The Hill of Dreams

Rating:
Summary: Gothic Vision of a Young Writer in 1890s London
Review: Arthur Machen is better known for his "horror" tales such as "The Great God Pan". However, there is more to Machen that that. Machen believed in a quality of literature (and life) that cannot be pinned down - a sort of magic.

When he first came to London from rural Wales in the late 1800s, he was involved in fin-de-siecle "magic" circles - such as The Order of the Golden Dawn. He translated "fantastic" tales and in works like "The Great God Pan" created his own vision of them. However, like Harold Bloom today, he was perhaps at his best when he wrote about literature, and he did this is three forms: directly, in "Hieroglyphics", autobiographically in "Far Off Things" and "Things Near and Far", and in a fictionalized manner in "The Hill of Dreams".

The Hill of Dreams is about a young writer from the country who goes to London and wanders its streets looking for inspiration, but finds himself caught up in the city's past and becomes alienated from those around him. It is like a Peter Ackroyd novel set from 100 years ago. There is also a magic there that is all Machen's own.

Machen is a writer worth getting to know, particularly in the books mentioned above. In the end, though, "The Hill of Dreams" is his masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: Gothic Vision of a Young Writer in 1890s London
Review: Arthur Machen is better known for his "horror" tales such as "The Great God Pan". However, there is more to Machen that that. Machen believed in a quality of literature (and life) that cannot be pinned down - a sort of magic.

When he first came to London from rural Wales in the late 1800s, he was involved in fin-de-siecle "magic" circles - such as The Order of the Golden Dawn. He translated "fantastic" tales and in works like "The Great God Pan" created his own vision of them. However, like Harold Bloom today, he was perhaps at his best when he wrote about literature, and he did this is three forms: directly, in "Hieroglyphics", autobiographically in "Far Off Things" and "Things Near and Far", and in a fictionalized manner in "The Hill of Dreams".

The Hill of Dreams is about a young writer from the country who goes to London and wanders its streets looking for inspiration, but finds himself caught up in the city's past and becomes alienated from those around him. It is like a Peter Ackroyd novel set from 100 years ago. There is also a magic there that is all Machen's own.

Machen is a writer worth getting to know, particularly in the books mentioned above. In the end, though, "The Hill of Dreams" is his masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: Second-Rate "Portrait of the Artist" Novel
Review: Arthur Machen's "Hill of Dreams" is not a very well-known novel, even among those well-read in 19th-Century English literature. And there are some good reasons for that. It is not a first-rate work of fiction. The writing is not tight and often lacks polish (despite Machen's 1890s pose as an aesthete and dandy); Machen is often as clumsy and obtuse as the social realists and naturalists he pretends to despise. "Hill of Dreams" positively drips with cloying sentimentality of the worst oh-poor-me-goodbye-cruel-world kind. It is almost like "Sorrows of Young Werther" without any ironic distance. And the story itself (the sensitive artist in conflict with a brutish and ugly reality), even as far back as 1900, was nothing new. The bildungsroman (German for "education of the artist") novel had been handled better by other writers.

But I must admit that the novel is indeed memorable for certain unique qualities. Probably what Machen does best in here is the evocation of the magical Welsh countryside, with its mysterious Roman Empire-era ruins crumbling in deep forests, and the vivid delineation of the young Lucian Taylor's solitary wanderings among them. That has stayed with me ever since I first read "The Hill of Dreams" in college ten years ago. It resonated with me especially then because I used to wander in the woods of central Florida where there were some ancient Indian burial mounds and they used to fire my imagination with mystery in the same way.

The novel had some devoted fans among the great writers of the 20th Century who also felt its power. Henry Miller included it in his list of the 100 books that most influenced him. F. Scott Fitzgerald read it, and in fact "The Hill of Dreams" probably influenced "This Side of Paradise." And John Dos Passos made a passing tribute to it in the USA trilogy as the book that Richard Ellsworth Savage and all his clever Harvard friends were reading in the years just before the outbreak of WWI.

Some companion novels in the same vein would be Frank Norris's "Vandover and the Brute", Stephen French Whitman's "Predestined", George Gissing's "New Grub Street", Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward Angel" and James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," to name just a few.

Rating:
Summary: Machen's masterpiece.
Review: The Hill of Dreams is not "a second-rate Portrait of the Artist." First of all, the book a great enough achievement that it warrants its own consideration apart from any Joyce comparisons. Secondly, Machen's prose in this bildungsroman is hardly "lacking in polish"; rather, it reveals him at the height of his aesthetic powers, revealing him as one of the great prose masters in English, a distinction gradually lost in his subsequent works. Furthermore, Machen never "posed as an aesthete and dandy"; on the contrary, he had little interest in the Yellow Book crowd, and expressed particular distaste for Oscar Wilde, whom he called "a great mass of rosy fat." The association of Machen's work with decadence and aestheticism is in large part a result of The Great God Pan's publisher (John Lane, publisher of The Yellow Book) and its Beardsley frontispiece. Machen's works, in fact, are works of decadence almost by accident: their intensely individualistic metaphysical and arcane vision was fortunate to receive apt expression through an aesthetic/decadent mode, a form of expression naturally absorbed and appropriated by Machen.

Fused with this occult mastery of language is an intensely haunting visionary experience of the main character's emotional consciousness. Without Machen needing to resort to overt supernatural machinations, the overwhelming sense of ancient, occult forces emanating from the Welsh Roman ruins is almost tangible. And Machen achieves this through a tour-de-force of style as he interweaves the reader's consciousness with Lucian Taylor's.

If I were forced to compare it to Portrait of the Artist, I would say it is every bit the equal. I am hesitant to do this, though, because there is no real reason to compare the two books apart from the fact that they are both bildungsromans. Outside of this, there is no similarity between the two books. It is interesting to see the rash and imperious judgments passed by those who favor a canonical counterpart. In my view, The Hill of Dreams should be recognized as a high point in English literature: its obscurity is a shame.