts. But afterwards, when long neglect had told upon it, when
+winter rains had wept upon its walls and soot showers had drifted
+on its pavilions, when the summer suns had scorched its whiteness,
+and black March winds had torn its feigned embroideries and false
+ornaments, when many autumn storms had beat upon its plaster
+battlements and the waterfalls were stilled and the lakes were become
+obscene pits of slime and rubbish--what an ugly mockery it stood
+there, an idiot’s city fallen into ruin, a scenic fairyland in evil
+days. So my Bagdad became like the “White City,” magic down at heel,
+its enchantments silly and clumsy tricks, its mystic architecture a
+shabby sham, its strange encounters, meetings with people who turned
+out to be bores or worse than bores. You know the story of the fairy
+gold: at night the man who had had happy commerce with the People
+of the Hills found himself enriched with boundless and wonderful
+treasure; but in the morning the marvel of gold had all turned into a
+heap of dead leaves; such was my case.
+
+And here I am moved to wonder, as I often wonder, whether what we
+call “fairy tales” do not in fact contain a curious wisdom and the
+secrets of a very strange and mysterious psychology. Take this old
+tale of the fairy gold and its transmutation into ugly rubbish, as
+an example. To most of us it is a tale and nothing more than a tale;
+without any reason, without any meaning, without any sort of sense
+or significance in it. We accept it just as a piece of picturesque
+fancy and nothing more; the turning of the magic gold into leaves
+was just a happy notion of the unknown and remote individual who
+made up the story. But suppose that there is something more than
+this: rather, something quite different from this. I am well aware,
+of course, of the various explanations of the fairy mythology;
+the fairies are the gods of the heathen come down in the world:
+Diana become Titania. Or the fairies are a fantasy on the small,
+dark people who dwelt in the land and under the land before the
+coming of the Celts; or they are “elementals,” spirits of the four
+elements: there are all these accounts, and, for all I know, all
+may be true, each in its measure. But is it possible that there is,
+now and then, a more hidden and interior sense in some of the tales
+of the fairyland and the fairies? I am inclined to think that this
+may be so; that the stories may be--occasionally, not always by any
+means--the veils of certain rare interior experiences of mankind;
+experiences, I may say, which are best avoided. The gold faded into
+dead leaves; it may be more than an idle tale. At any rate, it was a
+very dismal disenchantment to me when I woke up and found that I was
+not the Commander of the Faithful, that the fair Circassian was, in
+fact, a native not of Circassia but of Clapham, that Bagdad was not
+Bagdad at all, but a London “Exhibition” fallen into very bad repair
+and urgently in need of tacks and whitewash. The Palace was not
+habitable; rain was coming in through cracks and rents in the marble
+that was plaster on the head of him who for a time had been Haroun
+Alraschid, who now began to suspect that his real style and title
+was Silly Fool. And then I went on the stage, which is a world of
+illusion certainly, but of a much less harmful illusion than that of
+plaster-Bagdad and fairy gold and the hall under the hill.
+
+I have wondered at times why there is no good novel of the stage.
+But a little consideration shews that there can be no such thing.
+George Moore wrote long ago a clever book called “A Mummer’s Wife.”
+It is a capital book, and I should think a very faithful impression
+of a “Cloches de Corneville” touring company in the early ’eighties.
+I would say of an individual “Cloches de Corneville” company, for
+the characters strike one as portraits of particular people; there
+is nothing of the universal about the book, nothing of the essence
+of the stage life. And it is probably impossible to write the real
+novel of the stage, for the good reason that the stage is not one but
+many. In the old days, in the days of the Crummles Company, it would
+have been easier. The actor of those days was supposed, till he had
+proved his supreme eminence in one particular line of business, to
+be capable of all. He was to play “Hamlet,” he was also to go on in
+the Farce, he was to dance a hornpipe between the acts, he was always
+to be ready with a song; and, again, unless he were a very eminent
+actor indeed, he very rarely associated with people beyond the
+range of the call-boy’s voice. The stage in those days was a world
+apart, and the men and women who trod it a race apart; the actor was
+a type, just as the sailor of Smollett’s day was a type. But all
+that is long over; it would be very difficult to find a general
+formula to cover the life of the stage to-day. Commodore Trunnion
+viewed all existence as a voyage on board one of His Majesty’s
+ships; and I knew a stage-manager who, playing skittles, avowed his
+determination to bring down “that O.P. skittle”; but the Commodore
+is dead, and the stage-manager is dying. In fact I should say that
+the average actor of to-day is far from being gratified when he is
+recognised as an actor; rather he is inclined to be ashamed of his
+profession. I remember that as I was talking to two stage friends
+on a London pavement an old man who was selling laces and studs
+and such matters in the gutter implored us to buy: “I was an actor
+once myself, gentlemen.” I perceived that my friends were very far
+from being pleased. I think that the poor old man would have done
+better if he had said: “I was an officer in the Guards once myself,
+gentlemen.” So, in brief, the actors are no longer the race apart of
+the old days; they mix with all sorts of people and have, naturally,
+become very much like all sorts of people. Some of them think that
+the change is for the better, others disagree. I venture no judgment
+save this: that they are certainly less picturesque, because less
+differenced than of old, and thus it is that nobody is likely to do
+much good with a story of the stage.
+
+I daresay that few people outside the profession are aware that the
+old players had a language of their own, or rather a language which
+they shared with another and a widely different craft. Not merely
+the technical language of the stage, though that had its curiosities
+too. For example, I once heard George Alexander at rehearsal say
+to one of the company: “Too much of the old, Smith, too much of the
+old!” And Smith, though he had been for many years on the stage,
+told me afterwards that he had never heard the phrase before, and
+didn’t know what it meant. I knew what it meant, having associated,
+like Mr. Lillyvick, with members of the theatrical profession in the
+provincial, that is more or less, the less fortunate grade. “The old”
+means the melodramatic style of acting, the manner which used to be
+associated with the name of Barry Sullivan. When an actor said, “I
+gave them a bit of the old,” he meant that he exaggerated somewhat
+both in his tones and in the business of the scene; in other words,
+that he made it “big” and “broad.”
+
+But this is not the language I mean. Once on a provincial tour I
+found that the stage-manager had somehow heard of my connection with
+literature, and was inclined, in consequence, to suspect me a little
+of being, as we should say now, a “high-brow” and to resent the
+supposed fact. So I put him through an examination. I asked if he
+knew what “omees” were, in particular as to the character signified
+by the phrase “omee of the carser.” Then as to the idioms “nunty
+munjare” and “nunty dinnari” and so on. He broke down badly, but he
+put away his evil suspicions from that moment; he knew that if I had
+written books in my day I had turned over a new leaf and had become a
+reformed character: I knew the curious speech better than he did. It
+is barbarous Italian, and was the lingo of old-fashioned actors and
+thieves.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XI_
+
+
+It is a very odd experience to go on the stage at the age of
+thirty-nine. It is, of course, unpractical, since at that age a
+man is too old to learn the business properly; but it is a great
+entertainment. The change was so extreme. I had always lived a
+very quiet life. I had few friends, few acquaintances. My life was
+in reading books and in writing them. All my preoccupations were
+literary. Every morning after breakfast I went over what I had
+written the night before, correcting here and there and everywhere,
+generally convinced that the passage which had pleased me so much as
+I wrote it was, after all, not magnificent. I took the bulldog for
+a walk from 12 to 1, and another half-hour walk in the afternoon.
+Then two cups of tea without milk or sugar at 4, and the rigour of
+the literary game till 7, and again after dinner till 11. It was a
+life of routine, and all its adventures, difficulties, defeats and
+rare triumphs were those of the written page. I did not know a single
+actor, and had no curiosity as to the actor’s life, circumstances,
+customs or manners. And then, one afternoon in February, 1901, I
+found myself stuck up with a number of ladies and gentlemen on a
+thing like a greenhouse flower-pot stand, and we were all required
+to express suitable and varied emotions as Shylock appealed for the
+fulfilment of the bond which Antonio had given him. This was the
+first thing I had tried to do on the stage, and I believe it was
+the most difficult. No doubt Mr.--afterwards Sir Frank--Benson was
+right in saying that it was the only way to learn how to act; but
+gesture, facial expression, pantomime, the knack of knowing how to be
+individual and yet to join in effectively with the crowd; all these
+things are extremely difficult, very much more difficult than the art
+of speaking an effective line effectively.
+
+But--very likely because the change from my former way of living
+was so tremendous in every respect--I found the life an enchanting
+one. Of course I could not have begun under happier auspices; nay, I
+could not have begun under any auspices half so happy. It has been
+said, I think, more than once, and said by men far more qualified
+to speak than I, that if it had not been for the Benson Company,
+acting as an ordered art, with its technique and tradition, would
+pretty well have perished out of England. The old stock companies
+were gone, with their manifold opportunities for learning the actor’s
+craft. The young man who went on the stage probably walked on for
+six months or a year in a London production, and unless he were an
+exceptionally bright young fellow he learned very little. Perhaps,
+if he were lucky, he was promoted from a thinking part to a speaking
+one and uttered the line: “You don’t say so!” every night; but still
+he learned very little. If he became a good actor under this régime,
+it was a case of genius triumphing over circumstance. Of course good
+actors come from everywhere: from the academies, from melodramas
+travelling in the fit-ups, from the chorus of the musical play, from
+the ranks of the walkers-on in the long London run; but, as I say,
+these are cases of greatness overcoming difficulties. But under the
+training provided by the Benson Company it was a man’s fault if he
+did not learn to act; it was pretty definite proof that there was no
+acting in his composition. I remember Henry Ainley saying in this
+very year, 1901: “Well, in the last fortnight I have played twelve
+different parts, and if that won’t teach a man how to act, nothing
+will.” This, I may say, was at the end of the Festival Season at
+Stratford-on-Avon, a strenuous and a delightful time.
+
+But, as I say, I could have entered on the boards under no happier
+auspices. There was a constant succession of small parts, so graded
+with due tenderness both to the beginner and the audience that not
+much harm could be done by uneasy awkwardness, and much good was
+certain to be gained by the beginner. For example, I have a suspicion
+that the whole pack of us on that flower-pot stand in “The Merchant,”
+all of us beginners, were about as bad as bad can be; but it really
+signified little. The people in front were looking at Shylock and
+Portia, not at us; and I don’t suppose that our incapacity diminished
+to any calculable extent the public entertainment. Then in the next
+piece, “As You,” I was a Forest Lord with a line. I had to say to the
+Banished Duke: “I’ll bring you to him straight,” and Oscar Asche took
+pains to show me that I must speak it as I moved up stage with my
+back to the audience; but the fortunes of the play hardly depended on
+that line, while I was beginning to grow a slight seed of confidence.
+
+And how all this was an utterly different world from anything that I
+had ever conjectured; I cannot express the gulf that yawned between
+the old and the new. In the former years I struggled with words and
+phrases and sentences and shades of meaning implied by them: now I
+strove to understand how something like an attenuated pigtail could
+become a highly probable fifteenth-century beard and moustaches in a
+couple of minutes, when skilled hands were laid upon it. And I was
+occupied with R.U.E. and L.U.E. and 5 and 8, and how to stand so that
+you command the stage as F. R. B. instructed me, and the endeavour to
+take in and profit by the kindly tips and hints and cautions given
+by the elder members of the company: here was a holiday, indeed, for
+a man who had tried to tear the secret of literature from the thorn
+castle where it is concealed, who had torn his hands and his heart
+sadly enough in the endeavour.
+
+I have mentioned the tips and hints of the Elder Brethren amongst
+the Bensonians. This was a great part of the discipline and
+instruction of the course. It was not only what Benson said at
+rehearsal, it was also what Asche or Rodney or Brydone or Swete said
+after the rehearsal or after the show, and often what they said
+was, quite rightly, highly uncomplimentary. I remember when Henry
+Herbert--“starring” in America now, I believe--was playing in “King
+John,” it fell to him to pronounce the lines which speak of painting
+the lily and gilding refined gold. He spoke them, as I thought,
+with great spirit; but Brydone--dead not long ago--took him apart
+afterwards and talked to him for half an hour or more as to the grave
+mistake he had committed.
+
+“You spoke the lines as if they were beautiful poetry,” said Brydone,
+“and, indeed, they are. If you had been reciting them your reading
+would have been quite right; but not in the scene, on the stage.
+So-and-so--I have forgotten the name of the part--is raging against
+King John; he isn’t thinking of the poetic beauty of the words he is
+using.”
+
+Now, I do not presume to judge whether Brydone were right or wrong in
+this criticism; such matters are too high for my small experience as
+an actor; but consider the enormous value to the beginner of living
+in such an atmosphere of thought and observation and consideration of
+the things of the theatre. Herbert may have come eventually to the
+conclusion that he had been right after all, and that Brydone was
+wrong; but, anyhow, he had worried the question out and weighed it in
+his mind, and looked at it and around it; and all that, it seems to
+me, is the very air in which good craftsmanship is born and nurtured
+and grows great and flourishes.
+
+And so, apart from these after-confabulations and dressing-room
+counsels, a rehearsal in the Benson Company has always struck me as
+a liberal education in the player’s art. Benson himself--the “Pa”
+of the affectionate and reverent remembrance of many hundreds of
+his grateful sons and scholars--has always been an imaginative poet
+of a high order; though somehow he has never written any poetry.
+Instead, he has produced Shakespeare, and perhaps he has chosen the
+better way. He has illuminated his text admirably, and his way was
+not to come down to the theatre with the whole scheme of things cut
+and dried in his head, with every intonation, every bit of business
+and every position settled immutably beforehand, but rather to
+approach the play, scene by scene, with a liberal and open spirit.
+The main conception he doubtless brought with him, but any light he
+could find in the process of rehearsal he would welcome heartily, no
+matter whether it came from one of the elder brethren or from the
+newest member of the company. For example, during the rehearsals of
+“King John” we had come to the scene wherein the Legate, Pandulph,
+reconciles the King to Holy Church. I was talking to the Legate at
+the wings during some brief interval, and ventured very tentatively
+to describe the symbolical embrace known as the Kiss of Peace as a
+possibly effective bit of business in the reconciliation scene. The
+Legate, interested, asked me to show him how it was done, and we went
+through the business. But Benson, who seemed to be considering other
+matters down stage, had noticed what we were about, and he called
+out: “I like that: we’ll do it.” And done it was; and I had been a
+little over two months in the company and on the stage!
+
+And another instance, taken from the same play, of a Bensonian
+rehearsal of those days. The scene was the discovery of the dead
+body of Prince Arthur. I had to say:
+
+    “What wilt thou do, renowned Faulconbridge,
+    Second a villain and a murderer?”
+
+Whereon Hubert furiously interposed:
+
+    “Lord Essex, I am none!”
+
+And then I had to draw the cloak away from the corpse and exclaim:
+
+    “Who killed this Prince?”
+
+And thereupon a debate arose. Should the words be spoken before
+the removal of the cloak? Should the cloak be removed before the
+uttering of the line? Should word and action be simultaneous? The
+point was discussed with the utmost earnestness, as a matter of
+vital importance, and I, feeling that I was in mighty deep waters,
+suggested in all humility that I should speak the words with an
+indicative gesture and that Hubert should step forward, appalled,
+and remove the cloak and discover the body of the Prince. But this
+started another subsidiary debate, and the rehearsal breaking off at
+this point, Brydone (Hubert) and Frank Rodney (Faulconbridge) were
+left on the Stratford stage, walking up and down, and wondering,
+in muttered undertones, whether it would be within the limits of
+possibility and stage propriety for Hubert to snatch that cloak
+away. Their faces were grave, earnest and perplexed. Outside in the
+sunshine by the Avon I encountered “Pa.” He looked at me with a
+certain waggishness in his eye, as if he suspected bewilderment on my
+part, and said:
+
+“Well, Mr. Machen, what do you think about it yourself?”
+
+“Indeed, sir,” I replied, “I don’t venture to have any opinion.”
+
+And I meant what I said, for I didn’t think then, and I don’t think
+now, that it befits the entered apprentice to express his opinion, or
+presume to have any opinion, in the presence of past masters.
+
+Now it may be thought that I am “guying” the Company methods in this
+matter of Prince Arthur’s funeral cloak. I am not doing anything
+of the sort. I only wish I had gone on in the craft, and were now
+myself entitled to walk up and down the stage, debating just such
+a point. The matter in itself was, no doubt, small enough: a stage
+management in a hurry would have given a ruling and the scene would
+have proceeded; but under a stage-management in a hurry what would
+have become of the vivid interest taken in the smallest circumstance
+of the play by the whole company, from F. R. Benson downward?
+
+And, by the way, I trust I am not giving the impression that the
+Bensonians of that day were a body of solemn pedants? I have not
+yet forgotten my admiration, my almost awestruck admiration, at
+seeing the manner in which the man who was to play King John drank
+home-brewed ale in a triangular parlour of the Windmill on the
+afternoon before the production. He drank in the manner of the
+ancient heroes, and he gave a very good performance at night.
+
+But the Stratford Festival drew to its dose. On the last Saturday
+we were rehearsing in the morning, playing in the afternoon and
+playing again in the evening. Some time in the course of the day I
+was told that I was to play Nym in the “Merry Wives” on Monday night
+at Worcester. I bought the play and looked at the part and got the
+cuts from the Prompt Book--and I wonder why I didn’t drown myself in
+the Avon after the show as the easiest way out of the difficulty;
+and if anyone wants to know why, let him read the part of Nym in
+“The Merry Wives of Windsor,” and ask himself how he would like to
+learn that queer gibberish and learn how to play it in a couple
+of days, he having had three months’ experience of the stage. But
+instead of drowning myself in the Avon, I ... refreshed myself at a
+famous tavern of the town together with about half the company; and I
+think we heard the chimes at two o’clock in the morning, and it was
+reported that old George Weir, on being asked “to write something” in
+the hostess’s book had written the words: “When my cue comes call me
+and I will answeir.”
+
+And that reminds me: At the Bensonian dinner in the year in which
+this great actor, George Weir, died, F. R. Benson began his speech.
+His manner commanded the cessation of applause, and he raised one
+hand, and held it high, and said:
+
+“This year, one amongst us has answered the summons of the call-boy
+of the stars.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But to return to my small business. On the Sunday we travelled to
+Worcester, and I spent the rest of the day in a desperate struggle
+with Nym and “the humour of bread and cheese,” and “that’s the humour
+of it,” in endeavouring to get into my memory phrases which are not
+merely old but old-fashioned, for Nym, like Touchstone, discourses
+for the most part Elizabethan catchwords which, three hundred years
+before, were “certain of a laugh,” which the process of time and
+fashion has made meaningless, and phrases such as these are very
+difficult to learn.
+
+But I learned them somehow or other on the Sunday, and the next
+morning came to the one and only rehearsal. It was not on the stage,
+more important things were happening there, but in the travellers’
+samples room of one of the Worcester inns. Of course there was no
+scenery, no costumes, no “props” of any kind. A few chairs indicated
+the set, quite sufficiently, I may say to a man of experience, but
+dubiously enough to a man of next to no experience. Thus, when
+it came to my last exit, the Assistant Stage-Manager gave his
+instructions somewhat as follows:
+
+“After you have said the last words to Page, turn round and go up
+the flight of steps L.C., here, between these chairs. When you have
+got to the top, turn again and say to Page, over his shoulder: ‘My
+name is Nym, and Falstaff loves your wife.’ Then exit Left along the
+terrace.”
+
+Simplicity itself, to an actor, but somewhat horrifying to a
+beginner. And then two or three of the principals were not
+there--they were rehearsing other scenes, very likely, on the stage,
+and the Prompter’s: “Mr. Rodney will come on on that cue from the
+right upper entrance, where that table is, and you go up to him and
+meet him Centre and say so and so, and then he speaks the line so and
+so and you cross to the Right”--with much more to the same effect.
+And my breath was queer and catchy, even though it was only the
+rehearsal, and I wondered what my voice and I would be like at night!
+
+Well, I was paralysed with stage-fright. But I got through, somehow;
+and I hope the Old Woman of the Company, Miss Denvil, as admirable an
+actress as George Weir was an actor, meant what she said after I had
+made my Exit Left along the terrace. She smacked me heartily on the
+back, and said:
+
+“There! I always say the nervous ones are the best!”
+
+So the tour went on, and in the course of it I received an odd bit
+of promotion. I descended from the flower-pot stand in the Trial
+Scene of the “Merchant” and became the Clerk of the Court. I think
+he speaks one line and reads a letter, and that is all. It is hardly
+to be called a part; if the man who had to do it failed at the last
+moment the Business Manager or, more likely, his assistant, would be
+summoned and robed in the black habit and the square cap. He would be
+told the line and given the letter, and that would be all right. It
+was so small a thing that the man who “played” it was supposed not to
+care to do so under his own name, so I was either not in the bill at
+all or else I appeared as “Mr. Walter Plinge,” the Mrs. Harris of the
+Benson Company, who often came in useful on occasions like this, or
+when there was a case of “doubling.” There was such a person, but I
+believe he kept a tavern frequented by the Company.
+
+And so I was the Clerk of the Court, and solemnly proceeded to
+consider within myself what a Compleat Clerk of the Court should
+be like. I determined, firstly, that the boy at the back of the
+gallery should hear what I said; but this is a general rule--and by
+no means the least important--which applies to all acting. My second
+resolution was that a really convincing Clerk would not take the
+faintest interest in the very emotional procedure which seems to have
+characterised the strict court of Venice. He would listen to all
+the pleadings and all the agonies with a stolid countenance. When
+the Doge spoke of “brassy bosoms” and “hearts of flint” and “gentle
+answer, Jew” and so forth, the Clerk would become stonier and stonier
+in his indifference, possibly reflecting inwardly that he had always
+thought that the appointment was a purely political one, and that now
+he was sure of it. “Ad captandum arguments,” “Old Bailey rhetoric,”
+“Buzfuz on the Bench,” “Trying to throw dust in the eyes of the Jew,”
+such phrases, translated, of course, into choice Venetian dialect,
+might be supposed to flit through the purely legal and formalistic
+mind of the Clerk. As for the young advocate, whose credentials the
+Clerk had been obliged to proclaim, well, frankly, the Clerk could
+not understand how the Doge, politician as he was, could permit such
+unprofessional rubbish as the “Quality of mercy” speech to be uttered
+in court at all. “Mountain pines,” “wag their high tops,” “twice
+blest,” “crowned monarch better than his throne”: really, really!
+What was the Bar coming to? The Clerk’s face and attitude have become
+perfectly stony in their supreme indifference; he might be a thousand
+miles away.
+
+But! What is that? The Bond bad in law? The plaintiff debarred from
+recovering, and not only that, but, _ipso facto_, liable to criminal
+proceedings of a highly penal character? Now, indeed, the Clerk of
+the Court is interested. Not that he cares twopence for Antonio or
+for Shylock either; but there does seem distinctly to be a flaw.
+The young Advocate must have a technical mind, that greatest of all
+blessings. The Clerk pricks up his ears, as if he were a terrier
+advised of the presence of a rat; he is intensely awake; he consults
+his authorities on the table before him; he is really inclined to
+think that a highly important point is at issue; he believes that the
+question, or something very much like it, was raised in the Dogeship
+of Bragadin, _c._ 1150. At length the Clerk of the Court is all alive.
+
+I thought of all that, and I tried to render it as best I could.
+And I only mention this trivial nonsense because, to the best of my
+belief, it is the only instance in which I have found that doing my
+best and sparing no pains brought me the faintest sort of reward.
+As a rule, in my experience, the mere fact of taking pains has been
+rewarded with the malignity of scoundrels and the insults of fools.
+
+But in this extraordinary and, as I must say, miraculous affair it
+was otherwise. The tour of the Benson Company drew to its close. It
+was now hot summer and we were playing a _matinée_, I think on the
+Whitsuntide Bank Holiday, in some theatre on the south side of the
+river; some theatre which in all probability is now devoted to “the
+pictures.” It was glorious weather, there were few people in the
+house, and as one of the ladies of the company observed cheerfully in
+the wings, “People who come to see Shakespeare on an afternoon like
+this ought to have their noses rubbed in it.” Ah, the good, gross
+gaiety: how few people have as this lady had, and has, the true art
+of it! Her remark did me a lot of good that languid, heated afternoon
+in the half-empty theatre; and I believe that the Clerk of the
+Court--we were playing the “Merchant”--was a shade wearier than usual
+in his utter boredom and contempt of the whole proceedings: till his
+moment came.
+
+And a few days later Henry Ainley was saying to me in our
+dressing-room: “I am engaged by Alexander to play Paolo next year.
+And, do you know, Alexander said to me: ‘You’ve got a remarkably good
+actor in your Company; and I couldn’t even find his name in the cast.
+He was playing the Clerk of the Court that afternoon: he was very
+good indeed.’”
+
+The great George Alexander to speak thus of the little beginner
+in his little shadow of a part! Well, I suppose all such taps
+are vanities; but there was a very happy man that night in the
+dressing-room, and he plied the spirit-gum and fixed on his beard for
+the part of the Major-Domo in the “Shrew”--two lines--with trembling,
+unsteady, rapturous fingers.
+
+A few weeks later I was engaged to play a small part in “Paolo and
+Francesca,” but that was for the early spring of 1902, and I had to
+fill in. So I joined a pastoral or open-air company (almost all of
+whom were Bensonians), and played with them for three weeks. Then I
+met a friend in the Strand and said “I want a shop,” and found myself
+rehearsing next day the part of a comic Irish servant in a sketch
+called “The Just Punishment”--an entirely preposterous playlet. We
+did a fortnight of it--two houses a night--at the Hoxton Varieties
+and another East-End hall, the name of which I have forgotten. At
+the Varieties I dressed with a very pleasant black man; the rats ran
+about the dressing-rooms and passages like kittens. And the audience!
+There was no question of their being all right till you began to
+bore them. You made your entrance as the curtain went up, and found
+the whole house in an uproar. Most of it was lighthearted hilarity,
+some of it was argument, and they argue very forcibly in Hoxton,
+occasionally with broken bottles. The actor’s business was to drown
+them, and get them to listen, and amuse them--if he could--and very
+capital training it was. But the sketch was not booked on--and no
+wonder--so I went to Mr. Denton’s in Maiden Lane. He sent me to Mr.
+Charles Terry, who was taking out a melodrama called “The Silent
+Vengeance,” written by Mr. Harry Grattan round the personality of
+Mr. Silward, that wonderful animal impersonator. From first to
+last I played three parts in “The Silent Vengeance”--a solicitor,
+a doctor and a barber--and it only ran six weeks. But for the last
+week of the run I had been rehearsing the part of an old actor in
+the farcical comedy of “The Varsity Belle.” Then at the end of a
+fortnight, for one reason or another, I had to change this rôle for
+that of a University Don; and there were over two hundred cues in
+the first act, and I had only a week for study! The manager was an
+entirely honest but boorish fellow, and I gave him my notice; “bunged
+in my notice” would be more idiomatic. The day I left “The Varsity
+Belle” company I got an engagement from an old Bensonian friend to
+play for a fortnight or so in Old Comedy down in the western country,
+and a delightful engagement it turned out. We all knew each other,
+or very soon got to know each other, and we drank beer and played
+skittles in tumbledown alleys behind old inns, and brewed bowls of
+punch, and in spite of these wild practices acted, I think, decently.
+Poor Ernest Cosham was the Comedian and Mr. Leon Quartermaine played
+the juvenile leads; and I hope he has not forgotten a famous game of
+Blind Hookey in a little inn at Westbury-on-Avon, the only card game
+that I ever enjoyed. And the morning after our last performance I
+went up from Andover to town and listened to Stephen Phillips reading
+his play, “Paolo and Francesca,” to the assembled company. I had been
+a year on the stage, and I think I had had as varied an experience as
+falls to the lot of most beginners.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And here there is a great gap. There were other adventures on the
+stage; but enough, I think, has been said of these things. I have
+just told of that happy moment of June, 1901, when Henry Ainley
+repeated to me George Alexander’s kindly praise of my acting. And,
+indeed, that was bliss, but I believe that I received the promise
+of a happiness that should be deeper and more lasting one morning
+towards the end of August, 1921. For that morning brought a letter
+ending my career as a journalist.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Poor George Sampson got into grievous trouble over his innocent
+speculations as to so innocent a thing as an underpetticoat. I
+propose, therefore to say nothing about the craft of journalism,
+which I followed for many years.
+
+Save only this: _Eduxit me de lacu miseriæ, et de luto fæcis. Et
+statuit super petram pedes meos: et direxit gressus meos._
+
+
+                                THE END
+
+
+                      Printed in Great Britain at
+     _The Mayflower Press, Plymouth_. William Brendon & Son, Ltd.
+
+
+Transcriber’s Note:
+
+Words may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent
+hyphenation in the text. These have been left unchanged unless
+indicated below. Jargon, dialect, obsolete and alternative spellings
+were left unchanged. Three misspelled words were corrected.
+Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like
+this_. Unprinted or partially printed letters and punctuation,
+were corrected.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78106 ***
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+      Things near and far | Project Gutenberg
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+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78106 ***</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+<h1 class="ls">
+<i>THINGS NEAR AND FAR</i>
+</h1>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center">
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<ul>
+  <li><span class="allsmcap">THE TERROR</span></li>
+  <li><span class="allsmcap">THE BOWMEN</span></li>
+  <li><span class="allsmcap">DR. STIGGINS</span></li>
+  <li><span class="allsmcap">THE GREAT RETURN</span></li>
+  <li><span class="allsmcap">HIEROGLYPHICS</span></li>
+  <li><span class="allsmcap">THE HOUSE OF SOULS</span></li>
+  <li class="isub2">Including <span class="allsmcap">THE GREAT GOD PAN</span> and <span class="allsmcap">THE THREE IMPOSTORS</span></li>
+  <li><span class="allsmcap">THE HILL OF DREAMS</span></li>
+  <li><span class="allsmcap">THE CHRONICLE OF CLEMENDY</span></li>
+  <li><span class="allsmcap">WAR AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH</span></li>
+  <li><span class="allsmcap">THE SECRET GLORY</span></li>
+  <li><span class="allsmcap">FAR OFF THINGS</span></li>
+</ul>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="h1head">
+<i>THINGS NEAR &amp; FAR</i>
+</p>
+<p class="h2head">
+<i>BY ARTHUR MACHEN</i>
+</p>
+<p class="p4 center ls allsmcap">
+<i>LONDON: MARTIN SECKER</i>
+</p>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center">
+<i>Printed in Great Britain</i>
+</p>
+<p class="p4 center allsmcap">LONDON: MARTIN SECKER LTD. (1923)
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_7"></span></p>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">
+    CONTENTS
+  </h2>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td></td>
+<td class="tdr muchsmaller">Page</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter <abbr title="One">I</abbr></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Chapter_I">7</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter <abbr title="Two">II</abbr></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Chapter_II">27</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter <abbr title="Three">III</abbr></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Chapter_III">38</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter <abbr title="Four">IV</abbr></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Chapter_IV">48</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter <abbr title="Five">V</abbr></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Chapter_V">65</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter <abbr title="Six">VI</abbr></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Chapter_VI">73</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter <abbr title="Seven">VII</abbr></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Chapter_VII">89</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter <abbr title="Eight">VIII</abbr></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Chapter_VIII">109</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter <abbr title="Nine">IX</abbr></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Chapter_IX">125</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter <abbr title="Ten">X</abbr></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Chapter_X">144</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter <abbr title="Eleven">XI</abbr></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Chapter_XI">160</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="Chapter_I">
+    <i>Chapter <abbr title="One">I</abbr></i>
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap">The</span> road from Newport to Caerleon-on-Usk
+winds, as it comes near to the old
+Roman, fabulous city, with the winding
+of the tawny river which I have always
+supposed must be somewhat of the colour of the
+Tiber. This road was made early in the nineteenth
+century when stage-coaching came to perfection,
+for the old road between the two towns passed over
+the Roman bridge—blown down the river by a
+great storm in the seventeen-nineties—and climbed
+the break-neck hill to Christchurch. Well, this new
+road as I remember it was terraced, as it were, high
+above the Usk to the west, and above it to the east
+rose a vast wood, or what seemed a vast wood in
+1870, called St. Julian’s Wood, of some fame as a
+ghostly place. It was cut down long ago by an
+owner who thought timber of high growth better
+than ghosts.</p>
+
+<p>On the one side, then, the steep dark ascent of
+St. Julian’s Wood; on the other, the swift fall of
+the bank to the yellow river, where, likely enough,
+there would be a man in a coracle fishing for
+salmon. And then there came a certain turn,
+where suddenly one saw the long, great wall of the
+mountain in the west, and the high dome of Twyn
+Barlwm, a prehistoric tumulus; and down below,
+an island in the green meadows by the river, the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8"></span>little white Caerleon, shining in the sun. There is
+a grey wall on one side of it, a very old and mouldering
+wall to look at, and indeed it is old enough, for
+it is all that remains of the Roman wall of Isca
+Silurum, headquarters of the Second Augustan
+Legion.</p>
+
+<p>But there, white in the sun of some summer
+afternoon of fifty years ago or so, Caerleon still
+stands for me shining, beautiful, a little white city
+in a dream, with the white road coming down the
+hill, from Newport, down out of St. Julian’s Wood,
+and so to the level river meadows, and so winding
+in a curve and coming to the town over the
+bridge.</p>
+
+<p>That is my vision of the place where I was born;
+no doubt the recollection of driving home beside
+my father on some shining summer afternoon of
+long ago; but of later years another vision of the
+same white town and white road has come to me.
+I have “made this up,” as the children say, though,
+no doubt, it is all true. The time now goes back
+from the early ’seventies to the early ’fifties, and
+two young ladies are setting out from the Vicarage—it
+stood practically in the churchyard, pretty
+well in the position of that other, that illustrious
+Vicarage at Haworth, and my Aunt Maria could
+never see any reason why a vicarage should not be
+in a churchyard—the two young ladies closed the
+Vicarage door, and made their way down the deserted
+street, where the grass was green between
+the cobble-stones, and so passed over the bridge and
+into the Newport road. They were going to meet
+John, home from Jesus College, Oxford; and no
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9"></span>doubt they talked eagerly of how well John was
+doing at Oxford, and wondered when he would be
+ordained, and where his first curacy would be, and
+what a good clergyman he would make, and how
+they hoped he would marry somebody nice, and
+what a pity it was that John was not at home when
+Mr. Tennyson came to Caerleon and stayed at the
+Hanbury Arms, and smoked a black clay tobacco
+pipe with his feet on the mantelpiece; very odd,
+but poets always were odd people and “Airy Fairy
+Lilian” was very pretty. The Vicar had called of
+course, and had been a little shocked at the pipe;
+still, Papa was always so amiable and ready to make
+allowances.</p>
+
+<p>“Your grandfather,” Aunt Maria said to me
+years afterwards, “was a most amiable man,
+but he could not bear radishes or the <cite>Adeste
+fideles</cite>.”</p>
+
+<p>Well, the two young ladies, Anne and Maria,
+shading themselves from the heat of the sun with
+their fringed parasols, pace decorously along the
+Newport road discussing these and many other
+matters; parish-matters, of helping poor people
+and old people and sick people; county matters,
+the great doings that there would be at the Park
+when Sir (?) Hanbury Leigh was to have a great
+party from London on August 12th to shoot grouse
+on the mountain; Church matters; how a Mr.
+Leonard had just been given the living of Kemeys
+Commander and had actually been heard to say, “I
+call myself a Catholic priest” and, in spite of the
+Creeds, wasn’t that going rather far? And what
+would John say to that? And, somehow, I fancy
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10"></span>the talk came circling again and again back to John,
+and how glad he would be to be at home again, and
+how lucky it was that Mrs. Williams Pantyreos had
+come in that very morning because John always
+said that he never got butter like the Pantyreos
+butter anywhere, and how it was to be hoped that
+the weather would keep up till Wednesday when
+they were all going to drive to Aunt Mary’s at
+Abergavenny—except Mamma, who said, “Young
+gadabout ne’er won a clout”—and how this beautiful
+sunshine must be doing Cousin Blanche’s
+cough a great deal of good: John would like to see
+Cousin Blanche again.</p>
+
+<p>And so on, and so on, and the two sisters walk
+along the white limestone road, picking a flower
+now and again, for Anne paints flowers and Maria
+is much interested in Botany—I am not sure
+whether she had acquired Miss Pratt’s three-volume
+work on the subject at that date. And the evening
+draws along, and the sun hangs over the huge round
+of Mynydd Maen in the west, and the scents of
+St. Julian’s dark, deep wood fill the stilled air; till
+Maria says suddenly: “Anne! here is the omnibus
+at last, and, there! I believe I can see John’s
+face.”</p>
+
+<p>The old dim yellow and faded chocolate omnibus
+from the Bull—I remember it in its last days just
+before they made the line, and never will I speak of
+<em>this</em> omnibus as a ’bus—comes lumbering on its way,
+and the old driver, recognising the “two Miss
+Joneses the Vicarage” and knowing that Master
+John is inside, causes it to stop. John, a mild-looking
+young man with little side whiskers, gets
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11"></span>out and kisses his sisters; and the three then get in,
+and the omnibus lumbers down the hill towards
+Caerleon, the three chattering of Oxford, of plans
+and prospects, of Caerleon news and how happy
+Papa looked at breakfast. And so the evening draws
+on and the shadows deepen and the walls of white
+Caerleon glimmer and grow phantasmal like the old
+grey Roman wall as they cross the bridge and the
+Usk swims to high tide, the tawny yellow tinged
+with something of the sunset redness that glows
+over the mountain. The three are talking and
+chattering all the while, making plans for holidays
+and happiness and long bright years and the joy of
+life—a correct joy, but still joy—before them, and
+John is enquiring eagerly after Cousin Blanche and
+nodding and smiling to the Bluecoat boys and girls
+and saying: “I’ll unpack my box to-night and show
+you my prizes—Parker’s ‘Gothic Architecture,’ in
+three volumes, and Hooker and a lot more,” and
+they are hoping again and again that Wednesday
+will be fine, and Blanche is sure to be quite well by
+this, and John is feeling his young cheeks grow a
+little red when—it is night.</p>
+
+<p>Alas! They are all dead, years and years ago.
+The kind Vicar and his grim, good wife are dead.
+Poor Cousin Blanche perished of consumption in
+her fresh youth; no summer sun could allay the
+racking of that cough of hers. Anne followed her,
+by the same way to the same end: I have the
+“Holy Dying” that John, my father, gave her.
+There are two inscriptions in it; one facing the
+rubricated title-page, now “foxed” with time.
+This runs:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_12"></span></p>
+
+<p class="center smaller">
+To Anne E. Jones<br>
+from her affectionate<br>
+Brother John Edward<br>
+On her Birthday, and in<br>
+remembrance of the 29th<br>
+September, 1857&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_A_1" href="#Footnote_A_1" class="fnanchor">[A]</a><br>
+April 16th, 1858.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p1 footnote unindent"><a id="Footnote_A_1" href="#FNanchor_A_1" class="label">[A]</a> The date, I think, of their father’s death.</p>
+
+<p class="p1">The other, on the recto of the leaf, is as follows:</p>
+
+<p class="center smaller">
+Johannes Edvardus Jones,<br>
+In memoriam A.E.J.J.<br>
+Quæ obdormivit in Jesu<br>
+29 mo Martii <abbr title="1859">MDCCCLIX</abbr>
+</p>
+
+<p>And those of the party that lived longer knew
+more of sorrow, and more of broken hopes and of
+dreams that never came true. And thus, advisedly,
+I begin this second Chapter <abbr title="">i</abbr>n the story of a young
+man’s dreams and hopes and adventures. <i lang="la">Ego
+quoque</i>—I am forgetting my Latin tags—I, too,
+have walked on the white road to Caerleon.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>To walk a little faster, to comply, in fact, with
+the request of the whiting in Lewis Carroll’s
+beautiful Idyll, the end of 1884 and the beginning
+of 1885 found me in something of a backwater.
+“The Anatomy of Tobacco,” the book I had
+written in the 10 by 6 cell in Clarendon Road,
+Notting Hill Gate, had been published in the
+autumn of 1884, and soon after I had set about the
+translating of the “Heptameron.” Every evening
+I worked at this task till it was ended; and now it
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13"></span>was done, and there seemed nothing to do next. I
+wandered up and down the country about Llanddewi
+Rectory in my old way, lost myself in networks of
+deep lanes, coming out of them to view woods that
+were strange and the prospect of hills that guarded
+undiscovered lands. Thus on my wider and more
+prolonged travels, but I had haunts near home,
+nooks and retreats where nobody ever came. There
+was an unfrequented lane, very dark, very deep, that
+led from a hamlet called Common Cefn Llwyn—the
+Ridge of the Grove—to Llanfrechfa, used
+scarcely at all save by labouring men going to their
+work in the early morning and returning in the
+evening. All the length of this lane there was only
+one house in sight—the farms in Gwent are mostly
+in the heart of the fields, remote even from the by-ways—and
+this one house must have fallen into ruin
+eighty or a hundred years ago. From what remained
+one judged that it had been the <i lang="fr">petit
+manoir</i> of some dead and forgotten race of little
+squires; it was of grey stone, of fifteenth-century
+workmanship, and the corbels supporting the chimney
+were still sound and clean cut. All about the
+old broken house were the ruins of the garden,
+apple trees and plum trees run wild, hedges that
+had become brakes, a confusion of degenerate
+flowers; and by the tumbledown stile that led to
+this deserted place I would linger for an hour or
+more, wondering and dreaming and setting my
+heart on the hopeless endeavour of letters. Weather
+made no difference to my goings; a heavy greatcoat,
+boots with soles an inch thick, and leather
+gaiters up to the knee, made a wild wet winter’s day
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14"></span>a thing to be defied and enjoyed; and indeed I
+loved to get abroad on such days and see all the
+wells of the hills overflowing and rushing down to
+swell the Soar or the Canthwr, red and foaming,
+and making whirlpools of barmy froth as they fell
+into the brooks. And then, when the rain changed
+to snow, what a delight to stand on some high,
+lonely place and look out on the wide, white land,
+and on the hills where the dark pines stood in a
+ring about some ancient farm: to see the wonder
+of the icy sunlight, of the violet winter sky. These
+were my great adventures, and I know not whether
+in reality there are any greater, since it is a great
+thing to stand on the very verges of an unknown
+world.</p>
+
+<p>So the winter of ’84–85 went on and I dreamed
+and wondered and did nothing, though I was nearing
+the age at which many a young man has produced
+his first novel with success and acclaim. I
+never could do these things, and still I cannot do
+them. I knew that I had no business to be loafing
+and mooning about the rectory, a burden on my
+poor father—the “John” of that happy return of
+the ’fifties had by this time experienced sorrows and
+pains and miseries of all sorts. 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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15"></span>would lean his head on his hand; he had lost hope;
+nothing had any savour for him any more. And
+seeing this, I was distressed to be an additional
+weight in the heavy pack of sorrows and trials that
+he bore daily, and I tried to get all sorts of employments
+for which I was utterly unfit, which would
+not have harboured me for twenty-four hours.
+Nothing came of these attempts, and so the time
+went on till we were in June, 1885. Then there was
+a letter from the publisher of “The Anatomy of
+Tobacco” to the effect that he thought he could
+find me some odd jobs of work if I would come up
+to London; and so I returned again to the well-remembered
+cell in Clarendon Road.</p>
+
+<p>With mixed feelings. I was glad indeed at the
+prospect of doing something for myself and so
+removing a little from the weary burden at the
+rectory: but, I had not forgotten the <i lang="fr">peine forte et
+dure</i>; the dry bread, enough and no more than
+enough, the water from a bitter runnel of a sorrowful
+street, the heavy weight of perpetual loneliness.
+“Alone in London” has become a phrase, it is a
+title associated, I think, with some flaring melodrama;
+but the reality is a deadly thing. I was
+only twenty-two; and I shuddered a little one
+June night when I went out and bade farewell to
+the brooks and the woods and the flowers; to the
+scent of the evening air.</p>
+
+<p>All sorts of odd jobs and queer jobs awaited me.
+I was given a big folio book full of cuttings on a
+particular subject, and the publisher asked me to
+make a selection from these and so compile a book
+of oddments. Then, there were novels submitted
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16"></span>to him that I was to read and advise upon: a weary
+business when the said novels were as a rule foolish
+things written in varieties of straggly and scraggy
+scripts. But the principal business was the making
+of the Catalogue. For the publisher of York Street
+was also a second-hand bookseller. He had a mass
+of odd literature stored in a garret in Catherine
+Street, and on these volumes I was let loose; my
+main business being to write notes under the titles,
+notes describing the content of the books and
+setting that content in an alluring manner before
+the collector.</p>
+
+<p>It was as odd a library as any man could desire
+to see. Occultism in one sense or another was the
+subject of most of the books. There were the principal
+and the more obscure treatises on Alchemy, on
+Astrology, on Magic; old Latin volumes most of
+them. Here were books about Witchcraft, Diabolical
+Possession, “Fascination,” or the Evil Eye;
+here comments on the Kabbala. Ghosts and Apparitions
+were a large family, Secret Societies of all
+sorts hung on the skirts of the Rosicrucians and
+Freemasons, and so found a place in the collection.
+Then the semi-religious, semi-occult, semi-philosophical
+sects and schools were represented: we
+dealt in Gnostics and Mithraists, we harboured the
+Neoplatonists, we conversed with the Quietists
+and the Swedenborgians. These were the ancients;
+and beside them were the modern throng of
+Diviners and Stargazers and Psychometrists and
+Animal Magnetists and Mesmerists and Spiritualists
+and Psychic Researchers. In a word, the collection
+in the Catherine Street garret represented
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17"></span>thoroughly enough that inclination of the human
+mind which may be a survival from the rites of the
+black swamp and the cave—or an anticipation of a
+wisdom and knowledge that are to come, transcending
+all the science of our day.</p>
+
+<p>Which? It seems to me a vast question, and I
+am sure it is utterly insoluble. Of course, an enormous
+mass of occultism, ancient and modern, may
+be brushed aside at once without the labour of any
+curious investigation. Madame Blavatsky, for example,
+her coadjutors and assessors and successors
+need not detain us. I do not mean that every pronouncement
+of Theosophy is false or fraudulent.
+A liar is not to be defined as a man who never by
+any chance speaks the truth. A thief occasionally
+comes honestly by what he has. I mean that the
+specific doctrines and circumstances of Theosophy:
+the Mahatma stories, the saucers that fell from the
+ceiling, the vases that were found mysteriously reposing
+in empty cupboards, the Messiahship of a
+gentleman whose name I choose to forget: all this
+is rubbish, not worth a moment’s consideration.
+And so with Spiritualism; though in a less degree.
+For I am strongly inclined to believe that very odd
+things do sometimes happen amongst those who
+“sit,” that some queer—and probably undesirable—psychic
+region is entered; and all this quite beyond
+and beside the intention or understanding of
+those present at the séance. You never know what
+may happen when a small boy pokes his fingers
+carelessly among the wheels and works of a clock.
+But as to the profession of the Spiritualists; that
+they are able to communicate with ghosts, <em>that</em> need
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18"></span>not trouble us. Their photographs of fairies need
+not trouble us. Their revelations as to the life of
+the world to come as given through the Rev. Vale
+Owen need not trouble us. Though here is a
+“phenomenon” which seems to me of no little
+interest. How can a man who is confessedly perfectly
+honest and straightforward conjure himself
+into the belief that when he takes up a pencil an
+intelligence apart from himself guides his hand as
+he writes? I suppose the answer involves the doctrine
+of dual or multiple personality; and <em>that</em> is
+mysterious enough in all conscience. Yet, apart
+from all the nonsense, apart from the state of mind
+of the average Spiritualist—one of them, a very
+eminent one in his day, said that the clause of the
+Creed: “I look for the Resurrection of the Dead”
+meant “I expect to see some physical manifestations
+of the departed”—apart from all this I still
+think as I have said that very strange and inexplicable
+things do sometimes happen. Here is nothing
+to do with ghosts: but the evidence that the
+famous medium Home rose into the air, floated out
+of an open window high on a Scottish castle tower
+and floated in again at another open window: the
+evidence here is good; that is, if levitation, as they
+call it, were a criminal offence and Home had been
+put on his trial he would have been convicted. It
+will be seen that I am not exactly a fanatical
+Spiritualist: but I had rather be of the straightest
+sect of Rappers and Banjo Wielders than of that
+company which understands all the whole frame
+and scheme of the universe so thoroughly and completely
+that it is absolutely certain that levitation
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19"></span>is impossible, that a man cannot rise into the air
+unless he is mechanically and materially impelled
+and supported, that no evidence, however direct
+and unimpeachable, can establish this for a fact.
+I do not understand the universe; consequently I
+do not dare to advance any such proposition. And
+further; let me diminish a little a proposition that
+I have only just dared to make. I have said that
+all the ghost business, all the Vale Owen sort of
+business, is rubbish and foolery. Well, I believe
+most heartily and profoundly that it <em>is</em> rubbish,
+nonsense, unveridical to the last degree; in fact,
+and in the proper sense of the word, a lie. Yet;
+let us beware. Not one of us understands the
+universe. Even in the Higher Mathematics, the
+Queen of profane sciences, very odd things are reported
+to happen. So, possibly, the following
+account may really correspond with the truth of
+things.</p>
+
+<p>The room is in total darkness. One of the sitters
+proclaims with exultation that his nose has been
+tweaked by <i>Joey</i>, who, on this side, was a clown.
+<i>John King</i>, understood to have been a master-mariner,
+sings “Tom Bowling” in a falsetto voice
+through a speaking trumpet. On this, Cardinal
+Newman, known to be a lover of music, is gratified
+and utters the word “Benedictine.” There is a
+sudden scream of joy in a female voice: “Oh!
+darling Katy, thank you, thank you, <em>thank you</em>!
+Oh, <em>please</em>, may we have the lights turned up for a
+moment? Katy promised me a lock of her beautiful
+golden hair, and I am <em>sure</em> I felt it float down
+on my hand.” The lights are turned up. A strand
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20"></span>of yellow hair is, sure enough, reposing on the lady’s
+hand. It had evidently been treated with spiritual
+peroxide, made, no doubt, of Ethers, like the
+ghostly whiskey and sodas in “Raymond.” Then
+the room is darkened and the Medium takes up the
+tale.</p>
+
+<p>“This spirit’s name is Milton. Henry—no, John
+Milton, the author of the ‘Faery Queen.’ He says
+that he is very happy. He spends most of his time
+with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Shakespeare has
+confessed to him that all his plays were written by
+Bacon. The evidence will be found in a brass box
+under the Tube station at Liverpool Street. Pope
+often has tea with him. He says they don’t use
+alcohol there.”</p>
+
+<p>There is a sudden crash. “Avast!” comes with
+a roar through the trumpet. <i>John King</i> has returned,
+bringing with him an <i>American Indian</i> who
+speaks in the idiom of a Nigger Minstrel practising
+in the East End of London and will call the Medium
+his “Midi.” Whereupon Katy puts a beautiful
+warm arm round the neck of a gentleman sitter and
+the gramophone plays “Abide with me.” All repeat
+the Lord’s Prayer, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
+expresses his intense gratification.</p>
+
+<p>Well; it may be so. But I hope it isn’t, and I
+shall never believe that it is so.</p>
+
+<p>Well; there I laboured in the Catherine Street
+garret amidst all this, and much more than this.
+Down below were the publishing offices of old Mr.
+Vizetelly, who was issuing English translations of
+Zola at the time, and was at last sent to gaol for
+publishing an English version of “La Terre,” an
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21"></span>obscene book that every judicious Bishop of Central
+France should put in the hands of newly ordained
+priests—if it is to be accepted that the physician
+ought to have some knowledge of the constitutions
+of his patients and of the diseases from which they
+are suffering. It was a sumptuous and rich garret—a
+street now passes over the site of the house—filled
+with that mysterious odour that used to prevail in
+oldish London houses that were not too carefully
+swept and washed and polished, and there day after
+day I worked, reading and annotating, and all alone.
+Now and then in the older books I came across
+striking sentences. There was Oswaldus Crollius,
+for example—I suppose his real name was Osvald
+Kroll—who is quoted by one of the characters in
+“The Great God Pan.” “In every grain of wheat,”
+says Oswaldus, “there lies hidden the soul of a
+Star.” A wonderful saying; a declaration, I suppose,
+that all matter is one, manifested under many
+forms; and, so far as I can gather, modern science
+is rapidly coming round to the view of this obscure
+speculator of the seventeenth century; and, in
+fact, to the doctrine of the alchemists. But I
+would advise any curious person who desires to investigate
+this singular chamber of the human mind
+to beware of over-thoroughness. Let him dip
+lightly from the vellum quarto into the leather
+duodecimo, glancing at a chapter here, a sentence
+there; but let him avoid all deep and systematic
+study of Crollius and of Vaughan, the brother of
+the Silurist, and of all their tribe. For if you go
+too far you will be disenchanted. Open Robert
+Fludd, otherwise Robertus de Fluctibus, and find
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22"></span>the sentence: <i lang="la">Transmutemini, transmutemini de
+lapidibus mortuis in lapides philosophicos vivos</i>—Be
+ye changed, be ye changed from dead stones into
+living and life-giving stones. This is a great word
+indeed, exalted and exultant; but beware of mastering
+Fludd’s system—if confusion can be called
+a system—of muddled alchemy, physical science,
+metaphysics and mysticism. Get Knorr von Rosenroth’s
+“Kabbala Denudata,” vellum, in quarto, and
+find out a little about the Sephiroth: about Kether,
+the Crown; Tiphereth, Beauty; Gedulah, Mercy;
+Geburah, Justice or Severity. Really, you will discover
+very curious things, and the more easily, if
+instead of Knorr von Rosenroth, you choose A. E.
+Waite’s “Doctrine and Literature of the Kabalah.”
+It is odd, for example, to discover that the side of
+Mercy is the masculine side, that Justice or Severity
+is feminine; and that all will go amiss till these two
+are united in Benignity. Again, it is interesting
+from another point of view to discover that three
+of the Sephiroth are called the Kingdom, the Victory
+and the Glory. Is there any connection
+between these and the ancient liturgical response
+to the Pater Noster: “For Thine is the Kingdom,
+the Power and the Glory”? And then that matter
+of Lilith and Samael and the Shells or Cortices, the
+husks of spirits from a ruined world that brought
+about the Fall of Man; the strange mystery of
+that place “which is called Zion and Jerusalem”—duly
+here comparing Böhme on the Recovery of
+Paradise when innocent man and maid are joined
+in love—all this is a wonderful and fascinating
+region of thought. And beautiful indeed is the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23"></span>saying of one of the Fathers of Kabbalism: that
+when the lost Letters of Tetragrammaton, the
+Divine Name, are found there shall be mercy on
+every side. And here, perhaps, but not certainly,
+light may be thrown on certain obscure matters of
+Freemasonry. Dip then, and read and wander in
+the Kabbala; but do not become a Kabbalist. For
+if you do, you will end by transliterating your name
+and the names of your friends into Hebrew letters
+and finding out all sorts of marvellous things, till
+at last you back Winners—which turn out to be
+Losers—on purely Kabbalistic principles.</p>
+
+<p>And here, by the way, I may remark that I have
+long meditated writing an article called “The
+Aryan Kabbala,” keeping the requirements of
+occult magazines strictly in view. It would make
+a pretty article. I should begin by a brief note on
+the Hebrew Kabbala, explaining how the Sephiroth
+tell in a kind of magic shorthand the whole history
+and mystery of man and all the worlds from their
+source to their end. The Tree of Life—as the
+Sephiroth arranged in a certain scheme are called—is,
+in fact, I would point out, at once an account of
+how all things came into being and a map and an
+analysis of all things as they now are. As an occult
+friend once said to me by my hearth in Gray’s Inn:
+“The Tree of Life can be applied to that poker.”
+The Tree of Life, then, is a key to the secret
+generation and being of all souls and all heavens;
+it will also analyse for you the little flower growing
+in a cranny of the wall.</p>
+
+<p>Well; this made clear, I would go on to say:
+“But what if there be a Kabbala and a Tree of Life
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24"></span>of the Aryans as well as of the Semites? What if it
+tells all the hidden secrets of our beginning and our
+journey and our ending? What if its august symbols
+are known to all of us, in every-day and common
+use amongst us, remaining all the while as undiscerned
+as the most sacred and mystic hieroglyphics?
+What if the office boy and the grocer handle every
+day the signs which tell The Secret of Secrets?”</p>
+
+<p>And then, after all due amplifications and ponderous
+circumnavigations it would all come out.
+The Aryan Kabbala is, in fact, the Decad; the ten
+first numbers. They embody an age-old tradition
+dating from the time when the ancestors of the
+Greek and the Welshman, the Persian and the
+Teuton were all one people. They contained the
+secret mystery religion of this primitive race, they
+sank by degrees from their first august significance
+to become instruments of common use and commercial
+convenience, just as vestments became clothes.
+The proof is easy enough. Take the first number
+of the Decad: one in English, ἕν (in the neuter)
+in Greek, unus in Latin, un (pronounced “een”)
+in Welsh, ein in German. And then compare
+another series of words in these languages: wine,
+οἶνος, vinum, gwin, wein. Then: two, δύο, duo,
+dau, zwei; and compare with: water, ὕδωρ, udus,
+wy (and dwr) wasser. I drop the other terms,
+or Sephiroth, of the Decad—in Mrs. Boffin’s
+presence—and come to the last two numerals:
+nine, ἐννέα, novem, naw, neun, compared with
+new, νέος, novus, newydd, neu. Then finally ten,
+δέκα, decem, deg, zehn: compare with deck (bedeck)
+δόξα, decor, teg, schön.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_25"></span></p>
+
+<p>The conclusion, I hope, is evident: we (and all
+things) proceed from Unity, which is wine, decline
+to Duality (or a weakened, fallen nature), which is
+water. Then, after passing through many changes,
+adventures, transformations, transmutations—undescribed
+for the reason given—we are renovated,
+made New—“I will make all things new”—in the
+last number but one of the Decad, and, in the final
+term, which is Ten, are reunified in Beauty and
+Glory.</p>
+
+<p>There! It seems to me wonderfully plausible,
+and I really think I should have written the article
+and sent it to some suitable quarter. It is all nonsense,
+of course, but ... does that matter?</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Well, all that business of the Aryan Kabbala is an
+absurd digression, but it illustrates well enough the
+frame of mind likely to be induced by the study of
+a good many of the books in the Catherine Street
+garret. Take the interlude and add to it the rich
+odours of the frowsy, neglected room stuffed with
+confusions of old books and pamphlets, add to it
+the old, delightful, picturesque London that was
+undisturbed in those days. Holywell Street and
+Wych Street were all in their glory in 1885, a glory
+compounded of sixteenth-century gables, bawdy
+books and matters congruous therewith, parchment
+Elzevirs, dark courts and archways, hidden taverns,
+and ancient slumminess. There were no great,
+blatant Australia Houses or Colonial Edifices of any
+kind about the Strand in those times: instead, we
+had the beauty and the green lawns of Clement’s
+Inn and the solemn square of New Inn, and Clare
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26"></span>Market communicating tortuously with Great
+Queen Street by the most evil-smelling by-ways
+that I have ever experienced—and something of
+jollity in the air that seems to me to have vanished
+utterly. Take all these elements and things; and
+you have me as I worked high up in the vanished
+house in Catherine Street, preparing the Catalogue
+that was to be called: “The Literature of Occultism
+and Archæology”—when the gas lamps in the
+Strand shone with a brighter light than the arc
+lamps of to-day.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_27"></span></p>
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="Chapter_II">
+    <i>Chapter <abbr title="Two">II</abbr></i>
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap">Such</span> was the scene of my life in the
+summer of the year 1885. By my odd
+jobs; a little “reading,” a little compiling
+and a good deal of catalogue making,
+I just managed to live, earning perhaps as much as
+a pound a week, one week with another. I do not
+remember exactly the precise terms on which I
+worked, but I know that I had a good deal of time
+on my hands. Part of this time I spent in trying
+to learn shorthand. I can’t think why, for at this
+period of my life I had no newspaper or secretarial
+employment in view. I am inclined to think that
+trying to learn shorthand had become a mechanical
+habit with me. Then, I resumed my old mooning
+walks out of London, going westward usually or
+always, sometimes Acton way and sometimes
+through Brentford—that curious, dirty, and most
+fascinating place—to Osterley Park, where in those
+days you could walk and wander anywhere you
+pleased, so long, I suppose, as you did not glue your
+nose to the windows of that mansion. And then I
+fell to writing again.</p>
+
+<p>Now here is a mystery. It is held, and very
+properly, that people should keep their mouths shut
+unless they have something to say; similarly that a
+man has no business to write unless he has something
+in his heart which, he feels, cries out to be
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28"></span>expressed. But here was I not knowing in the least
+what I wanted to say, but resolved, even at the cost
+of much pain and misery, to say it; that is, to write
+it. There are, of course, people who are said to talk
+for talking’s sake; and so, I suppose, I was suffering
+from the analogous vice of writing for writing’s
+sake, otherwise known as the <i lang="la">cacoethes scribendi</i>. I
+fancy a volume of Hazlitt had fallen into my hands;
+it had strayed, very likely, into the Catherine Street
+library, and at first I began to try to write essays,
+more or less in imitation of this inimitable author.
+I need scarcely say that I made sad work of it; and
+happily, no scrap of manuscript survives. And then
+I fell on Rabelais and on Balzac’s “Contes Drolatiques,”
+and wondered and admired hugely and
+studied both deeply in my long night watches
+under the gas-jet in the little room in Clarendon
+Road. I would dine sumptuously on half a loaf of
+dry bread, green tea made as I liked it, without milk
+or sugar, with plenty of tobacco by way of dessert;
+and then to my books and to my wonder. It was
+not a bad life on the whole, sweetened as it was by
+the enthusiasm for letters; but the loneliness was
+an oppression and sometimes a horror. Weeks
+passed without any human converse beyond brief
+business dialogue; still, since then I have known
+far worse days. Poverty and loneliness; these are
+doubtless evils hard to bear; but they are light
+indeed; nay, they have their dignity, and the gas-jet
+of Clarendon Road is not altogether without a
+halo—when I weigh all this and set it in the balances
+beside the intolerable degradation of the service of
+Carmelite House. I often thought in those latter
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29"></span>and most hideous days that my case was somewhat
+that of a man who had been captured by a malignant
+tribe of anthropoid apes or Yahoos and was by
+them tormented and unspeakably degraded; and
+there was this additional shame and horror: that
+my degradation and misery were witnessed by
+rational creatures like myself. I remember how in
+my last year in the employment of “The Evening
+News,” I was out on some idiotic errand which led
+me up Wellington Street, past York Street, where
+George Redway, the publisher of “The Anatomy
+of Tobacco” and of “The Literature of Occultism
+and Archæology,” had his place of business. In a
+line, pretty well, with York Street I could see that
+new street which runs over the site of old Vizetelly’s
+office where the famous fusty garret was.
+The streets—Wellington Street, Bow Street, York
+Street—are not much changed in the last forty
+years, and the gap formed by the new street made
+me see myself a cloudy young man of twenty-two
+up in the air labouring amongst the dusty ancient
+books; all this and all the recollections of the days
+of dry bread, tea, tobacco and the hopeless but not
+dishonourable endeavour of literature; all this contrasted
+with the shameful circumstances of my life
+as a weary old man of fifty-eight, a man who had
+known struggles and sorrows and losses; all this, I
+say, overwhelmed me suddenly. It was almost more
+than I could endure.</p>
+
+<p>But we go too fast. We are still in the days of
+the cloudy young man, who is clear that fine literature
+is an infinitely noble thing, but is not clear
+upon any other subject whatever. I had my queer
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30"></span>books in the mornings and my long lonely walks in
+the afternoons, and my great books in the evening
+and far into the night. I remember reading Dante
+in Longfellow’s translation, from beginning to end,
+and though I could not by any manner of means
+lift up my heart and mind to the mountain-peak of
+the Paradise, I divined the majesty I could not
+comprehend. Don Quixote was always with me,
+and good company and meat and drink and lights
+and fire always to me; and so I pass along the dim
+London streets revolving all these mighty works, a
+ghostly man amidst the hurrying multitude of the
+living, and go far afield under dim trees in the
+West, or sit solitary on a bench near the river in
+Kew Gardens, looking towards Syon; all the while
+in a lonely but not an unhappy dream.</p>
+
+<p>It came suddenly to me one night. I was lying
+awake in my bed; and then it came to me that I
+would write a Great Romance. A Great Romance!
+I know it is funny; but it is sorry too. I didn’t in
+the least know what the said Great Romance was
+to be about; save this, that Rabelais was to have
+something to do with it, and that my own county,
+beloved Gwent, was to have much more to do with
+it. That does not sound very definite; but I
+believe it is more definite than the actual vision
+which appeared to me, for this was rather a warm
+and golden and wonderful glow and radiance than
+any scheme for a book. I know I lay happy and
+trembling for a long time and fell asleep happy
+and awoke happy in the morning, and went out
+forthwith to buy pens and paper. I had both
+already, but I felt that the occasion was more than
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31"></span>a special one and called for very special purchases.
+So, at the stationer’s shop, near the Holland Park
+end of Clarendon Road, I got ruled quarto paper,
+and “Viaduct” pens, and two penholders, and I
+am pleased that I am writing all this with a surviving
+penholder of those two; a poor old thing
+chewed to a stump and battered grievously in its
+metallic parts. So here was paper, here was pens
+and penholders; and of course the rest was easy.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>There was only this little difficulty. The golden
+and glowing vision of the night, the announcing of
+the Great Romance, declined to be more specific.
+It had no hints to give, it seemed, as to plot; it
+still veiled the subject of this wonderful book in
+the dimmest, most religious obscurity. The paper
+and the pens were ready; but how to begin writing
+the first line? I had not the faintest notion, so I
+proceeded to write Prologues and Epilogues, with
+commentaries on the <i lang="la">magnum opus</i> which was not
+even begun. Two of these oddities survive, the
+Dedication to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, as
+the Patron of men of letters; a dreadful quip
+founded on the old saying about “dining with
+Duke Humphrey,” which meant that you had not
+had any dinner. This was worked out with all
+elaboration and with an attempt at the great
+manner of Bacon in his most magistral mood. It
+ran in this vein:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>Truly, then, do we poor folk (men of letters)
+owe what service we are able to pay Your Grace,
+who in spite of mean dress and poverty (justly
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32"></span>accounted by Mr. Hobbes for shame and dishonour)
+is pleased to entertain us at that board,
+where so great a multitude of our brotherhood
+has feasted before. For your illustrious line
+hath now for many generations made it a peculiar
+glory to supply the needs of lettered men; and
+as we sit at meat it seems (methinks) as if these
+mighty men of old did sit beside us and taste with
+us once more the mingled cup we drink. The ingenious
+author of Don Quixote de la Mancha
+must, I suppose, have often dined with the Duke
+of his age, Mr. Peter Corneille and Mr. Otway,
+Senhor Camoens, Rare Old Ben, Signori Tasso
+and Ariosto not seldom: while young Mr.
+Chatterton the poet did not only dine, but break
+his fast, take his morning draught, and sup with
+Your Grace’s great-grandfather, till at last he
+died of a mere repletion.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>There! Very solemn and portentous fun, indeed;
+but what is so solemn as a youngster of
+twenty-two? Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster
+Abbey seem gay and light and airy by comparison.
+<em>I</em> like it still, to be sure; but then I am
+prejudiced, and indeed, there is one sentence that
+still affects me; that phrase about “the mighty
+men of old” who seem “to sit beside us and taste
+with us once more the mingled cup we drink.” For
+in that sentence I see something of the spirit which
+sustained me, the cloudy young man, the dreamy
+and obscure and inarticulate young man, of those
+long-ago days, all through the fire and the darkness
+of poverty and loneliness and weariness and disillusion.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33"></span>Let us still, if you please, ride the high
+horse and be as magnificent as we can: I saw
+myself and, to be frank, I still see myself, as the
+youngest novice in a great and noble monastic
+house. The novice is by no means a promising
+member of the congregation, the Abbot and the
+Prior and the Master of the Novices have the
+gravest doubts as to his vocation: the other
+novices are inclined to indulge in remarks of a
+jocular and contemptuous kind. But the little,
+obscure and despised candidate for the triple cord
+sits in his low place at the board and looks at the
+pictures on the walls: on the faces where torment
+and exultation shine with twin fires: on Blessed
+Bernardus a Baculo, who was beaten to death by
+the Danes in the ninth century, on the Venerable
+Servant of God, Marcellinus, who was impaled by
+the Turk, on St. Eugenius de Compostella, who was
+shut by the Moors in a horrible dungeon of filth for
+forty years and at last his visage shone and gave
+light to the tormentors when they came to end him,
+on Venerable Raymondus Anglus, who was slowly
+sliced into little pieces in Cathay, on Blessed Gregory
+Perrot, whom the ministers of the Virgin Queen
+attended to at Tyburn in 1590: on all these
+brilliant successes of the convent does the little
+novice gaze with admiring wonder. Well he knows
+that his picture will never hang on the wall; still,
+and after all, he is a member of the congregation to
+which these, the lucky and happy, belonged; in a
+faint sort they are his brothers; they are <i lang="la">commensales,
+cohæredes, et sodales</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Very fine, indeed; but in the meantime I am
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34"></span>scratching with a somewhat hopeless pen under
+Clarendon Road gaslight, taking difficulties for
+solution to lonely places such as Perivale, to the unfrequented
+parts of Hampton Court; or else, by
+contrast, to the long black High Street of Brentford,
+with its creeks and backwaters of the river,
+where grass and flowers grow on the decks of derelict
+barges. I find no oracles to help me in any of
+these promising quarters; there are some very sad
+nights in the little room over the dry bread, tea
+and tobacco and the helpless pen. Finally, in a kind
+of despair, I begin something of which the first scene
+is to be laid in Gwent, which, later, is to have a
+voyage in it—there is a great voyage in Rabelais to
+the Oracle of the Holy Bottle. I read the first
+chapter. It is quite hopeless; and yet I do not
+give up hope; I resolve to try again.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>But all this time, while the Great Romance refused
+to move, my worldly affairs were moving fast,
+and decidedly in the way of destruction. I suppose,
+having finished the Catalogue, I had done all that
+the publisher wanted of me. At all events, the
+stream of employment, never auriferous to any
+great extent, dwindled and dried up. I had a little,
+a very little money in hand, I could not possibly call
+on those poor people at home for help; my landlady
+in Clarendon Road had a hard struggle of it,
+I fancy, and I would not cadge on her kindness, even
+though my board and lodging were far from being
+luxurious. It seemed to me that at the end of the
+week I must just walk out of 23 Clarendon Road
+and go on walking towards the West till I couldn’t
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35"></span>walk any longer. I admit that the plan was vague,
+as vague as the plot of the Great Romance, but I
+could think of no other. And in the meantime—I
+had three or four days before me—I would write
+the Epilogue for my book: which was not yet
+begun.</p>
+
+<p>I set about this task with the utmost relish and
+enjoyment. For once, I knew what to write about;
+that was my own position; not in a plain and
+literal manner, but after the fashion of a decorated
+fantasy. It would never do to say: “Here am I,
+a stupid lad who is not worth twopence to anybody,
+who thinks he can write and can hardly get half a
+dozen words to stagger on the paper; here am I
+going out to die in a ditch or to live in a ward of the
+workhouse”: that would never have served. I
+agree with Mr. Sampson Brass in holding that the
+truth is often highly unpleasant and inconvenient.
+Hence the Epilogue to the unwritten book, which
+survives in the written book, “The Chronicle of
+Clemendy,” a work which is neither great nor a
+romance, but which answers the description admirably
+in all other respects. And as the Dedication
+was made to Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, so the
+Epilogue is concerned with the same nobleman. So
+here we are:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>A few days ago His Grace did take me aside
+into his cabinet, and looking kindly upon me
+(though some call him a stern and awful noble)
+said: “Why, Master Leolinus, you look but
+sickly, poor gentleman, poor gentleman, I protest
+you’re but a shadow, do not your Abbreviatures
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36"></span>bring you in a goodly revenue?” (Note
+the elegant reference to my mysterious shorthand.)
+“Not so, Your Grace,” answered I, “to the
+present time I have abbreviated all in vain, and
+were it not for the hospitality of your table, I
+know not how I should win through.” “How
+goes it then with your Silurian Histories?”
+(The Great Romance.) ... “With them, may
+it please Your Grace, it fares excellently well, and
+this morning I have made an end of writing the
+First Journey, containing many agreeable histories
+and choice discourses.” “I believe indeed
+it will be a rare book, fit to read to the monks of
+Tintern while they dine. But yet I will have you
+lay it aside a little, since I have a good piece of
+preferment for you, an office (or I mistake you)
+altogether to your taste. What say you, Master
+Scholar, to the Lordship of an Island and no less
+an Island than Farre Joyaunce in the Western
+Seas? How stand you thitherwards? Will you
+take ship presently?” At hearing this, I was, as
+you may guess, half bewildered with sudden joy,
+that is apt to bring tears into the eyes of them
+that have toiled in many a weary struggle with
+adversity: I could but kneel and kiss His Grace’s
+hand, and say “My Lord.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Of course, the allusions to “First Journeys” and
+“Silurian Histories” were put in months later,
+when I had at length found out what my book was
+about; at the time, October, 1885, I had not
+written one word of it. So the Epilogue went on
+its mellifluous way, and thus ended:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_37"></span></p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>But here is my Paumier, with his parchments,
+to advise with me concerning a grant of Water
+Baylage to the Abbey of St. Michael, and also
+concerning the ceremonies observed in the island
+at Christmastide. He tells me that the voyage
+will surely be a rough and tempestuous one, but
+with the captain of the <i>Salutation</i> there need be
+no fear. And so farewell, till the anchor be
+dropped in the Sure Haven of Farre Joyaunce.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>And indeed, as I was writing the last page of the
+Epilogue, a letter came for me. I had written to
+Mr. Quaritch, stating my experience in cataloguing,
+and asking for employment. Mr. Quaritch wrote
+very civilly stating that he did not want any
+cataloguers, but people who knew how to sell books.
+And I wrote on to my final flourish, with all the
+more relish. “Ceremonies observed in the island
+at Christmastide,” indeed! Ceremonies observed
+at Reading Workhouse, more likely!</p>
+
+<p>But the next morning came a letter from Aunt
+Maria, that Maria who had walked with Anne to
+meet John on the white Caerleon road. My mother
+was dying; and they sent me the money for the
+fare, that I might come home.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_38"></span></p>
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="Chapter_III">
+    <i>Chapter <abbr title="Three">III</abbr></i>
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap">It</span> is a debatable point, I suppose, whether
+life, taking it all round, by and large, as Mr.
+Bixby said, is a horrible business. On the
+one hand, most of us are excessively sorry to
+quit this world, so, clearly, there must be something
+to be said for it. But, on the other hand, how endless
+are the devices which we find to give a seasoning
+to a dish which is, perhaps, rather insipid than
+nauseous. I have eaten cold mutton with relish—after
+smothering it in about half a dozen different
+condiments, sauces, relishes and salads. So look at
+all the games we play with desperate earnestness,
+with a vigour and delight and, sometimes, an
+asceticism which we give to no office routine or
+serious employment of our lives. Perhaps we may
+try and define what “life” means a little later;
+but, under all ordinary and respectable conventions,
+I presume that the business of which I have been
+dimly aware on this day of writing can in no wise
+be classed as one of the serious employments of life;
+as, in any sense, a vital part of life according to
+accepted doctrine, religious, scientific or philosophical.
+The business of which, I say, I have been
+dimly aware; for all I have seen of it has been
+Grove Road, Grove End Road, and Circus Road
+and all the roads adjacent lined on both sides with
+motor cars of all sizes, splendours and miseries; the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39"></span>affair being the last day of the Oxford and Cambridge
+Cricket Match. And, looking at all this
+fairly, it comes to this: here are two wickets placed
+at a certain specified distance from one another on
+a stretch of turf, and here are men with bats and
+here are men with balls. Will the men with balls
+succeed in hitting the wickets, or will the men with
+bats succeed in hitting those balls away to remote
+parts of the turf? And on the whole: are the
+eleven young men of Oxford or the eleven young
+men of Cambridge the smarter and more skilled at
+these pursuits and in the subsidiary pursuit called
+“fielding,” or the art of stopping the ball which
+the man has hit with the bat from going to a remote
+part of the stretch of turf? That, in the very
+rough, is cricket; and I want to ask the clergy (if
+they have any time to spare from their self-appointed
+tasks of meddling in politics, “disapproving”
+of bookstall novels, and serving tables)
+what they honestly think Saint Paul would have
+said, if he had seen twenty-two of his most promising
+young converts engaged in this cricket
+business, applauded by a vast multitude of the
+saints? I desire to put this question not with a wish
+to “score”—to use an idiom of the game which
+we are discussing—but with an honest longing for
+information. That is: will theologians maintain
+that the ’Varsity Match and First Class County
+Cricket generally is a part of serious life, or a serious
+part of life? Or, will the scientific people or the
+philosophical people declare that this game, played
+as it is played at Lord’s with desperate earnestness,
+is a necessary part of the bodily and mental well-being
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40"></span>of the human race? I say the game as played
+at Lord’s, that is the great game; for the case of
+the old-fashioned, village cricket on the green was
+somewhat different. Then you had a number of
+people with two or three hours of leisure before
+them who found a good deal of fun and relaxation
+and amusement in bowling balls and hitting balls
+and running after balls, with intervals of supping
+of ale, sitting on the bench under the shady tree in
+front of the village inn; this is a very different
+matter from the high cricket of our times, just as
+diverting yourself with a ball, a racket and a net is
+remote from Mdlle. Lenglen’s game at lawn tennis.</p>
+
+<p>And these are the comparatively mild forms of
+sport. What of rowing till you are blue in the face,
+what of climbing frightful mountain-peaks, with
+half an inch of rock between you and a fall of a
+thousand feet? Why do people do all these things,
+voluntarily, gladly, enthusiastically? I can only
+suppose that they do these things to make life tolerable,
+even entertaining, just as I add tomato sauce,
+Worcester sauce, pickles, beetroot, cucumber and
+salad to the cold mutton, to make <em>that</em> tolerable and
+even appetising. It would seem indeed that life
+must be an awful business, if you have to plaster
+yourself on the walls of a sheer Alp before you can
+endure it. This is “drowning” your cold mutton
+in strong sauce with a vengeance.</p>
+
+<p>And all this by way of a tentative explanation of
+why I ever wrote anything at all, and still more why
+I have gone on writing, with brief remissions, ever
+since the autumn of 1880. This problem, as I have
+hinted already, is a profound mystery. For, taking
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41"></span>first the plain view of the man in the street, and
+applying his plain and simple test, I have just been
+running through a list of my books from 1881 to
+1922, and reckoning—it was an easy task—how much
+money I have made by them. The list contains
+eighteen titles. Of these, the “Heptameron,”
+“Fantastic Tales,” “Casanova” represent more or
+less laborious translations—“Casanova” runs to
+twelve sizeable volumes. And my total receipts
+for these eighteen volumes, for these forty-two
+years of toil, amount to the sum of six hundred
+and thirty-five pounds. That is, I have been paid
+at the rate of fifteen pounds and a few shillings
+per annum. It seems clear, then, that my literary
+activities cannot be adequately accounted for on
+the hypothesis of mere greed and money-grubbing.</p>
+
+<p>And, then, taking another side of the question:
+consider the debit of toil and endeavour and mortification
+and disappointment that these forty-two
+years of book-writing have cost me. I believe that
+business men, engaged in manufacture, always
+“write off” a considerable sum for legitimate wear
+and tear and depreciation of plant. What about
+the wear and tear of mind and heart and that
+T,e,a,r, which is pronounced in another manner;
+what about the depreciation of the plant—a highly
+important one—of self-confidence that my writing
+has inflicted on me? I have described some of the
+pains I endured when I set out to write the thing
+which afterwards became the “Chronicle of
+Clemendy,” and that was only the beginning of
+months of hard and agonizing labour. And then I
+remember another occasion. The “idea” which
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42"></span>turned into “The Great God Pan” came to me;
+again that delicious glow of delight. Now at last
+I had got hold of a real notion; I had a curious
+tale, a rare fantasy set in a rarer atmosphere to
+work upon: I thrilled at my heart as the explorer
+must thrill as he comes suddenly to the verge of the
+dark forest, or to the summit of the high mountain
+and sees before him a new and wonderful and undiscovered
+land. Well I remember how all this
+exquisite bliss was bestowed on me, one dark and
+foggy afternoon of 1890–91, in rooms in Guilford
+Street, not far from “The Foundling.” The foul
+air shone bright, the dingy street, the dingy room
+were irradiated: here was happiness almost too
+keen to be endured. With no delay I got notebook
+and pencil and proceeded to “lay out” the story;
+that is, to set down the various scenes and incidents
+by which the plot was to be developed. Afterwards;
+the writing, and on the whole I was not
+altogether so ill-contented—though I daresay that
+I ought to have been disgusted—till it came to the
+last chapter. And that simply would not be
+written. I tried again and again; it was impossible.
+I could hit on no incident that would convey
+the required emotion; and at last I put away the
+uncompleted MS. in despair; I was within an ace
+of tearing it to bits. But think of the suffering, the
+misery, the bitter disappointment of those evenings.
+True it was all a silly thing, a toy; but an authority
+quoted in “The Water Babies” says that one of
+the saddest sights in the world is a child crying over
+a broken toy. My scheme was all silly, I allow;
+but I had set my heart on it, I had glowed with
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43"></span>pride over it: and here it was all broken to pieces
+in my hands, a sorry, spoilt, piteous thing. True,
+I found some sort of an ending six months later;
+but that was not the same. There was no fun in
+that. You remember the party in the cabrioily
+that called on Mrs. Bardell? There was a dispute
+about the precise situation of Mrs. Bardell’s house,
+and finally the driver, who had dismounted, led the
+horse by the bridle to the house with the red door.</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>Here was a mean and low way of arriving at a
+friend’s house! No dashing up with all the fire
+and fury of the animal; no jumping down of the
+driver; no loud knocking at the door; no opening
+of the apron with a crash at the very last
+moment.... The whole edge of the thing had
+been taken off; it was flatter than walking.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>So with me and my story: I got to the house with
+the red door eventually; but the whole edge of
+the thing had been taken off. And so it has been
+with most of my books; I get, somehow or other,
+to the house with the red door, or to a house which
+I try to persuade myself is just as good; but on the
+way in the cabrioily I have suffered so many disappointments
+that I am in no condition to enjoy
+the pleasure of Mrs. Bardell’s society. I remember
+that, in writing “The Hill of Dreams,” I sat down
+every night for three weeks with blank paper before
+me, trying to get the second chapter. On some
+nights I wrote half a dozen lines, on other nights a
+couple of pages—before the evening’s work went,
+hopeless, into the drawer. A few months later,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44"></span>having fallen on the wrong path, I had the pleasure
+of casting aside about 30,000 words that I had
+written; and by the time the book was at last
+ended there were two neat piles of MS. in my
+drawer; the one a little higher than the other.
+The bigger pile consisted of the folios that I had
+written and had been forced to reject. And think
+of what that means: a heartbreak to every other
+page and the comment of the author on himself
+and to himself: “You fool! Why do you pass your
+life in rending your heart, in trying to do the thing
+that you can’t do? Why weren’t you brought up
+to sit by a brazier in the streets, to see that nobody
+steals the planks and railings and the wood pavement:
+to do something that with an effort you
+might be able to do?” Or, to return to our
+former metaphor: “Don’t you see that you
+haven’t the knack of the toy maker? Then why
+will you persist in trying to make toys which always
+break in your hands, while you fill the air with
+lamentable boohoos?”</p>
+
+<p>And yet, as I have said, such has been my employment,
+with intermissions, from 1880 to 1922. It
+was like that in 1885–86. Night after night, when
+my father had knocked out his last pipe at eleven
+o’clock, did I draw out my papers from the table-drawer
+and set them under the lamp. Winds came
+from the mountain of the west and shook the trees
+about the house and sighed and wailed; snows
+came from the mountains of the north and
+whitened the terraced lawn, black clouds drifted
+over Wentwood, the winter rains scourged the
+land; and still I wrote on in the silent house;
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45"></span>struggling against the bitter conviction of my incapacity,
+as a man struggles and claws at the
+crumbling earth when his foot has slipped and he
+is over the edge of the cliff. Yet, stubborn, I wrote
+on late into the night, far into the morning, and as
+the year advanced I often drew the heavy crimson
+curtain and looked out after I had put away my
+papers in the drawer, and saw a red or golden dawn
+streaming above the forest in the east. And as to
+the work itself? Let us not enquire too curiously;
+though I have always been proud of my parody of
+the terms of an ancient writ. <i lang="la">Diem clausit extremum</i>,
+he has ended his last day, was the title of the writ,
+which is moved now and then even in these days:
+my writ was called <i lang="la">Cyathum hausit extremum</i>: he
+has drained his last cup. And then there is the
+<i lang="la">merum et mixtum cervisium</i>, and the Charter of
+<i lang="la">Terra Sabulosa</i> or Sandy Soil, and the offices of
+Tankard Marshal and <i lang="la">Clericus Spigotti</i>, or Clerk
+of the Spigot; all choice jests—to adopt the
+manner of the work in question. But, as I say, let
+us not enquire too curiously into the merits of
+“The Chronicle of Clemendy.” I am content to
+abide by the verdict of M. Octave Uzanne, who is
+held, I believe, to be a good judge of letters. He
+said that it was “le renouveau de la Renaissance,”
+and that I was sure of my place beside Rabelais and
+Boccaccio, on the serene, immortal seats. I am
+surrendering my judgment wholly to that of
+M. Octave Uzanne.</p>
+
+<p>By the way; I do not know how it was, but the
+only copy sent out for review was addressed to
+“Le Livre,” which was then edited by M. Uzanne.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46"></span>Somehow, no review copies found their way to the
+English papers. But the MS. had been shown to a
+pushing young literary gentleman, and he said that
+if it were properly “cut” it might make a good
+Christmas book for boys.</p>
+
+<p>And then, again, the question returns: why did
+I compel myself to undergo all the toil and misery
+and disappointment that the writing of this
+“Chronicle of Clemendy” involved? It was my
+own choice, nobody stood over me with a stick to
+force me to do it. Why? Why do men row themselves
+into blueness and incipient heart disease at
+Henley and Putney? Why do men expose themselves
+to horrors, miseries and the instant risk of
+death on all the most desperate mountains of the
+world? The answer is the same in all these cases:
+that cold mutton (or life) is in itself intolerable;
+that <i lang="fr">Le Gigot de Mouton froid, sauce Cyanide de
+Potasse</i> is better than the same dish <i lang="fr">nature</i>.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>And, going further, the reason of this odd state
+of things is plain enough. The fact is, that what
+we commonly call life is not life at all. All the
+things that are considered serious, important and
+vital: the faithful earning of a living, the going to
+the City every morning to copy letters, keep accounts
+or float companies; the toils of the Chancery
+barrister, of the factory hand, of the doctor, of the
+shop-keeper, of the mining engineer, the affairs of
+all the serious and necessary employments of life;
+these things are not life at all. They are the curse
+of life, or, as it is sometimes called, the curse of
+Adam; as the theologians might have told us if
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47"></span>they had not been too busy over the “curse of
+alcohol,” over the dubious moral influence of “the
+pictures,” over the decidedly frivolous character of
+the lighter fiction of the day, and the demoralising
+effects of putting a bob on the winner—this dreadful
+offence, I believe, is held to “harden the heart”
+more quickly and thoroughly than any other
+method. But this curse of getting a livelihood remains
+profoundly unnatural to man, in spite of his
+long experience of it: hence his frantic efforts to
+escape from what he erroneously calls life by running
+himself red in the face at Lord’s, by rowing
+himself blue in the face at Henley, by drinking
+methylated spirit, by “putting on” those criminal
+bobs, by playing mind-torturing games like chess,
+by knocking small balls into small holes, by climbing
+Alps—and even by writing books. He will do
+anything to get away from what are called the
+serious facts of life and follow any track however
+desperate, trivial, perilous, or painful, if only those
+serious facts can be evaded and forgotten, though
+it be but for a few hours. And so I wrote on, night
+after night, till the August of 1886 saw my task
+ended; and I immediately began to think of what
+I could write next.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_48"></span></p>
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="Chapter_IV">
+    <i>Chapter <abbr title="Four">IV</abbr></i>
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap">I have</span> just been trying to reckon up the
+various quarters which I have occupied in
+my forty-two years on-and-off life in London.
+When I first came up to town in 1880—the
+year when the play was the thing—I stayed at
+Wandsworth in an old Georgian house near the
+ugly Georgian church. I looked for it a few years
+ago, but I could not find it; I suspect that shops
+now flourish on its site and on the site of its grave
+old garden. Then, in 1881–82 I was domiciled in
+a house fronting Turnham Green; here, too, were
+ample lawns and gardens which, for all I know, may
+remain still. Clarendon Road, as I have mentioned
+once or twice, entertained me in ’83, ’84, and again
+in ’85, and when I returned to London at the beginning
+of ’87 I lodged for a time in Upper Bedford
+Place, Russell Square. This place I left for an
+amusing reason. I had been out rather late. The
+festivity was not furious; simply a little and most
+informal dance given by Mrs. Augusta Webster, in
+those days an admired poetess; and I suppose that
+it was half-past one when I got home from Hammersmith.
+I was moving softly up the stairs, and
+was a good deal puzzled to hear the clanking noise
+of metal on metal, as I passed the door of the first-floor
+bedroom. However, I supposed that somebody
+was ill and that the fire was being kept up.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49"></span>But the next morning, the landlady addressed me
+gravely. She said that Mr. and Mrs. Sogden had
+been very much alarmed by hearing footsteps in
+the middle of the night, and had made preparations
+for receiving burglars; and on the whole the landlady
+thought that I should be much more comfortable
+at her sister’s in Great Russell Street, where
+no ladies were taken and things “were more
+Bohemian.” And, indeed, she was quite right. The
+garret—a real garret, with a sloping roof and a
+dormer window—looked out on Dyott Street, the
+last remnant of the old rookery of St. Giles; the
+house was late seventeenth century or quite early
+eighteenth, and the room, with tea and bread and
+butter breakfast included, only cost ten-and-six a
+week. Later in the year, I moved across the street
+and lived for a while over a stained-glass business;
+then I crossed again and lived over a tailor’s shop.
+January, 1890, found me in two rooms in Soho
+Street—undoubted seventeenth century, panelled,
+with beautifully deep wooden cornices. And here
+took place the battle of the fleas.</p>
+
+<p>I had moved in, as I say, early in the year, in
+cold weather. The rooms seemed quite all right,
+and the black tom cat of the premises was a remarkable
+and consistent character whom it was a privilege
+to know. His daily plan of dining with every
+one in the house, from his own family in the
+basement to the people in the attics, finally welcoming
+the cat’s-meat man with loud shrieks,
+shewed, I thought, Mind. And, as I say, the cornice;
+well, I wish that I had been draughtsman
+enough to draw a section of it. Well, everything
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50"></span>was as pleasant as it could be; and there, at the
+door, was all Soho to explore and investigate, and
+I suppose I need not say that Soho offered then,
+and still offers, I am glad to note, a large and
+curious field wherein the contemplative mind loves
+to expatiate.</p>
+
+<p>Very well; but the weather got warmer: and
+the fleas appeared. At first as single spies; and
+then in battalions. They swarmed everywhere.
+They made life hideous and intolerable. I did not
+see what was to be done. My furniture, such as
+it was, occupied the rooms; it would be highly
+inconvenient for me to move. The advertised
+specifics were useless. I isolated a flea—they were
+fair, large fleas—with a little of the powder, under
+a wine glass and watched his behaviour. He seemed
+happy, though perhaps a little torpid; he reminded
+me of a stout, red-faced old gentleman who has had
+two or three glasses of “hot Scotch,” and is inclined
+to fall asleep by the tavern fire. Clearly, such
+mild measures were useless against the busy multitudes
+which swarmed all over my rooms. Then,
+I had a notion, a much more brilliant notion than
+anything that I have known in the region of literature.
+I have an odd and random vein of practicality
+within me, and it came out in the Soho Street
+emergency. I took a large sheet of newspaper and
+brushed it over with treacle and laid it on the bedroom
+floor and waited for an hour or two. At the
+end of that time, a dozen or so of fleas were sticking
+fast to the treacle. I experienced the happy glow
+of the inventor; and now there was no dismal reaction.
+By the evening, there were at least six
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51"></span>dozen fleas captured and out of action. I thought
+I might say, Eureka.</p>
+
+<p>But then there came a difficulty. I discovered a
+certain property in treacle, which, so far as I know,
+is not recorded in scientific text-books. The matter
+of the work—to use the term of alchemy—was, I
+found, susceptible to weather. In certain states of
+the atmosphere, in place of being sticky, it became
+crystalline and as hard as glass. I do not know
+whether this interesting property of treacle can be
+utilised for forecasting purposes. But this hardness
+rendered it useless for my immediate end. The
+large, fair fleas hopped on to the trap and hopped
+away. I surveyed the problem anew. Again the
+flash akin to genius. I thought of fly-papers and
+bought half a dozen. The battle was over in a few
+weeks. I kept a careful daily account, and in a
+month, or perhaps five weeks, I had captured over
+three thousand fleas. And I had purged the first
+floor of 12 Soho Street utterly of all the race. I
+recollect well one night’s bag. I had been to see
+“A Pair of Spectacles” at the Garrick, and when
+I came home I found I had got 120 fine fleas.</p>
+
+<p>And then, having won this notable victory, a
+very odd distaste for London came upon me. I
+am not joking; the sentiment had nothing to do
+with the insects whom I had defeated; but, somehow,
+London sickened me. Its faint, hot summer
+airs were an oppression, its swarming streets a
+tribulation; I thought of cold wells in the hills
+and running brooks and the breath of the wood and
+the mountain in the early morning—and I resolved
+to be a countryman again. So I took a cottage
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52"></span>high up on the Chiltern Hills, and while certain
+alterations were being made, I left for Tours,
+Touraine, France.</p>
+
+<p>The Rabelaisian enthusiasm was still upon me. I
+had just issued a translation (called “Fantastic
+Tales”) of that extraordinary and enigmatic book,
+“Le Moyen de Parvenir,” by Beroalde de Verville,
+who was a canon of Tours Cathedral. So to Touraine
+I went; to see the land of Rabelais, of Beroalde,
+of Balzac. And the odd thing is, that my
+first Sunday afternoon in Tours—I got there on a
+Saturday—was a severe disappointment. The fact
+was that I had taken Doré’s wonderful illustrations
+to the “Contes Drolatiques” for granted. I supposed
+that the enchanted heights, the profound
+and sombre valleys, the airy abysses of these amazing
+plates represented, with a little exaggeration, perhaps,
+the veritable scenery of Touraine. You
+remember the picture showing how that sinful
+little page climbed the heights of Marmoutiers to
+confess his sin to the Abbot? Well, that Sunday
+afternoon, early in September, 1890, I set out from
+the Faisan, in the Rue Royale, to see the tremendous
+ascent of Marmoutiers. I crossed the bridge over
+the Loire, most of it sand with a swift stream here
+and there, and arrived at Portillon, where the conductor
+of the steam tram was calling out “Marmoutiers,
+Rochecorbon, Vouvray” in a melodious
+chant. But I walked along the road to Marmoutiers.
+Alas! there were no terrific heights, as
+in the picture. Imagine something like the high
+ground near the river at Henley; nothing higher,
+nothing as high. Instead of the dark green woods
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53"></span>of Henley, golden rocks and golden earth shining in
+a very happy sun; little villas, larger villas, everywhere
+with gardens that were gardens indeed.
+Green walled closes, with rich green lawns; fountains
+in the midst of them, flowering shrubs and
+flowery creepers blossoming and trailing everywhere;
+kitchen gardens where the peaches glowed
+and burned dark against the hot white walls, where
+the pears on the dwarf trees were as shapes of
+golden honey: at last the old <i lang="fr">clôture</i> of the Abbey
+of Marmoutiers with pepper-pot turrets at intervals,
+close to the road, and inside the enclosure, the
+modern buildings of a convent school: and the
+mellow, river cliff behind all. It was delightful;
+but it was not a bit like Doré. I confess, my heart
+sank. And then going on by the river road, I got
+to Rochecorbon. Still the warm cliff overhung the
+road, underneath it a small hamlet with a tavern,
+“A la Lanterne de Rochecorbon,” and perched on
+the edge of the cliff the Lantern, an odd structure
+which looked something like an ancient factory
+chimney, and was, I suppose, the sole relic of the
+ancient castle celebrated by Balzac. It took me
+some time before I could get Dora’s Touraine out
+of my mind and enjoy the Touraine of actuality on
+its own merits. And these are many. There were
+great moments on this first visit to the garden of
+France.</p>
+
+<p>I was staying at the Faisan in the Rue Royale—that
+street which Balzac, who was born in it, praises
+as being “always royal, always imperial,” which in
+these later days has taken to calling itself the Rue
+Nationale—a delicious inn indeed. I got the recommendation
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54"></span>from Thackeray. Philip stayed there
+once. He calls it the “Faisan d’Or.” It had three
+courtyards, or rather a courtyard and two gardens,
+both closed in by the hotel walls. You entered the
+courtyard under the archway in the Rue Royale;
+to the left was the dining-room hung with tapestries
+depicting in an ancient mode the famous castles of
+Touraine; on the right was the kitchen, all bright
+with glowing copper pots, and the big round cook
+standing at the open door or bending over his furnace,
+occasionally shaking one of his pots knowingly
+and beaming on you as you sat at your little table in
+the courtyard as much as to say: “You will find
+it good.” Around this great man were four or five
+boys, all in white like their chief, who seemed to be
+busy all day long in washing vegetables, in chopping
+meat and herbs fine for <i lang="fr">farses</i>, in manifold culinary
+employments, running out now and again and shaking
+showers from bags full of wet lettuce or endive
+leaves. At the back were the stables, and on market
+days the yard of the Faisan was full, like an English
+inn yard, of all manner of queer traps and shandridans
+from the country. And beyond this courtyard,
+at the back of the house, were the two gardens,
+secret, retired and delicious. Such green turf was
+there in these chosen places, so pleasant a music in
+one of them of a singing fountain, so glowing the
+flowers about it with the water drops glittering on
+them, so sweet the shade of overhanging boughs—there
+are here and there gardens that address the
+heart and spirit and not the florist, as Poe knew well.</p>
+
+<p>And thinking of the Faisan at Tours and of its
+curious delights, how is it that much money—one
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55"></span>may say the wealth of the whole world—cannot buy
+anything like this in London? Money will get you
+a set of rooms thirty feet or so in height from floor
+to ceiling, it will buy you the use of suites of furniture
+that make you wonder when you wake up in
+the morning whether by any chance you can have
+turned into Louis XV in your sleep; it will buy
+you bathrooms all marble and tessellated pavement,
+dining-rooms as marblous and Louisquinzious as
+your private suites; but delights such as are
+afforded by the Faisan at Tours it will by no means
+buy. It is a pity; at least I think so. But then I
+can never fancy that I am Louis XV even for a
+moment, and that, I suppose, is the reason why I
+don’t like living in the style of that monarch, why
+I don’t even like lunching or dining in palatial halls
+built and furnished in his favourite manner. And
+I doubt whether the grandest of all grand hotels in
+our London could furnish you with a bottle of
+Vouvray Nature of a named <i lang="fr">clos</i>, for any money
+that your millionaire’s purse could proffer.</p>
+
+<p>And the mention of that admirable amber wine
+of Vouvray, the wine wherein an argent bead rises
+at intervals through the mellow gold, reminds me of
+my first night at the Faisan. All down the tables
+were portly decanters of wine, red and white. I
+chose red, and found it a new sensation in wine
+vastly to my taste. It was, of course, an ordinary
+wine, and a little wine, I think of the kind called
+Joué Noble, from the place of its growth, a parish
+by the Cher river. It was scented like flowers in
+June; it was in its entirely unpretending way quite
+exquisite. I drank it with relish, and towards the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56"></span>end of dinner I had accounted for about three-parts
+of the decanter. Swiftly came the head waiter and
+bore it away and as swiftly put another and a full
+decanter in its place. It was almost too much;
+“temperance” enthusiasts would say a great deal
+too much. I thought solemnly to myself as I
+smoked a grateful pipe after dinner in the courtyard:
+“This night I have had as much good red
+wine as ever I could drink.” And this was one of
+the great moments of my visit to Touraine.</p>
+
+<p>And then there was Chinon. The train passes
+through the deep darkness of Chinon Forest, and
+you leave the station and come out into the sunlight.
+Here is a narrow river valley: the clear
+Vienne in the middle of it; to the left a gently
+rising land, rich with vines; to the right a long,
+golden, precipitous cliff, golden in such a sunlight
+as we never see in England. As in the backgrounds
+of the old Italian masters, the trees stand out
+clearly, vividly, distinctly against the sky; so was
+it at Chinon. That long, mouldering and golden
+cliff was surmounted by the walls of the old castle,
+golden and mouldering also, irradiated; and from
+the river to the cliff the town climbed up; narrow
+ways, winding ways, steep ways, and every here and
+there the grey-blue <i lang="fr">tourelles</i> of the fifteenth-century
+houses piercing upwards; and the dark mass
+of the forest stretching far and far away beyond.
+And then the thought that the man who had received
+one of the great visions of reality once walked
+these ways, and looked on a scene that had not
+much changed since his time; that the golden and
+rich sunlight had shone on him also, in the hour
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57"></span>when the amazing, terrible, tremendous figures and
+symbols of the vision of Pantagruel, Panurge, Friar
+John, the three who are yet one came to him, we
+must conjecture, in clouds and darkness and uncertainties,
+as he listened to the new song of the vineyards,
+and the vine and the outpoured wine: all
+this was made a great moment also. I sat on a sort
+of bridge—if I remember—joining the two parts of
+the ruined castle, sat on golden stones, and looked
+down on the Chinon of the grey-blue <i lang="fr">tourelles</i>, on
+the shining Vienne, and the gentle vine-covered
+slope, and I thought of the cloudy young man
+stumbling over that hard French of Rabelais far
+into the night, in obscure Clarendon Road, long
+ago. It was not long ago; this was of ’90 and that
+was of ’85, but hard pains make long years. I went
+down the hill again, past the fountain, and drank
+the red wine of Chinon solemnly, reverently in a
+dark tavern in one of the dark, narrow streets. It
+was called “Le Caveau de Rabelais.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>I came back to London in the autumn and took
+rooms in Guilford Street till that cottage on the
+Chilterns should be ready for occupation. Then
+from 1891 I lived in the country, and found it
+nothing, and came back to London in the autumn
+of 1893, to an “upper part” in Great Russell Street,
+a little westward of the British Museum. It was
+then that I began to explore London, and to realise
+its vastness, its immensities. Things are relative;
+I began now to appreciate the fact that if you set
+out, without a map, from your house at 36 Great
+Russell Street and walk for an hour eastward or
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58"></span>northward you are in fact in an unknown region, a
+new world. Continually you stand on a peak in
+Darien, and look out on undiscovered territories,
+inhabited by peoples of whom you know nothing.
+I would go along Great Russell Street, and turn
+up into Russell Square, and then go by Guilford
+Street, crossing Gray’s Inn Road, and so find myself,
+like the knight in the song, “ten leagues beyond
+the wide world’s end.” I would go northward, up
+the Gray’s Inn Road, and then turn to the right,
+descend into a valley and climb a height and so
+come to a region which was to me as the ultimate
+parts of Libya, and the lands of the Mountains of
+the Moon. I shall never forget the awe with which
+I first came upon the other Baker Street, the Baker
+Street which would enter no taxi-driver’s mind;
+those houses climbing up the hill into Lloyd Square,
+stucco houses with classic pediments, but all tottering,
+askew, and falling into decay; the jerry building
+of 1820–30. And, I remember, seeing on one
+of the leaning and doubtful doors here the brass
+plate of someone who said that he was a “Buhl
+Maker.” I wonder. Did someone really labour in
+this forsaken, climbing street in that rich eighteenth-century
+art of brass and tortoiseshell, fashioning
+curious cabinets and escritoires! How unlikely it
+seemed; more unlikely than another announcement
+on a modest door in the recesses of Camden
+Town, to the effect that here were made Shell
+Boxes.</p>
+
+<p>Often I went up Baker Street and stood in Lloyd’s
+Square and looked down on London, on Gilbert
+Scott’s horrible, villainous sham-Gothic St. Pancras
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59"></span>Station and on all the vague, smoky, weary streets
+about it. Here, one evening, the sun flamed suddenly
+and struck the windows of a school below and
+lit fires in them: hence the lines—in “A Fragment
+of Life”—entitled: “Lines written on looking
+down from a Height in London on a Board School
+suddenly lit up by the sun.”</p>
+
+<p>And here I would say that the matter of Wonder—that
+is the matter of the arts—is everywhere
+offered to us. It is, I am sure, true, as the feeble
+though pious Keble wrote, that:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">The daily round, the common task</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Will furnish all we need to ask.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>And it is utterly true that he who cannot find
+wonder, mystery, awe, the sense of a new world
+and an undiscovered realm in the places by the
+Gray’s Inn Road will never find those secrets elsewhere,
+not in the heart of Africa, not in the fabled
+hidden cities of Tibet. “The matter of our work
+is everywhere present,” wrote the old alchemists,
+and that is the truth. All the wonders lie within a
+stone’s-throw of King’s Cross Station.</p>
+
+<p>I remember that when, later on, I wrote a book
+on the principles of literary criticism called “Hieroglyphics,”
+a good many of the reviewers found
+grave fault with my dictum that all fine literature
+is the work of ecstasy and the inspirer of ecstasy.
+“In other words,” said these clever fellows, “a
+good book is a book that you happen to like. But
+other people may have very different tastes and
+likings; no doubt many people experience ecstasy
+in reading a newspaper feuilleton. Is the feuilleton
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60"></span>therefore fine literature?” The objection, I
+hasten to say, is perfectly legitimate. Tens of
+thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people, I
+have no doubt, read the newspaper feuilleton in an
+ecstasy of delight. I once found myself, to my
+dumb, almost awestruck horror, in a drawing-room
+where a number of tolerably well-educated people
+were engaged in taking the works of ... well, Miss
+Thingumbob, seriously. Doubtless, then, there are
+many people who find rarities and wonders in matter
+that you and I pronounce to be contemptible or
+detestable or just nothing at all: my reviewers were
+perfectly right. But if you accept their ruling you
+put an end to criticism of all sorts. I could form
+a large company of coalheavers, financiers, sporting
+noblemen, gardeners, journalists, ladies of quality,
+actors, scavengers—I was going to add bishops, but
+they rarely speak the honest truth—and myself who
+had very much rather not see the famous Primavera
+and the famous Monna Lisa Gioconda than see
+them, who had rather—again I include myself—listen
+to George Robey’s songs and gags and wheezes
+than to “Hamlet.” But what does that prove?
+Simply, I suppose, that so far as the pictures and
+the play are concerned my friends and myself
+cannot rise to these particular heights. As an old
+friend of mine once observed very well, “We all
+of us have some windows that are darkened.” My
+friend is a musician, and remembering his maxim,
+I was much diverted one day by hearing him speak
+with easy contempt of the composer of “Acis and
+Galatea.” But it is true that each one of us has
+some darkened windows: Oscar Wilde confessed
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61"></span>to me once, with shame be it said, that he thought
+absinthe a detestable drink. But no inference can
+be drawn from this undoubted fact. It always
+stirs in me a certain feeling of impatience when I
+see the solemn correspondence, the more solemn
+leading articles under the dread heading, “What
+is Wrong with the Church?” It is alleged, I am
+sure with complete truth, that a great many people
+do not go to church; and the conclusion is drawn
+that the Church must be very gravely at fault.
+Now this may be true also—I think it is—but it is
+a conclusion not to be deduced from the minor
+premiss, the sole premiss stated. Scholastic logic,
+the only logic that is worth twopence, the “new
+logic” being, as an Oxford graduate once very
+sensibly observed to me, merely “nonsense about
+things,” is now unfashionable, so, I suppose I shall
+be thought somewhat boorish for exhibiting the
+newspaper syllogism at full length, supplying the
+suppressed major. But here it is:</p>
+
+<p>That which is unpopular is worthless.</p>
+
+<p>The Church is unpopular.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, the Church is worthless. In other
+words, as one of the ladies in the cabrioily—to which
+I have already alluded—observed: “Most Votes
+carries the day.” Very well; but how does the
+attendance on the pictures in the National Gallery
+compare with the attendance at “the pictures”?
+And shall we try the experiment of “knocking” the
+music-halls, the revue houses and the musical
+comedy houses by running Bach’s Organ and
+Clavier Fugues at popular prices? Perhaps the
+purse of Rockefeller might survive the experiment;
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62"></span>certainly no other purse would hold anything
+after a year of it. Mr. Walkley of “The Times”
+proposes to solve the difficulty of criticism by
+making the critic address himself to ὁ χαρίεις, the
+well-graced and accomplished man. But who is
+he? Each one of us is a good judge—in his own
+judgment. And technical instruction is nothing.
+No one in his senses would seek anything vital as to
+Greek or Latin poetry from a classical don at Oxford
+or Cambridge. Keats, poor, shabby John, who had
+only been to a commercial academy, knew more
+about Greek poetry than a wilderness of classical
+tutors.</p>
+
+<p>But, I was going to say, all these considerations
+apply to the known and recognised arts, to literature,
+music, painting, architecture. In all these I
+am willing to admit I may be hopelessly wrong—I
+have said that I had much rather hear Robey than
+“Hamlet”—but I will listen to no objections or
+criticisms as to the Ars Magna of London, of which
+I claim to be the inventor, the professor and the
+whole school. Here I am artist and judge at once,
+and possess the whole matter of the art within myself.
+For, let it be quite clearly understood, the
+Great Art of London has nothing to do with any
+map or guide-book or antiquarian knowledge,
+admirable as these are; and indeed Peter Cunningham’s
+“London” is to me one of the choicest of
+books. But the Great Art is a matter of quite
+another sphere; and as to maps, for example, if
+known they must be forgotten. How would the
+Odyssey have read, do you imagine, if Ulysses had
+been furnished with Admiralty Charts, giving the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63"></span>soundings in fathoms, even to the exact depth of
+water in the harbourage of Calypso’s isle? And
+all historical associations; they too must be laid
+aside. Mr. Pickwick at Bury St. Edmunds has
+nothing to do with the history of the famous abbey.
+Of all this the follower of the London Art must
+purge himself when he sets out on his adventures.
+For the essence of this art is that it must be an
+adventure into the unknown, and perhaps it may
+be found that this, at last, is the matter of all the
+arts.</p>
+
+<p>And it was this art of London that I followed,
+while I lived in Great Russell Street between ’93
+and ’95, and still more earnestly afterwards when
+I was living at Verulam Buildings, Gray’s Inn.
+Sometimes I took a friend with me on my journeys,
+but not often. The secret of it all was hidden from
+them, and they were apt to become violent. On
+one grey day that I remember I had personally conducted
+a man on a most interesting exploration of
+the obscurer by-ways of Islington. He grew silent
+as the streets grew greyer and the squares dimmer
+and the remoteness of the whole region from any
+conceivable London that he knew filtered through
+his soul. His London was Piccadilly, the Haymarket,
+St. James’s, and the many polite neighbourhoods
+where there are flats and calls are paid
+and tea is taken and literary and theatrical and
+artistic circles meet and gather. But this London
+that was a grey wilderness, these streets that went
+to the beyond and beyond, these squares which
+nobody that my friend could ever have known could
+ever inhabit: it was all too much for him. His
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64"></span>face darkened with terror and hate, and with a
+poisonous glance at me he struck his golden-headed
+cane violently on the pavement, and stopping dead,
+exclaimed: “I wish to God I could see a hansom!”</p>
+
+<p>So, of course, I never took him to Barnsbury.
+As for Brentford, that is the Great Magisterium,
+the Hidden Secret. There is a Secret Society of
+those initiated in Brentford, and so darkly is the
+mystery kept that there have been cases in which
+members have known each other intimately for
+twenty years before the passwords have been
+exchanged.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_65"></span></p>
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="Chapter_V">
+    <i>Chapter <abbr title="Five">V</abbr></i>
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap">I have</span> been talking of rooms in Gray’s Inn,
+of trips to Touraine; and I suppose it will
+have become evident that the days of the
+Clarendon Road cell, of dry bread and green
+tea meals were over. This was, in fact, the case.
+Between ’87 and ’92 I “came into money,” that is,
+into what I called money. My mother died in 1885,
+my father in 1887; distant and ancient relatives in
+Scotland who had lived to fabulous ages died at
+last, and thus moneys that should have come to my
+mother came to me. And I was no longer the lonely
+man of the earlier chapters.</p>
+
+<p>Reckoning up the various sums which I inherited,
+I calculate that if they had been invested I should
+have had enough whereon to live narrowly and
+meanly for the next thirty years. Somewhere about
+1921 a long lease would have fallen in, and two-thirds
+of my income would have disappeared. I should
+then have been left with sixty pounds a year at the
+outside, and even with the “aconomy” recommended
+by Captain Costigan, there is very little to
+be done in these days with £60 per annum. But I
+did not invest my fortune in sound securities. Perhaps
+I might have done so if it had fallen in a lump
+on my lap; but this was not the way of it. It
+came in bits and parcels: £700 one year, £500
+eighteen months afterwards. So I adopted the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66"></span>simple, manly course of putting my money as I got
+it into a box, as it were, and dipping my hand into
+the box when I needed a few gold pieces. I wish
+it were possible to do this literally: it must be
+magnificent to live on a chestful of gold; but I
+compromised by getting a cheque-book.</p>
+
+<p>And I have always been glad that I made this
+business-like arrangement. By it I was enabled to
+live for eleven or twelve years under pleasant and
+humane conditions. Not in luxury, be it understood,
+for luxury has always been utterly detestable
+to me. Detestable to me, I say with emphasis; I
+do not say that luxury is detestable in itself. If
+men like to have it so, by all means let them dwell
+in marble halls, with vassals and serfs and wine-stewards
+at their side. Let them be as Louisquinzious
+as ever they please in their homes and at their
+hotels; for all I care, they may take their ease in
+snuggeries, all gold and mirrors and marbles, fifty
+feet high, a hundred feet high, if they like it so.
+But to me, a poor clerk, all this has ever been
+nauseous. When I plied my sorry trade of journalist,
+I disliked most things involved in that vile
+business, but I hated my occasional missions to the
+Hôtel Splendide and the Hôtel Glorieux. I would
+be sent to these places to find out, say, the exact
+method employed by the new chef, M. Mirobolant,
+in cooking red herrings for the famous Joy Teas in
+the Venetian Hall—everybody has heard of the Joy
+Teas at the Splendide, and of the Joy Band of
+twenty kettle-drums, fifty tea-trays, ten trombones
+and thirty bassoons. Well, I would be sent to the
+Splendide on this errand; or, perhaps, to the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67"></span>Glorieux to find out whether it were true that the
+principals of the Russian Ballet sucked their morning
+tea through raspberry jam and declared that
+this was necessary to their art. I would visit one or
+other of these establishments and sit down on Louis
+Quinze or Louis Seize chairs and wait there in my
+dingy old cloak, while “Reception” and “Enquiries”
+smiled to see such an incongruous figure
+before them, while the guests of the hotel smiled
+also as they went in and out, till at last the manager
+arrived, fretful enough, usually, at being dragged
+from his business or his leisure to answer idiotic
+questions. I used to wonder on these Splendide or
+Glorieux days what I had done to deserve such
+humiliations. The only thing that somewhat consoled
+me was the thought that, whatever pains the
+Doctor may have suffered, while he waited in Lord
+Chesterfield’s outward rooms or was repulsed from
+that nobleman’s door, my case was more humiliating
+still, since an English nobleman of race is a much
+greater personage than the shiniest of hotel
+managers. And perhaps, also, I fancied that I was
+beginning to follow a little in the faithful steps
+of Venerable Raymondus Anglus, who was slowly
+sliced into little pieces in Cathay.</p>
+
+<p>Rather, I am afraid, in the steps of a relative of
+my own, some distant Cousin Machen, whom business,
+I suppose, took to Cathay in the ’fifties and
+’sixties of the last century. It so fell out that while
+this gentleman was in China we declared one of
+our infamous Opium Wars against the Dragon
+Throne and the Vermilion Pencil. Promptly the
+local mandarin seized Cousin Machen and put him
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68"></span>in a cage. They then travelled him round the
+Chinese “Smalls.” When the cortège got to a
+village or town, my cousin’s custodians touched him
+up smartly with their spears. Cousin Machen
+would then dance with anguish, and, I am sure,
+most ungracefully, and the happy villagers, howling
+with mirth, and voting Cousin Machen good goods,
+would pelt the poor man with undesirable matters.
+He got away from them, but I have heard my relations
+say that in extreme old age the mere word
+“China” was enough to bring a sweat of horror
+pouring down his face. And I am in a position to
+sympathise fully with Cousin Machen&#x2060;——</p>
+
+<p>Well, I was saying, I think, that I never cared for
+luxury, and so did not waste my bit of money on it.
+But if luxury tempts me not at all, I care a great
+deal for homely comfort, and I lived in considerable
+comfort in the days of which I am speaking. I
+think that my annual budget was between four and
+five hundred a year, and let me tell an amazed
+generation that for five hundred a year or rather
+less two people could live very sufficiently in the
+’eighties and ’nineties. Your saddle of mutton and
+your sirloin of beef were of the best, lamb at Easter—is
+there anything better than spring lamb with
+its skin roasted to a golden-brown?—was easily
+attainable; fowls and ducks, grouse and partridges
+and pheasants, with now and then that most delicious
+bird the woodcock, were no rarities. And
+asparagus might well appear quite early in the
+spring, and green peas in advance of the main crop.
+And sometimes one felt that it would be amusing
+to go out to dinner for a change: well, the bill of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69"></span>the Soho restaurant never gave an indigestion afterwards.
+Sometimes the Soho dinners were quite
+good, they were always amusing; and in those days
+there was such a thing as decent Chianti. It came
+to the cheerful table in flasks of very thin glass, and
+between the cork and the wine was a stratum of
+olive oil. This the waiter flicked off on to the
+linoleum with a swift gesture. The last Chianti of
+this order that I tasted was in 1902. I saw great
+gallon flasks of it standing in the window of a small
+shop opposite the stage door of the Palace, and
+bought one of these flasks—it cost six shillings, if I
+remember—and bore it tenderly to my dressing-room
+at the St. James’s Theatre. It was the last
+night of “Paolo and Francesca,” and we drank the
+Chianti merrily in trunk hose and armour when the
+play was done. And Herbert Dansey, who was
+really a noble Florentine, “degli Tassinari,” vowed
+you could get no better Chianti in all Tuscany.</p>
+
+<p>Or again, one didn’t fancy roast beef, and yet one
+didn’t want to go out dining. There was the middle
+course; Salame or Mortadella, half a round of ripe
+Brie and a bottle of a sufficient red or white wine.
+And a half-bottle of Benedictine only cost four-and-six.
+And the whole of the small banquet ran
+into very little: they were cheap days, and the
+Income Tax was inconsiderable then. But I was
+forgetting. I had no income, so I saved the expense
+of the tax. And under these conditions, living very
+pleasantly, with a month in France every year, I
+cultivated literature between 1890–1900. I refrained,
+utterly, I am glad to say, from the impious
+folly of wondering what would happen when the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70"></span>money should have come to an end. When that
+day came, why, that day could see to it.</p>
+
+<p>Living very pleasantly; that is, apart from my
+chosen sport of making books. I have already discussed
+the strange paradox of writing, of writing,
+that is, when it is entirely divorced from all commercial
+considerations. I wrote purely to please
+myself; and what a queer pleasure it was! To
+write, or to try to write, means involving oneself in
+endless difficulties, contrarieties, torments, despairs,
+and yet I wrote on, and I suppose for the reason
+which I have given, the necessity laid upon most of
+us to create another and a fantastic life in order
+that the life of actuality may be endurable. Look
+at the golfer: observe how he toils and frets in that
+fantastic world that he has made for himself, a
+world wherein he who can say, “I did the fourth
+hole in two” is happy; while the wretch who had
+to hit the little white ball six or seven times before
+it finally popped into that fourth hole goes out
+wretchedly into the night. It is fantastic nonsense;
+but for all that the golfers are in the right.</p>
+
+<p>Still, there may be a little more in the sport of
+literature; and if the golfers feel hurt by this
+remark, let them remember that a man always
+praises his own game. We understand so little of
+the real scheme of things that, for all we know, golf
+may be the end for which man was made, as, according
+to Coleridge, snuff was the final term of the
+human nose. But waiving this possibility—I think
+a remote one—I would contend that literature has
+more in it on the whole. Being an art as well as a
+sport, there is a question of making something, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71"></span>very occasionally of making something that will
+divert or enchant others, besides the maker;
+whereas the sport which is nothing but a sport has
+no such by-products as “Don Quixote” or “Pickwick.”
+Of course the man who plays a game, such
+as golf or cricket, often gives pleasure—or amusement,
+at all events—to many spectators; but when
+the match is over and the last ball bowled nothing
+permanent remains. So far as others are concerned
+the player of games is much in the position of the
+player of plays. The actor thrills the house or
+rocks it with laughter; but the curtain falls and
+all is over. We know that the best judges of the
+eighteenth century found Garrick natural, simple,
+affecting; but we know no more. We have pictures
+of Garrick in his favourite situations; but I
+at least have no distinct image in my mind of what
+it was really like to be in the front row of the pit
+at Drury Lane and see and hear Garrick play.</p>
+
+<p>And, this apart, I cannot help thinking that the
+pleasures of the literary game are more intense and
+more exquisite than the pleasures of the other
+games. I know this is a very difficult question;
+there is no final answer to it. But I feel sure that
+the happiness of Charles Dickens on writing the
+last words of “David Copperfield” was greater
+than the happiness of the cricketer at Lord’s who
+carries out his bat for a faultless innings of two
+hundred against the most difficult bowling and the
+best fielding in England. I do not know that this
+is so, but I conjecture that it is so, chiefly because
+the joys of the writer of a great romance are so
+varied and so complex in comparison with the joys
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72"></span>of the man who has played a perfect innings. In
+a sense, perhaps, the first-rate cricketer has achieved
+the more perfect performance: he has met every
+difficulty splendidly, his judgment as to running
+has been impeccable, he has not given a single
+chance. The writer, on the other hand, is—I think
+we may say—never perfect: consider those last
+chapters of “Don Quixote”; consider Steerforth
+and that infernal ... woman, Agnes; the Grandfather
+and Little Nell. Yet the man of the book
+has traversed such an infinitely wider region than
+the man of the bat and ball: he has perhaps rectified
+the work of the Creator and made himself
+anew and made himself much better; and so he
+has worked with all the world, fashioning a new life,
+discovering wonders where before there were no
+wonders, shewing secrets that had been hidden
+from the foundation of things, peering now and
+again, as Poe and Hawthorne peered, into the places
+of thick darkness, and, above all, voyaging into the
+unknown, perpetually climbing the steep white
+track that vanishes over the hill.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_73"></span></p>
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="Chapter_VI">
+    <i>Chapter <abbr title="Six">VI</abbr></i>
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap">We</span> are, I think, in the period 1890–1900;
+or, perhaps, to be more accurate, let us
+say 1889–1899. Between these dates I
+made a translation of “Le Moyen de
+Parvenir,” an early seventeenth-century book by an
+odd follower of Rabelais. I wrote “The Great God
+Pan,” “The Inmost Light,” “The Three Impostors,”
+“The Hill of Dreams,” a short collection of
+experiments called “Ornaments in Jade,” “Hieroglyphics,”
+“The White People,” the first part of
+“A Fragment of Life,” and “The Red Hand.”
+As I have said, I had inherited a little capital and
+spent it, and at ample leisure wrote these books and
+tales, instead of doing honest work. In the words
+of some character in “The Three Impostors,” I
+regarded my various legacies as an endowment of
+research.</p>
+
+<p>Now, as to the first title on this list, I was inspired
+to translate “Le Moyen de Parvenir” by
+that earlier Rabelaisian enthusiasm, which had
+lasted on. I found the book (in the original edition,
+I think), a little dumpy volume, while I was in the
+employment of a firm of second-hand booksellers
+who lived not far from Leicester Square. I have
+been called a modest man in an after-dinner speech,
+and I hope I am one; but I am sure I was modest
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74"></span>in 1888. For, finding that I could not get a “rise”
+on the £60 a year which York Street afforded me,
+I tried Leicester Square and asked as much as £80;
+thirty shillings a week. I think the firm were
+amused; but they gave it me, and I set about
+cataloguing books for them.</p>
+
+<p>I did this under odd conditions. When I made
+my application, the Brothers—let us say—took me
+down to the place in the basement where my work
+would have to be done. Once, I suppose, it had
+been the underground back-kitchen of the house.
+The kitchen was occupied by two other employees
+of the firm. One of them kept the accounts; the
+other treated “foxed” plates and pages in baths
+and made them fresh again, and “grangerised” and
+packed up books that had been bought. And the
+kitchen had the illumination from the solid glass
+over which people walked as they passed the shop,
+and some sort of air from the outer world. But my
+workshop had neither one nor the other. Save for
+gas, it was in total darkness. Its air was dead.
+And the House asked me very fairly whether I
+thought I could stand it. I said I could, and so I
+went to work.</p>
+
+<p>I was never any good at cataloguing, real, technical
+cataloguing. I was explaining the other day
+to a friend of mine, a most accomplished and learned
+cataloguer, how I despised his work. “This business,”
+I said, “of putting little slanty lines between
+the words of a title-page. A pitiable job,” I proceeded,
+“it must be so since I could never make
+anything of it.” But, the truth is, I never had
+any heart for the work. I don’t care twopence
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75"></span>whether a book is in the first edition or in the
+tenth; nay, if the tenth is the best edition, I
+would rather have it. To me it appears mere
+childishness to consider whether Lowndes—I think
+that is one of the authorities—has seen three copies
+of some particular book or three hundred; the only
+question being: is the book worth reading or not?
+Then, when it comes to measuring an Elzevir, say,
+with a graduated rule, and pronouncing a little
+book three inches and a half high to be a “tall
+copy,” my common sense revolts. In other words,
+I am sure that Bibliography is a capital game, but
+it is not my game. I disliked my work of cataloguing;
+but I loathed another branch of my work,
+that was indexing. Everybody knows about
+“grangerising.” You take a book, say, Smith’s
+“Life of Nollekens.” In it many eighteenth-century
+personages are mentioned, and many
+London streets and public places. The indexer has
+to read through the book, noting every person,
+every place, and compile an index. And on this
+index the grangeriser, the bookseller, goes to work
+hunting his stock of plates, hunting certain well-known
+sources for pictures with which he can stuff
+the original work. He will destroy a dozen or a
+hundred or a thousand other books of less value to
+produce a kind of monster: “The Life of Nollekens,”
+by Joseph Smith, 1 vol., 8vo., 17—. Enlarged
+to 3 vols. quarto, and furnished with 250
+extra illustrations, comprising portraits, views,
+plans, maps, and original and facsimile letters from
+Blank, Dash, Chose, and other famous persons of
+the period. Purple Levant Morocco Jansenist;
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76"></span>in watered purple silk case, gilt. Price: A great
+deal.</p>
+
+<p>There. I am afraid I have forgotten the trick
+of the business and my friend the expert cataloguer
+will say that it is a good thing indeed that I
+have changed my trade; but it is something like
+that. Well, indexing is a horrible job; a weariness,
+a nuisance; a matter of covering the table with
+innumerable little slips of paper that flow over on
+to the floor; and one must be careful and accurate,
+and I have always hated being careful, and accurate—unless
+I happen to be interested in what I am
+doing. Besides, I hold that “grangerising” is both
+barbarous and silly. So I didn’t like my work, but I
+liked the Brothers. They were always most courteous.
+Near our establishment was a shop where a
+very old gentleman sold precious things. His shop
+windows were made of small squares of glass.
+Above them was an inscription to the effect that
+the firm were “Goldsmiths and Silversmiths to
+Their Majesties the King and Queen and to Her
+Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent.” And the
+old gentleman who kept this shop wore what we
+call evening-dress all day long, and advanced to
+meet his customers with an inclined head, his hands
+clasped together. The Brothers were a good deal
+younger, but they were of the same school. They
+had a way of putting things. For example, Brother
+Charles was trying to teach me how to catalogue
+their very beautiful collection of French eighteenth-century
+illustrated books, the sort of books that
+have illustrations by Fragonard.</p>
+
+<p>“And if, Mr. Machen,” said Brother Charles,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77"></span>“if it strikes you that any of these plates are
+brilliant impressions—well, we have no objection
+to your saying so.”</p>
+
+<p>It may be mentioned that the firm dealt occasionally
+in works which would not be suitable for the
+“center table” of a New England parlour. For
+themselves, for their own private taste, they read
+George Eliot and thought her by far the greatest
+novelist that the English Nation had ever produced.
+I am sure that they would have held “Peregrine
+Pickle”—save in the rare first impression—to be a
+low book, and Dickens, I conjecture, would have
+struck them as funny and vulgar. But, still, selling
+books was their business, and it was not their affair
+as booksellers to censor the morals of the works
+they sold. They dealt in rare books.</p>
+
+<p>Well, one morning as I walked down from Great
+Russell Street to the shop, I was reading of the trial
+and conviction of a minor bookseller of Charing
+Cross Road. This Mr. Jackson, or whatever his
+name was, had been found guilty of selling obscene
+books, and had been sent to gaol, for nine months,
+if I remember. I mentioned the matter to Brother
+Ned as I entered.</p>
+
+<p>“You’ve seen about Jackson?” I said.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Mr. Machen,” said Brother Ned, with a
+certain moral austerity of demeanour that was new
+to me. “We <em>have</em> seen about Mr. Jackson, and we
+wish to state at once that we have no sympathy
+with Mr. Jackson; none whatever. There is a
+<em>right</em> way, Mr. Machen, of doing these things and
+a <em>wrong</em> way.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Jackson, I may say, did not deal in rare books.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78"></span>His prices were low, he appealed to the general
+public. I hasten to add that on the whole I sympathise
+with the Brothers on this matter. And I
+add also: that after more recent experiences of
+mine I am very loath to find fault with any persons
+who treat those in their employment as human
+beings, with the decent civilities, courtesies and
+considerations that are befitting between man and
+man. In those days I had no knowledge of the
+anthropoids; still, I appreciated the pleasant
+treatment I received.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, with all their pleasant manners, I am afraid
+that the Brothers did not find in me the ideal
+cataloguer. Anyhow, one day Brother Ned came
+down to my darksome place with a queer little
+quarto in his hand, a quarto in a dull paper wrapper.
+He had it open, marked with a slip of paper, at a
+certain page, and so far as I remember, without any
+particular preface or explanation, he asked me to
+begin making a translation of the work from that
+point. I said: “Certainly, Mr. Edward,” and
+began to translate without more ado.</p>
+
+<p>And here I may say that my career as a French
+translator has always struck me as highly humorous.
+At the good old grammar school where I was
+educated and educated very well, I think that the
+headmaster thoroughly agreed with the boys that
+Foreign Languages were a silly game that, for
+various reasons, one had to play. Education was
+Latin and Greek, but a notion had arisen in these
+late days that one ought to learn French, and so
+there was a French master. But he wore neither
+cap nor gown, and so he was not a real master, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79"></span>so, again, his language was not a real language.
+Therefore: poor M. Ménard! And I am afraid
+that he was a very bad master. If his authority had
+been supported, and if we had tried our best, I do
+not think we should have learned much; as it was,
+the French lessons, three times a week, were a
+farce. I knew no French when I left Hereford
+Cathedral School in 1880, that is, I could not have
+conjugated the verb <i lang="fr">Aimer</i> to save my life. I had
+read no French to speak of. Then, in my desolation
+in Clarendon Road, I had somehow come
+across “Gil Blas” and had managed, being interested,
+to get through it. Then, the York Street
+publisher had sent me down the sixteenth-century
+“Heptameron” and had ordered me to translate
+it, and I did so, somehow. And now, Brother Ned
+ordered me to translate from the dumpy quarto
+which he handed me; and forthwith I set about
+translating, not troubling what it was, what it was
+about, not caring two straws that I had not the
+thread of the narrative, nor worrying over the fact
+that I knew nothing whatever about the enigmatic
+“M.M.” or the mysterious “C.C.” into whose
+singular adventures I now plunged gaily. Thus I
+began the translation of the famous “Memoirs of
+Casanova,” and I think the money balance between
+the Brothers and myself was readjusted. For if I
+had been dear as a cataloguer, at thirty shillings a
+week, I was decidedly cheap as a translator. Casanova
+is a work that runs into twelve sizeable
+volumes, and the task of turning it into English
+took me a year, and I think the cost to the firm
+will be held to have been strictly moderate.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_80"></span></p>
+
+<p>And what about these strange Memoirs of the
+charlatan adventurer? Well, not long ago I was
+called upon to write an introduction to a reissue of
+the version I had made in the ’eighties. I found
+this an extremely difficult task. The obvious solution
+of the difficulty, the writing a sort of <i lang="fr">précis</i> of
+the book and calling it an Introduction, did not
+appeal to me. It was some time before the “moral”
+of the Memoirs disengaged itself. The Introduction
+when written proved to be an essay on the
+futility of trying to tell the whole truth about the
+relations between men and women. This is what
+Casanova, who was highly qualified, in a certain
+sense, for the undertaking, tried to do; and the
+more “frank,” the more “outspoken” his page
+the more the secret escapes from it; the more
+openly he reveals, the more deeply he conceals the
+mysteries. For the fact is that all the real secrets
+are ineffable; the secrets of love, and the secrets
+of the wood; the secrets of the flower and the
+secrets of the flame; and the secrets of the Faith.
+As I point out in my Introduction, you can enumerate
+the scientific facts—such of them as are known—relating
+to any subject. You can define a horse,
+for example, as Bitzer defined it in “Hard Times.”</p>
+
+<p>“Quadruped. Gramjnivorous. Forty teeth,
+namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth and
+twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in
+marshy countries sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard,
+but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by
+marks in mouth.”</p>
+
+<p>And so you may discourse of the pistils and
+stamens of the lilies of the field, and divide the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81"></span>fowls of the air into genera and species and sub-species
+and count the teeth of Keats: and when
+all is done, you know—nothing. Nothing that is
+of the essence of your matter, nothing of its
+“quiddity,” a word that we have ceased to use, I
+suppose, because we have no use for it, having forgotten
+that there is such a thing as that essence
+which is present in all things, which indeed makes
+them to be what they are, which is nevertheless
+unsearchable and ineffable. And all this is true,
+not only of the matters which the plain man, the
+man in the street, is inclined to sniff at, but of all
+things, of man himself and of the universe of
+noumena and phenomena which is presented to him.
+If you talk to the plain, practical man about Mystic
+Theology, Mystic Love, Poetry, Romance, he will,
+very likely, brush you aside with his “In my
+opinion that’s all imagination”—and serve you right
+for talking to him on such subjects at all. The
+dear fellow has no notion of the fact that he has
+never seen a point, a line, a square, or a triangle,
+and that he never will see any one of these things—in
+this life at all events. He has seen black marks
+on paper which he has been told are lines and squares
+and triangles. Being at heart thoroughly credulous,
+he believes what he is told, but if he will dig up his
+old “Euclid” and read the definitions, he will find
+that no mortal eyes can ever see a square or a circle,
+since a line is length without breadth and a plane
+surface is length and breadth without thickness.
+There is nothing in the nature of things to prevent
+a man from seeing a dragon or a griffin, a gorgon
+or a unicorn. Nobody as a matter of fact has seen
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82"></span>a woman whose hair consisted of snakes, nor a
+horse from whose forehead a horn projected;
+though very early man most probably did see
+dragons—known to science as pterodactyls—and
+monsters more improbable than griffins. At any
+rate, none of these zoological fancies violates the
+fundamental laws of the intellect; the monsters
+of heraldry and mythology do not exist, but there
+is no reason in the nature of things nor in the laws
+of the mind why they should not exist. But no
+man hath seen a line at any time, since the manifestation
+of length without breadth is a contradiction
+in terms. And the plain man is probably
+inclined to believe in the existence of vulgar fractions;
+he may tell you that he makes use of them
+daily in his calculations. But let him study the story
+of the race between Achilles and the Tortoise, and
+note to what monstrous results his belief in elementary
+arithmetic inevitably conducts him; results
+which are more intolerable than a madman’s
+dreams.</p>
+
+<p>And then, again, there are wider, more universal
+conceptions than anything contained in the
+geometry and arithmetic books. In a little book
+of mine with the bad title of “War and the Christian
+Faith”—the publisher chose the title—I speak
+thus of Space and Time:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>“Take two insistent and unavoidable examples
+(of the things which are unsearchable and indefinable),
+space and time. No man who strolls
+from his arm-chair to the mantelpiece and watches
+the hands of the clock move round can deny the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83"></span>existence of either, since he has walked from
+point to point in one and seen the other measured
+before his eyes. But as to understanding space
+and time, what highest philosophy can attain to
+such a pitch? The limitless cannot so much as
+be imagined in the mind, nor imagined in a
+nightmare: but that space which you have
+traversed of some eight or ten feet is limitless,
+and must be so.</p>
+
+<p>“It is a sea without a shore. And time, that
+which your two-guinea clock ticks off for you, as
+you watch the dial: it had no beginning that
+you can picture; it can have no end save with
+God. You cannot understand; you must believe;
+and so on your very hearth-rug the infinites
+and eternities are before you and confront
+you, as truly as the clock face confronts you.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>And the conclusion of the whole matter is that
+we live and move in a world of profound and ineffable
+mystery; that all things from the most
+abstract to the most concrete are involved in this
+mystery, and, <em>therefore</em>, that Casanova as an exponent
+of love is a futile fellow. He was a Voltairean;
+he approached the question as he would
+say without prejudices, as the foolish among us
+would say, without any nonsense, or, as the still
+more foolish among us would say, in a scientific
+spirit. And the result is exactly what might be
+expected: nothing. Love is defined and expounded
+in the spirit of Bitzer defining a horse; and one
+perceives that science misapplied is just gibberish,
+nothing more or less. Otherwise, taking Casanova’s
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84"></span>Memoirs from a lower standpoint, they are in many
+places vastly entertaining. He knew all Europe
+from Petersburg and Constantinople to London and
+Madrid; he was familiar with the palace and the
+gutter; he was the friend of Kings and philosophers
+and popes—and also of the scum of the eighteenth-century
+earth. One cannot understand the period
+as a whole without knowing Casanova.</p>
+
+<p>So I translated and translated day after day; but
+in a few months’ time the black hole in which I
+worked began very violently to disagree with me.
+I got ill, and it was clear that some change must be
+made. The Brothers, as always, were courteous and
+considerate: why not do the work at home? I
+assented very willingly, worked at the task for five
+hours every day, and every Saturday took my parcel
+of copy to the shop and got my thirty shillings, the
+week’s wages.</p>
+
+<p>And here I must make a boast, which is not
+wholly a boast: the second part of this sentence I
+shall explain no farther. I finished the translation
+of the Memoirs, but the book was not immediately
+issued. On the completion of my job the Brothers
+needed me no more. I imagine that they wanted
+a real, expert, technical cataloguer, not a literary
+man of sorts; and my having worked for them for
+some months at my own home and not in the shop
+made it easy for them to get rid of me quietly;
+rather, to let me fade away, without the least suspicion
+of firmness, much less of harshness. And
+they were always very glad to see me when I chose
+to look them up, either on business or merely as a
+friendly caller. I remember, for example, that
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85"></span>when I had finished the translation of “Le Moyen
+de Parvenir” and was “subscribing” the book with
+“the trade,” I called at the shop and was received
+with a genial and kindly courtesy that I have not
+forgotten, though it is a long time since 1890; but
+then I do not forget. And lest it should be suspected
+by some persons that under a veil of benignity
+I am “getting at” the Brothers all the
+time, I hasten to say that this is not so; to say this
+in the strongest manner possible. True, thirty
+shillings a week was not good pay for decent French-English
+translating, even in 1889; but it was
+the wages that I had asked myself, having been
+thoroughly convinced by my experiences of the
+six preceding years that I was such a dismal and
+incapable ass that if I just managed to escape the
+Governorship of the Island of Farre Joyaunce—otherwise
+the ditch or the workhouse—it was as
+much as I could expect. So I asked my thirty
+shillings a week and hoped in my heart that it was
+not too much; and I am not blaming the Brothers
+in the least because they did not press more upon
+me. And, however that may be, they were always
+courteous and kindly in all communications that
+passed between us; and for that they shall be in
+my grateful memory so long as I live. I have said
+already, I think, how once during the last year of
+my employment on the “Evening News,” finding
+myself in old haunts of long ago, Wellington Street,
+Bow Street, York Street, anguish possessed me as I
+remembered how I had once starved and had known
+something like happiness while I toiled over the
+ancient occult books in the Catherine Street garret;
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86"></span>anguish possessed me as I recollected the happy
+time in misery. And, as I said to a friend soon
+afterwards: “In those days I was getting considerably
+less money in a whole year than I am now
+getting in a month; and yet....”</p>
+
+<p>Again, I say, if our clergy would but mind their
+business. If instead of enquiring into the exact
+cut of bodices, instead of passing anxious hours as to
+the pernicious corruptions of the Fox-Trot and the
+Bunny Hug, instead of working with all their hearts
+and souls to make sure that no one can possibly get
+a glass of bitter beer after ten o’clock, instead of
+unmasking the inferno of the race-course, the utter
+levity of much of our railway literature; if, instead
+of all this accursed drivel, cant and imbecility,
+they would but say Mass and preach the Gospel,
+and otherwise quite abide in peace! Let them go
+to the Book, and there they will find that the most
+horrible sin denounced in it is neither gambling,
+drinking nor wantoning, but the sin of shaming a
+man, of bitterly insulting him, of making him mean
+in his own eyes, of making him despise his own self
+as something unutterably fouled and scorned and
+bewrayed. What is the text? Something like:
+but he that sayeth to his brother, “Thou fool,”
+shall be in danger of hell fire.</p>
+
+<p>I am drawing a contrast between 1889 and 1921,
+and hence I say that the Brothers always treated
+me with the common decency due from one human
+being to another, though they were rich and I was
+poor, though they were men of business and I an
+idiot in all matters of business, though they were
+masters and I was man.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_87"></span></p>
+
+<p>And now as to the famous boast. As I said, I
+ceased to be in the employment of these good men.
+I went into the country, up on the Children Hills.
+We neither saw nor heard anything of each other.
+But all the while those legacies of which I have
+spoken came dropping slow, and in 1893, when I
+had made up my mind to return to London, I
+think I must have had in bank something between
+three and four thousand pounds. I was assailed by
+an unworthy pang of prudence, by one of the
+foolish notions that the world’s people take for
+wisdom. It struck me that this living on capital,
+taking the pieces of eight by fistfuls out of the chest,
+would never do; that the money ought to be invested,
+preferably in some business in which I
+could contribute work as well as money. I looked
+about me, I advertised, I saw some people in the
+City and found nothing promising from my point
+of view, though I found here and there such
+curiosities as London, I believe, only affords. For
+example, in a very dim sort of cock-loft in an old
+house in the heart of the City, I hit upon a firm of
+general agents who had answered my advertisement.
+There were two of them: one, a young, rosy, out-in-the-open
+sort of man, the other elderly, frock-coated,
+with a kind of dissenting beard on his chin.
+He talked of the version of Horace’s odes that he
+was shortly bringing out at his own expense, and
+discussed with me the true pronunciation of the
+Latin language with much intelligence. The junior
+partner’s talk was of trawling, and indeed he said
+that the firm was a sort of trawling concern—in
+City waters.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_88"></span></p>
+
+<p>But nothing came of it, and at last I bethought
+me of the Brothers. Brother Charles was as genial
+as ever. He saw my point. He said: “We are
+going to issue Casanova at last; why not put a
+thousand pounds into that for a start?” I agreed,
+and the matter was settled. And then, very nervously,
+with a good deal of hesitation, with a certain
+difficulty in the choice of words, Brother Charles
+said:</p>
+
+<p>“Of course, Mr. Machen, we quite recognise
+the ... er ... circumstances in which you made
+your most admirable translation of the book. It
+was ... er ... in a manner ... er ... task-work;
+yes, <em>task-work</em>. Well ... the case is now,
+to a certain degree ... altered; you have an
+interest in the prosperity of the venture, and, in
+short, we rather wondered whether you would like
+to ... to ... <em>revise</em> your manuscript.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Charles,” I replied, “I did the job as well
+as I could; and I don’t think I can make it any
+better.”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_89"></span></p>
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="Chapter_VII">
+    <i>Chapter <abbr title="Seven">VII</abbr></i>
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap">Beroalde de verville</span> proved to
+be what the elder members of the
+theatrical profession used to call “a
+pill.” Only the other day I was reading
+a French account of this author. The critic said
+in the course of his remarks that many people who
+had gone to the “Moyen de Parvenir” in search
+of unpleasantness had turned back from the quest,
+deterred by the difficulty of the language. And I
+don’t know that it is more difficult for a modern
+Frenchman than for an Englishman. It is written
+in a sort of Babylonish dialect which is not exactly
+French though it looks like it; as Meredith
+looks like English to the casual glance. And then,
+it is not only difficult, but obscure; not only are
+the sentences queerly constructed, but the subject-matter
+is of a highly dubious and cloudy character:
+when you have found out what Beroalde is saying,
+you begin to wonder what he is saying it about.
+And, then, there are bits of old dialect peppered
+about this excessively odd volume. I remember
+coming upon two words: “iquent hesne.” I sat
+down in front of them, and looked at them from
+every angle. I don’t know how I found out at last
+that “iquent hesne” was a sort of seventeenth-century
+French “Zummerzet” for “cette chêne”—“thicky
+oāk.” Again the “Moyen” is thick
+with puns, of the kind that used to be called in the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90"></span>golden days of Burlesque “outrageous”: and the
+time I wasted in trying to turn these silly French
+tricks into sillier English contortions! On the
+whole, I would say that “Le Moyen de Parvenir”
+in literature is as a cathedral constructed entirely
+of gargoyles would be in architecture. Rabelais is
+full of gargoyles, “apes and owls and antics,” as he
+calls them, on the outside of the jar. But within,
+as he rightly claims, there are precious medicines,
+aromatic balms of singular power and virtue. And
+so far as I can judge, Beroalde is all oddity and
+nothing else. He cost me a year’s hard labour;
+the version was issued and is now valued by collectors;
+and that is all that need be said.</p>
+
+<p>And now—in 1890—I began to try a little
+journalism of the more or less literary kind. I
+began, I think, by writing “Turnovers” for the
+“Globe,” and miscellaneous articles for the “St.
+James’s Gazette,” and at length stories for the latter
+paper, which was then edited by Mr.—now Sir—Sydney
+Lowe. The “Globe” is extinct, the “St.
+James’s Gazette” is merged and submerged in the
+“Evening Standard”; there are no papers of such
+metal now in existence. The difference between
+them and the evening papers of the day is a very
+simple one: the former were meant to please the
+educated, the latter are designed to entertain the
+uneducated, and the uneducated may be equated,
+very largely indeed, with women. It is an odd
+paradox: there is no doubt, I suppose, that the
+instruction—or, if you like, education—of women
+has made immense strides in the last thirty years;
+and yet it is true that when a newspaper editor says
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91"></span>to himself: “We have an immense number of
+women readers and we must see that they get what
+they like,” the result is drivel. This sort of thing:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>Madame has just discovered a new craze.
+Jewelled clay pipes and shag tobacco delicately
+sprinkled with gold-dust are now quite <i lang="fr">démodés</i>
+when once we cross the borders of Balham; but
+my lady prides herself on her collection of
+hookahs, the water-pipes of the gorgeous East.</p>
+
+<p>It is quite the thing, I hear, amongst really
+smart women to give “Hookah Teas.” Everybody
+wears Oriental costume, and sits on cushions
+piled on the floor, and delicately draws in the
+aroma of the rarest Turkish Tobacco, scented by
+its passage through rosewater or lavender-water.
+At Lady Clarinda Belsize’s Hookah Tea last
+Wednesday, two native musicians played the
+tom-tom and the <i>guzla</i> behind a curtain, or
+<i>purdah</i>, as I am told it is called. Of course
+<i>yashmaks</i> were worn by all the guests.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>There; it is not worth parodying. And there
+is another sort of terrible tosh which deals with the
+doings of “The Summer Girl” and “The Winter
+Girl” and “The Marathon Girl”: all of it a very
+feeble imitation of the cheapest American journalism.
+In the ’nineties this kind of thing existed,
+but it was confined to the columns of one or two
+ladies’ papers. In those days, I would not say
+that the editors of evening papers brought out
+their journals exclusively for the benefit of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92"></span>members of the best clubs of St. James’s and Pall
+Mall; but I certainly should say that they had the
+clubs in their mind’s eye; that they presumed a
+certain standard of education and culture in their
+readers. All that ended when the evening “Westminster
+Gazette” came to an end.</p>
+
+<p>But indeed there would be little harm done if a
+column or two columns or three columns were
+reserved for the “Hookah Tea” stuff and the
+“Caravan Girl” stuff and all similar stuff. You
+could skip these columns if you didn’t like them,
+just as I skip the racing columns, in which I am
+not interested. But “the women” rule the whole
+paper. Not only must the editor put in matter
+which he knows they will like, he must keep out
+matter which he knows they won’t like. And the
+result is ... the result as we know it. As the
+“literary editor” of a big London paper acutely
+observed to me not long ago, the case of the newspaper
+article is exactly as the case of chops and
+steaks, beefsteak puddings and saddles of mutton
+that were of old. “The women” have spoilt all.
+What do they know or care about man’s food? To
+them there is nothing to choose between a chop
+fried white and hard and greasy in the frying-pan
+and a chop which has been purged of all excess
+by the ardent heat, beneath the gridiron, which
+beneath a coat half black, half golden-brown, preserves
+its delicious juices, which sizzles on the plate
+as William or Charles serves it, which, opened by
+the eager knife, shews within a hue like that of a
+blush-rose in June. These are not matters to enchant
+the wayward heart of a young girl, and when
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93"></span>once she sets foot inside the tavern coffee-room,
+farewell to all such solid merits. There was once
+a noble tavern called Herbert’s, famous for two
+generations. Men who had spent half a lifetime in
+Africa or India or in the islands of the South Seas
+were sustained by the thought of the beefsteak
+pudding at Herbert’s. The times changed and the
+old tavern with them. Going there in these later
+days, I used to wonder why all the meats seemed to
+taste alike, why there was no distinctive and peculiar
+relish about any of the dishes. I found out the
+reason why one day. I had business, oddly enough,
+in Herbert’s kitchen. One of the cooks shewed 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. One night I was dining there,
+and a member of the party asked the waiter to bring
+him some Stilton. “I beg your pardon, sir,” said
+the man, “we only have <em>English</em> cheeses.” It
+sounds impossible; but I heard this with my ears.
+In the old days Herbert’s was exclusively masculine
+in its custom; I do not know what would have
+happened to that waiter then. I hardly think that
+his death would have been an easy one.</p>
+
+<p>But to “the women” all this is of no account.
+They know nothing about man’s food, as I say, and
+they care less. I do not blame them; I do not
+blame myself for being ignorant of the difference
+between Hopsac and Gaberdine: but how would
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94"></span><em>they</em> like it if I poked my nose into their Oxford
+Street shops and insisted on these shops being
+carried on to suit my taste?</p>
+
+<p>So through this monstrous incursion of women,
+with the war and the nursery hours of to-day, the
+old tavern life has gone; utterly and for ever, I am
+afraid. A good thing has gone. The old mahogany
+boxes with bright brass work and green curtains,
+the light twinkling in the dark polished surfaces
+that were all about the room, the flaming fire with
+the plates warming by it, the plain food, the best
+of its kind, cooked in the best possible manner, the
+mighty tankards of mighty ale, the port that <em>was</em>
+port afterwards, in itself a great gift and a curious
+grace, and later—say about eleven o’clock—Charles
+appearing with a large china bowl and a bottle under
+his arm, following up these things with lump sugar,
+lemons, and the hot water: it is all over. And it
+is not only the good material things that have been
+taken away: the good meats and the good drinks,
+the glowing mahogany and the cheerful blaze and
+crackle of the fire: with them has gone, I suspect,
+a certain genial habit of the mind and soul which
+was congruous with all the circumstances of the
+old-fashioned tavern, which was congruous also with
+good men and good books and choice poetry, with
+all the rich zest and relish and unction which made
+the Victorian age of letters a great age; and, in its
+measure, a worthy successor to three other illustrious
+tavern ages: the Shakespearian, the Caroline,
+and the Johnsonian. Think of Falstaff and his
+tavern bill and his warning against thin potations,
+think of Herrick and his address to Ben, his fond
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95"></span>remembrance of the taverns “where we such
+clusters had as made us nobly wild not mad,” think
+of Johnson squeezing the orange into the bowl
+with antick gestures, saying “Who’s for <i>poonsh</i>?”
+think of Tennyson and that blest pint of port at
+the vanished Cock Tavern, think of Dickens, that
+great lover of tavern feasts and immortaliser of
+them: think of all this, my poor young man, and
+beat your breast. There are no jolly taverns for
+you, and your favourite authors do not write
+like men—“my son Cartwright writes all like a
+man,” said Ben Jonson—but like psycho-analytical
+chemists.</p>
+
+<p>And as I was saying, as with the taverns, so with
+the papers. When I wrote a little for them, in 1890
+or thereabouts, it was allowable to assume a certain
+amount of literacy, a certain knowledge in the
+reader. Now that is over. I know the case of a
+man who, I am certain, pretends ignorance that he
+may continue to be employed. As it happens, he
+is an expert in food and drink; but I have known
+him number Beaujolais with the wines of Bordeaux
+in a newspaper article, and speak of curry powder
+and pickles as ordinary ingredients in veal and ham
+pie. I believe he knows much better; but he has
+probably found out that a misstatement or two
+gives an easy careless air that is much admired.
+Nobody can call a writer of this kind a pedant. A
+highly accomplished journalist said to me a few
+years ago: “Always remember that we appeal, not
+to the cabman, but to the cabman’s wife.” And
+another instance, though I am afraid it is somewhat
+tinged with self-praise. I had written a brief article
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96"></span>for the “Evening News” on a topic that had been
+given to me; I was to explain <em>why</em> it is that a
+“mean street” of to-day is, generally, hideous and
+appalling, while a row of sixteenth-century cottages
+is, generally, a delight to see. I did as I always do
+when I can, I took the particular instance and placed
+it under a general principle. I said the chief horror
+of the modern street was not to be sought in the
+poverty of the design, though that was, doubtless,
+bad enough, but in the fact that in the street of
+to-day each house is a replica of the other, so that
+the effect to the eye is, if the street be long enough,
+the prolongation of one house to infinity, in an
+endless series of repetitions. And I pointed out
+that even if you admired some particular picture or
+statue immensely, it would be rather awful to
+traverse a long gallery in which the picture or the
+statue were repeated again and again as far as the
+eye could see. And then, on the other hand, I
+shewed how the sixteenth-century cottages were
+each of them individuals, each with some slight
+difference from the cottage next door, each with
+its variety in door or window or pent-house. And
+hence, I urged, a continual slight surprise to the
+beholder, and taking the supposed row as a whole,
+that strangeness in the proportion which Bacon
+declared, most profoundly, to be necessary to the
+highest beauty. Well, I got this with difficulty into
+the prescribed 500 words—“nobody will read anything
+over 500 words”—and said to myself: “Now
+that Patmore is dead, nobody else could have written
+that article. But ... there will be a row.” There
+was. Lord Northcliffe gave the little essay the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97"></span>honour of a special mention in one of his famous
+<i lang="fr">communiqués</i>—as I believe they were called. He
+spoke of it with venom as “a wiseacre article.”
+I am sure he was perfectly right from his point of
+view. The fault was mine. “When I am in Rome,
+I fast on Saturdays,” said one of the Fathers.</p>
+
+<p>Things have changed indeed. I was mentioning
+Coventry Patmore. In the Introduction to the
+“Religio Poetæ,” a collection of short essays of the
+profoundest wisdom, he acknowledges his obligations
+to Greenwood, once editor of the “St. James’s
+Gazette.” Some of these essays had appeared in
+that journal: the fact is quite stupefying considered
+in the light of the journalism of to-day. Education
+increases; ignorance grows deeper.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Let me not be understood as claiming that my
+newspaper work of thirty-two years ago was characterised
+by the profoundest wisdom. Very far from
+it; my articles were harmless and agreeable enough,
+I think, in a small way; and writing them, I first
+began to get a hint of my true subject; the country
+of my childhood and my youth. And I thus began
+to move away from the exotic Rabelaisian influence,
+both as to manner and to matter: to perceive that
+not the splendid Loire but the humble Soar brook,
+winding and shining in deep valleys and obscured
+by dark alder thickets, was my native stream. I
+began to see that I was a citizen of Caerleon-on-Usk,
+and not of Tours or of Chinon, and that the old
+grey manor-houses and the white farms of Gwent
+had their beauty and significance, though they were
+not castles in Touraine. There was something of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98"></span>all this, of course, in “The Chronicle of Clemendy,”
+the Great Romance which was neither great nor a
+romance; but in this everything was viewed and
+everything expressed in an exotic medium: now I
+saw that a blossoming thorn bush in the valley of
+the Soar and the nightingale singing in it and the
+river level about Caerleon and the red fires of sunset
+over the mountain in the west were all in themselves
+and by themselves fit matter for the work; that
+they needed not to be disguised in a French literary
+habit of four hundred years ago.</p>
+
+<p>It was in this summer of 1890 that I wrote the
+first chapter of “The Great God Pan.” I have
+told the whole story in the Introduction to the
+latest edition of that fantasy, which is published by
+Messrs. Simpkin, Marshall, and whether I should
+weary my readers I know not, but I do know that
+I should weary myself if I told it all over again.
+The tale was written in bits, in the intervals between
+severe literary cramps, as I have mentioned in this
+present volume, and it was published by Mr. John
+Lane, of the Bodley Head, at the end of 1894, when
+yellow bookery was at its yellowest. And it aroused
+a certain amount of attention. There was a storm—in
+a doll’s teacup.</p>
+
+<p>The other day a friend of mine said genially to me:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>“I have just been reading that ‘Great God
+Pan’ of yours over again, and I really don’t see that
+there’s much in it to make a sensation of.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>I am sure he was quite right. But a sensation
+there was, of a minor kind. It had some mysterious
+property in it, this little book, which caused good
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99"></span>men to froth at the mouth, greatly to my delight.
+I have quoted a good many of the reviews in the
+Introduction to the Simpkin, Marshall edition:
+things like this:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>“We are afraid he only succeeds in being
+ridiculous. The book is, on the whole, the most
+acutely and intentionally disagreeable we have
+yet seen in English. We could say more, but
+refrain from doing so for fear of giving such a
+work advertisement.”—“Manchester Guardian.”</p>
+
+<p>“This book is gruesome, ghastly, and dull ...
+the majority of readers will turn from it in utter
+disgust.”—“Lady’s Pictorial.”</p>
+
+<p>“These tricks have also their ludicrous side.”—“Guardian.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>And so forth. It is very well, but I cannot help
+saying, as an old craftsman and an old reviewer,
+that it might have been better. I have no fault to
+find with the technique of the “Guardian”; but
+the “Lady’s Pictorial” should have left out the
+“gruesome” and the “ghastly” and also, I am inclined
+to think, the “disgust.” There are readers who
+like the gruesome and the ghastly; there are readers
+whose curiosity is stimulated by the term “disgust.”
+I am afraid, for example, that if the account of
+legal proceedings, civil or criminal, is headed “Disgusting
+Details,” there are minds so prurient as to
+be rather attracted than repelled, and I am sure that
+the gentle scribe of the “Lady’s Pictorial” did not
+wish to paint my little book in attractive colours.
+And so with the “Manchester Guardian.” “Ridiculous”
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100"></span>is admirable; but “acutely and intentionally
+disagreeable” is something of a signal set to
+attract those prurient readers whose existence I
+have regretted; and the last sentence says too much.
+Mr. Harry Quilter, something of a figure in those
+days, did better. He pointed out in an article in the
+“Contemporary Review”—also something of a
+figure in those days—that the only explanation he
+could give of such favourable notices as the book
+had received was that the author must have a great
+many friends engaged in journalism. I wrote a
+temperate letter to Mr. Quilter in which I said I
+was very sorry, but I didn’t know any journalists
+at all—which happened to be the truth. He wrote
+back to remind me, as he said, that there was “an
+Inmost Light to which you may yet be true”—“The
+Inmost Light” is the title of a tale which
+was included in the first edition of “The Great
+God Pan.”</p>
+
+<p>—One of the saddest books in the world is Mrs.
+Gaskell’s wonderful “Life of Charlotte Brontë.”
+But there is one tragi-comical touch. Poor valiant,
+simple, stricken Charlotte was being entertained in
+town by Mr. and Mrs. Smith. There was a dinner-party,
+given, I suppose, in her honour, and she
+writes to an old friend:</p>
+
+<p>“There were only seven gentlemen at dinner
+besides Mr. Smith, but of these five were critics—men
+more dreaded in the world of letters than you
+can conceive. I did not know how much their
+presence and conversation had excited me till they
+were gone, and the reaction commenced. When I
+had retired for the night, I wished to sleep—the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101"></span>effort to do so was vain. I could not close my eyes.
+Night passed; morning came, and I rose without
+having known a moment’s slumber.”</p>
+
+<p>Who were these terrible five? We do not know,
+and it is possible enough that if we heard their
+names we should not have heard of their names,
+though, likely enough, George Henry Lewes was
+one of them. It is odd and pathetic too to think
+that a great woman such as Charlotte Brontë should
+have allowed the brilliant repartees and tremendous
+reputation of George Henry Lewes to break her
+rest. And just before this passage there is another,
+as strange and as pathetic. A severe review of
+“Shirley” appeared in “The Times.” Mr. and
+Mrs. Smith kindly “mislaid” the paper. But
+Charlotte insisted on pressing the thorn to her
+bosom. She would see “The Times.”</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>“Mrs. Smith took her work, and tried not to
+observe the countenance, which the other tried
+to hide between the huge sheets; but she could
+not help becoming aware of tears stealing down
+the face and dropping on the lap.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>And all over a review, an unfavourable review!
+It is very strange, or, at least, it seems so to me,
+since, like Jim the nigger, I don’t never cry ska’sely
+over reviews, and I have always contrived to get my
+usual sleep.</p>
+
+<p>But I have left out one curious specimen of the
+“Great God Pan” reviews, a specimen which
+leads up to a curious passage. The “Westminster
+Review” said:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>“It is an incoherent nightmare of sex and the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102"></span>supposed horrible mysteries behind it, such as
+might conceivably possess a man who was given
+to a morbid brooding over these matters, but
+which would soon lead to insanity if unrestrained
+... innocuous from its absurdity.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>I was talking over old literary doings and the
+affairs of the ’nineties with a friend one day in the
+spring of 1921. My friend was asking me about my
+early books and their reception. I gave him a lurid
+account of the castigations which I had received on
+account of “The Great God Pan.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why,” said I, “the ‘Westminster’ practically
+told me that if I didn’t take care I should end up
+in a lunatic asylum.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” replied the man, meaning to be funny,
+“haven’t you? I understood you were at Carmelite
+House?”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” I returned, also meaning to be funny, “I
+haven’t. All the lunatic asylums that I’ve heard
+of have been managed by a <em>doctor</em>.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>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.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103"></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104"></span>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105"></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>And that is one reason why I beg my bread in my
+sixtieth year.</p>
+
+<p>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! <i lang="la">De me fabula narratur</i>; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106"></span>Jacobs must speak through an everlasting Night
+Watchman, through an eternal countryman draining
+the last dregs of his beer on the settle at the <em>Cauliflower</em>:
+with these immortals I am happy.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_107"></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108"></span>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.”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_109"></span></p>
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="Chapter_VIII">
+    <i>Chapter <abbr title="Eight">VIII</abbr></i>
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="in_drop-cap"><span class="flt_lt_std">“</span><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> 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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110"></span>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111"></span>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.”</p>
+
+<p>“You shouldn’t have done it,” he said. “You
+destroy the illusion. Never take people behind the
+scenes. I never do.”</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_112"></span>some mysterious service. A voice is heard from
+somewhere:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0a">“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">You cataracts and hurricanes, spout</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Till you have drench’d your steeples, drown’d the cocks,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Singe my white head; and then, all-shaking thunder—”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“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!’”</p>
+
+<p>And I may say that the literary gentleman meant
+this as a very great compliment; indeed so it was.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_113"></span>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“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:</p>
+
+<p>“Too-too, tootery-too! Bang!” bringing his
+practicable foot down on the boards with a terrific
+crash.</p>
+
+<p>“Too-too-too, too-too: Bang!”</p>
+
+<p>Then: “March over. Flourish of Trumpets.
+Tara-tara-tara, ta-ta-ta. Curtain up! Tara-tara,
+ta-ta-ta-ta-tara. Procession on.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_114"></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115"></span>announces: “Flourish over”—and the play
+begins.</p>
+
+<p>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: “<i lang="fr">Ce livre est trop fumiste, ou pas assez
+fumiste</i>”; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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!”</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116"></span>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 <i lang="la">inextricabilis
+error</i> 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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117"></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118"></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“I think,” said he, “that I can show you something
+that you will like.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_119"></span></p>
+
+<p>He led me round corner after corner, by turns
+and ways that became more and more obscure.
+Then, elated, he said: “There!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120"></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121"></span>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. <i lang="es">Aqui esta
+encerrado el alma del licenciado.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_122"></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>“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.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123"></span>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 <i lang="la">alma mater</i>. 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.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124"></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_125"></span></p>
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="Chapter_IX">
+    <i>Chapter <abbr title="Nine">IX</abbr></i>
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap">It</span> 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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126"></span>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 <i lang="la">in actu</i>,
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127"></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128"></span>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_129"></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i lang="la">alibi</i>, either on his dying bed or in Tibet.
+Suppose the latter case, suppose that Secretan
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130"></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.’”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131"></span>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132"></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133"></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134"></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Well, I made my experiment, expecting, very
+doubtfully, almost incredulously, certain results.
+The results that I obtained were totally different
+from my expectations. I couldn’t have hypnotised,
+or “magnetised,” or mesmerised, or suggested, or
+Couéd, or in any way bedevilled myself into the
+obtained condition for the good reason that I had
+never heard of it, had no faintest notion of it, and
+was, in fact, as I have stated, not a little alarmed by
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135"></span>it, half-thinking, if the truth be told, that I was
+very near to death. I may state, by the way, that
+in the course of a pretty extensive acquaintance
+with “occult” company, I only once heard of anything
+at all comparable with this strange adventure
+of mine. A man was running on, foolishly and uncritically
+enough, about his various occult experiences—they
+were of little interest as a whole—and
+talked at last of some sojourn that he had made
+amongst the Moors of Northern Africa. Here, he
+said, he had met a man who had known wonders,
+and he proceeded to tell them. There was nothing
+very wonderful, so far as I can remember; but the
+Moor or Arab of the story had an experience like
+enough to mine—I need not say that I had not
+mentioned it nor so much as hinted it to my occult
+acquaintance. The African also had seen the walls
+shiver and prepare for dissolution, had felt that the
+world was shaken, and that his heart was shaken
+within him. Mr. Jones-Robinson told the tale
+without any sense, apparently, that it had any
+special significance; it was part of his occult pack,
+that was all; and he went on to some sick rubbish
+about the “correspondence” of the Tarot Trumps
+with the letters of the Hebrew Alphabet; and this
+nonsense he discussed with real relish and a high
+sense of its infinite importance. I think that he
+alone knew the real “attribution” of the aforesaid
+Tarot Trumps, but he “had received it under
+pledge and was not at liberty to speak”—for which
+inhibition I was deeply thankful, having little
+patience for solemn hanky-panky or Abracadabras
+of any sort. But in ending his story of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_136"></span>Enchanted Moor, he said that this man, who had
+seen the material world quivering and fading before
+his eyes, had received, in some manner not indicated,
+a command or an intimation that he must “leave
+everything”; and this he could not do, having a
+wife and children. And I must say at once that
+being pretty well acquainted with Jones-Robinson
+and all his type, I should have paid no more attention
+to his story of the Moor than I paid to his
+story of the Tarot Trumps—if it had not been for
+something which I knew and kept to myself. As
+it was, I heard the tale and the injunction, and
+wondered deeply, and still wonder.</p>
+
+<p>But now to our point: the connection between
+material or sensible things and spiritual things, the
+question whether the former are ever of any real
+consequence or significance. As I have said before,
+the evidence that Home the medium rose “miraculously”—to
+adopt a convenient shorthand—into
+the air seems to me good; but is such a phenomenon
+of any more true consequence than the phenomenon
+of Hydrogen gas rising into the air from the admixture
+of water, zinc and sulphuric acid? And so,
+were the incense clouds that came to my nostrils in
+places where, assuredly, no material incense smoked,
+of consequence? Was the billowy and resilient
+pavement of detestable Rosebery Avenue of consequence?
+Were the pictures that shivered and
+wavered on the unstable wall of consequence? I
+do not know; but I am sure that the state which
+followed this last experience was of high consequence.
+For when I rose, afraid, and broke off the
+process in which I had been engaged, I found to my
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137"></span>utter amazement that everything within had been
+changed. Amazement; for the utmost that I had
+hoped from my experiment was a temporary dulling
+of the consciousness, a brief opium oblivion of my
+troubles. And what I received was not mere dull
+lack of painful sensation, but a peace of the spirit
+that was quite ineffable, a knowledge that all hurts
+and doles and wounds were healed, that that which
+was broken was reunited. Everything, of body and
+of mind, was resolved into an infinite and an exquisite
+delight; into a joy so great that—let this
+be duly noted—it became almost intolerable in its
+ecstasy. I remember thinking at the time: “There
+is wine so strong that no earthly vessels can hold it”:
+joy threatened to become an agony, that must
+shatter all. Emily Brontë, describing the state of
+Heathcliff soon before his death, has described just
+such a condition; I have often wondered how she
+knew of it.</p>
+
+<p>But this was later. For that day and for many
+days afterwards I was dissolved in bliss, into a sort
+of rapture of life which has no parallel that I can
+think of, which has, therefore, no analogies by
+which it may be made more plain. The vine and
+the exultation of the vine are solemn and ancient
+and approved figures of the joys of the interior life,
+but these are not quite to my purpose. I can only
+fall back on little things, and quite material things.
+My chambers in Verulam Buildings were towards
+the northern portion of the Inn, and the traffic of
+Theobald’s Road was distinct enough, distinct
+enough, often, to be an annoyance. But this night,
+the “ping, ping!” of the omnibus bell, the grind
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138"></span>of the many wheels upon the cobble-stones sounded
+to me as marvellous and tremendous chords reverberating
+from some mighty organ; filling the air,
+filling the soul and the whole being with rapture
+immeasurable. And another trifle, as insignificant,
+even more insignificant, perhaps. In the ordinary
+state of existence the sense of touch is exercised
+constantly, but almost unconsciously. Now and
+again it is used with intent; the buyer of old furniture
+acquires a sort of thumb-and-finger craft;
+he passes the tips of his fingers over the edges of the
+bureau or cabinet, and they help him to decide
+whether the object is an antique or a novelty.
+And so, I suppose, a woman choosing stuffs uses her
+fingers in much the same manner, learning something
+about the silk or velvet by the process. But
+in general, and very conveniently, you take up pen
+or pencil, or place your hand on the back of the
+chair without any distinct consciousness of the
+impact of your flesh on these exterior objects:
+unless, that is, your hand encounter some unexpected
+object which insists on notice, such as a pin
+point or a rusty nail. But in these strange days of
+which I am speaking touch became an exquisite and
+conscious pleasure; I could not so much as place my
+hand on the table before me without experiencing
+a thrill of delight which was not merely sensuous,
+but carried with it, mysteriously and wonderfully,
+the message of a secret and interior joy.</p>
+
+<p>And one more instance. I had always been subject
+to headaches which visited me at intervals of
+five, six or seven weeks, and invariably lasted for
+twenty-four hours. The pain was distressing, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139"></span>any movement of the head raised it into a racking,
+throbbing agony; I should imagine that I suffered
+from a kind of migraine or megrims. Late one
+night during the time of which I am speaking I felt
+the first approaches of one of these tiresome
+attacks. I said to myself: “I wonder whether I
+can stop it,” and I placed the tip of the forefinger
+of the left hand upon my forehead. I felt the sense
+as of a dull shock: and the pain was gone. And
+though I have had my share of pains and aches
+since then, I have never been revisited by that particular
+kind of headache from that day to this.</p>
+
+<p>And there was yet another matter. In a little
+book of mine called “The Great Return,” which
+nobody has heard of, I have told how the Holy
+Grail came back for a brief while to Britain after
+long years. And describing some of the things that
+were seen and known during that happy visitation,
+I have written:</p>
+
+<p>“The ‘glow’ as they call it seems more difficult
+to explain (than certain other matters duly related).
+For they say that all through the nine days, and
+indeed after the time had ended, there never was
+a man weary or sick at heart in Llantrisant, or in
+the country round it. For if a man felt that his
+work of the body or the mind was going to be too
+much for his strength, then there would come to
+him of a sudden a warm glow and a thrilling all
+over him and he felt as strong as a giant, and happier
+than he had ever been in his life before, so that
+lawyer and hedger each rejoiced in the task that was
+before him, as if it were sport and play.”</p>
+
+<p>Thus in the story, and thus it was with me in fact,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140"></span>in that autumn and winter of 1899–1900. It was
+with a singular surprise that I read, in St. Adamnan,
+many years afterwards, how St. Columba’s monks,
+toiling in the fields, experienced now and again the
+very sensation—if it be just to speak of it as a sensation—that
+I have described. They, too, weary
+with their work of reclaiming the barren land of
+their isle, would know that sudden glow of joy and
+strength and courage; and they believed that it
+was the prayer of their Father in God, Columba,
+strengthening them and inspiring them, as he knelt
+before the altar of the Perpetual Choir. And lest
+it be said that I had read Adamnan when I was a
+boy and had forgotten all about it consciously
+though I had retained it subconsciously, I must
+solemnly declare that this was not the case; and
+that when this strange experience first befell me,
+I was overwhelmed with astonishment, and could
+scarcely credit that which was actually happening.
+I have hesitated as to whether it should be, in
+strictness, called a sensation, and I still hesitate.
+It seems to me, and I think that I can trust my
+recollection, that the two worlds of sense and spirit
+were admirably and wonderfully mingled, so that
+it was difficult, or rather impossible, to distinguish
+the outward and sensible glow from the inward and
+spiritual grace. <i lang="la">Magnum vere sacramentum.</i> And
+all this, be it remembered, would fall out in dim
+Bloomsbury squares, in noisy, clattering Gray’s Inn
+Road, in a train on the Underground, amongst
+hustling crowds in common streets. I mention this,
+not forgetful of a pretty severe rebuke which I
+received from a very high literary quarter on
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141"></span>account of that little book, “The Great Return,”
+which I have just cited. The critic noted the fact
+that in my book the Holy Grail was manifested to
+the common people, to common modern people, to
+Welsh tradesmen and farmers. He seemed to think
+this very low. It may be low, but perhaps things
+happen in this way sometimes; and so with me:
+I, by no manner of means a knight, received joys
+and knew wonders while the trams clanged along
+the Clerkenwell Road in the grey winter afternoon.
+So it was, and it appears to me necessary to tell
+the truth. As Coventry Patmore says, quoting
+from an earlier writer: “Let us not deny in the
+darkness that which we have known in the light.”</p>
+
+<p>And beyond all this, beyond these experiences in
+which things of the body and things of the spirit
+were mingled, there was a better world of which I
+saw the verges. There was no more grief; there
+was no more resentment, there was no more anger.
+The griefs that flood the heart with agony, the great
+sorrows of life, these were seen to be but passing
+trifles of no moment, like the sorrow of a little
+child which is past and forgotten before its tears
+are dry. I remember tearing up an old diary which
+I had kept in the bitter days of Clarendon Road, a
+record of struggles and starvings and desolations;
+I tore it up because it no longer signified anything
+to me. The words, I daresay, were strong enough,
+but the tale had become of no meaning at all. I
+glanced at one page and another of the tattered
+old notebook before I rent it, with a kind of mild
+curiosity as to the state of mind of the silly stranger
+who had written all this, and had whined so dismally.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_142"></span>At all events, it had nothing to do with me, and
+so it went into fragments and into the fire. If
+it could be restored to me now, I should read it all
+with interest and whine again and foam again <i lang="la">sæva
+indignatione</i>; but then I have long returned into
+that darkness in which, I suppose, most of our lives
+are spent.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>There is one thing that I hope I may be spared,
+that is the comment of the Oriental Occult Ass. I
+confess that I have written all this with difficulty,
+and with doubt as to the decency of writing it at
+all, especially when the tale, if it is to be a true tale,
+makes it necessary for me to seem to compare, for
+one little moment, the saints of the company and
+following of St. Columba with myself. But I do
+hope that nobody will say: “Why, this is only
+Ruja-Puja! You get it all in the first chapter of
+the Anangasataga Raja! It’s all perfectly elementary.
+Little Hindu children learn their A B C out
+of it in the Svanka Visatvara. Why, when the
+Swami Vishnakanandaram Jam Ghosh was over here
+last summer he mentioned all these phenomena as
+things you have to forget before you set out on the
+Way. As he put it so beautifully: ‘The sun arises.
+It gleams on the Lotus. The petals of the <i>bhulji</i>
+flower expand. The stars are no longer seen.’ Yes,
+isn’t he wonderful? Fancy anybody still bothering
+about Keats and those silly people!”</p>
+
+<p>I hope, I say, that I shall be spared that. I can
+bear better I think the (more or less) Occidental
+Idiot, who will speak of Shin—the letter of the
+Hebrew Alphabet, not the delicate portion of our
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_143"></span>anatomy—attribute it to the Tarot Trump called
+the Fool, and just throw in a reference to Salt,
+Sulphur and Mercury.</p>
+
+<p>As for me, I make no deductions, I infer nothing,
+I refrain from saying “therefore.” Like Sancho
+Panza: “I come from my own vineyard; I know
+nothing.” Perhaps I may venture to say that I have
+seen a lousy, lazy tramp drinking from a roadside
+stream that drips cold and pure from the rock in
+burning weather. Then the wastrel passes on his
+ill way, refreshed indeed, but as lousy and lazy as
+ever.</p>
+
+<p><i lang="la">De torrente in via bibet: propterea exaltabit caput.</i></p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_144"></span></p>
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="Chapter_X">
+    <i>Chapter <abbr title="Ten">X</abbr></i>
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class="hanging"><span class="smcap">Mr. Charles O’Malley</span>,<br>
+Castle O’Malley, <abbr title="County">Co.</abbr> Galway.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap">That</span> was the inscription of a card which
+had just been placed in my hand, as
+I walked along Southampton Row—on
+which I found myself stupidly gazing in
+real old Southampton Row, not the staring, blatant
+street that bears the name now—one fine day in the
+summer of 1900.</p>
+
+<p>Ten minutes or so before I had been taking my
+morning stroll in the company of my bulldog,
+Juggernaut. I was accosted very politely by a
+stoutish, youngish, clean-shaven gentleman, well
+dressed, with the mere suspicion of an Irish accent.</p>
+
+<p>He had said without preface of any kind:</p>
+
+<p>“A fine dog you’ve got, sir. I should be very
+glad if you’d come up with me and show it to a
+lady I know who lives in the flats opposite.”</p>
+
+<p>I assented at once, feeling thoroughly in the
+scene, as they say on the stage. I followed him
+and we displayed the dog Juggernaut, certainly a
+noble specimen of his noble race, to the lady who,
+I may say at once, was a lady, and appeared to be
+on terms of polite acquaintance with the gentleman.
+Jug was admired, and the gentleman and I went
+down into the street again. The lady had not
+evinced the faintest astonishment at the introduction
+of a total stranger with a bulldog into her flat.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145"></span>When we were both down on the pavement of
+Southampton Row, the amateur of bulldogs gave
+me his card, and told me that I should be welcome
+and more than welcome if ever I found myself near
+Castle O’Malley, in County Galway. And so he
+vanished—if he ever were there, as to which I held
+and still hold, in a fantastic sort of way, vague doubts.</p>
+
+<p>No, the flat was a perfectly quiet and unostentatious
+one. Nothing to drink was produced;
+there were no K.O. drops. The lady did not ask
+me to look in again some evening for a quiet game
+of cards with a few congenial friends. Mr. O’Malley
+did not say that he had salvaged a Spanish galleon
+wrecked beneath the rocks on which Castle O’Malley
+was built, and that in consequence he had more
+money than he knew what to do with. And I
+missed nothing from my pocket. That is one of
+the reasons why I hate rationalism, since, when it
+is called in, in a little difficulty or perplexity, its
+advices and explanations are always so stupid, so
+wide of the mark, so absolutely futile. Finally,
+from that day to this, I have never seen Mr. Charles
+O’Malley, of Castle O’Malley, Co. Galway, nor
+have I heard of him. I have forgotten to say that
+he did not so much as ask me my name.</p>
+
+<p>I only wish that I had kept some kind of note of
+the very strange period which I had entered. It
+came about gradually, the merging of Syon into
+Bagdad; and I have a much dimmer recollection
+of the latter city. For its essence, as will be seen
+in the anecdote of the O’Malley, was lack of purpose,
+a certain fantastic confusion, a sense that
+something without any ratio might happen at any
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_146"></span>moment. Nothing began, nothing ended: strange
+people were apt to separate themselves from the
+crowd, to engage in queer discourse without intelligible
+motive or meaning, and then to sink back
+again, leaving no trace behind. And when events
+lack logical sequence or connection, it is difficult
+to retain them in the memory. But I believe that
+I do remember that on this very day of the O’Malley
+incident ten total strangers addressed me, without
+any very manifest reason and to no discernible
+end. We encountered in all sorts of places, in the
+street, in the restaurant, in the vanished Café de
+l’Europe in Leicester Square; the strangers
+uttered their mysterious messages, which to me were
+as incomprehensible as if they had been in cipher,
+and so vanished away. Indeed, looking back, I
+begin to wonder whether I were constantly being
+mistaken for someone else, who must have been
+exactly like me; this Someone Else being evidently
+a prominent member of a secret society, who would
+be aware of the signs and passwords of the order.
+For all I know, when Mr. O’Malley praised poor
+old Jug—he has long years ago gone to be a gargoyle
+on the parapet of some great Gothic church of the
+skies—I should have answered: “Yes, he is a fine
+dog, but green bulldogs with blue spots are finer.”
+Then, it may be, the interview would have become
+coherent, and tending to some end, and the lady in
+the flat would have pressed the secret panel and have
+disclosed ... I really don’t know what.</p>
+
+<p>That very day, I mean the day of the incident of
+the Bulldog, Mr. O’Malley and the Lady in the
+Flat, I was sitting in the Café de l’Europe with a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147"></span>friend, discussing various matters, when, as we rose
+to go a young man of a somewhat colourless and
+unpretending appearance, who had been sitting at
+the other side of the table, suddenly observed:</p>
+
+<p>“I have been very much interested, sir, in your
+conversation, and I should very much like to hear
+more of it.”</p>
+
+<p>Again, I was in the scene. I gave him my address
+in Gray’s Inn, and he called to see me several times,
+always coming at night and staying pretty late,
+asking me many questions about interior things. I
+think it was only on his last visit that I found out
+his odd manner of leaving the Inn, when he went
+away at one or half-past one in the morning. He
+was ignorant of the fact that the Raymond Buildings
+Gate and the Holborn Gate have watchers by
+them who will open the portals all the long night;
+and so when he left me he would climb the spiked
+wall which separates Verulam Buildings from Gray’s
+Inn Road and make off into the gaslight. He, too,
+vanished, and I saw him no more.</p>
+
+<p>It was some time earlier in this year that I became
+conscious of a very odd circumstance. It will perhaps
+have been noticed that I have become insensibly
+Stevensonian in my diction, as I have spoken
+of the Incident of the Bulldog, or of this or of that.
+That is so because the atmosphere in which I lived
+was becoming remarkably like the atmosphere of
+“The Three Impostors,” which, as I have remarked,
+is derived from the “New Arabian” manner of
+R. L. Stevenson. Not only did strange and unknown
+and unexplained people start up from every
+corner, from every café table, and engage me in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_148"></span>obscure mazes of talk, quite in the Arabian manner,
+but I presently became aware that something very
+odd indeed was happening: certain characters in
+“The Three Impostors” showed signs of coming
+to life, a feat which, perhaps, they had failed to
+perform before. I was once talking to a dark young
+man, of quiet and retiring aspect, who wore glasses—he
+and I had met at a place where we had to be
+blindfolded before we could see the light—and he
+told me a queer tale of the manner in which his
+life was in daily jeopardy. He described the doings
+of a fiend in human form, a man who was well
+known to be an expert in Black Magic, a man who
+hung up naked women in cupboards by hooks which
+pierced the flesh of their arms. This monster—I
+may say that there is such a person, though I can
+by no means go bail for the actuality of any of the
+misdeeds charged against him—had, for some
+reason which I do not recollect, taken a dislike to
+my dark young friend. In consequence, so I was
+assured, he had hired a gang in Lambeth, who were
+grievously to maim or preferably to slaughter the
+dark young man; each member of the gang receiving
+a retaining fee of eight shillings and sixpence a
+day—a sum, by the way, that sounds as if it were
+the face value of some mediæval coin long obsolete.
+I listened in wonder, for there are some absurdities
+so enormous that they seem to have a stunning
+effect on the common sense, paralysing it for the
+moment and inhibiting its action. It was only
+when I got home that it dawned upon me that I
+had been listening to the Young Man in Spectacles,
+and that he came out of “The Three Impostors.”
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_149"></span>And soon Miss Lally, another character from the
+book, appeared, and like her prototype discoursed
+most amazing tales, was the heroine of incredible
+adventures, would appear and disappear in a quite
+inexplicable manner, relating always histories before
+unheard of, a personage wholly diverting, enigmatic
+and enchanting.</p>
+
+<p>And the odd thing is that it was as if these two
+had parts to play for a season, and played them—till
+the prompter’s bell sounded, and the curtain fell
+and the lights went out. Both Miss Lally and the
+Young Man in Spectacles still live; but they have
+become useful members of society and eminently
+successful, as I believe, in their several employments.
+Thus do the King and Queen in the play go home to
+their flats or their lodgings after the show and enjoy
+cold beef, pickles and a comfortable bottle of beer.</p>
+
+<p>And now I am going at last to say a good word
+for literature. I have said, again and again, even to
+tedium, that the only good that I can see in it is
+that it is one of the many ways of escaping from
+life, to be classified with Alpine Climbing, Chess,
+Methylated Spirit and Prussic Acid. The way I
+have always seen it is like this: I go out on a
+Sunday afternoon in March with the black north-easter
+blowing to take a walk up Gower Street. I
+say to myself: “O come! I can’t stand this,” and
+go home and write—or try to write—a Chapter <abbr title="">i</abbr>n
+“The Hill of Dreams.” Many people will say that
+the Chapter <abbr title="">i</abbr>s much worse than the street, and I
+daresay that they are right; but, anyhow, it was
+different: it was, for me, the nearest way out of
+Gower Street and the black north-easter. But I
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_150"></span>believe that there may be a little more in literature
+than this. It is certainly the escape from life; but
+perhaps it is also the only means of realising and
+shewing life, or, at least, certain aspects of life.
+Here is an example to my hand. Here am I, not
+trying to write literature, but doing my best to tell
+a true tale, and I find that I can make nothing of
+it. I can set down the facts, or rather such of them
+as I remember, but I am quite conscious that I am
+not, in the real sense of the word, telling the truth;
+that is, I am not giving any sense of the very extraordinary
+atmosphere in which I lived in the year
+1900, of the curious and indescribable impression
+which the events of those days made upon me; the
+sense that everything had altered, that everything
+was very strange, that I lived in daily intercourse
+with people who would have been impossible, unimaginable,
+a year before; that the figure of the
+world was changed utterly for me—of all this I can
+give no true picture, dealing as I am with what are
+called facts. I maintained long ago in “Hieroglyphics”
+that facts as facts do not signify anything
+or communicate anything; and I am sure
+that I was right, when I confess that, as a purveyor
+of exact information, I can make nothing of the
+year 1900. But, avoiding the facts, I have got a
+good deal nearer to the truth in the last chapter of
+“The Secret Glory,” which describes the doings
+and feelings of two young people who are paying
+their first visit to London. <em>I</em> never bolted up to
+town with the house-master’s parlour-maid; but
+truth must be told in figures.</p>
+
+<p>There is one episode of this period of which I
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_151"></span>may say a little more, that is the affair of the Secret
+Society. Putting two and two together, a good
+many years after the event, I am inclined to think
+that it was a mere item in the programme of
+strange and Arabian entertainment that was being
+produced for my benefit: the Secret Society was
+of the same order as the Incident of Mr. O’Malley
+and the Adventure of the Young Man who always
+left by the Spiked Wall, only of a more gorgeous
+and elaborate kind. And I must confess that it did
+me a great deal of good—for the time. To stand
+waiting at a closed door in a breathless expectation,
+to see it open suddenly and disclose two figures
+clothed in a habit that I never thought to see worn
+by the living, to catch for a moment the vision of a
+cloud of incense smoke and certain dim lights
+glimmering in it before the bandage was put over
+the eyes and the arm felt a firm grasp upon it that
+led the hesitating footsteps into the unknown
+darkness: all this was strange and admirable indeed;
+and strange it was to think that within a foot
+or two of those closely curtained windows the common
+life of London moved on the common pavement,
+as supremely unaware of what was being done
+within an arm’s length as if our works had been the
+works of the other side of the moon. All this was
+very fine; an addition and a valuable one, as I say,
+to the phantasmagoria that was being presented to
+me. But as for anything vital in the secret order,
+for anything that mattered two straws to any
+reasonable being, there was nothing of it, and less
+than nothing. Among the members there were,
+indeed, persons of very high attainments, who, in my
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152"></span>opinion, ought to have known better after a year’s
+membership or less; but the society as a society
+was pure foolishness concerned with impotent and
+imbecile Abracadabras. It knew nothing whatever
+about anything and concealed the fact under an
+impressive ritual and a sonorous phraseology. It
+had no wisdom, even of the inferior or lower kind,
+in its leadership; it exercised no real scrutiny into
+the characters of those whom it admitted, and
+so it is not surprising that some of its phrases
+and passwords were to be read one fine morning
+in the papers, their setting being one of the most
+loathsome criminal cases of the twentieth century.</p>
+
+<p>And yet it had and has an interest of a kind. It
+claimed, I may say, to be of very considerable
+antiquity, and to have been introduced into England
+from abroad in a singular manner. I am not
+quite certain as to the details, but the <em>mythos</em> imparted
+to members was something after this fashion.
+A gentleman interested in occult studies was looking
+round the shelves of a second-hand bookshop,
+where the works which attracted him were sometimes
+to be found. He was examining a particular
+volume—I forget whether its title was given—when
+he found between the leaves a few pages of
+dim manuscript, written in a character which was
+strange to him. The gentleman bought the book,
+and when he got home eagerly examined the manuscript.
+It was in cipher; he could make nothing
+of it. But on the manuscript—or, perhaps, on a
+separate slip laid next to it—was the address of a
+person in Germany. The curious investigator of
+secret things and hidden counsels wrote to this
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_153"></span>address, obtained full particulars, the true manner
+of reading the cipher and, as I conjecture, a sort of
+commission and jurisdiction from the Unknown
+Heads in Germany to administer the mysteries in
+England. And hence arose, or re-arose, in this isle
+the Order of the Twilight Star. Its original
+foundation was assigned to the fifteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>I like the story; but there was not one atom of
+truth in it. The Twilight Star was a stumer—or
+stumed—to use a very old English word. Its true
+date of origin was 1880–1885 at earliest. The
+“Cipher Manuscript” was written on paper that
+bore the watermark of 1809 in ink that had a faded
+appearance. But it contained information that
+could not possibly have been known to any living
+being in the year 1809, that was not known to any
+living being till twenty years later. It was, no
+doubt, a forgery of the early ’eighties. Its originators
+must have had some knowledge of Freemasonry;
+but, so ingeniously was this occult fraud “put upon
+the market” that, to the best of my belief, the
+flotation remains a mystery to this day. But what
+an entertaining mystery; and, after all, it did
+nobody any harm.</p>
+
+<p>It must be said that the evidence of the fraudulent
+character of the Twilight Star does not rest
+merely upon the fact that the Cipher Manuscript
+contained a certain piece of knowledge that was
+not in existence in the year 1809. Any critical
+mind, with a tinge of occult reading, should easily
+have concluded that here was no ancient order from
+the whole nature and substance of its ritual and
+doctrine. For ancient rituals, whether orthodox
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_154"></span>or heterodox, are founded on one <em>mythos</em> and on
+one <em>mythos</em> only. They are grouped about some
+fact, actual or symbolic, as the ritual of Freemasonry
+is said to have as its centre certain events
+connected with the building of King Solomon’s
+Temple, and they keep within their limits. But
+the Twilight Star embraced all mythologies and all
+mysteries of all races and all ages, and “referred”
+or “attributed” them to each other and proved
+that they all came to much the same thing; and
+that was enough! That was not the ancient frame
+of mind; it was not even the 1809 frame of mind.
+But it was very much the eighteen-eighty and later
+frame of mind.</p>
+
+<p>I must say that I did not seek the Order merely
+in quest of odd entertainment. As I have stated in
+the chapter before this, I had experienced strange
+things—they still appear to me strange—of body,
+mind and spirit, and I supposed that the Order,
+dimly heard of, might give me some light and guidance
+and leading on these matters. But, as I have
+noted, I was mistaken; the Twilight Star shed no
+ray of any kind on my path.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was towards the end of 1900 that I perceived
+that as I had lost sight of the admirable Syon, so
+Bagdad was wearing badly enough. I have seen
+from the train the architecture of the “White
+City” in these recent years. It was never anything
+at its best, assuredly; never anything save foolishness.
+Still, lit up on a summer night, with its
+extravagant towers and walls, pavilions and domes
+and minarets, with all its fretted and fantastic
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_155"></span>work, with its still lakes and pouring waterfalls; in
+those old days before the war I have no doubt that
+it symbolised joy and enchantment to young and
+simple hearts. But afterwards, when long neglect
+had told upon it, when winter rains had wept upon
+its walls and soot showers had drifted on its pavilions,
+when the summer suns had scorched its whiteness,
+and black March winds had torn its feigned embroideries
+and false ornaments, when many autumn
+storms had beat upon its plaster battlements and
+the waterfalls were stilled and the lakes were become
+obscene pits of slime and rubbish—what an ugly
+mockery it stood there, an idiot’s city fallen into
+ruin, a scenic fairyland in evil days. So my Bagdad
+became like the “White City,” magic down at
+heel, its enchantments silly and clumsy tricks, its
+mystic architecture a shabby sham, its strange encounters,
+meetings with people who turned out to
+be bores or worse than bores. You know the story of
+the fairy gold: at night the man who had had happy
+commerce with the People of the Hills found himself
+enriched with boundless and wonderful treasure;
+but in the morning the marvel of gold had all turned
+into a heap of dead leaves; such was my case.</p>
+
+<p>And here I am moved to wonder, as I often wonder,
+whether what we call “fairy tales” do not in
+fact contain a curious wisdom and the secrets of a
+very strange and mysterious psychology. Take this
+old tale of the fairy gold and its transmutation into
+ugly rubbish, as an example. To most of us it is a
+tale and nothing more than a tale; without any
+reason, without any meaning, without any sort of
+sense or significance in it. We accept it just as a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156"></span>piece of picturesque fancy and nothing more; the
+turning of the magic gold into leaves was just a
+happy notion of the unknown and remote individual
+who made up the story. But suppose that
+there is something more than this: rather, something
+quite different from this. I am well aware,
+of course, of the various explanations of the fairy
+mythology; the fairies are the gods of the heathen
+come down in the world: Diana become Titania.
+Or the fairies are a fantasy on the small, dark people
+who dwelt in the land and under the land before
+the coming of the Celts; or they are “elementals,”
+spirits of the four elements: there are all these
+accounts, and, for all I know, all may be true, each
+in its measure. But is it possible that there is, now
+and then, a more hidden and interior sense in some
+of the tales of the fairyland and the fairies? I am
+inclined to think that this may be so; that the
+stories may be—occasionally, not always by any
+means—the veils of certain rare interior experiences
+of mankind; experiences, I may say, which are best
+avoided. The gold faded into dead leaves; it may
+be more than an idle tale. At any rate, it was a
+very dismal disenchantment to me when I woke up
+and found that I was not the Commander of the
+Faithful, that the fair Circassian was, in fact, a
+native not of Circassia but of Clapham, that Bagdad
+was not Bagdad at all, but a London “Exhibition”
+fallen into very bad repair and urgently in need of
+tacks and whitewash. The Palace was not habitable;
+rain was coming in through cracks and rents in the
+marble that was plaster on the head of him who for
+a time had been Haroun Alraschid, who now began
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_157"></span>to suspect that his real style and title was Silly Fool.
+And then I went on the stage, which is a world of
+illusion certainly, but of a much less harmful illusion
+than that of plaster-Bagdad and fairy gold and the
+hall under the hill.</p>
+
+<p>I have wondered at times why there is no good
+novel of the stage. But a little consideration shews
+that there can be no such thing. George Moore
+wrote long ago a clever book called “A Mummer’s
+Wife.” It is a capital book, and I should think a
+very faithful impression of a “Cloches de Corneville”
+touring company in the early ’eighties. I
+would say of an individual “Cloches de Corneville”
+company, for the characters strike one as
+portraits of particular people; there is nothing of
+the universal about the book, nothing of the essence
+of the stage life. And it is probably impossible to
+write the real novel of the stage, for the good reason
+that the stage is not one but many. In the old days,
+in the days of the Crummles Company, it would have
+been easier. The actor of those days was supposed,
+till he had proved his supreme eminence in one
+particular line of business, to be capable of all. He
+was to play “Hamlet,” he was also to go on in the
+Farce, he was to dance a hornpipe between the
+acts, he was always to be ready with a song; and,
+again, unless he were a very eminent actor indeed,
+he very rarely associated with people beyond the
+range of the call-boy’s voice. The stage in those
+days was a world apart, and the men and women
+who trod it a race apart; the actor was a type, just
+as the sailor of Smollett’s day was a type. But all
+that is long over; it would be very difficult to find
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_158"></span>a general formula to cover the life of the stage
+to-day. Commodore Trunnion viewed all existence
+as a voyage on board one of His Majesty’s ships;
+and I knew a stage-manager who, playing skittles,
+avowed his determination to bring down “that
+O.P. skittle”; but the Commodore is dead, and
+the stage-manager is dying. In fact I should say
+that the average actor of to-day is far from being
+gratified when he is recognised as an actor; rather
+he is inclined to be ashamed of his profession. I
+remember that as I was talking to two stage friends
+on a London pavement an old man who was selling
+laces and studs and such matters in the gutter implored
+us to buy: “I was an actor once myself,
+gentlemen.” I perceived that my friends were very
+far from being pleased. I think that the poor old
+man would have done better if he had said: “I
+was an officer in the Guards once myself, gentlemen.”
+So, in brief, the actors are no longer the
+race apart of the old days; they mix with all sorts
+of people and have, naturally, become very much
+like all sorts of people. Some of them think that
+the change is for the better, others disagree. I
+venture no judgment save this: that they are certainly
+less picturesque, because less differenced than
+of old, and thus it is that nobody is likely to do much
+good with a story of the stage.</p>
+
+<p>I daresay that few people outside the profession
+are aware that the old players had a language of
+their own, or rather a language which they shared
+with another and a widely different craft. Not
+merely the technical language of the stage, though
+that had its curiosities too. For example, I once
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159"></span>heard George Alexander at rehearsal say to one of
+the company: “Too much of the old, Smith, too
+much of the old!” And Smith, though he had
+been for many years on the stage, told me afterwards
+that he had never heard the phrase before,
+and didn’t know what it meant. I knew what it
+meant, having associated, like Mr. Lillyvick, with
+members of the theatrical profession in the provincial,
+that is more or less, the less fortunate grade.
+“The old” means the melodramatic style of acting,
+the manner which used to be associated with the
+name of Barry Sullivan. When an actor said, “I
+gave them a bit of the old,” he meant that he
+exaggerated somewhat both in his tones and in the
+business of the scene; in other words, that he made
+it “big” and “broad.”</p>
+
+<p>But this is not the language I mean. Once on a
+provincial tour I found that the stage-manager had
+somehow heard of my connection with literature,
+and was inclined, in consequence, to suspect me a
+little of being, as we should say now, a “high-brow”
+and to resent the supposed fact. So I put him
+through an examination. I asked if he knew what
+“omees” were, in particular as to the character
+signified by the phrase “omee of the carser.” Then
+as to the idioms “nunty munjare” and “nunty
+dinnari” and so on. He broke down badly, but he
+put away his evil suspicions from that moment;
+he knew that if I had written books in my day I
+had turned over a new leaf and had become a
+reformed character: I knew the curious speech
+better than he did. It is barbarous Italian, and was
+the lingo of old-fashioned actors and thieves.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_160"></span></p>
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="Chapter_XI">
+    <i>Chapter <abbr title="Eleven">XI</abbr></i>
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap">It</span> is a very odd experience to go on the stage
+at the age of thirty-nine. It is, of course,
+unpractical, since at that age a man is too
+old to learn the business properly; but it is
+a great entertainment. The change was so extreme.
+I had always lived a very quiet life. I had few
+friends, few acquaintances. My life was in reading
+books and in writing them. All my preoccupations
+were literary. Every morning after breakfast I went
+over what I had written the night before, correcting
+here and there and everywhere, generally convinced
+that the passage which had pleased me so much as
+I wrote it was, after all, not magnificent. I took
+the bulldog for a walk from 12 to 1, and another
+half-hour walk in the afternoon. Then two cups of
+tea without milk or sugar at 4, and the rigour of the
+literary game till 7, and again after dinner till 11.
+It was a life of routine, and all its adventures,
+difficulties, defeats and rare triumphs were those
+of the written page. I did not know a single actor,
+and had no curiosity as to the actor’s life, circumstances,
+customs or manners. And then, one afternoon
+in February, 1901, I found myself stuck up
+with a number of ladies and gentlemen on a thing
+like a greenhouse flower-pot stand, and we were all
+required to express suitable and varied emotions as
+Shylock appealed for the fulfilment of the bond
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_161"></span>which Antonio had given him. This was the first
+thing I had tried to do on the stage, and I believe
+it was the most difficult. No doubt Mr.—afterwards
+Sir Frank—Benson was right in saying that
+it was the only way to learn how to act; but
+gesture, facial expression, pantomime, the knack of
+knowing how to be individual and yet to join in
+effectively with the crowd; all these things are
+extremely difficult, very much more difficult than
+the art of speaking an effective line effectively.</p>
+
+<p>But—very likely because the change from my
+former way of living was so tremendous in every
+respect—I found the life an enchanting one. Of
+course I could not have begun under happier
+auspices; nay, I could not have begun under any
+auspices half so happy. It has been said, I think,
+more than once, and said by men far more qualified
+to speak than I, that if it had not been for the
+Benson Company, acting as an ordered art, with
+its technique and tradition, would pretty well have
+perished out of England. The old stock companies
+were gone, with their manifold opportunities for
+learning the actor’s craft. The young man who
+went on the stage probably walked on for six
+months or a year in a London production, and
+unless he were an exceptionally bright young fellow
+he learned very little. Perhaps, if he were lucky,
+he was promoted from a thinking part to a speaking
+one and uttered the line: “You don’t say so!”
+every night; but still he learned very little. If he
+became a good actor under this régime, it was a
+case of genius triumphing over circumstance. Of
+course good actors come from everywhere: from
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_162"></span>the academies, from melodramas travelling in the
+fit-ups, from the chorus of the musical play, from
+the ranks of the walkers-on in the long London
+run; but, as I say, these are cases of greatness
+overcoming difficulties. But under the training
+provided by the Benson Company it was a man’s
+fault if he did not learn to act; it was pretty
+definite proof that there was no acting in his composition.
+I remember Henry Ainley saying in this
+very year, 1901: “Well, in the last fortnight I
+have played twelve different parts, and if that won’t
+teach a man how to act, nothing will.” This, I
+may say, was at the end of the Festival Season at
+Stratford-on-Avon, a strenuous and a delightful
+time.</p>
+
+<p>But, as I say, I could have entered on the boards
+under no happier auspices. There was a constant
+succession of small parts, so graded with due tenderness
+both to the beginner and the audience that
+not much harm could be done by uneasy awkwardness,
+and much good was certain to be gained by
+the beginner. For example, I have a suspicion that
+the whole pack of us on that flower-pot stand in
+“The Merchant,” all of us beginners, were about
+as bad as bad can be; but it really signified little.
+The people in front were looking at Shylock and
+Portia, not at us; and I don’t suppose that our
+incapacity diminished to any calculable extent the
+public entertainment. Then in the next piece,
+“As You,” I was a Forest Lord with a line. I had
+to say to the Banished Duke: “I’ll bring you to
+him straight,” and Oscar Asche took pains to show
+me that I must speak it as I moved up stage with
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163"></span>my back to the audience; but the fortunes of the
+play hardly depended on that line, while I was
+beginning to grow a slight seed of confidence.</p>
+
+<p>And how all this was an utterly different world
+from anything that I had ever conjectured; I
+cannot express the gulf that yawned between the
+old and the new. In the former years I struggled
+with words and phrases and sentences and shades of
+meaning implied by them: now I strove to understand
+how something like an attenuated pigtail
+could become a highly probable fifteenth-century
+beard and moustaches in a couple of minutes, when
+skilled hands were laid upon it. And I was occupied
+with R.U.E. and L.U.E. and 5 and 8, and how to
+stand so that you command the stage as F. R. B.
+instructed me, and the endeavour to take in and
+profit by the kindly tips and hints and cautions
+given by the elder members of the company:
+here was a holiday, indeed, for a man who had
+tried to tear the secret of literature from the
+thorn castle where it is concealed, who had
+torn his hands and his heart sadly enough in the
+endeavour.</p>
+
+<p>I have mentioned the tips and hints of the Elder
+Brethren amongst the Bensonians. This was a
+great part of the discipline and instruction of the
+course. It was not only what Benson said at rehearsal,
+it was also what Asche or Rodney or
+Brydone or Swete said after the rehearsal or after
+the show, and often what they said was, quite
+rightly, highly uncomplimentary. I remember
+when Henry Herbert—“starring” in America now,
+I believe—was playing in “King John,” it fell to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164"></span>him to pronounce the lines which speak of painting
+the lily and gilding refined gold. He spoke them,
+as I thought, with great spirit; but Brydone—dead
+not long ago—took him apart afterwards and
+talked to him for half an hour or more as to the
+grave mistake he had committed.</p>
+
+<p>“You spoke the lines as if they were beautiful
+poetry,” said Brydone, “and, indeed, they are. If
+you had been reciting them your reading would
+have been quite right; but not in the scene, on the
+stage. So-and-so—I have forgotten the name of
+the part—is raging against King John; he isn’t
+thinking of the poetic beauty of the words he is
+using.”</p>
+
+<p>Now, I do not presume to judge whether Brydone
+were right or wrong in this criticism; such matters
+are too high for my small experience as an actor;
+but consider the enormous value to the beginner
+of living in such an atmosphere of thought and
+observation and consideration of the things of the
+theatre. Herbert may have come eventually to
+the conclusion that he had been right after all,
+and that Brydone was wrong; but, anyhow, he
+had worried the question out and weighed it in
+his mind, and looked at it and around it; and all
+that, it seems to me, is the very air in which good
+craftsmanship is born and nurtured and grows
+great and flourishes.</p>
+
+<p>And so, apart from these after-confabulations
+and dressing-room counsels, a rehearsal in the
+Benson Company has always struck me as a liberal
+education in the player’s art. Benson himself—the
+“Pa” of the affectionate and reverent remembrance
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_165"></span>of many hundreds of his grateful sons and
+scholars—has always been an imaginative poet of a
+high order; though somehow he has never written
+any poetry. Instead, he has produced Shakespeare,
+and perhaps he has chosen the better way. He has
+illuminated his text admirably, and his way was not
+to come down to the theatre with the whole scheme
+of things cut and dried in his head, with every intonation,
+every bit of business and every position
+settled immutably beforehand, but rather to
+approach the play, scene by scene, with a liberal
+and open spirit. The main conception he doubtless
+brought with him, but any light he could find in
+the process of rehearsal he would welcome heartily,
+no matter whether it came from one of the elder
+brethren or from the newest member of the company.
+For example, during the rehearsals of “King
+John” we had come to the scene wherein the
+Legate, Pandulph, reconciles the King to Holy
+Church. I was talking to the Legate at the wings
+during some brief interval, and ventured very tentatively
+to describe the symbolical embrace known
+as the Kiss of Peace as a possibly effective bit of
+business in the reconciliation scene. The Legate,
+interested, asked me to show him how it was done,
+and we went through the business. But Benson,
+who seemed to be considering other matters down
+stage, had noticed what we were about, and he
+called out: “I like that: we’ll do it.” And done
+it was; and I had been a little over two months in
+the company and on the stage!</p>
+
+<p>And another instance, taken from the same play,
+of a Bensonian rehearsal of those days. The scene
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_166"></span>was the discovery of the dead body of Prince
+Arthur. I had to say:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0a">“What wilt thou do, renowned Faulconbridge,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Second a villain and a murderer?”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Whereon Hubert furiously interposed:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0a">“Lord Essex, I am none!”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>And then I had to draw the cloak away from the
+corpse and exclaim:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0a">“Who killed this Prince?”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>And thereupon a debate arose. Should the words
+be spoken before the removal of the cloak? Should
+the cloak be removed before the uttering of the
+line? Should word and action be simultaneous?
+The point was discussed with the utmost earnestness,
+as a matter of vital importance, and I, feeling
+that I was in mighty deep waters, suggested in all
+humility that I should speak the words with an indicative
+gesture and that Hubert should step forward,
+appalled, and remove the cloak and discover
+the body of the Prince. But this started another
+subsidiary debate, and the rehearsal breaking off at
+this point, Brydone (Hubert) and Frank Rodney
+(Faulconbridge) were left on the Stratford stage,
+walking up and down, and wondering, in muttered
+undertones, whether it would be within the limits
+of possibility and stage propriety for Hubert to
+snatch that cloak away. Their faces were grave,
+earnest and perplexed. Outside in the sunshine by
+the Avon I encountered “Pa.” He looked at me
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_167"></span>with a certain waggishness in his eye, as if he
+suspected bewilderment on my part, and said:</p>
+
+<p>“Well, Mr. Machen, what do you think about
+it yourself?”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed, sir,” I replied, “I don’t venture to
+have any opinion.”</p>
+
+<p>And I meant what I said, for I didn’t think then,
+and I don’t think now, that it befits the entered
+apprentice to express his opinion, or presume to
+have any opinion, in the presence of past masters.</p>
+
+<p>Now it may be thought that I am “guying” the
+Company methods in this matter of Prince Arthur’s
+funeral cloak. I am not doing anything of the sort.
+I only wish I had gone on in the craft, and were now
+myself entitled to walk up and down the stage,
+debating just such a point. The matter in itself
+was, no doubt, small enough: a stage management
+in a hurry would have given a ruling and the scene
+would have proceeded; but under a stage-management
+in a hurry what would have become of the
+vivid interest taken in the smallest circumstance of
+the play by the whole company, from F. R. Benson
+downward?</p>
+
+<p>And, by the way, I trust I am not giving the
+impression that the Bensonians of that day were a
+body of solemn pedants? I have not yet forgotten
+my admiration, my almost awestruck admiration,
+at seeing the manner in which the man who was to
+play King John drank home-brewed ale in a triangular
+parlour of the Windmill on the afternoon
+before the production. He drank in the manner of
+the ancient heroes, and he gave a very good performance
+at night.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_168"></span></p>
+
+<p>But the Stratford Festival drew to its dose. On
+the last Saturday we were rehearsing in the morning,
+playing in the afternoon and playing again in the
+evening. Some time in the course of the day I was
+told that I was to play Nym in the “Merry Wives”
+on Monday night at Worcester. I bought the play
+and looked at the part and got the cuts from the
+Prompt Book—and I wonder why I didn’t drown
+myself in the Avon after the show as the easiest way
+out of the difficulty; and if anyone wants to know
+why, let him read the part of Nym in “The Merry
+Wives of Windsor,” and ask himself how he would
+like to learn that queer gibberish and learn how to
+play it in a couple of days, he having had three
+months’ experience of the stage. But instead of
+drowning myself in the Avon, I ... refreshed
+myself at a famous tavern of the town together with
+about half the company; and I think we heard the
+chimes at two o’clock in the morning, and it was
+reported that old George Weir, on being asked “to
+write something” in the hostess’s book had written
+the words: “When my cue comes call me and I
+will answeir.”</p>
+
+<p>And that reminds me: At the Bensonian dinner
+in the year in which this great actor, George Weir,
+died, F. R. Benson began his speech. His manner
+commanded the cessation of applause, and he raised
+one hand, and held it high, and said:</p>
+
+<p>“This year, one amongst us has answered the
+summons of the call-boy of the stars.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>But to return to my small business. On the
+Sunday we travelled to Worcester, and I spent the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_169"></span>rest of the day in a desperate struggle with Nym
+and “the humour of bread and cheese,” and
+“that’s the humour of it,” in endeavouring to get
+into my memory phrases which are not merely old
+but old-fashioned, for Nym, like Touchstone, discourses
+for the most part Elizabethan catchwords
+which, three hundred years before, were “certain
+of a laugh,” which the process of time and fashion
+has made meaningless, and phrases such as these are
+very difficult to learn.</p>
+
+<p>But I learned them somehow or other on the
+Sunday, and the next morning came to the one and
+only rehearsal. It was not on the stage, more important
+things were happening there, but in the
+travellers’ samples room of one of the Worcester
+inns. Of course there was no scenery, no costumes,
+no “props” of any kind. A few chairs indicated
+the set, quite sufficiently, I may say to a man of
+experience, but dubiously enough to a man of next
+to no experience. Thus, when it came to my last
+exit, the Assistant Stage-Manager gave his instructions
+somewhat as follows:</p>
+
+<p>“After you have said the last words to Page,
+turn round and go up the flight of steps L.C., here,
+between these chairs. When you have got to the
+top, turn again and say to Page, over his shoulder:
+‘My name is Nym, and Falstaff loves your wife.’
+Then exit Left along the terrace.”</p>
+
+<p>Simplicity itself, to an actor, but somewhat
+horrifying to a beginner. And then two or three
+of the principals were not there—they were rehearsing
+other scenes, very likely, on the stage, and
+the Prompter’s: “Mr. Rodney will come on on
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_170"></span>that cue from the right upper entrance, where that
+table is, and you go up to him and meet him Centre
+and say so and so, and then he speaks the line so
+and so and you cross to the Right”—with much
+more to the same effect. And my breath was queer
+and catchy, even though it was only the rehearsal,
+and I wondered what my voice and I would be like
+at night!</p>
+
+<p>Well, I was paralysed with stage-fright. But I
+got through, somehow; and I hope the Old Woman
+of the Company, Miss Denvil, as admirable an
+actress as George Weir was an actor, meant what
+she said after I had made my Exit Left along the
+terrace. She smacked me heartily on the back,
+and said:</p>
+
+<p>“There! I always say the nervous ones are the
+best!”</p>
+
+<p>So the tour went on, and in the course of it I
+received an odd bit of promotion. I descended
+from the flower-pot stand in the Trial Scene of the
+“Merchant” and became the Clerk of the Court.
+I think he speaks one line and reads a letter, and
+that is all. It is hardly to be called a part; if the
+man who had to do it failed at the last moment the
+Business Manager or, more likely, his assistant,
+would be summoned and robed in the black habit
+and the square cap. He would be told the line and
+given the letter, and that would be all right. It
+was so small a thing that the man who “played”
+it was supposed not to care to do so under his own
+name, so I was either not in the bill at all or else I
+appeared as “Mr. Walter Plinge,” the Mrs. Harris
+of the Benson Company, who often came in useful
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_171"></span>on occasions like this, or when there was a case of
+“doubling.” There was such a person, but I believe
+he kept a tavern frequented by the Company.</p>
+
+<p>And so I was the Clerk of the Court, and solemnly
+proceeded to consider within myself what a Compleat
+Clerk of the Court should be like. I determined,
+firstly, that the boy at the back of the gallery
+should hear what I said; but this is a general rule—and
+by no means the least important—which applies
+to all acting. My second resolution was that a
+really convincing Clerk would not take the faintest
+interest in the very emotional procedure which
+seems to have characterised the strict court of
+Venice. He would listen to all the pleadings and
+all the agonies with a stolid countenance. When
+the Doge spoke of “brassy bosoms” and “hearts
+of flint” and “gentle answer, Jew” and so forth,
+the Clerk would become stonier and stonier in his
+indifference, possibly reflecting inwardly that he had
+always thought that the appointment was a purely
+political one, and that now he was sure of it. “Ad
+captandum arguments,” “Old Bailey rhetoric,”
+“Buzfuz on the Bench,” “Trying to throw dust
+in the eyes of the Jew,” such phrases, translated, of
+course, into choice Venetian dialect, might be supposed
+to flit through the purely legal and formalistic
+mind of the Clerk. As for the young
+advocate, whose credentials the Clerk had been
+obliged to proclaim, well, frankly, the Clerk could
+not understand how the Doge, politician as he was,
+could permit such unprofessional rubbish as the
+“Quality of mercy” speech to be uttered in court
+at all. “Mountain pines,” “wag their high tops,”
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_172"></span>“twice blest,” “crowned monarch better than his
+throne”: really, really! What was the Bar coming
+to? The Clerk’s face and attitude have become
+perfectly stony in their supreme indifference; he
+might be a thousand miles away.</p>
+
+<p>But! What is that? The Bond bad in law?
+The plaintiff debarred from recovering, and not
+only that, but, <i lang="la">ipso facto</i>, liable to criminal proceedings
+of a highly penal character? Now, indeed,
+the Clerk of the Court is interested. Not that he
+cares twopence for Antonio or for Shylock either;
+but there does seem distinctly to be a flaw. The
+young Advocate must have a technical mind, that
+greatest of all blessings. The Clerk pricks up his
+ears, as if he were a terrier advised of the presence
+of a rat; he is intensely awake; he consults his
+authorities on the table before him; he is really
+inclined to think that a highly important point is
+at issue; he believes that the question, or something
+very much like it, was raised in the Dogeship
+of Bragadin, <abbr title="circa" lang="la"><i>c.</i></abbr> 1150. At length the Clerk of the
+Court is all alive.</p>
+
+<p>I thought of all that, and I tried to render it as
+best I could. And I only mention this trivial nonsense
+because, to the best of my belief, it is the
+only instance in which I have found that doing my
+best and sparing no pains brought me the faintest
+sort of reward. As a rule, in my experience, the
+mere fact of taking pains has been rewarded with
+the malignity of scoundrels and the insults of fools.</p>
+
+<p>But in this extraordinary and, as I must say,
+miraculous affair it was otherwise. The tour of the
+Benson Company drew to its close. It was now hot
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_173"></span>summer and we were playing a <i lang="fr">matinée</i>, I think on
+the Whitsuntide Bank Holiday, in some theatre on
+the south side of the river; some theatre which in
+all probability is now devoted to “the pictures.”
+It was glorious weather, there were few people in
+the house, and as one of the ladies of the company
+observed cheerfully in the wings, “People who
+come to see Shakespeare on an afternoon like this
+ought to have their noses rubbed in it.” Ah, the
+good, gross gaiety: how few people have as this
+lady had, and has, the true art of it! Her remark
+did me a lot of good that languid, heated afternoon
+in the half-empty theatre; and I believe that the
+Clerk of the Court—we were playing the “Merchant”—was
+a shade wearier than usual in his
+utter boredom and contempt of the whole proceedings:
+till his moment came.</p>
+
+<p>And a few days later Henry Ainley was saying to
+me in our dressing-room: “I am engaged by
+Alexander to play Paolo next year. And, do you
+know, Alexander said to me: ‘You’ve got a remarkably
+good actor in your Company; and I
+couldn’t even find his name in the cast. He was
+playing the Clerk of the Court that afternoon: he
+was very good indeed.’”</p>
+
+<p>The great George Alexander to speak thus of the
+little beginner in his little shadow of a part!
+Well, I suppose all such taps are vanities; but
+there was a very happy man that night in the
+dressing-room, and he plied the spirit-gum and
+fixed on his beard for the part of the Major-Domo
+in the “Shrew”—two lines—with trembling,
+unsteady, rapturous fingers.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_174"></span></p>
+
+<p>A few weeks later I was engaged to play a small
+part in “Paolo and Francesca,” but that was for
+the early spring of 1902, and I had to fill in. So I
+joined a pastoral or open-air company (almost all
+of whom were Bensonians), and played with them
+for three weeks. Then I met a friend in the Strand
+and said “I want a shop,” and found myself rehearsing
+next day the part of a comic Irish servant
+in a sketch called “The Just Punishment”—an
+entirely preposterous playlet. We did a fortnight
+of it—two houses a night—at the Hoxton Varieties
+and another East-End hall, the name of which I
+have forgotten. At the Varieties I dressed with a
+very pleasant black man; the rats ran about the
+dressing-rooms and passages like kittens. And the
+audience! There was no question of their being
+all right till you began to bore them. You made
+your entrance as the curtain went up, and found
+the whole house in an uproar. Most of it was lighthearted
+hilarity, some of it was argument, and they
+argue very forcibly in Hoxton, occasionally with
+broken bottles. The actor’s business was to drown
+them, and get them to listen, and amuse them—if
+he could—and very capital training it was. But
+the sketch was not booked on—and no wonder—so
+I went to Mr. Denton’s in Maiden Lane. He sent
+me to Mr. Charles Terry, who was taking out a
+melodrama called “The Silent Vengeance,” written
+by Mr. Harry Grattan round the personality of
+Mr. Silward, that wonderful animal impersonator.
+From first to last I played three parts in “The
+Silent Vengeance”—a solicitor, a doctor and a
+barber—and it only ran six weeks. But for the last
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_175"></span>week of the run I had been rehearsing the part of
+an old actor in the farcical comedy of “The
+Varsity Belle.” Then at the end of a fortnight, for
+one reason or another, I had to change this rôle for
+that of a University Don; and there were over
+two hundred cues in the first act, and I had only a
+week for study! The manager was an entirely
+honest but boorish fellow, and I gave him my
+notice; “bunged in my notice” would be more
+idiomatic. The day I left “The Varsity Belle”
+company I got an engagement from an old Bensonian
+friend to play for a fortnight or so in Old
+Comedy down in the western country, and a
+delightful engagement it turned out. We all
+knew each other, or very soon got to know each
+other, and we drank beer and played skittles in
+tumbledown alleys behind old inns, and brewed
+bowls of punch, and in spite of these wild practices
+acted, I think, decently. Poor Ernest Cosham was
+the Comedian and Mr. Leon Quartermaine played
+the juvenile leads; and I hope he has not forgotten
+a famous game of Blind Hookey in a little inn at
+Westbury-on-Avon, the only card game that I ever
+enjoyed. And the morning after our last performance
+I went up from Andover to town and listened
+to Stephen Phillips reading his play, “Paolo and
+Francesca,” to the assembled company. I had been
+a year on the stage, and I think I had had as varied
+an experience as falls to the lot of most beginners.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>And here there is a great gap. There were other
+adventures on the stage; but enough, I think, has
+been said of these things. I have just told of that
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_176"></span>happy moment of June, 1901, when Henry Ainley
+repeated to me George Alexander’s kindly praise of
+my acting. And, indeed, that was bliss, but I believe
+that I received the promise of a happiness that
+should be deeper and more lasting one morning
+towards the end of August, 1921. For that morning
+brought a letter ending my career as a journalist.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Poor George Sampson got into grievous trouble
+over his innocent speculations as to so innocent a
+thing as an underpetticoat. I propose, therefore
+to say nothing about the craft of journalism, which
+I followed for many years.</p>
+
+<p>Save only this: <i lang="la">Eduxit me de lacu miseriæ, et de
+luto fæcis. Et statuit super petram pedes meos: et
+direxit gressus meos.</i></p>
+
+<p class="p4 center">
+THE END
+</p>
+
+<p class="p4 center smaller">
+Printed in Great Britain at<br>
+<cite>The Mayflower Press, Plymouth</cite>. William Brendon &amp; Son, Ltd.
+</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter transnote">
+  <h3 id="Transcribers_Note">
+    Transcriber’s Note:
+  </h3>
+<p>    Words may have multiple spelling
+    variations or inconsistent hyphenation in the text. These have been
+    left unchanged unless indicated below. Jargon, dialect, obsolete and
+    alternative spellings were left unchanged. Three misspelled words were
+    corrected.
+</p>
+<p>A Table of Contents was added for convenience of the
+    reader. Unprinted or partially printed letters and punctuation, were
+    corrected.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78106 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+This book, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
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+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
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+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook #78106
+(https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78106)