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With singular unanimity critics for thirty years have slighted the workof Arthur Machen. A line suffices for him in Holbrook Jackson's "TheEighteen Nineties," and Mr. Blaikie-Murdoch ignores him completely in"The Renaissance of the Nineties"; yet those are the standard works onthe period to which, chronologically, at least, Machen belongs. Mr.Turquet-Milnes, with greater appreciation, gives him a half-chapter inhis scholarly work, "The Influence of Baudelaire," but even that is madeup largely of quotations from "The Hill of Dreams," to prove Machen adescendent of Baudelaire—an error to which I subscribed until Machenhimself disillusioned me, although the assertion is still partiallytrue.
Because, in my opinion, Arthur Machen is the outstanding artist of histime, and one of the great masters of all time, I wrote the followingpaper, which first appeared in Reedy's Mirror for October 5, 1917.That issue is not now obtainable, and, as calls for it continue to cometo me and to the publisher, I find ground for a belief that Machen may,at length, be coming into his own, a tardy phenomenon which I am happyto hasten so far as it lies within my power. Mr. Walter M. Hill sharesthis feeling and this brochure is the result.
I am indebted to Mr. William Marion Reedy for permission to reprintthose parts of the article which appeared in his journal.
V.S.
Some thirty odd years ago a young man of twenty-two, the son of a Welshclergyman, fresh from school and with his head full of a curiouslyoccult mediaevalism, privately acquired from yellowed palimpsests anddog-eared volumes of black letter, wrote a classic. More, he had itpublished. Only one review copy was sent out; that was to Le Livre, ofParis. It fell into the hands of Octave Uzanne, who instantly orderedRabelais and Boccaccio to "shove over" on the immortal seats and makeroom by their side for the author. The book was "The Chronicle ofClemendy"; the author, Arthur Machen.
Three years ago, about, not long after the great war first shook theworld, a London evening newspaper published inconspicuously a purelyfictional account of a supposed incident of the British retreat fromMons. It described the miraculous intervention of the English archers ofAgincourt at a time when the British were sore pressed by the Germanhordes. Immediately, churchmen, spiritualists, and a host of others,seized upon it as an authentic record and the miracle as an omen. In thehysteria that followed, Arthur Machen, its author, found himself atalked-of man, because he wrote to the papers denying that the narrativewas factual. Later, when his little volume, "The Bowmen and OtherLegends of the