Welsh Journals

A Welsh Border Writer. By Geoffrey H. Wells. r INHERE are few living authors of prominence who can conscientiously be described as stylists in the older sense of the term, but among them Arthur Machen holds a high place. He is, too, one of the foremost of modern Welsh contributors to English literature, and it. does not need much critical imagination to per- ceive the intimate connection between the fine phrases and full cadences of his best work and the fact of his Welsh origin. "There is in Celtdom," he writes, "a certain literary feeling which does not exist in Anglo-Saxondom. it is diffused, no doubt, and appreciative rather than creative still it is there, and it is delighted with the rolling sound of the noble phrase." This feeling, though of course in his case creative, is evident throughout the work of Arthur Machen, "a man three-parts Celt," a Welshman of the south-east marches. It is the care with which he writes, the untiring revision, the quest for perfection, the twelve-inch pile of manuscript thrown aside in the pro- duction of a short novel, which account for his reticence, for the comparatively small number of volumes which have been issued by him. But of those score or so of books which are the main result of over forty years of literary labour, at least one quarter will become classics in the libraries of the future-a high proportion when one gets down to facts and comparisons-and to-day he is able to say of those books that he "cannot recall having written a single sentence with the intent of pleasing anybody-save myself." Misunderstanding concerning the definitely Welsh aspect of Mr. Machen's literary career may easily arise if the material circumstances are studied but superficially. Brought up as a boy in the Usk valley he was still under twenty when Gwent became only a temporary refuge, and but a year or two later even less than that, since when his western sojourns have been no more than holiday visits. Yet it is true to say that both he and his work are essentially Welsh, not only because most of his stories are set in Welsh scenes, but still more because they "derive" so evidently from his youthful experiences in Gwent. Even after all these years in London he remains provincial, a countryman at heart. In "Far Off Things," which tells the story of his life from infancy to his twenty-first year, he gives a vivid and most happy picture of the Usk countryside of fifty years ago. The district has changed little since then, preserving still at heart its pristine isolation, its silence beneath the smooth guardian summits of the hills. But there have been changes in the actual population. Mr. Machen was born just in time to see the last phases of "a singular social process, which I can only call the Passing of the Gentry," and he relates his reminiscences of the last represent- atives of that class, and of the farmers and of the independent small-holding labourers of that day, and of the fellowship that was between them in times of hardship. To these people of Gwent who never moved twenty miles from their homes London was a distant unknown city "wonderful, mystical as Assyrian Babylon" even its newspapers had to be fetched from Newport or Pontypool Road In this book, however, there is still more of the country itself, of "the mountain in the west, the forest in the east, and a wild land between them," of the deep leafy lanes, the wooded slopes, the fields marked out by stubborn hedge or shady stream, the orchards, and the old white-washed farms with walls a good yard thick. "It is one of the most beautiful circumstances in Gwent that this custom of whitewash prevails. To look up to a mountain side and to see the pure white of the walls of the farms and cottages established there, fronting great winds, but nestling too in a shelter of tossing trees, gives me even now the keenest pleasure. And if, on a summer day, one climbs up amidst those brave winds and looks down on all the rolling land of Gwent, it is dotted with these white farms, that shine radiant in the sunlight." It was amid such scenes that Arthur Machen, an only child, was born in 1863 in Caerleon-on- Usk, "the little silent, deserted village that was once the golden Isca of the Roman legions." Here in this lonely land of old romance he was brought up in isolation, companioned only by the mysterious woods and the everlasting hills and the books in his father's "thoroughly ill- selected library." He was eleven years old when he was sent away to Hereford Cathedral School: by that age he was "set" to loneliness, and even six years there did not serve to break the barriers about his heart. Each term was passed as "a sort of interlude amongst strangers," and at each term-end he "came home to my friendly lanes, to my deep and shadowy and secret valleys, as a man returns to his dear ones and his dear native fields after exile amongst aliens and outlanders." In this isolation, this lonely exploration of such a countryside, this study of old and mar- vellous books, his thoughts inevitably turned inward to wonderment and brooding, and he looked upon all things with the eyes of the mystic: "everything was to me wonderful, everything visible was the veil of an invisible secret. Before an oddly shaped stone I was ready to fall into a sort of reverie or meditation, as if it had been a fragment of paradise or fairyland." This sense of awe is a quality which has persisted, which is the impulse of all that Mr. Machen has ever written, his work being no more than an attempt to convey through descriptions of incidents and places (these being no more than symbols) the deep impressions his young mind "had received from the form