The Hermit gets down to cases, with extended remarks on
Don Quixote -- which he can read only in translation -- and
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
P. 73: The Hermit says: Fine literature is simply the expression of the eternal things that are in man; fine literature always draws itself away and goes apart into lonely places far from the common course of life.
So
Don Quixote expresses "the eternal quest of the unknown." I suppose that, ever since reading Machen on
Don Quixote over 40 years ago, I have had in the back of my mind the idea that I should read it, and this notion was further encouraged by Dostoevsky's very high regard for the book (which, I suppose, he too knew only in translation). So I have taken it from its shelf. The Hermit refers to "that longing,
peculiar to man, which makes him reach out towards infinity." Does that help to show why, many postings back on this thread, I included those remarks about the nature of man? (See also page 84: "man is a sacrament, soul manifested under the form of body, and art has to deal with each and both.")
How different that is --
reaching towards infinity -- from what goes on in the typical classroom taught today by inculcators of literary theory. How banal seems their endless preoccupation with arcane terminology and leftist politics.*
I was blessed, I would like to say, with not just one but two professors who
did know about that longing and reaching. I have written about them at length in a piece that will appear this month in William Breiding's
Portable Storage. Their names were Brian Bond and U. Milo Kaufmann. Both, by the way, had connections with the fannish world.
P. 82: You can see how Machen probably had Stevenson's novella in the back of his mind, in "The Inmost Light" and "The White Powder." Machen is disappointed with RLS -- who had a great idea, Machen says, but fell short in realizing its potential, writing a story too much concerned with empirical psychology.
I don't sign on with Machen when he affirms a statement he attributes to Poe, that allegory is
always a literary vice, because doing so would tend to lead unsuspecting readers to skip some very fine works, such as the
Faerie Queene of Spenser -- and yet, after all, though I know from personal experience that the
Faerie Queene may be read, and reread, with high pleasure, perhaps this requires a careful attitude towards the allegorical element, such that while reading you let it exist just as a sort of undertone but don't dwell on it. I don't know what C. A. Smith thought of Spenser, but my understanding is that Donald Sidney-Fryer was an admirer of CAS and a very great admirer of the
Faerie Queene.
*If you are wondering what I am thinking of, look over the essay on
King Lear here:
[
www.winthrop.edu]
This is, notice, an
award-winning paper. One wonders if the modern academy is a place in which people may write award-winning essays about fine literature and never be attuned to the qualities in those works that Machen's Hermit celebrates. There may be professors of literature for whom literature, in Machen's sense, has in some way never happened.
I'm not without hope, though. I knew a feminist English professor who got a course on women's literature added to the catalog, and who also wanted Shakespeare taken out as a required course for English majors. I won't go into details of our differences. But I would have been wrong to write her off in my mind, I think, as someone who taught literature but for whom
literature had never happened; one day we happened to have an encounter by the photocopy machine, and she mentioned that she had gone to England once, on some kind of English student tour I think, and had seen the manuscript of
The Pickwick Papers -- and had teared up. I very much hope that that meant some of Dickens's magic had got through to her despite the carapace of theory. It may be that, at that time, she had not been as hard-boiled in theory as, I fear, she may have become. I don't know, but I'm hopeful for her. Perhaps literature really had been a love of hers and perhaps there's been some estrangement from it thanks to the "activist" spirit of the current scene but she will return to her "first love" some day. I wish her well.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 4 Oct 19 | 04:35PM by Dale Nelson.