Arthur Machen: Ecstasy and Epiphany

Abstract

This essay examines the treatment of epiphany in the fiction of Arthur Machen from 1894 to 1922. It argues that whereas modernist
writers often preferred to detach the notion of epiphany from its originally spiritual context, Machen’s characters experience
versions of it inflected by pagan and Christian religious practice. Accompanying this was his evolution of ‘ecstasy’ as a
literary concept; the essay explores the way that the two ideas were fused in fiction such as The Hill of Dreams (1907), The Great Return (1915) and The Secret Glory (1922).

Full text

ARTHUR MACHEN: ECSTASY
AND EPIPHANY
Nicholas Freeman
Abstract
This essay examines the treatment of epiphany in the fiction of Arthur
Machen from 1894 to 1922. It argues that whereas modernist writers often
preferred to detach the notion of epiphany from its originally spiritual con-
text, Machen’s characters experience versions of it inflected by pagan and
Christian religious practice. Accompanying this was his evolution of ‘ecstasy’
as a literary concept; the essay explores the way that the two ideas were fused
in fiction such as The Hill of Dreams (1907), The Great Return (1915) and The
Secret Glory (1922).
Epiphany is central to modernist writing. Distrusting a Victorian version of
realism that they increasingly regarded as complacent and misleading, James
Joyce, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, amongst others, focused in-
stead on fleeting episodes—‘the most delicate and evanescent of moments’, as
Joyce calls them—in which the world and/or the self was beheld with startling
clarity. Mixing the conclusion of Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1873) and
impressionist art’s fascination with what Robert Browning had earlier termed
‘The instant made eternity’, the epiphany was, explained Joyce’s Stephen
Hero, ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation ...the gropings of a spiritual eye
which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus’.
1
Although Joyce stressed the spiritual nature of epiphany, recognising its
Greek origins in the ‘showing forth’ of a god, many modernist revelations
were essentially personal rather than recognitions of the numinous beyond or
outside the individual: the confused stirrings of Bertha and Miss Fulton look-
ing at the pear tree in Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ (1918) are a typical example. Even
when modernist writers do consider the beyond, as D. H. Lawrence does in
the final paragraph of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ (1909) where Elizabeth
‘wince[s] in fear and shame’ from ‘death, her ultimate master’, the result is
abstract and curiously secularised, for Lawrence and his contemporaries were
as suspicious of the Victorians’ pieties as they were of their omniscient narra-
tors.
2
This wariness has been shared by many subsequent critics, who have
preferred analysis of Woolf’s ‘moments of being’, Joyce’s epiphanies or the
unspecified traumas enacted in E. M. Forster’s Marabar caves to examining
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such incidents within a wider context of early 20th century (Christian)
mysticism.
Arthur Machen’s fiction, by contrast, reveals a markedly different concep-
tion of epiphany and ecstasy running alongside the more secular, or at least,
non-doctrinal versions of them often associated with the avant-garde experi-
mentation of the fin de sie
`cle. Machen occupies an uncertain position in the
religious literature and culture of the early 20th century, being a radical yet
traditional Anglo-Catholic, for want of a neater label, rather than a Catholic
propagandist like R. H. Benson, an exuberant juggler of paradoxes like G. K.
Chesterton or what might loosely be termed a ‘conventional’ Anglican. More
conservative than Marie Corelli or George Moore—he never sought to re-
write biblical narratives in the manner of her Barabbas (1893) or his The Brook
Kerrith (1916)—he was nevertheless idiosyncratic and dogmatic. Regarded
chiefly as a horror writer since his first novel, The Great God Pan, sparked
controversy in 1894, Machen’s spiritual writings have been largely overlooked
by academic commentators who have preferred to concentrate on his Gothic
fiction or, latterly, his treatment of urban life.
3
Vincent Starrett termed him
‘a novelist of ecstasy and sin’ 90 years ago, but subsequent critics of Gothic,
decadence and urban studies have rarely pursued the implications of such
claims, and even when they have done so, they are rarely sympathetic towards
them.
4
S. T. Joshi, for instance, admits the ‘sad irony that we now read the
bulk of [Machen’s] fiction to gain a few pleasant shudders rather than to
renounce the modern world of science and rationalism’, and asserts that his
work ‘failed in [its] literary and philosophical exercise’.
5
This is because
‘Machen’s monolithic views remained unaffected by any new insights’ and
were less ‘a philosophy than a series of prejudices’ (pp. 16–17). Such com-
ments demonstrate the increasingly scientific and secular attitudes of late-20th
century commentators rather than doing justice to Machen’s beliefs.
This essay considers instances of epiphany and ecstasy in Machen’s work
from The Great God Pan to The Secret Glory (1922). Machen undoubtedly set
himself against modernity, disliking its literature, art, music, architecture and
even food, but he was not simply a reactionary curmudgeon who refused to
move with the times. He sought instead an alternative way of viewing the
world, one steeped in mystical and occult tradition and within which the artist
played a central role. There are ‘two solutions of existence’, he wrote in 1902.
‘[O]ne is the materialistic or rationalistic, the other, the spiritual or mystic.’
6
It
is from a dialogue between the two that true art and enlightenment emerge.
Born in 1865, Machen grew up in rural South Wales far from the metro-
politan tumult that characterised much of later Victorian Britain. The ‘son,
grandson, great-grandson of Welsh priests and scholars’, his spiritual and aca-
demic lineage instilled in him a profound respect for tradition and encouraged
a conviction that his forefathers had been the guardians of ancient wisdom.
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This idea is the mainspring of The Secret Glory, written in 1907, which tells
how Ambrose Meyrick grows up haunted by his childhood memory of the
Grail, and is eventually martyred by Muslims after returning ‘a Celtic cup’ to ‘a
certain concealed shrine in Asia’ where its glories would be hidden forever
from ‘the evil world’.
8
Machen’s religious upbringing was extremely influen-
tial on his later views, but one should note two subsequent important events.
The first was a period in the mid-1880s when he catalogued occult books for
the London publisher, George Redway, and marinated himself in arcane
knowledge. The second was his friendship with A. E. Waite, mystic, magician
and historian of freemasonry, whom he met in 1887. The two collaborated on
a cryptic epistolary work, The House of Hidden Light (1904), and a verse drama,
The Hidden Sacrament of the Holy Graal, included in Waite’s Strange Houses of
Sleep (1906). Machen also helped his friend with The Hidden Church of the Holy
Graal (1909).
9
In return, Waite used his position as the editor of Horlick’s
Magazine to promote Machen’s work, and it was in this unlikely organ that
‘A Fragment of Life’ and extracts from The Hill of Dreams first appeared be-
tween 1904 and 1907. Waite also encouraged Machen to study ritual magic
and join the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1899, and an amalgam of
these differing influences, augmented by Machen’s eclectic reading of classical
and medieval literature, gradually solidified into a spiritual credo which
opposed alike contemporary materialism and the workings of an Anglican
church Machen considered to have betrayed its divine purpose.
10
While he
wholeheartedly believed that Christianity still possessed what Ian MacDonald
calls ‘the supernatural collateral to support its claims’, the Church of England
could not provide access to it.
11
Its clergy, Machen wrote in 1915, ‘pass their
time in preaching: not the eternal mysteries, but a twopenny morality, in
changing the Wine of Angels and the Bread of Heaven into gingerbeer and
mixed biscuits’.
12
This was, he felt, ‘a sorry transubstantiation, a sad alchemy’,
and the main reason why Christianity was ‘slipping into irrelevance and
disdain’ for much of the population.
13
While the Anglican Church struggled to engage with the numinous,
Machen’s fiction sought to convey its intense but often bewildering intim-
ations. An emblematic work is ‘The Holy Things’, a short story from 1897,
eventually published in Ornaments of Jade (1924), where a discontented poet
and artist suddenly perceives a prosaic London street as ‘a long aisle’, ‘a rich
tabernacle, mysterious, the carven house of holy things’. His surroundings are
transfigured without warning as he sees ‘golden mighty figures moving’ and
‘imploring arms stretching forth’ accompanied by the sound of a choir singing
in Welsh, ‘the tongue of his boyhood that he had forgotten’. It would be a
mistake to read the fragment in purely autobiographical terms, but it seems
clear that the nameless protagonist combines Machen’s visionary imagination
with a more general notion of mystical experience.
14
His epiphany, like the
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one recalled by a young man in William James’s The Varieties of Religious
Experience (1902), comes ‘unasked and unexpected, and seemed to consist
merely in the temporary obliteration of the conventionalities which usually
surround and cover my life’. Machen would have regarded ‘merely’ here as
chronic understatement, but the sense of ‘a temporary loss of my own identity,
accompanied by an illumination which revealed to me a deeper significance
than I had been wont to attach to life’ is one that his writings frequently
evoke.
15
‘The Holy Things’ offers in microcosm the repeated concerns of
much of Machen’s subsequent fiction, with its angelic figures reappearing in
his famous account of the Angels of Mons, ‘The Bowmen’ (1914) and its
notion that the metropolis can be transfigured by the golden light of divinity
the basis of ‘A Fragment of Life’ (2004).
The Hill of Dreams, written between 1895 and 1897, also offers glimpses of
the beyond. Initially, these are joyous communions with the Gwent coun-
tryside, such as when Lucian Taylor, the novel’s artistic young protagonist,
looks on ‘glamour’ while wandering the ‘outland and occult territory’ of its
hills, or imaginatively reconstructs the Roman city of Siluria.
16
Later in the
novel however, when Lucian is undergoing great hardship in London, epiph-
any becomes an altogether more menacing notion as the city is transfigured
into ‘one grey temple of an awful rite’ or ‘a land of grey rocks’ (p. 191). There
is no Christian consolation here: Lucian vainly deploys his memory of happier
times as a bulwark against alienation and despair, clinging to his belief that
literature is ‘the art of causing delicious sensation by the use of words’ (p. 155)
even as his life collapses into loneliness and addiction. Having made art his
religion, Lucian becomes spiritually solipsistic and self-devouring: while he is
open to new sensations and stimuli, he no longer has any external religious
anchorage and the failure of his writing robs him of creative success and
humanity. A letter from his clergyman father recalls ‘the holy memory of
Mass on Christmas morning’ (p. 189) and briefly arms him against ‘an influ-
ence that seemed to come from without and within’ (p. 190), but any
Christian renaissance and ‘good resolutions’ (p. 190) are short-lived and des-
pair and desire overwhelm him. The sacred and the profane become confused,
so that young men chanting ‘some music-hall verse’ make it sound ‘like
plainsong’ (p. 197). He begins to think ‘in symbols’ (p. 201), his world a
sensual paradise that divorces the immediate gratifications recommended by
Omar Khayyam from any wider religious or intellectual context. As his de-
cline accelerates, his perception of life loses even its lustrous eroticism, sub-
stituting for it ‘the marriage of the Sabbath’ in which Lucian and a nameless
prostitute ‘writhed in the flames, insatiable, forever’ (p. 234).
Lucian’s definition of literature was reiterated in Machen’s critical
manifesto, the anti-realist polemic Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in
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Literature (1902). Great literature, he argued, gives us ‘an overpowering im-
pression of ‘‘strangeness’’, of remoteness, of withdrawal from the common
ways of life’ and ‘in that withdrawal is the beginning of ecstasy’ (p. 57).
‘Ecstasy’ was an elusive concept—Machen discovered it in both The
Pickwick Papers and the Odyssey—and he glossed it as ‘rapture, beauty, ador-
ation, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown, desire for the unknown’
(p. 21). His theory was dramatised in stories such as ‘The White People’
(1904), which opens with the claim that ‘Sorcery and sanctity’ are ‘the only
realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life’.
17
Such usage
was broadly in line with that of Renaissance theologians and doctors such as
Ridgeley, whose A compleat practice of physick (1656) defined ‘exstasis’ as occur-
ring ‘when the mind is drawn away to contemplate heavenly things’, but
Machen at this point blurred the line between spiritual and artistic phenomena
in arguing that art acted as only the ‘beginning of ecstasy’. A suitably worded
description of the numinous could therefore act as a gateway to the numinous
itself, a feeling perhaps prompted by his boyhood reading of the King James
Bible.
18
He was also prepared to admit the possibility of ecstasy being induced by an
encounter with pre-Christian deities, though he admitted that The Great God
Pan had ‘translated awe, at worst awfulness, into evil’.
19
Regretting this failure,
Machen offered, in The Hill of Dreams, a sumptuous description of priests of Isis
and Mithras, who wear ‘grotesque ornaments, symbolizing secret things’ and
who speak ‘a rich jargon of coloured words, full of hidden meanings’ (p. 153).
Hieroglyphics maintained that the work of the artist is ‘the shaping for us of
ecstasy by means of symbols’ (p. 125), and in the early years of the 20th
century Machen began to combine this belief with a growing interest in
the Holy Grail and the early Celtic Church. Moving away from the evocative
paganism of The Hill of Dreams, or indeed, the initiatory mysteries undergone
by Joseph Walters in The Three Impostors (1895), Machen now focused his
spiritual eye on the Grail as the central symbol and instrument of ‘ecstasy’ in
his work.
Whereas R. H. Benson’s The Light Invisible (1903) recast supernatural fiction
as Catholic homily in tales such as ‘The Green Robe’, Machen shied away
from doctrinal constraints. Secular art could somehow, he implied, initiate an
encounter with the miraculous otherness which lay all about his readers but
which few could perceive unaided. His autobiographical work The London
Adventure (1924) maintained that the ‘unknown world is, in truth, about us
everywhere, ... the thinnest veil separates us from it; the door in the wall of
the next street communicates with it’.
20
I have shown elsewhere how Machen
applied the doctrines of the late-19th century Symbolist movement to urban
space, transforming the most humdrum quarters of London into a
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phantasmagoria in which the ‘true’ city, undetected by the multitude, revealed
itself to ‘men of vision and the imagination’ in epiphanic moments of unset-
tling power.
21
Drawing on Plato’s cave analogy, Machen wrote that ‘We see
nothing real .... We see the shadows cast by reality ... though poets catch
strange glimpses of reality, now and then, out of the corners of their eyes’.
22
In
such observations, Machen valorises the superior perceptions of the artist, but
rather than revelling in them for their own sake as Lucian Taylor does, he uses
them to encourage others to follow his trail into the secret metropolis.
Drawing on Christian and pagan esoteric teachings—his first published
work was a poem on the Eleusinian mysteries in 1881—Machen sought,
particularly in ‘A Fragment of Life’, to imbue London life with a condition
of visionary strangeness that would inspire rather than alienate his readers’
relations with an avowedly secular or profane environment, one
late-Victorian churches had tried in vain to evangelise. While organised reli-
gion employed a variety of tactics to spiritually regenerate the city, from
football teams to housing projects, Machen proposed an individual salvation
based at first upon the imagination and then, in ‘A Fragment of Life’, on a
personalised version of Celtic Christianity. It was here that the ecstasy created
through the appreciation of fine writing—prose which Machen’s detractors
dismissed as ‘purple’ and out of keeping with the more economical styles
coming to the fore in much early 20th century fiction—was married to
divine revelation. His concern was with the means by which the imaginative,
‘the good people’ who ‘feel that everything is miraculous’ and who are ‘con-
tinually amazed at the strangeness of the proportion of all things’, could use
their perceptions of the unseen world to transcend frequently dismal urban
settings.
23
Machen and Waite spent years pursuing Grail research in the British
Museum and elsewhere. Their letters show how they studied medieval ro-
mances (from which Machen derived his preferred Old French spelling of
‘Graal’) and more modern Grail historians and theorists such as Alfred Nutt
and Sebastian Evans.
24
Machen’s undertaking was, he recalled in 1922, ‘an
extraordinary and fascinating journey into a misty and uncertain region of
Christian history’, one inflected by his spiritual and national allegiances as well
as scholarly vigour.
25
He was unconvinced by Evans’s allegorical reading of
Grail lore and by Nutt’s interpretations, crossing swords with him in four
essays published in the Academy in 1907, and was similarly unimpressed by
Jessie L. Weston’s ‘fallacious’ From Ritual to Romance (1920), the work that
made such an impression on the novice Grail scholar, T. S. Eliot.
26
For
Machen, the Grail legends were an accretion of tangled but ultimately
more or less coherent narratives centred on a relic of a Celtic saint. ‘I am of
the opinion that the story is of Celtic origin, and that the Knights of the Graal
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are Welsh saints in armour’, he wrote in a review of Waite’s The Hidden
Church of the Holy Grail:
A relic of peculiar sanctity—a portable altar, perhaps—used by St David, and
famed for its miraculous properties, became confused at a very early period with
the Magic Cauldron of pagan tradition; the ruin of the Celtic Church and the
Celtic State found its symbolism in the desolate ‘enchantment’ of Britain; the loss
or concealment of the relic became the vanishing of the Grail.
27
In the aftermath of the Synod of Whitby in 664, the Roman Church sup-
pressed the ancient Celtic rites, and though St David’s became a Catholic
shrine, the cult of Dewi Sant officially came to an end in 1538.
28
As Mark
Valentine observes of Machen’s The Great Return (1915), ‘it is a dream of
wish-fulfilment for Machen, long the exile from his land, long the seeker
for a spirituality that satisfied his own burning certainties about the presence of
wonder all about us’.
29
It was in this tale, and in the rhapsodic experiences of
The Secret Glory, that he succeeded in blending the ‘ecstasy’ of Hieroglyphics
with his personal spiritual and scholarly enthusiasms.
What then were the literary results of Machen’s fusion of research, belief
and creative art? The most obvious is a style that enacted the ‘withdrawal from
the common ways of life’ which he associated with visionary experience.
Machen would not have been sympathetic to William James’s taxonomy of
mysticism, opposing any attempt to systematise experience, but whether or
not he had read it, it is more than likely that Waite was familiar with its ideas
and that Machen knew them at second hand or through his friendship with
Evelyn Underhill, author of works such as Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and
Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (1911) and the poems collected in
Immanence (1914) and Theophanies (1916).
30
In James’s terms, Machen’s work
could certainly be read as a mystical record as much as a fanciful elaboration.
The Varieties of Religious Experience characterises the mystical state as ineffable,
in that ‘it defies expression’ and ‘that no adequate report of its contents can be
given in words’. It has a ‘noetic quality’, providing ‘insight into the depths of
truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect’. Its ‘illuminations’ and ‘revela-
tions’ are ‘full of significance and importance’ and though they are inarticul-
able, they ‘carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time’.
Mystical states are also transient, and ‘[e]xcept in rare instances, half an
hour, or at most an hour or two, seems to be the limit beyond which they
fade into the light of common day’. Finally, although a mystical state can be
prepared for through, for instance, meditation, once it sets in ‘the mystic feels
as if his own will were in abeyance ... as if he were grasped and held by a
superior power’.
31
As a writer, the first of these would seem to represent an
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insuperable barrier for Machen, but as he had discovered both through his
reading of medieval theologians such as Eckhardt and through the writing of
Gothic tales in which the inability to describe the unknowable was essential
for the creation of unease, the same techniques could be utilised for the
evocation of awe rather than nameless evil.
In ‘A Fragment of Life’, Darnell, a London clerk, leads an unexceptional
suburban existence until he experiences a remarkable and inexplicable epiph-
any. ‘[T]he sky or something made me feel quite queer; everything changed in
a way I couldn’t understand’, he tells his bewildered wife. The pavement feels
like velvet or ‘soft carpet’, the foul London air ‘seemed to smell sweet, like the
incense in Catholic churches, and my breath came queer and catchy, as it does
when one gets very excited about anything’.
32
It is ‘like being pitched all of a
sudden from one world into another’ (p. 52). Machen is here recounting
Darnell’s epiphany in the language of the clerk himself, who lacks the vo-
cabulary or education to recount his experience in Jamesian terms. As Joshi
comments, metropolitan modernity has made the Darnells ‘repressed in their
very inability to communicate to each other—or even realise clearly to them-
selves—their love, their awe, their ecstasy’.
33
Instead, Darnell gives vivid ac-
counts of an everyday world suddenly, like that in Gerard Manley Hopkins’
poem, ‘charged with the grandeur of God’.
34
Darnell is peculiarly receptive to
its majesty because, as he discovers from his father’s notebooks, he numbers
among his ancestors a Welsh saint, who knows the ‘Hidden Songs of Iolo
Sant’ (p. 80). This knowledge hastens his perception and acceptance of ‘the
work of separation’ (p. 81) which gradually removes him from the horrors of
modern life. His speech and thought elaborate as his long-buried ‘real’ self
emerges: he comes to believe that ‘the soul is made wise’ by ‘the contempla-
tion of mystic ceremonies and elaborate and curious rites’, and that ‘the world
is but a great ceremony or sacrament, which teaches under visible forms a
hidden and transcendent doctrine’ (p. 81). It is this realisation which will
ultimately allow him to ‘transmute’ London to Syon, or ‘the City of the
Cup’ (p. 83), a paradise of gratified desire and everlasting happiness.
The Secret Glory is a less aesthetically satisfying work than ‘A Fragment of
Life’, but its visions of the Gwent landscape and indeed, the Grail itself, are
perhaps Machen’s most rhapsodic. Machen himself considered the book to be
one ‘that everyone will hate’, and to judge from the reviews he published in
his rueful scrapbook, Precious Balms (1924), his prediction was an accurate one,
with Forrest Reid asking readers of the Daily Herald, ‘Have we gained a
missionary and lost an artist?’
35
As reviewers observed, the book is certainly
unusual in its mixture of the mystical and the attritionally banal, but this
combination is central to Machen’s satirical and spiritual message. Early in
the novel, the sensitive and intelligent Ambrose Meyrick is suffering all the
torments a minor public school can provide but remains fortified by his
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memory of a strange ceremony he attended with his father years before.
Cradock, a Welsh farmer, is the guardian of the blessed cup, the latest in a
line of protectors stretching back 1,300 years. When the Meyricks visit his
humble farmhouse, he lights a pair of candles, and then, from an aumbry in
the wall, draws forth an iron box containing the grail itself, ‘a bowl-like vessel
of the most wonderful workmanship’ (p. 47) shot through with myriad
colours and decorated with precious stones and exquisite metalwork. The
effect on Ambrose is dramatic:
Among the precious stones which were set into the wonder was a great crystal,
shining with the pure light of the moon. About the rim of it there was the
appearance of faint and feathery clouds, but in the centre it was a white
splendour; and as Ambrose gazed he thought from the heart of this jewel there
streamed continually a shower of glittering stars, dazzling his eyes with their
incessant motion and brightness. His body thrilled with a sudden ineffable
rapture, his breath came and went in quick pantings; bliss possessed him utterly as
the three crowned forms passed in their golden order. Then the interwoven
sorcery of the vessel became a ringing wood of golden, and bronze, and silver
trees; from every side resounded the clear summons of the holy bells and the
exultant song of the faery birds; he no longer heard the low-chanting voices of
Cradock and his father as they replied to each other in the forms of some antique
liturgy. (p. 48)
Machen here avoids Ambrose having to recount this experience for himself,
and thus gives his narrator, who elsewhere in the story is often acerbic in his
satire of institutions, free rein to employ language as ornate and jewelled as the
cup itself. Unfamiliar ecclesiastical terms combine with the imagery of
the moon, the stars, and the Celtic faeryland in a deliberate removal from
the contemporary setting with which the book begins.
36
Reversals of ex-
pected word order (one of Machen’s favourite devices) provide a poetic,
liturgical element again separating the account from the realms of ordinary
spoken language. Semi-colons break long sentences into a series of meditative
images while allowing fluid passage from one image to another. At the same
time, words with mystical association such as ‘ineffable’ and ‘rapture’ augment
the intensity of Ambrose’s vision. That Machen uses the passive voice is en-
tirely appropriate, for the image and power of the Grail are being indelibly
impressed on the boy’s mind as his father sets out to ‘charm his son’s heart’
(p. 72), marking him as a future cup-bearer and, though he is as yet unaware
of his fate, ensuring his eventual martyrdom. Such techniques are used
throughout the book, alongside poetry Machen footnotes as translated from
the Welsh (a piece of authorial sleight-of-hand) which is brutally juxtaposed
with the idiocies of a school song glorifying football rather than the majesty of
God. There are elements here of ‘decadent’ style that Ellis Hanson
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characterises as ‘elaborate, highly artificial, highly ornamented, [and] often
torturous’, delighting in ‘strange and obscure words, sumptuous exoticism,
exquisite sensations, and improbable juxtapositions’. Such writing is, he con-
tinues, ‘fraught with disruption, fragmentation, and paradox’, has ‘a tendency
to vague and mystical language’ and ‘a longing to wring from words an en-
igmatic or perverse irony’.
37
However, the epiphany’s prosaic setting and
Ambrose’s powerful sense of mission and service, allied to his increasing feel-
ing of national consciousness, show Machen using ‘decadent’ language not to
alienate the multitude but to emphasise the unique and overwhelming power
of the Grail itself and to signal again its distance from the fallen world of
increasingly godless humanity.
The Great Return (1915), Machen’s final Grail story, took a very different
approach. Commissioned by a friend who managed a Christian publishing
house, the Faith Press, the novella is an account of the Grail’s reappearance in
Llantrisant narrated by a journalistic investigator who elides fictional characters
and Machen himself: at one point, Machen’s own forebears are named.
38
This
figure, hearing reports of remarkable incidents—the miraculous recovery of a
tubercular girl, strange lights at sea, and the conversion of an Evangelical
clergyman ‘who would rather have burnt sulphur in his church than
incense’—gradually assembles a series of intersecting and cumulative narratives
in the manner of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859), Bram Stoker’s
Dracula (1897), or, more daringly, the Gospels themselves.
39
By 1915, Machen
was an experienced journalist writing for the Evening News and it may be that
his industrious production of short essays and fillers, with their concomitant
deadlines, had caused him to streamline his style. The Great Return, whose
complex entangling of fact and fiction was further enhanced by its serialisation
in the Evening News, is remarkable for the way in which, to quote Joshi, ‘the
coldly reportorial voice causes the miraculous incidents to stand out in even
bolder relief’ (p. 19).
Only in the account of Olwen, the sick girl’s, dream, does Machen offer a
‘great return’ to the transportative sumptuousness of his earlier prose. Olwen is
at the point of death when she has a vision of three men in ‘blood-coloured
robes standing beside her bed’. The first has a ‘golden bell’, the second a blue
jewel, and the third ‘a cup that was like a rose on fire’. ‘There was a great
burning in it’, says Olwen, ‘and a dropping of blood in it, and a red cloud
above it, and I saw a great secret. And I heard a voice that sang nine times:
‘Glory and praise to the Conqueror of Death, to the Fountain of Life im-
mortal’ (p. 62). The anaphoria of Olwen’s reiterated conjunctions show her
immersion in scripture, and the biblical echoes of the style help to invest her
dream with religious authority. Her cure is miraculous and occasioned by the
Grail itself, but the narrator distinguishes carefully between her words and his
own, concluding that ‘the dream of Olwen Philips was, in fact, the vision of
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the Holy Graal’ (p. 64) but ending the tale as a whole with reflections on
hallucination, vision, and the possibility that the villagers were inspired by
reading Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. There is sly humour at work here, but
also recognition that, while in time of war people are eager for revelations of
the working of the divine, those in 1915 must read such accounts in the
journalistic language of the day, not the rhapsodic intoxication of The Secret
Glory.
Machen’s use of a journalistic style in The Great Return seems at first to be an
admission that materialism has triumphed, and that its preferred discourses
have absorbed even the supernatural and miraculous. However, it could
also be argued that Machen had succeeded in turning such discourse against
itself, by applying it to events that it could not accommodate. Rather than
trying to reproduce the intensity of ecstatic experience, he now gestured
towards it, showing how such a condition defies linguistic representation.
The results of the Grail’s return are everywhere apparent, but the numinous-
ness that comes with it cannot be articulated; those present at ‘The Mass of the
Sangraal’ (p. 64) are able to say ‘but very little of what was done beyond the
veil’ (p. 65). That the story ends in a rhetorical question, ‘But at the last, what
do we know?’, signals the limits of human knowledge and understanding, as
well as being a confession of humility.
Machen’s reverence for what he regarded as the workings of the divine
cannot disguise the contradictions of his position. Adrian Eckersley describes
Machen’s faith as ‘increasingly orthodox’ Anglo-Catholicism, but this hardly
accounts for the idealisation of the Celtic Church in ‘A Fragment of Life’ and
The Secret Glory.
40
Machen was contemptuous of Protestantism, jokily label-
ling the Church Times ‘the organ of Satan’, and loathed the Dissenters who had
taken root in his beloved Gwent, but like many British religious thinkers, he
‘eschew[ed] the complexities of continental epistemology in favour of a
belief-system that was self-evident and natural’.
41
Linked neither with the
aestheticised Catholicism of decadent writers such as Lionel Johnson or
Frederick Rolfe, nor with the circle of young Catholic writers such as
Chesterton and Belloc that grew up around Alice and Wilfred Meynell,
Machen disbelieved in ‘the popish church as the sole custodian of Faith and
Sacraments’ yet revered Thomas Aquinas as much as any Thomistic theolo-
gian.
42
Machen’s son, Hilary, recalled in 1963 that his father had a ‘curious’
attitude to the Catholic Church, one which balanced reverence for the Mass
and a love of plainchant with a trenchant dismissal of a presumed ‘appetite for
obscuring ... treasures of eternal Truth with semi-literate pieties of Italian or
French origin’.
43
He was clearly sympathetic to much Catholic ritual and
thought, had been married to a Catholic, and was apparently instrumental
in Lord Alfred Douglas’s conversion to the Roman faith, yet he never
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formally converted to Catholicism himself. As Roger Luckhurst concludes, his
‘only consistency, in short, is his resistance to dogma’.
44
What is clear is that Machen sought always to pursue his own spiritual
quest, and though it drew upon elements of Catholicism and the ancient
Celtic Church, it was at last an individual endeavour, one which left a power-
ful impression upon his friends but is now largely overlooked in considerations
of early 20th century Christianity as well as literary history. Machen’s ‘ecstasy’
transcended or overrode doctrinal affiliations, but because it was so personal,
and indeed, articulated through fiction that was persistently associated with the
Gothic, it could not be shared by any readers beyond those who were entirely
sympathetic to its approach. As literary fashion changed and Machen’s work
seemed a fly in decadent amber, his spiritual revelations were seen as arising
from his choice of words, not through the experiences that may have sug-
gested that choice in the first place. His ecstasy became regarded as linguistic
and aesthetic rather than spiritual, though Machen himself believed until his
dying day that ‘omnia exeunt in mysterium’: mystery ends all things.
Department of English & Drama,
Loughborough University,
Loughborough, LE11 3TU, UK.
n.freeman@lboro.ac.uk
REFERENCES
1
R. Browning, ‘The Last Ride Together’,
Men and Women (1855); J. Joyce, Stephen
Hero: Part of the first draft of ‘A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man’, ed. T. Spencer
(London: Jonathan Cape, revised edition
1956 [1944]), p. 216.
2
D. H. Lawrence, ‘Odour of
Chrysanthemums’ in ed. B. Finney,
Selected Short Stories (London: Penguin,
2000 [1982]), p. 105.
3
Significant recent studies of Machen
include S. J. Naverette, The Shape of
Fear: Horror and the Fin de Sie
`cle Culture
of Decadence (Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1990), S. T. Joshi, The
Weird Tale (Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press, 1990), K. Hurley, The
Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and
Degeneration and the Fin de Sie
`cle
(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), K. MacLeod, Fictions of
British Decadence: High Art, Popular
Writing, and the Fin de Sie
`cle
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006),
and my own Conceiving the City: London,
Literature, and Art 1870-1914 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007).
4
V. Starrett, Arthur Machen, Novelist of
Ecstasy and Sin (Chicago, MA: Walter
M. Hill, 1918). See too Frank Baker’s
claim that Machen was ‘that curious
mystic of English letters’ who had ‘the
quality of a mystic and explored the
true nature of ecstasy’. I Follow But
Myself (1968) reprinted in Faunus 17,
Winter 2007/08,8,p.31.
5
Joshi, The Weird Tale (Holicong, PA:
Wildside Press, 2003 [1990]), p. 38.
Subsequent quotations are given in the
body of the essay.
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6
A. Machen, Hieroglyphics: A Note upon
Ecstasy in Literature (London: Unicorn
Press, 1960 [1902]), p. 71. All further
quotations are from this edition and will
given in the body of the essay.
7
Machen, letter to M. Havens, 1April
1924, in A. Reynolds and W. Charlton,
Arthur Machen: A Biography (London:
Richards Press, 1963), p. 10.
8
Machen, The Secret Glory (Alan Rodgers
Books/Ægypan Press, 2006 [1922]),
p. 142. This is a reprint of the first
British edition of the novel and lacks
two chapters that Machen suppressed,
perhaps because they amplified rather
than developed the concerns of the
book. These chapters are incorporated
within the Tartarus Press edition of
1999, now out of print. For ease of refer-
ence, I have used the only paperback
edition of the novel to reprint the text
of the original edition. All subsequent
references are to this edition and are
given in the body of the text.
9
Machen did not declare his contribution
when reviewing the book.
10
Machen purported to be baffled by the
teachings of Waite’s subsequent Golden
Dawn offshoots, the Independent and
Rectified Rite (1903–1914) and the
Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, a sodality
that attracted the novelist Charles
Williams among others.
11
I. MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The
Beatles’ Records and the Sixties (London:
Vintage, 2008 [2005]), p. 21.
12
Machen, Introduction to ‘The Bowmen’
(August 1915)inThe Collected Arthur
Machen, ed. C. Palmer (London: Gerald
Duckworth, 1988), p. 299.
13
J. Howard, ‘A World of Great Majesty:
The Pattern in Arthur Machen’s Carpet’,
Avallaunius 17 (Winter 1997)41.
14
Machen, ‘The Holy Things’ in
Ornaments of Jade (Horam/Oxford:
Tartarus Press & Caermaen Books, 1997
[1924]), p. 50,54.
15
W. James, The Varieties of Religious
Experience: A Study in Human Nature
(London: Longmans, Green and Co.,
1915 [1902]), p. 70.
16
Machen, The Great God Pan & The Hill
of Dreams (New York: Dover, 2006),
pp. 75–6. Further quotations from this
edition will be given in parentheses.
Lucian’s vision of Siluria takes up the
entire fourth chapter of the novel: his
later claim that it was ‘the subconscious
fancies of many years that had rebuilt the
golden city’ (169) should be regarded
with scepticism.
17
Machen, ‘The White People’ in H. P.
Lovecraft’s Favorite Weird Tales, ed. D. A.
Anderson (New York: Cold Spring Press,
2005), p. 131.
18
‘Extasis’, OED.
19
Machen, Far Off Things (London: Martin
Secker, 1923), p. 127.
20
Machen, The London Adventure or The Art
of Wandering (London: Village Press, 1974
[1924]), p. 100.
21
H. G. Wells, ‘The Door in the Wall’
(1906) in Freeman, Conceiving the City,
p. 148. I discuss Machen’s urban
theories in some detail—see especially
pp. 196–201.
22
Machen, The London Adventure, pp. 70–1.
23
Ibid., p. 127.
24
Nutt’s work included Studies on the
Legend of the Holy Grail with Especial
Reference to the Hypothesis of its Celtic
Origin (1888) and The Legends of the
Holy Grail (1902), while Evans was
responsible for In Quest of the Holy
Graal: An Introduction to the Study of the
Legend (1898). For a summary of Nutt’s
beliefs, see R. M. Dorson, The British
Folklorists, A History (Chicago, MA:
University of Chicago Press, 1968),
pp. 229–39.
25
Machen, Preface to The Secret Glory
(New York, NY: Knopf, 1922), no
page numbers.
26
Machen to Colin Summerford, 13 March
1924,Selected Letters,p.90.
27
Machen, ‘The Holy Graal: A New
Theory’, review of Waite’s The Hidden
Church of the Holy Graal,The Academy
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12 February 1909. Quoted in M.
Valentine, Arthur Machen (Bridgend:
Seren, 1995), p. 93.
28
See J. Wyn Evans, ‘St David and St
David’s: Some Observations on the
Cult, Site and Buildings’, in Celtic
Hagiography and Saints’ Cults, ed.
J. Cartwright (Cardiff: University of
Wales Press, 2003), pp. 10–25; and H.
James, ‘The cult of St David in the
Middle Ages’ in In Search of Cult:
Archaeological Investigations in Honour of
Philip Rahtz, ed. Martin Carver
(Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer,
1993), pp. 105–11.
29
Valentine, Arthur Machen,p.95.
30
Underhill’s novel The Column of Dust
(1909) features a mystic who guards the
Grail in a secret shrine in the Welsh hills.
It was dedicated to Machen and his
second wife, Purefoy, but Machen
dismissed it as ‘not very good’. Letter to
Summerford, 12 May 1924,Selected
Letters,p.93.
31
James, The Varieties of Religious Experience,
pp. 380–81.
32
Machen, ‘A Fragment of Life’, The
Collected Arthur Machen,p.51.
Subsequent references are given in the
text. The story was first published in
book form in Machen’s The House of
Souls (1906).
33
Joshi, The Weird Tale (2003), p. 28.
34
G. M. Hopkins, ‘God’s Grandeur’ (1877),
l.1.
35
Machen’s comment comes from the
Preface to the US edition of the novel,
Reid’s from Machen’s Precious Balms
(Horam: Friends of Arthur Machen/
Tartarus Press, 1999 [1924]), p. 64.
36
‘Aumbry’ is an archaic form of ‘ambry’, a
recessed cupboard in the wall of a church
near the altar used to store sacred vessels.
37
E. Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997), p. 2. For Machen’s uneasy
assimilation into the decadent canon, see
L. Dowling, Language and Style in the
Victorian Fin de Sie
`cle (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1986), pp.
154–64; R. Luckhurst, The Invention of
Telepathy 1870-1901 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), pp. 199–204;
MacLeod, Fictions of British Decadence,
pp. 159–63.
38
The Grail may appear in the Glamorgan
village of Llantrisant as its name means
‘church of three saints’: Illtyd, Gwynno
and Dyfodwg. The village church is
dedicated to them.
39
Machen, The Great Return in his Tales of
Horror and the Supernatural (London:
Panther, 1963 [1949]), p. 39. Further
references are given in the body of the
text.
40
Eckersley, ‘Arthur Machen (3March
1863 –15 December 1947)’, Dictionary
of Literary Biography 156 – British Short-
Fiction Writers 1880-1914: The Romantic
Tradition, ed. W. F. Naufftus
(Washington, Detroit, London: Bruccoli
Clark Laymon, 1996), p. 220.
41
Machen to Summerford, 5March 1926,
Selected Letters,p.106; M. Knight and
E. Mason, Nineteenth-Century Religion
and Literature: An Introduction (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 194.
42
Undated letter to Waite in Reynolds and
Charlton, Arthur Machen,p.102.
43
H. Machen, ‘In My Father’s House’,
Aylesford Review 5.2(Spring 1963).
Reprinted as ‘Foreword’ to Machen’s
Selected Letters,p.14.
44
Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy,
p. 203.
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