Things near & far Chapter 18: Part 18

Coram Street. And, unless I am mistaken, we shall find Hebrew letters inscribed on plaster shields applied to the house front.” The Hebrew inscriptions were still there; very faint, but still there. I had last seen them in ’95–’96 when I was entangled in the most intricate problems of “The Hill of Dreams.” I have told already some of the troubles of the book: the battle of the second chapter, the notion sought in vain for three weeks: the affair of the fifth chapter when I lost my way completely and wrote many thousands of words that had to be rejected. Nearly all the journey, from the autumn of 1895 to the spring of 1897, there were doubts and trials and questionings: after all, was it not hopeless; would it not be better to tear it up and start afresh on a new book? In the summer of 1896, when I was in the thick of these perplexities, I spent a month in Provence and Languedoc, visiting places the very names of which are incantations: Arles, Avignon, Nîmes, Montpellier, Beaucaire, famed Tarascon by Rhone; and I saw how the sun can shine on the white cliff road by Marsilho--to give the city its Provençal name, which you must pronounce, as near as may be, Mar-see-yo-ho. And the changing of the colours of the sea there, as the sun sank and brief twilight gathered and the moon rose: here were marvels and beauties that sank deeply into the heart. A wonderful land, indeed. The olive garths, of such a silvery, dim green as our northern seas sometimes put on near the land, the scented rosemary growing as a weed by the roadside, the walls of Avignon seen by sunset light, the great Roman arenas, still in use for bull-fights, a matter not remote from their original purpose, the Temple of Diana at Nîmes, no ruin, but a perfect building into which the priest of Diana might well enter as you viewed the portal from the modern street; and above all the splendour of that southern sun shining on white rocks, on the dark cypresses, on the white arch which looked as clear and fine as if it had been built a year, which was eighteen hundred years old or more: all these are Provence; not at all forgetting the Bouillabaisse which Pascal makes in the Old Port, Pascal who roasts his incomparable partridges before a fire of vine boughs. More than once I felt that I had made a journey rather in time than space, that these black cypresses and clear white walls and green and silvery olives were present not in our day but in the old Roman world. The last few days of my visit to Provence I spent in a little hotel at a place called Roucas Blanc, not far from Marseilles. The hotel, sheltered by the white rock and the dark green woods, had been built on the very verge of the sea, and in the morning I would open the door-window of my apartment and stand on a platform, but a few feet above the water. I would lean over the low wall, and wonder at the jewelled glory of the Mediterranean blue beneath the mounting sun--and my heart was at home, in Gray’s Inn, in my old Japanese bureau, in the litter of papers that awaited me there, in the wretched book that I was struggling to make. _Aqui esta encerrado el alma del licenciado._ What have I said of the paradox of life, that its actualities are so nauseous that men will do anything to escape from them? And here was I, free to enjoy the sun on the Provençal sea and the wonder of the Roman world, hankering after the world of anguish and difficulty and disappointment that I had made for myself in grim Verulam Buildings, amidst the London fogs. And so I got back and found that the labour of months had been wasted, and set to work to break and remake. The book was finished, somehow, in the March of 1897, and just then, as if he had come upon his cue, a new publisher, Mr. Grant Richards, wrote to me asking if I had any manuscripts that I should like to have published. I saw him and left “The Hill of Dreams” with him. He did not take long to make up his mind about it. He would have none of it, and he wrote advising me by no means to publish the book; for, he said, it would do me no credit. What he meant was that it was not in the least like “The Three Impostors,” and it took him ten years before he saw light on the subject, for it was the firm of Grant Richards that published “The Hill of Dreams” in 1907. Some amusing reviews appeared. The “Daily Graphic” said, very truly, that the book was not of much practical interest, and the “Outlook” confirmed this dictum by stating that there was “scarcely a place for it in the widest utilitarian view.” “Will readily impress a reader of quiet tastes,” declared the gentler “Scotsman.” “Nothing that more quickly tends to tedium,” corrected the “Manchester Guardian”: naturally enough, if the “Athenæum” was right in saying that “the main matter of regret is the utter formlessness and the arid inhumanity of his work.” “Well written, but written not quite well enough,” was the fatal sentence of the “Chronicle.” And so on, and so on. I will not disguise the fact that some of the notices were very good indeed; but it has always been the other sort of review that has heartened me, and so forthwith I set about writing a book in high spirits. This turned out to be “The Secret Glory,” which was published in the spring of 1922. This book also was on the whole very well reviewed, though it is as queer as queer can be--I am afraid I must say that the bridge is not nearly so well kept now as in the brave days of old. But one reviewer stood out boldly, and him I will quote in full, and so make an end of talking about reviews, which some authors jeer at, which I treasure with reverent care. “Even if we wished, we could not tell the story of ‘The Secret Glory.’ Mr. Machen manages to combine an onslaught on the public-school system with some watery Paterian mysticism. Personally, we have an equal dislike of those who belaud and those who denigrate the public-school system. Besides, ‘there ain’t no sich person’; there are as many systems as there are public schools. But Ambrose Meyrick, if he could have been jerked for a moment by his creator into a semblance of real existence, would justify the worst outrages wrought upon him by his equally incredible _alma mater_. He is a sentimental philanderer with æsthetic Catholicism, a mystical Celtic dreamer, a Soho Bohemian (before Soho was ruined, of course); but these crimes are as nothing compared to his incorrigible penchant for ‘poetic prose.’ Mr. Machen has encouraged him in it. He will have a great deal more to answer for in the day of judgment than the schoolmaster who tried to beat him out of it.” There! That notice, which appeared in “The Nation and the Athenæum,” was signed by Mr. J. Middleton Murry, generally recognised as being one of the most eminent literary critics of the day, if he is not rather to be accounted as the most eminent literary critic of the day. He is also, as a fellow-writer assured me, regarded as “the leader of the younger intelligentsia.” Anyhow, I like a man who speaks his mind. I try to do so myself, sometimes. And “there!” again. I think I have written enough about the manner in which I thought of my books, the manner in which I wrote my books, the manner in which I broke down more or less lamentably in the beginning, the middle and the end of my books, the manner in which they were welcomed by eager publishers, and the manner in which they finally tottered into print and were acclaimed by the Press. Enough has been said on all these topics, and perhaps a good deal too much for the patience of a weary world. Let us now be brief on this matter. The year 1898 I spent in the service of “Literature,” a weekly journal that had just been started by “The Times.” In 1899 I wrote “Hieroglyphics” and “The White People,” and the first chapter of “A Fragment of Life.” Then a great sorrow which had long been threatened fell upon me: I was once more alone. _Chapter IX_ It was somewhere about the autumn of 1899 that I began to be conscious that the world was being presented to me at a new angle. I find now an extreme difficulty in the choice of words to convey my meaning; “a new angle” is clumsy enough, “here in this world he changed his life” is far too high in its associations; but there certainly came to be a strangeness in the proportion of things, both in things exterior and interior. And it is in these latter that I held and still hold that the true wonder, the true mystery, the true miracle reside. There is the old proverb, of course: “Seeing is believing” and, for once, the old proverb is widely astray. All phenomenal perception is apt to be deceitful, and very often is deceitful. This is in the nature of things, as Berkeley pointed out a very long time ago. That castle tower that looks round in the distance is found to be square when you get a little nearer to it; the red and golden glory and the magic architecture of the sunset cloud would change, if you were in it, into something like a London fog. And if it be objected: “Yes, exactly; when you are far away from an object you see it incorrectly, but when you come near it you see it correctly”--that is not so. If you were near enough to the tower, with your nose within six inches of it, you only see a certain limited extent of stone surface; the tower, qua tower, has entirely disappeared. But you see the stone surface accurately? No, you don’t. The ant crawling up it has a wildly different vision and perception of that stone surface from your vision and perception; and a microscope gives yet another vision, different from either; and as magnification must be infinite in potentiality, though not _in actu_, it is quite clear that no one can ever see the truth of any external object presented to the eyes: there must always