Things near & far
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