Things Near and Far

Arthur Machen

• Publisher: White Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781528766944
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito letterario

"Things Near and Far" was is the second part of Arthur Machen's autobiography. The first part is contained in "Far Off Things" (1922) and the third in "The London Adventure" (1924). Arthur Machen (1863 – 1947) was a Welsh author and renowned mystic during the 1890s and early 20th century who garnered literary acclaim for his contributions to the supernatural, horror, and fantasy fiction genres. His seminal novella "The Great God Pan" (1890) has become a classic of horror fiction, with Stephen King describing it as one of the best horror stories ever written in the English language. Other notable fans of his gruesome tales include William Butler Yeats and Arthur Conan Doyle; and his work has been compared to that of Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Oscar Wilde. "The Glorious Mystery" is not to be missed by those with an interest in the life and work of this seminal writer. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

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*

April 16th, 1858.

The other, on the recto of the leaf, is as follows:

Johannes Edvardus Jones,

In memoriam A.E.J.J.

Quæ ob dorm vit 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 Carrol’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 byways—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 tweake...