I have always been given to certain enthusiasms. That does not necessarily mean that I am, to use my mother’s country expression, “flighty.” The important enthusiasms are lifelong passions: the search for a telos, literature, beauty, travel, history, genealogy. These interests are both abiding and defining.
Within those categories, however, I enjoy launching off on tangents, rooting around in the nooks and crannies of a particular interest. For example, Art and beauty have always attracted me, and find I am paying more attention the older I get. I appreciate most everything from the Ancients up through the Renaissance. I begin to lose interest with the Baroque, and this disinterest accelerates with 18th-century French and English portraiture (but not Spanish). I am happily back on board with the 19th-century Romantics and Pre-Raphaelites, but modernism in all its forms, like all abstractions, leaves me cold. And so, my enthusiasms take me to unlikely places: a museum in the Midlands to view a small Puvis de Chavannes, a remote Orthodox church in Abastumani, Georgia with Nesterov iconography, or Worcester, MA (anticipated) with a typically weird Piero di Cosimo.
Oftentimes, my enthusiasms overlap. In 2018, I drove especially to Urbino (travel), to view Piero della Francesca’s “Flagellation of Christ” (art), primarily because the seated king is thought by some critics to be John VIII Paleoulogos (history/religion). In a similar pattern, itineraries in the U.K. (travel) include visiting old churches (history) which have uncovered wall murals (art) that had been whitewashed during the iconoclastic spasms of the English Reformation (religion).
My literary tangent for the last year or so, has been centered on Frederick Rolfe and Arthur Machen. Of the latter, I was only vaguely aware of him prior to reading a selection of his work in Eighth Day Institute’s Microsynaxis. As so often happens, this initial exposure ripened into an obsession to read everything I could find on Machen. And as he lived a full rich life, writing almost up to the end, this turned out to be a formidable body of work. Soon I joined the Friends of Arthur Machen, which led me to the collecting of the past journals of that society. Along the way, I became friends with two gentlemen who are largely responsible for the vitality of that literary association: Mark Valentine (Wormwoodiana) and Ray Russell of Tartarus Press. They are both wonderful Machenian writers in their own right, and I am currently enjoying delving into their books.
Closer to home, my interest in Machen led me to a friendship with Christopher Tompkins and his darkly bright press. We met last fall at the Inkings Festival at Eighth Day Books. He delivered several talks on Machen, and we enjoyed each other’s company in the fellowship that is part and parcel of that annual gathering.
Arthur Machen, if he is known today at all, is recognized as one of the founders of supernatural and/or horror genre. H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King acknowledge their debt to him. This is not the sort of literature that I generally read. For example, I have never read a book by either of those authors, nor do I have any plans to do so. Such a categorization of Machen limits him, I think, for he wrote so much more than just about the supernatural.
His horror stories were not mere explorations of monstrosities, but rather, insight into the demonic, the expression of Machen’s belief in the unseen world, the very real battle waged by the forces of the Evil One against the Hosts of Heaven. As a Welshman, Machen was a born storyteller, remembering well the stories of his youth. He relished folklore, and the faerie world was alive in his telling. They were not, however, the light and mischievous, but ultimately benign creations of Victorian children’s stories, but rather, malevolent creatures, in some semblance of obligation to the Underworld.
The son of a clergyman, Machen was the highest of high church Anglicans. He had a deep and abiding resentment against the excesses and ruin of the English Reformation and their defenestration of the English church. He never became Catholic, but his sensibilities were all in that direction. Machen was disdainful of the Anglicanism of his own day. He, like Eliot, deserves to be grouped with that great migration of English intellectuals and writers into Catholicism (or almost so in their cases) between John Henry Cardinal Newman in 1845 and Dame Edith Sitwell in 1955. For them, the beauty was gone, leaving a hollowness at the core of the English church. My Orthodox path was not available to them in their time, but I greatly sympathize with these fellow travelers.
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I recently purchased Occult Territory: An Arthur Machen Gazetteer by R. B. Russell (Ray) at Tartarus Press. Machen’s entry for Tintern Parva church, near Tintern Abbey is classic. He builds to a crescendo, then lets unleashes his fury. Enjoy.
The mass was sung in the little church of Tintern Parva, on the height overlooking the great and glorious abbey. Here alone, indeed, was carven in fair stones and manifested in broken arches and ruinous walls all the matter of our work, all that we loved and hated. There, in the wonderful and enchanted valley, had once risen a miracle, the restoration of lost Paradise, a perfect and transcendent work of art, a shrine for the Graal of Heav en, for the Life-giving and Quickening Bread of the soul. The dull and heavy and shapeless stones had once more received life and beauty: then had stood in its glories the Holy House of the Mass, a priceless sacrament, a marvelous testimony to supernatural truth to the Great Fact–the only fact of any consequence–that the world is not wholly Devildom, that the aim of men is not altogether to ‘do business’. And there, too, was the sign of that which we hated; the holy place was roofless and the wall decayed: the altar was thrown down, and the caravan work in ruins; the Sacrifice was not offered any more, and the Tabernacle of God was no longer with men. I cursed the ‘Protestant Reformation’ then with heart and soul; and still do I curse it, and hate it, and detest it, with all its works and in all its abominable operations, internal and external; I loathe it and a bhor it as the most hideous blasphemy, the greatest woe, the most monstrous horror that has fallen upon the hapless race of mortals from the foundation of the world.
Russell notes that in 1910, Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s “Bosie” was sued, his publication being deemed a vehicle for “Catholic propaganda.” In the trial, a portion of this piece was quoted. Incredibly, in early 20th-century England, pro-Catholicism could still be censored. The plaintiff actually won the case.
Ok. Now that Terry has suggested Machen now I have to read...
The most excited I've been to subscribe to something in awhile. I have always enjoyed your writing and look forward to reading this new blog.