BOOK: Arthur Machen, "The Hill of Dreams"

Arthur Machen: The Hill of Dreams. London: E. Grant Richards, 1907. iv + 310 pp.

After reading Machen's House of Souls a couple weeks ago, and liking it a good deal, I decided to continue with Machen's next book, The Hill of Dreams, a novel first published in 1907. No doubt this book is much better literature than The House of Souls was, and would be appreciated by readers more sophisticated than myself, but for me it has been something of a disappointment. I understood it much less and liked it much worse than the stories in The House of Souls; almost at no point was I really drawn into the act of reading, but had to deliberately push myself to continue, at the relatively slow pace of one chapter a day.

This difference between the two books is no coincidence; as Machen explains in an interesting preface that he wrote to the 1922 edition of The Hill of Dreams, he deliberately set out to write something different from his earlier stories (the ones later collected in The House of Souls) as a result of criticism that this earlier work had received. As he describes it there, writing The Hill of Dreams was quite a struggle for him, and you can't help wondering if Lucian's struggles as a writer here in The Hill of Dreams weren't partly inspired by Machen's own struggles as a writer in real life. (He even describes how a publisher to whom he sent his manuscript later tried to steal a part of the plot and use it in another book (p. xv of the 1922 ed.), which is a milder case of what happens to Lucian in chapter 2 of The Hill of Dreams! Either this is an incredible instance of life imitating art, or Machen is making this up, or he added this to chapter 2 in a later version of the manuscript after sending an earlier version to the publisher who tried to steal from it.)

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Lucian Taylor, the protagonist, is the son of a poor clergyman in rural Wales. He has an academic bent but is no good at sports, so the other boys bully him and he keeps mostly to himself, immersing himself in old books, the more obscure the better, and going on rambles through the countryside. One summer day he falls asleep in a secluded spot near the ruins of a Roman fort on top of a hill, and has an odd dream or vision, and feels some sort of presence (pp. 19–22). Eventually his father can no longer afford to keep him in school; Lucian tries his hand at writing, but struggles greatly to put his feelings into words.

He sends his manuscript to a publisher, who rejects it; some time later Lucian is shocked to find, in another book by the same publisher, that about half of its text was stolen from his rejected manuscript! Meanwhile he has another odd experience: while walking home from the nearby town late in the evening, he takes a shortcut and gets lost in the woods. He stumbles on for a while, creeped out by nocturnal sounds and a distant white apparition, but upon catching up with the latter finds it to be simply Annie, a girl from a neighbouring farm. They walk together for a while, and he professes his love for her. After returning home, Lucian decides it would be futile to try exposing the thieving publishers, and instead focuses on planning his next book.

Annie goes away for some time and meanwhile Lucian's love for her turns into a bizarre, quasi-religious obsession. He learns the arts of calligraphy and illumination, and pours out his feelings for her into a medieval-style handwritten book; he develops rituals to worship her; he takes to waking up in the middle of the night and lying on thorny branches until his body is covered in scars. Meanwhile he has increasingly good reason to be disgusted with much of the society around him. Women of the rural upper class treat him with disdain because of his father's growing poverty; he sees a group of boys kill a puppy for sport (pp. 121–3; one of the saddest, most horrid instances of cruelty to animals in literature I've read since that scene of a man beating his horse to death in Crime and Punishment).

But Lucian increasingly learns to pay no attention to people around him; he takes an interest in local archeological finds and begins to imagine, more and more vividly, the ancient Roman town that had once stood there. He feels as if he had discovered a kind of alchemy whereby a man could “become lord of his own sensations” (p. 150). Literature, he discovers, “is the sensuous art of causing exquisite impressions by means of words”, and as if Machen wanted to demonstrate what Lucian meant by this, he gives us a chapter filled with beautiful, decadent prose, in which Lucius takes in the sights and smells of “the garden of Avallaunius”,* and talks to its inhabitants. Meanwhile in real life, he has lost all appetite and is reduced to little more than skin and bones.

[*We are not told exactly who this is; but in one of Machen's earlier tales, The Three Impostors, we see Dr. Lipsius' cultists drinking “wine of the Red Jar that Avallaunius had made”.]

Some time later, Lucian learns that Annie has married someone else; but he doesn't really mind, and he still has the imaginary world that his love for her had helped him access. He inherits a modest sum of money from a distant relative (p. 178), which enables him to move to lodgings in a London suburb and devote himself to writing. He struggles for months, trying to find the perfect way to put his words together, rewriting endlessly and finishing nothing; but he is glad, at any rate, that he is neither a workaday commercial novelist (p. 190) nor, worse yet, a clerk in the City like some of his relatives (p. 198).

Eventually he has a terrible period of writer's block, which drives him to despair and almost (or more than almost?) to madness. He has detached himself from ordinary people (or “barbarians”, as he likes to call them) and their way of life in order to dedicate himself to literature, but now he seems to be finding out that he isn't able to write at all, and might end up being left with nothing, neither human society nor literary work (p. 230). His despairing imagination magnifies harmless everyday incidents to the point where he wonders if he is turning into some sort of monster (pp. 215–17, 232). He resolves to try writing again, convinced that this is the only thing that can save him from perdition.

However, he spends much of the next night in a half-awake state, having dreams and visions of his past life, much of it things we've already seen in this book, but also a few new ones. He remembers his childhood wanderings in the countryside, to the Roman fort and elsewhere, and also more recent rambles in the outskirts of London; he remembers the news of his father's death, which severed his last link with home (p. 285); he remembers a story he managed to publish, which was not even entirely unsuccessful (p. 300). Meanwhile it is a dark and stormy night outside, he can't quite bring himself to wake up fully, and feels more and more a strange sense of dread; his visions become increasingly lurid and bizarre, and culminate with his joining a witches' sabbath led by none other than poor Annie (pp. 303, 306).

The story ends with a twist: Lucian's landlady barges in and finds him more or less dead; it turns out he had been taking drugs for some time now, and this last night was when he finally overdosed. She is set to inherit his meager property; as for the copious manuscripts he has left behind, they appear to be largely illegible and worthless.

</spoiler warning>

I'm reminded of the old story of the curate's egg (“parts of it are excellent!”), but of course it isn't a fair comparison, because there the idea is that the egg as a whole is spoiled and hence worthless even if parts of it are good; and it wouldn't be fair to say that about The Hill of Dreams. It's just that I liked some things about it a great deal even while not enjoying it as a whole.

For instance, in the 1922 preface, Machen describes his intention to change his style (p. x) into something much plainer than that of his earlier stories; I was worried when I read that, but was then relieved to find that his style was not much different here in The Hill of Dreams; it is still beautiful and sonorous and well-rounded, and much of the time it was a pleasure to read it slowly and pay more attention to the sound than to the meaning of the words. Indeed Machen himself puts this fine characterization into Lucian's mouth: “Literature is the sensuous art of causing exquisite impressions by means of words.” (P. 157.) Earlier he writes about language being “chiefly important for the beauty of its sounds, [. . .] its capacity, when exquisitely arranged, of suggesting wonderful and indefinable impressions [. . .] Here lay hidden the secret of the sensuous art of literature, it was the secret of suggestion, the art of causing delicious sensation by the use of words.” (P. 156.) This is presented as Lucian's opinion, but Machen seems to be adhering to it in his own writing in this book as well.

Another recurring thing is Machen's disdain for commercial writers, the sort whose three-volume novels provide “harmless amusement” to the patrons of Mudie's libraries (p. 50). (Incidentally, I was surprised by his reference to three-volume novels, because The Hill of Dreams was published in 1907 and by then the three-volume novel was a thing of the past; but it turns out that he wrote it ten years earlier (1922 preface, p. xv), i.e. just before they went out of fashion.)

Lucian also disdains (and, I presume, so does Machen himself) that intermediate type of writers whose work is “not the utterly commonplace” but “where the real thing is skilfully counterfeited, [. . .] the books which give the reader his orgy of emotions, and yet contrive to be superior, and ‘art,’ in his opinion.” (Pp. 245–6.) By way of example, he mentions two historical novels: George Eliot's Romola (“the clever sham”, p. 246) and Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth (“the real book”, ibid.). From what I've seen of these two books in the wikipedia, they both sound interesting and intriguing and I hope to read them some day. And sadly, from what I know of my own lack of taste and sophistication, I very much suspect that I will enjoy the “clever sham” much better than the “real book”. Probably I've read (and liked) a few clever shams already; I wonder which of the books I've read would merit that label in Machen's eyes? Is The Name of the Rose, for instance, a clever sham or a real book? I enjoyed it a lot when I read it many years ago, but I never could quite shake off a nagging feeling that there is something slightly cheap about how Eco parades out his erudition to impress the reader.

I remember that, when we learnt about fin-de-siecle literature in school, one of its features was supposed to be the attitude that the artist is somehow separate from, and indeed elevated above, the general public. I'm always interested to find such things ‘in the wild’, so to speak, and this idea appears prominently here in The Hill of Dreams. Lucian refers to people around him who have no appreciation for art as “barbarians”, and wonders half-jokingly “whether there were some drop of the fairy blood in his body that made him foreign and a stranger in the world” (p. 210), or if the fairies had substituted him for a changeling that time when he fell asleep in that mysterious thicket at the old Roman fort (p. 231). He does his best to disregard the “barbarians” and their opinions, and withdraw from them both physically (by shutting himself in his garret) and mentally (by exercising his imagination very vividly, as we see e.g. in ch. 4). He believes that “man could, if he pleased, become lord of his own sensations” (p. 150), and he compares the artist to an alchemist: “he held in his hand the powder of projection, the philosopher's stone transmuting all it touched to fine gold; the gold of exquisite impressions” (ibid.). He sticks to this comparison even in his despair towards the end of the book: “It was an interminable labour, and he had always known it to be as hopeless as alchemy.” (P. 289.)

I think it is to Machen's credit that this idea of the artist as being above the general public is not presented uncritically, nor really as something praiseworthy or admirable as you might perhaps expect to see in the work of a fin-de-siecle artist. After all, Lucian and his fate are hardly something we should wish to emulate; he tries to detach himself from ordinary people to devote himself to his art, but his only reward is to become wretched and die prematurely. Even he himself realizes this: “he had lost the art of humanity for ever” (p. 210).

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But for me, these interesting aspects of the book were outweighed by things I didn't enjoy. Too much of this book is spent on vague descriptions of Lucian's wanderings and visions, whether in the woods of Wales or the suburbs of London, and too often it was hard to be sure whether something really happened or was it all inside Lucian's mind. Indeed if I had to summarize my complaints about this book into a single sentence, it would be that too much of it is taking place inside Lucian's mind. I suppose that for some people that makes it the very apex of literature, but for me it's just the opposite; I just can't bring myself to care that much what is going on inside other people's heads. I can sympathize with Lucian in the abstract, especially with his distaste for the practical-minded and material pursuits of the bulk of humankind; I can admire his zealous dedication to his art; and having absolutely no artistic talent of any sort myself, I can definitely feel sorry for Lucian's inability to actually produce any finished work. But all of that still doesn't make me want to read two or three hundred pages about his rambles and dreams and his slowly losing his mind.

Already in The House of Souls I was slightly annoyed by Machen's tendency to include vague references to fairies and satyrs and the like, and I was glad when he resolved to have “no more hanky-panky with [. . .] the Little People or any people of that dubious sort” (1922 preface, pp. vi–vii), but then while reading The Hill of Dreams I couldn't help feeling that he didn't manage to give up the habit quite as thoroughly as he had promised. He just introduced a little more plausible deniability, but he isn't fooling anybody.

For instance, one of the key experiences from Lucian's childhood seems to be that hot summer day when he fell asleep in a thicket atop a hill with the ruins of the Roman fort (pp. 19–22) — plausible enough, you might say; but then he dreams about being “upon the fairy hill” (p. 20), and his body is compared to that of “a strayed faun” (p. 21); and “the wood was alive” (p. 21), and he senses an odd presence, perhaps a “visitant” (p. 22), when he wakes up. Later we hear that “it seemed as if a woman's face watched him [. . .] and that she summoned to her side awful companions who had never grown old through the ages” (p. 262). Eventually Lucian even wonders if he has been replaced by a changeling (p. 231). Come on, Mr. Machen, you're going to sprain your eyebrows from waggling them so hard! You promised no more fairies, and then this!

And speaking of fauns, references to them positively abound in this book. A wine labelled Faunus appears in Lucian's imaginary sojourn in the ancient Roman town (“Look for the jar marked Faunus; you will be glad”, pp. 153, 155; to see that this is just Machen relapsing into old habits, remember that we already saw “Wine of the Fauns” in The Three Impostors); later he imagines the stories of women who “met the faun when they were little children” (p. 160). Later, while in London, he buries himself into his work partly to avoid the temptation to “listen [. . .] to the singing of the fauns” (p. 183; and see also further references to this on pp. 210, 233). In his last months in London, his look is compared to that of “a faun who has strayed from the vineyards and olive gardens” (p. 240; echoing the “strayed faun” from p. 21).

Is this Symbolism? The time period is about right. Is the faun a symbol? But if so, of what? Sure, it's easy to handwave something about the faun being something primal and authentic, quite possibly wild and dangerous as well, and almost certainly a poor fit for our modern civilization — but surely it cannot be that the purpose of Symbolism is to turn literature into a cheap puzzle-game like this. No, there must be something more to it; but unfortunately someone like me hasn't got the slightest chance to figure out what.

Fauns are not the only old habit of Machen's that returns in The Hill of Dreams. There are also plenty of allusions to the Sabbath, which occur the more often in Lucian's visions the more disordered his mind grows (pp. 219–20, 237–9, 262). At one point he passes what to a sane observer might have been nothing more than an unusually rowdy pub, with a street-walker standing in front of it, but to Lucian the whole affair is an orgy of “Bacchic fury unveiled and unashamed [. . .] Every instinct of religion, of civilisation even, was swept away” (pp. 237–8), and the woman outside is a witch who has “summoned him to the Sabbath” (p. 239), and he would be lost if he had not refused. By the end of the book even Annie, the farm-girl he had been in love with, turns into “the Queen of the Sabbath” (p. 303), and they “celebrate the wedding of the Sabbath” (pp. 305, 306) in a wild access of purple prose that would make even Lovecraft blush.

Actually, it's not that I really mind any of this — I don't — I'm just pointing out that Machen's habit of vague allusions to fairies, fauns and witches continues largely unabated in the present work, and that his protestations of reform in that 1922 preface ring somewhat hollow.

[Incidentally, another interesting recurring element: he keeps mentioning naphtha flares or lamps where he wants to emphasize the luridness and intensity of some orgiastic situation; “the black night air glowed with the flaring gas-jets and the naphtha-lamps, hissing and wavering before the February wind” (p. 233); “[a] flare of naphtha, burning with a rushing noise” (p. 234); “the array of naphtha lamps” (p. 237); “[s]he was in the full light of a naphtha flame” (p. 238); “[t]he lurid picture of that fiery street, the flaming shops and flaming glances, all its wonders and horrors, lit by the naphtha flares an by the burning souls” (p. 247); “the naphtha flares tinged with red” (p. 248); “the sight of an orgy, of dusky figures whirling in a ring, of lurid naphtha flares blazing in the darkness” (p. 292); “the naphtha flares” (p. 302); “hissing jets of light and naphtha fires” (p. 305).]

So in the end, this novel suffers from many of the same downsides that already bothered me in Machen's earlier short stories. We get lots of hinting at fairies, fauns, witches' sabbaths and the like, but is it all real or is it just the disordered fancies of Lucian's increasingly drug-addled mind? (And if it's the latter, why should we care?) Machen plays coy and refuses to quite commit himself, even more so than in his earlier works. But to these downsides The Hill of Dreams adds a new one, namely that it was a slog to read and that too much of it is happening only inside Lucian's head. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would enjoy this book a lot (and indeed the wikipedia describes it as “Machen's masterpiece”), but I for one am just glad that I got through it.

ToRead:

• George Eliot: Romola (1863), and Charles Reade: The Cloister and the Hearth (1861). Two historical novels, mentioned here on p. 246.
• Nina Antonia: The Greenwood Faun (2017). A novel apparently inspired by Machen's Hill of Dreams, which indeed is why I started reading Machen in the first place.
• Judging by the list of his works in the wikipedia, Machen wrote a few more stories after this book, as well as a three-volume autobiography; some of these things sound as if they might make for interesting reading.