The Return of the Devil
Wright, Cuthbert
August 18, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 365 THE RETURN OF THE...
...One day at sunset, standing altogether undeserved...
...Certainly, if evil, "Yes, and of the sinners too...
...You are falling into 366 THE COMMONWEAL August i8, 1926 the error of confining the spiritual world to the su- hero or victim is one who, throughout the book, never premely good, but the supremely wicked, necessarily, commits a bad action in the world's sense of the word...
...In his diabolic Mr...
...Francis Brett Young could who have sounded the very depths of sin who all their have produced a book with something of this power lives have never done an `ill deed.' " when he produced Cold Harbour...
...sound and scent and color are There are none of these coy relapses into Main so blended that "a boy's innocence is as a perfume Street in the work of Mr...
...Eventually Lucian forsakes his mystic town is a book so relentlessly realistic, so "modern" in one for London, a grey wilderness of unending streets, and sense, that it ventures to lead the reader into a Parisian at this point might be inscribed like the heading in the milieu special, partly to show the author's reaction Graal Historie : Here Begin Terrors...
...He is no but a gentleman and an Oxford graduate, goes to longer the happy and unconscious Satanist since he the other end of Europe to rescue a soul possessed now senses his danger, but he has lived the life of by the Demon in person...
...in short, an apparently fruithe approached the more infernal portions of his mag- ful field for a revival of belief in practical Satanism...
...This comment may be unintelligent without being to the swine themselves...
...best to transform the Evil Principle into the grand At about the same time, Arthur Machen in Engand sympathetic hero of a losing cause, now proceeded land published his Great God Pan, followed by the to debase the Devil to the sphere of a nurserymaid's unforgettable Hill of Dreams...
...been expected, in Paris during the 'nineties...
...of the persecution can read the following proud passage and not agree of the Church by politicians affiliated to the lodges that Milton was only really inspired as an artist when of French Freemasonry...
...bogie to frighten infants and darkies...
...too," someone might well interject...
...Lucian Taylor, the unhappy "accidents" of Cold Harbour are somewhat similar hero of that masterpiece, is of the stuff that both to those of The Hill of Dreams-witchcraft, medisaints and demoniacs are made of .in his ability to aevalism, Celtic magic, the Roman occupation, ,and withdraw from the common life...
...He imitated This theory of the unconscious Satanist explains Machen once before to some advantage in his first much that is obscure in Machen's first long novel, novel, Undergrowth...
...great furnace doors were opened...
...At all events, the degradation and Memoirs to Prove the Existence of the Devil...
...sham death of the Devil has only been of brief duraThe various peregrinations of Satan through polite tion...
...Furnival, above the little town, hatred for it and his fellows Mr...
...The purpose of Milton naturalism, now devoted his limited energies to commight have been to justify God's ways to man, but he piling data on the new demonology, delving into had the Puritan's conception of God, and the result Gorres and Fra Sinistrari, investigating the movements of a disgraced priest, later to be transferred to was that he only succeeded in justifying God's enemy...
...They are content not to be artists, so meadows, its laughter of fauns in the thicket...
...This deference to the Devil on the part of three Thus, transliterated in a fashion which bears about contemporary writers, all of great talent is, to say the as much relation to Machen's own style as the alphabet least of it, impressive...
...Young had a complicated character of considerfloods his heart, and he says aloud to that immemorial able rich possibilities...
...August 18, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 365 THE RETURN OF THE DEVIL By CUTHBERT WRIGHT R EADERS of Arthur Machen's story, The Great as the new "thinkers" are fond of asseverating, is God Pan, will recall Mr...
...It was That great poet, being also a Puritan, not unnaturally the decade of Zola (vide La Terre and La Bite made Satan the real hero of Paradise Lost...
...and reality are blurred...
...The result of Machen was of old Welsh ancestry, son of the Vicar this progressive degradation is that no one in Prot- of Llanddewi in the heart of the Gwent valley in South estant America takes Satan very seriously any more, Wales...
...Shadowy forces gather about bathed and saturated in the supernatural...
...I have seen the rectory where he presumably outside the anthropomorphic rites of camp-meetings grew up, an ancient house, curtained by black beeches, and African conventicles...
...When one learns that he is simrather call the devils my brothers...
...Geoffrey Dennis, author of and the roses become a chant," and all this is trans- Harvest in Poland, a very remarkable novel which has muted in a prose which is simply incomparable, sym- passed by our reviewers practically unnoticed...
...At all cations, aesthetic and moral, yet it is almost unknown...
...hitherto occupied his leisure moments in a government It is quite perfect in its nuance of involuntary and office in producing a few brief and dismal studies in almost passionate admiration...
...The hero, him and strange companions...
...Here phonic...
...Clark, the gentleman merely another illusion of hag-ridden humanity...
...He who reads to a pre-war world given over to Satan, as he conbetween the lines perceives that Lucian is being pursued ceives it, guzzling, tippling, making swinish love, by'something he perhaps evoked long ago in the pleas- hating and self-hating...
...This ment his internal life begins, and all is fair and well idiotic itch to be "scientific" and modern, to chart with him...
...The sordid town, with its brick villas and the 'sunset tracts of Lyonesse with a complete surshabby lanes, dissolves into the golden Isca Silurum veyor's kit, and people The Hill of Dreams with the of the Romans with its tesselated pavements, its mur- discouraging phantoms of Dr...
...And a good thing "You are speaking of the saints...
...America to the congenial society of Mr...
...Freud, has ruined many murous baths, the red and green of its roses and a better man...
...Yet never was a book so ant land of Gwent...
...Dream long as they are up to date...
...A novelist, who had Waiting revenge...
...Very who secretly hugged a belief in fantasy and questionably, we might add, if evil really exists as a spent his evenings in compiling what he called his positive principle...
...nificent, if formidable, epic: Numerous grew the cases of "possession...
...Puritanism, whose one great poet had just done his the pages of La Bas as "a certain canon...
...It is noteworthy, too, that the doomed stones on the Dover Road...
...The reader is cheated into bevalley, whose ether is imprinted, impregnated with so lieving at first that Mr...
...His experiments in the rest...
...it was Darkened so yet shone even rumored that the abominable sacrilege called the Above them the Archangel: but his face black mass was practised by a few worn-out degenDeep scars of thunder had intrenched, and care erates who, wearied of all else whether good or bad, Sat on his faded cheek, but under brows were trying to persuade themselves that they believed Of dauntless courage and considerate pride, in Satan and quite loved him...
...And there is a glow in the sky as if there is only one thing to do and that is to finish the great furnace doors were opened...
...And at the end when his lifeless body is dis- more intense than that of imaginative ecstasy, of covered, there is still a glow in the dead eyes "as if artistry, for the author is apparently a Christian...
...The Salem witch trials which, under other Roman bridge, under the domed hills, crowned by lonecircumstances, might have given New England litera- ly Norman churches or bits of mysterious woodland, I ture a gloomy and fascinating background of folk- thought of the probable effect of this lovely but occult lore, have a shabby, suburban, pinchbeck element, de- landscape upon the mind of a Celtic youngster of spite Hawthorpe's fine attempt to raise them to the Anglo-Catholic upbringing and strong literary bent...
...It is a folk-lore and magic, white or black, the most interestwonder that he did not die of it altogether, unless ing thing in Machen is his theory of absolute evil, as his real triumph is in convincing the world that he announced by Ambrose in The White People...
...Even in its actual form, Cold Harbour is that special sphere begin when he is a lonely boy an admirable yarn...
...There are many, I think, who eat Devil to the region of dusty broomsticks and old wives' dry crusts and drink water with a joy infinitely sharper tales where he becks and grimaces as harmlessly as than anything within the experiepce of the `epicure.' " Punchinello in a peep-show...
...Sorcery and sanctity," he said, "are the only realiIn short, the ultimate result of "the Gospel light ties...
...events these three novels stand up like statues richly Without once capitalizing the word "devil," Machen dight among rows on rows of dull novels resembling has written a book whose protagonist is most certainly brick and plaster villas, all proclaiming in a damnable that Evil Principle which consists in "taking heaven reiteration and a detestable style that there are mileby storm...
...Moreover, the materials, the The Hill of Dreams...
...Sludge the But apart from their descriptive beauty, disquieting Medium and the votaries of new "thought...
...And two centuries did The effect can be seen in a number of books which are not pass before the unfortunate Demon had sunk in among the few glories of contemporary English prose...
...No one Humaine) ; of the Russian Entente...
...Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the comthat dawned in Boleyn's eyes" was to relegate the mon life...
...level of transatlantic sorcery...
...he is beleaguered by a sort of primitive Christian, a Plymouth Brother, fantastic miseries and growing madness...
...There have been those Had he so chosen, Mr...
...More- who expatiate daily in the "column" of a New York over, he is surrounded by a set of cackling and paper, remarked, however, that the book left him malignant people, inferior in mentality and manners cold...
...The second fall of Satan, and in the course of wandering through Caerleon, once considered as an elan vital, began very early in Puri- the glittering Isca Silurum of the Legions, past the tan history...
...Furnival is another unconmany age-long hates, lusts, and sorceries : "I would scious "possessed...
...have their portion in it...
...One of the facetious dullards in Gwent, driven almost mad by poverty...
...Never has there been writ- their parishes...
...I would rather ply a vulgar hypnotist and an incredibly "wicked man," live in hell...
...From that mo- effort as quickly as possible and go to bed...
...These writers appear to be bending ten an imaginative work with such tremendous impli- every effort to put him back into our books...
...Formerly the clergy -were only to the poetry of Lycidas, is the motivation of a story too well content if they could exorcise the Devil from unique in our literature...
...The amazing, elliptical, halfdreams so long that he cannot move hand or foot in tortured writing is of one himself possessed by a magic escape...
...literature form, indeed, a very interesting subject of His first public reappearance was, as might have study, even if one goes back only so far as Milton...
...does not exist...
...Lately he has been revived startlingly...
Vol. 4 • August 1926 • No. 15
