The Glorious Mystery

Arthur Machen

Description

“The Glorious Mystery” is a 1924 collection of essays and vignettes by Arthur Machen. Arthur Machen (1863 – 1947) was a Welsh author and renowned mystic during the 1890s and early 20th century who garnered literary acclaim for his contributions to the supernatural, horror, and fantasy fiction genres. His seminal novella “The Great God Pan” (1890) has become a classic of horror fiction, with Stephen King describing it as one of the best horror stories ever written in the English language. Other notable fans of his gruesome tales include William Butler Yeats and Arthur Conan Doyle; and his work has been compared to that of Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Oscar Wilde. “The Glorious Mystery” is not to be missed by those with an interest in the work and mind of this seminal writer. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

Sujets

• Robert Louis Stevenson

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 16 octobre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528766937
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE GLORIOUS MYSTERY
Copyright 2017 Read Books Ltd.
This book is copyright and may not be
reproduced or copied in any way without
the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Arthur Machen
Arthur Machen was born in Caerleon, Monmouthshire, Wales in 1863. At the age of eleven, he boarded at Hereford Cathedral School, where he received a comprehensive classical education. Family poverty ruled out going to university, and Machen was sent to London, where he sat entrance exams at medical school but failed to get in. In the capital, he lived in relative poverty, working in a variety of short-lived jobs and exploring the city during the evenings. However, he began to show literary promise; in 1881, at the age of just eighteen, he published a long poem, Eleusinia , and in 1884, he published his second work, the pastiche The Anatomy of Tobacco .
By 1890, Machen was publishing in literary magazines, and writing stories with Gothic and fantastic themes. His first major success came in 1894, with the novella The Great God Pan . Although widely denounced by the press as degenerate and horrific because of its decadent style and sexual content, it has since garnered a reputation as a classic of horror; indeed, author Stephen King has called it maybe the best [horror story] in the English language. Machen next produced The Three Impostors (1895), a novel composed of a number of interwoven tales which are now regarded as some of his best works.
Between 1900 and 1910, Machen dabbled in acting, and published what is generally seen as his magnum opus, The Hill of Dreams (1907). He accepted a full-time journalist s job at Alfred Harmsworth s Evening News in 1910, where he remained throughout the war, not leaving until 1921. Machen accepted this role mainly to pay his bills - fiction-writing was his true passion, and he carried on producing novels and short stories throughout the 1910s - but he came to be regarded as a great Fleet Street character by his contemporaries.
The early 1920s saw something of a Machen boom; his works became popular in America, and he brought out his two-volume autobiography. However, by 1929 he was struggling financially again, and left London with his family. It was only a literary appeal launched on the occasion of his eightieth birthday - which drew contributions from admirers such as T. S. Eliot and Bernard Shaw - that eventually ended Machen s money woes. He died some years later in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England, aged 84. His legacy remains formidable; his work has influenced countless other artists, and is seen as setting the stage for - amongst other things - the Cthulhu horrors of H. P. Lovecraft.
The Glorious Mystery
By
Arthur Machen
Edited by
Vincent Starrett
CONTENTS

The Sangraal
The Holy Grail
A Reply to Arthur Machen.
The Sangraal
A Reply to Alfred Nutt.
The Grail Romances
A Reply to Arthur Machen.
The Matter of Romance
Consolatus and Church-Member
A Secret Language
Edgar Allan Poe
The Iron Maid
The Rose Garden
Fragments of Paper
The Holy Things
Scrooge: 1920
Conjuring Time
La Dive Bouteille
Sancho Panza at Geneva
The Morning Light
The World to Come
Good Little Books
Faith and Conduct
The Apostolic Ideal
Ecclesia Anglicana.-I
Ecclesia Anglicana.-II
Modernism
Dissenting Logic
False Prophets
Intolerance
The Dark Ages
FOREWORD
IN THIS final important volume drawn from my collection of the uncollected writings of Arthur Machen, for the first time are brought together in covers many of Mr. Machen s finest contributions to the periodical press. In each is expounded some part of the high doctrine that is so peculiarly and beautifully Machen s own, but which rapidly is becoming the possession of others in number as the sometime clandestine celebrity of Arthur Machen and his philosophy spreads through the world. In the history of religion, I believe no more arresting and challenging theological work has appeared than the present volume, in which a great mediaevalist, still living, sets forth his quest of the Graal, and finds a symbol of that sacred vessel in less holy cups; in which a High Church theologian of the first importance triumphantly asserts and perhaps proves his conviction that Protestantism is a revolt against Christianity and the industrial blight and a curse on civilization.
Most of the reviews and essays here collected were contributed years ago to London journals, and there appears in many of them names and references long since lost to memory with the passing of the men and of the issues; but for the most part the dogmas assailed and the doctrines celebrated are still fundamentally and vitally questions of the hour. Where it has seemed necessary to stress a date, for any reason, I have appended to the paper in question the date of the issue of the journal in which originally it appeared, although the arrangement of the essays is not necessarily chronological.
Supplementing the Graal symposium, with which the book opens, and the theological philippics, are a number of graceful essays in lighter vein, some short fictional studies, and a bit of literary criticism. The grim little tale called The Iron Maid was originally a part of the volume known as The Three Impostors, but when that engaging chronicle became a part of the larger collection called The House of Souls it was abridged by the omission of The Iron Maid, which has not since been reprinted. It has seemed a good idea to include the story in the present collection to make it accessible to those readers who can not or do not care to possess first editions. To all save ardent Machen collectors who have gone to the extreme of unearthing early magazine appearances of their idol, it is likely that the present collection from first to last will be quite new.
V INCENT S TARRETT .
THE GLORIOUS MYSTERY
THE SANGRAAL
IT IS really rather refreshing. Scare heads are presumably inevitable; in the pleasing language of their inventors they seem to have come to stay. Well; if we must have them it is much better to be confronted with:
MYSTERY OF A RELIC
F INDER B ELIEVES I T TO B E THE H OLY G RAIL T WO V ISIONS D ISCOVERED AT G LASTONBURY
than with an array of trumpet-toned capitals which tell us the King is going to meet the Kaiser at Marienbad. And the story told is quite a curious one. A saucer-shaped vessel, made of bluish-green glass into which silver leaf had been introduced, was found in a well at Glastonbury. The newspaper accounts leave its genuineness an open question; but we are informed that a British Museum expert who has seen the vessel pronounces in favour of its antiquity, and considers it to be of Ph nician workmanship. So goes the history of the matter; there is also a legend.
The legend is more difficult. It is an affair of spiritual voices, of visions declaring the vessel to be the cup used by our Lord at the Last Supper that He made, of seeresses who describe the object without seeing it, of dreams in which a woman appears holding the vessel in her hands, of a strange radiance which is diffused from this (possibly) Holy Relic.
But there are some curious points in the tale, apart from its super-normal ingredients. In the first place the newspaper reporters speak of the vessel as a cup. It is not a cup; it is a saucer; and therefore it is idle to speak of it as the chalice of the Last Supper. In the second place, the discoverers, who say it is the Holy Grail, once the great relic of Glastonbury Abbey, are apparently ignorant of the fact that Glastonbury never claimed the possession of any such object. William of Malmesbury, who wrote the Glastonbury Legend in the first half of the twelfth century, says that the body of Joseph of Arimath a was buried somewhere in the abbey precinct, and that with his body there was a phial of the Precious Blood; the idea may have been suggested to Gul. Marisburiensis by the fact that a phial said to contain the Precious Blood had just been brought to Bruges. But so far as we are aware the monks of Glastonbury who discovered the body of King Arthur in the reign of Henry II. never discovered the body of St. Joseph or the phial.
Then, again, there is the consideration that, with one exception, the Romances insist on the final withdrawal of the Grail, either into a vague region of mystery, or as in the great Galahad Quest, first to Sarras and finally to heaven. The one exception is Wolfram s Parzival, where the Grail is left at Montsalvatch guarded by the Templesiens ; but Wolfram s continuators, pressed probably by the universal tradition, bore away the Grail at last to the realm of Prester John. Of course there is the question of what the word grail really means. Paulin Paris thought it came from Grail Book (Mass Book); as a matter of fact the Gradual was called the Grail in the middle ages, and according to Ducange a Grail Service meant a morning service or mass. But more modern scholarship derives the word from a conjectured form, cratella , a diminutive of crater , and the word seems to have implied to the twelfth-century mind a sort of shallow dessert-dish, standing on a stem or foot. Now there is neither foot nor stem to the vessel just discovered at Glastonbury; and yet it is odd enough that a sculptured stone at Nigg in Scotland depicts two Celtic priests bowing in adoration before something which resembles a saucer on a stem, over which hovers a dove bearing a Host in its beak. In this connection it must be remembered that the Grail was a vague object t