Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1973 Arthur Machen and the Celtic Renaissance in Wales. Karl Marius Petersen Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Petersen, Karl Marius, "Arthur Machen and the Celtic Renaissance in Wales." (1973). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 2420. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/2420 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This material was produced from a microfilm copy of the original document. 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Xerox University Microfilms 300 North ZM b Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 46106 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I I 73-27,862 PETERSEN, Karl Marius, 1938- AR3HJR MACHEN AND THE CELTIC RENAISSANCE IN WALES. The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, Ph.D., 1973 Language and Literature, m o d e m U n iv ersity M icro film s, A XEROX C om pany, A n n A rb o r, M ic h ig an ™ t c nTCCEDTATTnM UAC ECEM MTrurtBTTMEn C TA m V AQ PFfPTVPn Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Arthur Machen and the Celtic Renaissance in Wales A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Karl Marius Petersen B.A., Louisiana State University in N.O., 1963 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1966 May, 1973 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would lilce to express my appreciation to Dr. Thomas Watson, under whose direction this research was completed, for his patience and for his guidance; to my committee in general, and especially to Dr. Otis Wheeler and Dr. John Wildman for their careful reading of the manuscript and subsequent recommendations. I cannot adequately express my appreciation to many friends who have sustained me during periods of emotional fatigue and frustration. Most especially my thanks go to Elise Kleinschmidt, who pushed me through the last stretch, but also Ernie, Anna, and Charlotte Kleinschmidt. For their endless confidence in my completing the course, I thank Dr. Thomas Kirby, Faye Ott Rifkind, Bill Horan, Raeburn Miller, and Nolan LeCompte. For their love and kindness and a different view of success in this project, I thank my Malaysian and Thai friends. Finally, I thank Sandra and Jerry Fackrell for their help in getting this dissertation typed. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................. ii ABSTRACT ..................................... iv Chapter I . General Introduction ................ 1 II. The Celtic Theorists ................ 19 III. Machen's Critical Theory............. 56 IV. Machen's Novels and ShortStories .... 105 V. Celtic Fairylore and theEv i l ....... 162 VI. Conclusion .......................... 204 LIST OF WORKS C I T E D .......................... 210 VITA ......................................... 214 iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT Arthur Machen (1863-1947) does not now enjoy much recognition as a serious literary craftsman. The principal reason for his obscurity is that readers have been deterred by the commentators from seeing his achievement in terms of the literary movements of the 1890's, the decade of his best work. Born in Caerleon-on-Usk, Machen looked to Wales as the source of inspiration. The spiritual affinity to the Celtic fatherland is analyzed by a series of critics— Ernest Renan, Matthew Arnold, W. B. Yeats, and Grant Allen— as the point of departure for the Celtic genius. A pervasive sense of the supernatural, melancholia, the magical treatment of nature, escape into the world of dream, are further traits which the critics isolate as distinctly Celtic. Machen uses all the traits consistently in developing his fictional characters, especially Lucian Taylor in The Hill of Dreams, his principal novel, and Ambrose Meyrick in The Secret Glory. Machen constructs a theory of literature in Hieroglyphics which is based on ecstasy, the result of seeing the physical iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. world as a projection of a spiritual reality. The physical ■universe, under such an interpretation, is a sacrament. Great literature, Machen claims, is an attempt to capture this sense of man's existence within two worlds, an ideal shared by such seemingly irreconcilable elements as the pre- Christian Druids and the Symbolists of the nineteenth century. His view of nature as a sacrament is the most consistently developed of Machen’s ideas and is his original contribution to a long history of Celtic thought which has had as its primary characteristic the concern with spiritual rather than physical realities. Although the sacramental idea appears in all the novels, its implications are specifically worked out in several essays, specifically "Dr. Stigging: His Views and Principals," and "Farewell to Materialism." Through the Welsh fairylore Machen probes the question of whether the spiritual force underlying physical reality might not be evil. In such stories as "The Novel of the Black Seal" and "The White People," he makes a convincing argument that the basic intent of the tales surrounding the fairies is to reveal the darker spiritual truths, which can only be sug­ gested rather than fully understood. Within the context of traditional fairylore he develops a negative sacramentalism, \7 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. his view that the mean and ugly physical realities are the projection of an underlying spiritual evil. The solitary and imaginative escape into the dream world which characterizes all Machen's heroes is a Celtic quality, but is also common to the heroes of Aestheticism. Although Machen denied any explicit contact with the disciples of Aestheticism, his work exhibits the same concern with the cultivation of sensation, and the dedication to beauty, and their reconstruction by the imagination. Seen as an artistic movement of the 1890’s, the Celtic Renaissance assimilated the highly sympathetic attitudes of Symbolism and Aestheticism. Arthur Machen, consciously a Welsh Celt throughout, made use of a particularly rich fusion of artistic influences to create original literary works of considerable merit. As a poet, novelist, and critic, he was uoxii^ uixc na uj. vc ncxon ma ucx. juaj. a5 a v cxia.^xc wx. uoUywj. Gxjf sensibility in much the same way as Yeats was using the Irish and MacLeod the Scottish material. Machen has suffered in reputation because he has not previously been credited with his clear and significant contribution to the Celtic Renais­ sance, specifically as it affected the Welsh. vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER I GENERAL INTRODUCTION Arthur Machen and the Celtic Renaissance in Wales December 15, 1972, was the twenty-fifth