Arthur Machen and the Trials of the Aesthete

Who, or what, are artists? What is the nature of imagination's gift - and is it really a gift at all, or might it be a curse? Artists[i], after all, hold converse with things which are not: they summon voices out of the air, or conjure landscape and likeness out of nothing. A glance at some folktales reveals that an interest in the moral status of the gifted artist goes back a long way, and shows that in earlier times poetic power was connected with the underworld. Thus the German minstrel-poet Tannhauser drew his power of song from his sinful underground life in the Venusberg, and comes close to being damned for it. Similarly, the Scottish Thomas the Rhymer drew his power of poetic prophecy from his visits to underworld Elf-land and the special favour of its queen. These examples may remind us that in the traditional collective mindset, artists may be holy, or they may have some whiff of damnation about them.

In the middle years of the nineteenth century, most saw the artist as holy. Many felt the rising tide of industrial materialism as dehumanizing, and saw imagination as a comforting antidote to its factual brutality. Some understood imagination as a gift sent by God so that humans might know him more perfectly.[ii] The artist's work was essentially like the priest's; both nourished belief in what was not immediate to the senses; thus the Pre Raphaelite painters liked to depict Biblical scenes in the photographic terms most credible to their contemporaries. However, as the century wore on there was much lightening up. The later Pre Raphaelites began to paint scenes not from the life of Christ, but from classical Greece and Rome, scenes which evoked the pagan values of those societies, and could shock older mid-Victorian sensibilities. These avant-garde artists adopted the creed of Ôart for art's sake', so much more liberated than the earlier Ôart for religion's sake'. They called themselves aesthetes, and made a cult of beauty beyond morality. If the aesthete artist was still a holy man, he was a pagan holy man, not really holy at all to decent Christian folks. Nevertheless, the artists got away with it, mainly as the later nineteenth century was an era in which the older, harsh standards of public morality were felt to be inhumane, and were effectively in decline.

The aesthete movement began in the 1860s, and grew steadily in strength. Its climax came in the first half of the 1890s, the era of the Yellow Book[iii], a time of broad but fragile permissiveness. However, in 1895, rather dramatically, the permissive moral climate darkened, due to a savage and rising backlash. The event most often taken to mark this shift is the fall of Oscar Wilde. If any one figure personified the new spirit of permissiveness arising in the 1890s, it was Wilde. He was hugely successful and fashionable too. He had sharpened the subtle amoralisms of aestheticism into urbane and crackling wit, and through his 1890s plays, Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), An Ideal Husband (1895) and, above all, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), he reaped a glory which focused a massive notoriety upon him, which he loved and courted. Having thus become a very public but on that account very vulnerable figure, Wilde sued the Marquis of Queensberry for the libel of imputing then-criminal homosexual activities to him. Wilde's libel suit failed, and the ensuing criminal counter-action ended in his very public disgrace and imprisonment. Yet, tragic as it was, Wilde's fall signified more than merely the punitive dishonouring of one man: his light and often provocatively flippant treatment of potentially heavy Ômoral' matters made him very much the personification of the Ônaughty nineties' artist, and so his dethroning may also be read as an attack upon a set of stances and attitudes common to a much wider group, an attack which would lead eventually to a cultural paradigm shift.

Wilde's fall can easily be seen as a kind of first cause of this change in moral climate. However, it may also be understood as the result of forces already in motion. The factor which concerns me here is a rising disapproval of the permissive artist by the world of science, which, as will emerge below, had the power to depict him as something far worse than a mere Ôbad boy'.

The roots of this opposition lie far back in 1859, when Charles Darwin's Origin of Species proclaimed the theory of natural selection, which gave credibility to the doctrine of evolution. Darwin's work led to the gradual triumph of evolutionary theory, including the concomitant idea of human descent from some ape-like ancestor. But along with the idea of evolution came its flip-side: degeneration.[iv] According to the evolutionists, humanity had climbed above the animal kingdom, and might climb still further. But there was also the danger of sinking back, of evolution taking a turn backwards towards the apes, and this was what that word, degenerate, implied. Degenerates were, arguably, part of an incipient species that was different from the rest of us.

Just like the idea of evolution itself, the idea of the degenerate throwback pre-dated Darwin, though it drew a huge legitimacy from his work. Building on its foundation, social Darwinist thinkers tended to see the more successful human groups, whether defined as races or classes, as more advanced in evolutionary terms: thus for example the successful middle classes were seen as more evolved than the urban poor, and Europeans as a whole more evolved than Ôsavages'. Late nineteenth century criminology drew heavily on these ideas: the idea that the criminal was a kind of evolutionary throwback was explored and comprehensively documented through experimental observation by the leading Italian criminologist, Cesare Lombroso. The common criminal could be recognized, according to the school of Lombroso, by a variety of physical telltale signs which included asymmetrical features, low forehead, jutting eyebrows and so on. These were obvious, visible degenerates.

Much energy was spent, in the decades after the publication of Origin of Species, in restoring human species-pride by exploring and proclaiming with ever-greater precision the differences between human and animal. It became widely believed within the increasing army of Darwin's followers that the most fundamental difference between animals and humans was the human moral sense.[v] Animals didn't have a moral sense; they merely acted in their own interest but humans could and did act altruistically, for the good of the group rather than the selfish individual. People of a religious disposition saw the moral sense as, like the imagination, a gift from God, but many of the scientists committed to evolutionary theory stressed that this moral sense, whose most obvious outward sign was the ordinary human need for the approval of others, was evolution's most recent gift to humanity, and in any evolutionary downward sliding it was the first thing that would disappear. Thus there would be some people who lacked the obvious features of the low criminal, but who nonetheless had a huge potential for criminality as they had no moral sense. These were termed Ôhigher degenerates' and their danger to society lay as much in the greater scope of their ability as in their capacity to disguise themselves as ordinary men or women.

There was an increasing tendency in the 1890s to see many if not all artists and writers as part of this dangerous group. In his book The Man of Genius [vi] Lombroso argued that the moral sense, though it was the defining characteristic that separated human from beast, could have an inhibiting effect on creativity. Those without the moral sense might have what we now call psychopathic tendencies, but through their very lack of inhibition they might also be the most original thinkers of their generation. Lombroso argued this link between genius and degeneracy using examples drawn from both the scientific and artistic culture of the nineteenth century. Thus for example he listed as degenerate the poet Charles Baudelaire, whom he accused of pathological mental instability, obsessive fame-hunger, and "morbid passions"[vii] in love. There is a flavor of the witch-hunt about the book; just as supernumerary nipples were once signs of devil-following, so at that time not only physical symptoms but casts of mind and factors in behavior were adduced to demonize in medical terms.

Lombroso has arrogated the right to judge Baudelaire the man, his behavior, his emotions, his sexual preference for "ugly and horrible womenÓ[viii] but he makes no judgment about his work. His most dedicated follower, Max Nordau, medically-trained but a keen participant in the cultural scene too, did not shirk this task. In his book Degeneration[ix], published in Britain in1895, the year of Wilde's fall, he treated not only the traits of character of his artist-contemporaries as medical symptoms, but also the works themselves. Nordau accused the modern artists and writers of the day - aesthetes, gutter-realists, PreRaphaelites and French impressionists alike - of being degenerate, and gave the qualities of their works as evidence for his argument. At the centre of contemporary art and literature he sees artists who are mentally hyperactive, hysterical, dream-obsessed, incapable of dealing in reason, structure or meaning. In his view, these degenerate artists were incapable of a focused, selective attention, and this led to the overexcited visions of mysticism, often tinged with a "morbidly irritated" sexuality which cannot be controlled, as the blood-supply to overexcited cells cannot be turned off.[x] He also saw this Ôdegenerate' art as something approaching a conspiracy. In his view there was an ongoing collusion between degenerate artists and admiring degenerate public, who were working together to ensure the triumph of a kind of culture, which would create others in its image, undermining the moral rectitude of the state.

Nordau's influential work represented a broad swathe of post Darwinian opinion,  and provided authority for a witch-hunt on the degenerate artist. Thus in 1895 it was not just Wilde who was on trial, but all permissively-orientated avant-garde artists. As a consideration of fiction-texts such as R.L.Stevenson's Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1884) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) may persuade us, there was a fear abroad at the time of the beast in human clothing. The artist himself could be fitted-up for the role as clearly as any of his characters.

Arthur Machen was a writer of fantastic and supernatural fiction whose career was checked by this dramatic shift in literary climate in 1895; yet from this check came his finest piece of fiction. Born in 1863 the son of a village clergyman, in Caerleon-on-Usk, a small town in the South Wales border region of Gwent, Machen was a natural scholar but his family was too poor to for him to follow his father's footsteps to Oxford.[xi] Instead, he went to London while still in his teens, officially to become a journalist but in reality to live a life dedicated to literature. In his early work the rebellious young man rejected the very language of his own time, preferring instead to write in archaic and  Ôfantastickal' seventeenth century prose. Then suddenly, in 1890, he dropped this approach, took on the urbane style of utterance of the aspiring young fiction writers of his time, the language of R.L.Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle, and began to write quite racy stories, which brought him some success.

Published by John Lane, in his notorious Keynotes series, with cover designs and illustration by the very shocking Aubrey Beardsley, Machen's work was very much part of the avant-garde scene of the first half of the 1890s. Superficially, what makes it so is the playful but normative urbanity of its style and the way narrative is handled. Like the Sherlock Holmes stories of his near-contemporary Arthur Conan Doyle, the narration is urbane and evenly paced. Tales begin almost universally in cozy London surroundings, yet their development takes the reader to the outermost reaches of the human heart, of urban social geography, or both. In the early 1890s Machen had a detective figure like Holmes: Mr Dyson, student of human nature, who is often to be found dining with his acquaintance in the best restaurants of London's West End, yet who has also intimate knowledge of the city's obscurest byways.

  Yet Machen is more clearly a member of the 1890s avant-garde than Doyle, not through his urbanity, but through the places his fiction visits. Whereas in the Holmes tales we are saved from the terror of the terminally unfamiliar because there is always in the end a solution to the mystery, Machen's outcomes are less cosy. There are disturbing, exciting entities society women of demonic parentage, substances which plunge the user into the witches' sabbath, obscure surgical procedures that can bring us face to face with a terror not so easily contained. But what makes Machen so completely a member of the avant garde of his time is the way his writing engages with sexuality.

I shall give two examples. First, his 1894 novella ÒThe Great God PanÓ[xii]: the central figure is a woman whom the reader is invited to see as descended from the devil. It is established in the text that she, Helen Vaughan, is alluring and promiscuous; yet encounters with her leave her lovers white faced, gasping, suicidal. We are never told what happens in the bedroom, but the facts of the case are functionally placed before us in such a way that we must try to imagine what happens there. Machen's fictional technique is to hide everything, yet simultaneously to make us strain to see.

A second example: in the masterly 1890 short story ÒA Double ReturnÓ[xiii], a married man who has been away for some time returns to his wife in London to discover that she believes him to have returned already, the night before. We may choose to read the tale as one of the supernatural, the stalking of a doppelganger, and the story encourages us to see things this way, by for example letting the hero believe he has glimpsed himself from a train. But if we are adults we will pass through this reading, and though not encouraged to do so will come to understand that an impostor disguised as the hero has spent the night with his wife. The couple are both deeply shocked by their discovery - then a curtain falls. There is brief allusion to the Ômanner of conversation' which ensues between them, then a throwaway ending merely informs us that the wife had died and the husband has emigrated. The story positively encourages meditation upon what happens in bedrooms, upon how far sexual partners should or could be able to recognize one another, yet nothing of this is enunciated. Again, Machen uses the trick of combining extreme reticence with large doses of sexual suggestiveness.

The permissive dispensation under which these stories flourished was truly fragile. Their enormous reticence suggests the sense of restraint which lurked around matters pertaining to sexuality, while the obsessive nature of the curiosity they invite suggests the explosive potential of what is held in check. Machen's work in the early 1890s thus suggests in an almost structural way that sexuality is a demonic force. Considering the detail will suggest much the same. The beast in human form, that most post-Darwinian entity, is already present in the example discussed above: the trickster who spends the night with the wife in ÒA Double ReturnÓ is just such a creature, spreading his seed in despite of the rules, offending against altruism, and showing Lombroso's precise combination of talent, amorality and lack of concern for others. Other male figures in Machen's work are gripped by an equally furious aberrant sexuality. The demon-woman of ÒThe Great God PanÓ enters the world through the machinations of a sadistic scientist, who inflicts an operation of his own devising upon a young servant girl who is indebted to him. The text lingers disingenuously upon her innocence as she submits to his vile practices, Òthe feeling of submission strong upon her, crossed [...] arms upon her breast as a little child about to say her prayersÓ[xiv]. In a companion-piece, ÒThe Inmost LightÓ[xv], the sinister Doctor Black inflicts a similar operation on his wife, to remove her soul. Machen's work of this time portrays scientists as perverts, drooling with sadistic lust to perpetrate acts of moral outrage and physical outrage upon lovely young women. Yet there is classic ambivalence afoot: the reader is invited to condemn the disgusting sadism of the scientists, but the way these scenes are described invites the reader to share the very excitement which is simultaneously condemned. As so often, the fierce and condemnatory moralism exists side by side with what it condemns. Nordau's accusations of hysteria would sit easily here.

Machen is himself at this time prepared to play dangerous games with the concept of the ÒartisticÓ, illuminating its potential for acquiring immoral overtones. One of the narrators of Machen's 1895 frame-novel The Three Impostors presents himself to the reader as an Ôartist' of crime. The tale this narrator tells, ÒThe Novel of the Iron MaidÓ[xvi] concerns a collector of instruments of torture who has an unpleasantly connoisseurish, if Ôartistic', relish for his collection. He is destroyed by a horrific accident with the implement of the title: familiarly, the sadism of the reader is invoked in the just punishment of that of the collector.

  Fiction is a fragile platform for the ushering in of liberal or permissive attitudes. When a story is judged horrifying or disgusting, readers may easily disavow it or turn against it. A writer may try to do the same, claiming that he wrote his text only to assuage an appetite in the public, but he is less likely to be taken seriously. In 1895, Machen might have been damned merely through connection with the avant-garde and ultimately Wilde: his work had been illustrated by Beardsley, as had Wilde's Salome. But these connections are beside the point: Machen's work was quite capable of being judged unhealthy on its own merits, and was judged so. This fact illustrates clearly that the moral backlash of the later 1890s was not aimed only at homosexuality, but at all or any whose texts could be judged permissive.

Machen's fiction between 1890 and 1895 allows a homogenous grouping: all is urbane, exciting, rich in ambivalence, hysteriogenic.  In 1895 he recognized that this modality was played out, and was looking to do something new. There is no clear proof that Machen ever read Nordau, but the text he came up with, The Hill of Dreams[xvii], often considered his finest work of fiction, seems to respond to Nordau's accusations. The Hill of Dreams is, perhaps defensively, much less hysterical than the work of the early 1890s and, furthermore, goes a long way towards adopting the perspectives of the scientific enemy. This is particularly surprising when one bears in mind Machen's hatred of scientists, vaunted in the tales discussed above.

The novel's hero is a young writer, Lucian Taylor who, unable to engage with the contemporary world, eventually fails and dies. Machen was not the only writer at around this time to engage with this theme of the artist who cannot succeed. George Gissing's 1891 novel New Grub Street shows us two not dissimilar figures, the young novelists Edwin Reardon and John Biffen, both of whom like Lucian end up dead: but we can be fairly sure that Gissing is pointing the blame for this waste upon the unresponsive world, not upon inadequacies of the writer himself. The Hill of Dreams approaches this point with a rich ambiguity.

It becomes gradually apparent that Lucian is a degenerate. Early in the novel, on a blisteringly hot summer's day, he climbs the hill of the title, falls asleep or into trance, and is assailed by a vision of the goddess, which we may also interpret as a sex-dream. The side of Lucian which responds to the erotic goddess of imagination is presented to the reader as a faun, the half-man half-goat entirely-sexualized Pan-figure from Roman times. This faun is, at any rate at first, not quite Lucian's self but is a living potential within him, as Hyde is within Jekyll. But it is important; the faun that lives hidden within him is the essence of the young man's imaginative power, to write. Though this is a far more sympathetic treatment of the artist than anything in Nordau's book, Nordau's ideas are nevertheless endorsed: Lucian is a writer because something atavistic, something of the throwback, lives vitally within him. However, he can reap no benefit from this; the alter-ego faun compromises the young man by resolutely insisting on living within its own world rather than joining Lucian in his. If we need that sort of label we may see Lucian as schizoid, but this undersells the subtlety with which the novel allows us to engage with two not-quite-conflicting but also not-quite-complementary realities, which become irreconcilable only very late within the novel. Lucian does indeed go mad, but there are long sections of the novel in which we can and probably will follow him into his madness, if only because his madness is art.

The artist is a dreamer. Even before he leaves for the London which will eventually destroy him, Lucian tends to inhabit the faun's world, literally seeing around him the erotically-charged and morally unhealthy splendors of Roman Caermaen rather than the prosaic provincialities that others see. These visions are products of imagination, and they are what make him an artist, yet they clearly make him fated to live beyond the compass of the social world. When Lucian, following his writer's destiny, makes the transition to London, he is no less haunted by the faun's vision. Because the faun has the power to see its world, not that of civilization, the overreaction of a woman he surprises in the fog makes him reach for Òthe stigmata of evil branding his foreheadÓ[xviii] and hear her scream as Ònocturnal SabbathÓ.[xix] And there are moments when London becomes:

 

one grey temple of an awful rite, ring within ring of wizard stones crowded about some central place, every circle was an initiation, every initiation eternal loss.[xx]

 

The past is not merely objective history, but it also sleeps as memory and potential within the individual, accessible through imagination.  The faun is a throwback to pagan Roman times, before the evolution of the moral sense had fostered and been fostered by Christianity.

The faun's other-focused vision, which we may more prosaically understand as the rather puritanical young man's compulsive and contradictory imagination, is connected with sexuality, and it is this which destroys him. In the final stages of the novel he becomes the lodger of a prostitute, but the delicately-raised young man who is not the faun cannot cope with the reality of this, and goes into what we now call denial. Thus by the end of the novel Lucian is a truly divided self: the faun, who like Hyde has always been really in charge, has led the boy into the faun's dwelling, and the boy has chosen madness and death rather than facing up to this.

Lucian is, in the exact, Aristotelean sense, a tragic hero. Much sympathy is invited for him, but so also is an understanding of his non-viability. Some have claimed otherwise, that he is more like Gissing's heroes, a noble, sacred spirit trapped in a disgustingly fallen world, but this reading is not in the end convincing. By the end of the tale we are clearly invited to see Lucian from outside, understanding much about him that he does not. But the best evidence to qualify the idea that Lucian can be seen as the champion of an unmediated aestheticism, an avatar of living in dreams, arises if we compare Lucian's life with that of his creator, Machen himself.

When the comparison is made, it quickly emerges that Lucian is Machen's vision of his own might-have-been a turning in his life which he did not take. The early similarities between the biographies of writer and character are huge: both are born in Wales of a clergyman father, both are scholarly in temperament, both are unable to attend university, both move to London aided by a legacy, in quest of literature. Yet the similarities cease: Machen succeeded and wanted to succeed - where Lucian failed.

It is possible that a further refinement of evolutionary theory prompted Machen to write this text in this form. In evolutionary theory, success is its own justification: when the white man invaded and the primitive inhabitant became extinct, this was seen merely as nature's way of clearing out anything unfit for life's great struggle. Lucian may be much lamented, but it was his creator who survived and by the late 1890s had a name, a wife, and a position in society.

We can't easily know exactly how Machen understood or evaluated his own avoidance of Lucian's fate. Did he see his escape as arising out of a difference in kind between him and his hero, or due only to a difference in degree? Did Machen sense himself as damned by the places his imagination caused him to visit? Publishers certainly did. Though it can be well-argued that the book is about the degenerate artist rather than itself an example of degeneracy, no publisher could be found when Machen finished writing the book, in 1897. Probably at that time only an entirely unsympathetic portrait of such an artist could have succeeded with the public. It was not until 1904, when the tide of backlash had receded considerably, that a magazine editor friend[xxi] dared to publish a truncated version, and the full text finally emerged as a book in 1907.[xxii]

In the post 1895 climate only the fittest aesthetes survived, and they did so by adapting. The Rhymers' Club disbanded: its minor poets faded away to premature death or suburban alcoholism while its one giant, W.B.Yeats, refined and transformed himself into someone else. The permissive periodicals, first TheYellow Book and then The Savoy, faded and died. Machen remained an artist of aesthete sensibility, yet his work changed in character in a way consonant with the threat that the aesthetes faced. In the period 1895 to 1899, as well as The Hill of Dreams, he wrote other texts that as much as anything in the period before 1895 can be considered decadent, aesthetic, engaged with terror-invoking sexuality. But there is evidence that Machen did sense himself as having a compromised imagination: increasingly, he turned aside from engaging with what we may call the pagan side of his imagination, which was where the trouble started, and instead developed something more Ôspiritually wholesome', acceptable to a broader if less excitable public.

Thus, for example, very soon after The Hill of Dreams he wrote ÒA Fragment of LifeÓ[xxiii], a novella in which a married man of humble status (rather like H.G.Wells's Kipps or Mr Polly) finds his true spiritual destiny in the mystical worship of his forefathers and the landscapes of the Welsh valleys. This is fiction which has the power to move, but it lacks the rich ambiguity and complexity of vision which makes The Hill of Dreams something more. At the turn of the century and in the years that followed, Machen was one of many who went on to purge and edit their earlier, racy aestheticism, until it became focused upon mysticism, which became a new watchword after 1900.

Machen himself, like other repentant aesthetes playing away from his older strengths, became progressively more interested in religion. He became champion of the ancient Celtic Church, of the religious faith of his ancestors, and of the reawakening of a potential for spiritual regeneration at the heart of materialism. At this point the wheel has come full circle: the beleaguered and threatened artist has fled back to his ancient pre-aesthete alliance, with the priesthood. This may seem something of a victory for the scientific culture which had been growing steadily in strength since the middle of the nineteenth century: science had identified itself with the voice of moral orthodoxy, had challenged the aesthete artist, and fought him to a standstill. But it was not all a victory for the scientists. The mysticism which the survivor-aesthetes adopted was one of the aspects of recent art which Nordau had fulminated upon. But the aesthetes no longer feared him when they had religion close at hand.