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141 Alfred Nutt (who understood the vessel in pagan, rather than Christian terms) and more to Machen’s experiments with the occult and various Christian mystical cults.*
untraditional school story. It is in the school parts of the novel that Machen demonstrates the most obvious clash between the nineteenth-century and modem (mystical, spiritual) understandings of the medieval. They come in the form of Meyrick’s conflict with his chief tormentor, Horbury - his uncle and the bursar of Lupton School. Meyrick’s passions are medieval: he first incurs the wrath of his uncle when he is late returning to school after spending a day admiring the gothic architecture of the nearby Seldon Abbey. Being a school where the masters are ‘nothing more or less than bloated schoolboys’, Meyrick is severely beaten by his uncle for such an impudent interest.116 Meyrick’s elevation to the spiritual plain, however, appears to validate such a ‘genuine’ appreciation of the medieval. Meyrick’s uncle Horbury is similarly consumed with an enthusiasm for medievalism, but of the nineteenth-century Neo-Gothic type. He appears as a malevolent portrait of one of the many other nineteenth-century public school headmasters who sought to employ Muscular Chivalry as a means of educating upper- middle class schoolboys. Horbury spends his evenings imagining the school (with * Machen (1863-1947) was an avowed anti-materialist throughout his life. His early work was influenced by the decadent movement of the 1890s and constitutes a series of lurid tales on Gothic or fantastic themes. The Three Impostors (1895) is commonly regarded as his best work-of this period. At the turn of the century, following a period of sustained clinical depression brought on by the death of his first wife, Amy Hogg, Machen recast himself as a champion of mysticism and spirituality, which can be seen, in part, as a new means of combating the economic and scientific materialism which he saw as the ruination of contemporary society. He believed that the function of literature was to convey a sense of spiritual ecstasy. Legends of the Grail, Machen believed, were based on vague recollections of the rites of the Celtic Church. These ideas feature heavily in The Secret Glory, which was written around the same time as he published essays on Grail origins in Alfred Douglas’ The Academy. Mark Valentine’s biography Arthur Machen (1995) is a useful introduction.
142 himself as headmaster) transformed into resplendent Victorian Gothic.* Unlike Meyrick’s mystic love of architecture and holy vessels, Horbury’s vision is purely materialistic: the transformation of the school’s buildings into ‘red brick French thirteenth century, with Venetian detail, much admired’ is done purely in order to increase school, and personal, revenues. There is something wholly inauthentic about all his dreams: he gamers ecclesiastic support; designs an impressive list of ‘old boys’, including Walter Raleigh; and orders anything preceding the Gothic revival to be ‘boarded up and used as a gardener’s shed’. 17 Presumably, the reader is meant to nod sagely when the uncle’s career is abruptly ended with unfounded allegations of indecent behaviour - rumours which apparently begin with the Grail itself, now in the keeping of the increasingly vengeful Ambrose Meyrick. The increasingly sadistic tone of the latter half of the novel was common to several other Grail novels at this time, including Charles Williams’s War in Heaven (1930) and Sherard Vines’s Return, Belphegor! (1932). Machen wrote several other essays and stories on the Grail, most notably The Great Return (1915), which, following the discovery of purportedly true Grails in Wales and Glastonbury, describes in an anecdotal style of reportage how the Grail appeared in a Welsh village, where it healed the sick and united the Anglican and 1 1 o Nonconformist congregations in a mystical Celtic Mass. An influence on Machen’s views of the Grail was his friend and fellow mystic, A.E. Waite, who introduced * As a further signifier of the bursar’s love of all things medievalist, Horbury also occupies himself away from classes in annotating Tennyson’s ‘The Passing of Arthur’ for a selection of ‘English literature for Lower Forms’ (20-1). 1 As part of his materialist plans for Lupton School, the bursar intends to encourage many more ‘rich Jews’ to enrol. For the ‘rich Jew who desired to send his son to an English Public School was, in nine cases out of ten, anxious to do so precisely because he wanted to sink his son’s connection with Jewry in oblivion [...] the more Jews the better’ (24-5). Clearly aligned to the forces of materialism, and in opposition to Meyrick’s and Machen’s mysticism, the presence of the rich Jews in The Secret Glory is the first hint at the growth in anti-Semitism that became a staple part of much of the Grail literature of the 1920s and 30s, especially in Mary Butts’s Armed With Madness (1928) and Charles Williams’s
143 Machen to the various Christian-mystical sects with which he was associated. In 1903 they collaborated on a verse drama, ‘The Hidden Sacrament of the Holy Grail’.119 Apart from this play, Waite’s only other fictional contribution to the Grail legend was a religious epic, The Book o f the Holy Grail (1921), which charted his own mystical experiences in blank verse interspersed with short lyrics. More influential than his poetry was Waite’s scholarship on the Grail. His research was far more controversial than his mystical verses, which belong ‘firmly to the vein of late Victorian religious poetry.’ Bom in New York, but brought up in London, Waite was raised in ‘genteel poverty alleviated by fervent devotion to the 1^1
Roman Catholic church’. The mysteries of Sacramental Christianity would remain central to much of Waite’s life and criticism. He intensely disliked Weston’s ritual theory of the Grail’s origin (his attacks on her became increasingly personal and misogynistic), while academic scholars found his mystic understanding of the Grail 1 O')
utterly ‘fantastic’. Waite’s scholarship took his readers into the realms of heightened Christianity: into hidden Catholic sects which maintained the secrets of esoteric knowledge which, as is often the case with esoteric writers, Waite did not reveal. Another adherent of Waite’s esoteric writings was Charles Williams. Williams joined Waite’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross in 1917. After reading Waite’s The Hidden Church o f the Holy Grail (1909), Williams sent Waite a copy of War in Heaven (1930), Williams’s first foray into the Grail legend.123 Although more famous * Waite, Machen and Evelyn Underhill, who wrote a contemporary-set Grail novel, The "Column o f Dust (1909), which is dedicated to Machen and concerns a young clerk, Constance Tyrell, who keeps the Grail in her London flat, were all members of the Order of the Golden Dawn. The Order came to be subject to a number of scandals in the years immediately before the Great War. Waite formed The Fellowship of the Rosy Cross in 1915, which was more overtly Christian in orientation than the Order of the Golden Dawn had been. Charles Williams joined in 1917. Waite also joined The Quest Society, whose members included W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Underhill and John Masefield. See Francis King, Ritual Magic in England (1970), 112; Grayson, ‘In Quest of Jessie Weston’, 37, and Barber, The Holy Grail, 295-6. Yüklə 2,81 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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