1‘It is probable, I think, that there is a point where the ascetic principle and the aesthetic become one and the same.’1 The interest of the neglected Welsh writer Arthur Machen in self-discipline and humility is evidence that asceticism far exceeds the intricate categories to which it is frequently correlated—notably Catholicism—and can be an essential part of other denominations, including Anglicanism.2 Machen was brought up as an Anglican by his clergyman father and never converted to Catholicism, contrary to the constellation of French and British authors during the fin-de-siècle era.3 Like several High Church Anglicans, however, Machen embraced the ideas of the Oxford Movement (also called Tractarian Movement, after its series of publications, Tracts for the Times, 1833–41), for whom religious services in England lacked ritualism and needed a more solemn, less latitudinarian liturgy. The humble represents an essential part of his fin-de-siècle work and is emulated by his predilection for short texts (poems, prose poems, short stories and novellas). In addition, Machen partook in the Celtic Revival: like Welsh writers living in England, he and his characters experience the feelings of loss and homesickness entailed by their self-imposed exile and suffer from the vertical relationship between the culture of the imperial capital, London, and their Welsh marginalised patrimony. His novel The Hill of Dreams (1895–97; 1907) was published ten years after it was written, due to its extreme forms of humbleness, notably the protagonist’s self-inflicted violence, which has often been interpreted literally, as insanity and mental illness, and not as a spiritual exercise. The extreme forms of humbleness dating back to the Early Church of the third century reinvested by Machen in this Symbolist text constitute a spiritual adventure, an escapist outlet against a growing mindset that Machen resisted during his post-Darwinian and post-Schopenhauerian era: the triumph of the self and the ‘death of God.’4 The novel, which draws closer to the Künstlerroman genre, recounts the evolution of a young writer, Lucian Taylor, from his happy childhood in a rural area of South Wales to his tragic death in the urbanized setting of London. Despite the protagonist’s social and literary failure, the artistic and spiritual adventures he goes through remain edifying both for him and the reader. The hero’s syncretic liturgy combines pagan beliefs grounded on a revival of the Hellenic ideal with the sapiential corpus of the Bible (not only the Books of wisdom but also Christ’s parables and maxims: ‘Whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted,’ Mat. 23: 12, KJV). The overly pagan dimension of The Hill of Dreams, however, has sometimes undermined the underlying, less obvious Christian conception of the humble in the novel, wherein the ‘humble’ carries a more social dimension than ‘humility,’ a Christian concept. The humble is based on a return to the primary principles of life, to being rather than seeming, and in particular a return to Nature as the matrix of creation (‘humble’ comes from the Latin humus, ‘earth,’ ‘soil’) and is furthermore ritualised; it becomes a liturgy as Machen develops an evangelical poetics which reproduces the contemplative and pathetic overtones of the psalms, the solemn formulae of the Book of Common Prayer, and the musicality of Anglican hymns. Machen’s strong inclination for prose poetry, a hybrid form, originated from his admiration for Charles Baudelaire who defined and elevated the genre in his Spleen de Paris (1855):

Quel est celui qui n’a jamais rêvé le miracle d’une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscienceconscience?5

2The absence of versification in The Hill of Dreams is compensated by rhythmical variations, sound and visual effects, rhyming phrases, and a highly alliterative and assonantal style. We shall observe that the humble as literary motif may be conveyed both by aesthetic minimalism and rhetorical excess, depending on its nature. First, the autobiographical asceticism depicted in the novel gives birth to a representation of the anorexic body and a waste-land motif. Second, when it involves extreme penitential practices, self-inflicted pain in particular, the humble is, on the contrary, expressed by a poetics of violence and monstration.

Aesthetics of Minimalism Emulating the Artist’s Asceticism and Humbleness

3Machen experimented the notion of ascêsis (σσ) both from an ancient Greek perspective (namely, as a gymnastic, physical exercise) and a Judeo-Christian viewpoint (physical abnegation leading to spiritual enlightenment). Lucian Taylor, the protagonist of The Hill of Dreams, lives in an extremely confined room assimilated to a cenobitic space, a sort of cloister. Machen explicitly conveys the analogy between the artist’s marginality and the monk’s withdrawal:

He was willing to endure the austerities of a monk in a severe cloister, to suffer cold, to be hungry, to be lonely and friendless, to forbear all the consolation of friendly speech, and to be glad of all these things [. . .]6

4The third person conceals an autobiographical substratum, as Machen confesses when he refers to ‘the miseries of the inevitable garret [. . .] For two years I had endured terrors of loneliness in my little room in Clarendon road, Notting Hill Gate’ (Machen 69). Like his character, Machen was subjected to all the consequences of a very low income in the 1880s, as he worked as a cataloguer:

. . . after many weeks of severe diet, [Lucian’s] income [. . .] amounted to sixty-five pounds a year. During these austere periods his only food was bread, at the rate of a loaf a day; but he drank huge draughts of green tea and smoked black tobacco. (Machen 117)

5The annual sixty-five pounds were synonymous with near starvation, as W. Roberts confirms in his article ‘Life on a Guinea a Week,’ in particular regarding the unaffordability of meat, which was ten times more expensive than tea and bread.7 Machen refers to bread as a primary aliment symbolizing humility,8 especially unleavened bread (served during the Eucharist) and manna, the bread of exile eaten by the Jews in the desert.9 Tobacco and tea both gave the author a feeling of repletion and therefore reduced his hunger. On the other hand, tea is a natural diuretic used by the artist to purge his body from superfluous substances—it involves an unbalanced cycle of ingestion and excretion wherein the artist eliminates more than he consumes.

6The representation of the anorexic body becomes a locus communis in the novel as the body undergoes a metamorphosis and carries the visible marks of the humble, the stigmata of humility. Lucian is often portrayed as a spectral entity, either a ghost-like figure or a skeleton, in which case the humble is associated to vacuum and disease: ‘he grew thinner and thinner everyday; the skin was stretched on the bones of his face, and the black eyes burnt in dark purple hollows’ (Machen 134). The ascetic’s body becomes a palimpsest showing the marks of his internal humbleness, notably when he sees in a mirror ‘some loathsome mark, [. . .] the stigmata of evil branding his forehead’ (Machen 187), both an echo to the crucifixion wounds and to the lexicon used by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) in ‘The Pilgrims’:

. . . on your brows is written a mortal sentence, An hieroglyph of sorrow, a fiery sign . . .10

7In The Hill of Dreams, the ascetic principle finds an aesthetic equivalent through the use of fragments embedded in the novel, emulating the status of the humble—poems, letters, written prayers, litanies and even hymns are scattered throughout the diegesis. Machen even attempted to develop a form of mystical writing:

He endeavored to find the secret of those pages and sentences which spoke, less directly, less obviously, to the soul rather than the ear [. . .] he dreamed of a prose in which the music should be less explicit, of neumes rather than notes. (Machen 176)

8Lucian’s penchant for neumes, the most primitive system of musical notation, predating the five-line staff notation and used in plainsong, assimilates language to an archaic albeit natural and efficient medium. Linguistically, Machen furthermore establishes two types of discourse revealing the dichotomy between lower-class, humble characters, on the one hand, and upper-class, proud characters, on the other. Lucian’s humbleness is expressed by an attitude of silence and withdrawal reminiscent of the rule of Saint Benedict: his paratax and short sentences make his ideas clear and relevant; whereas most people from his materialistic society use a hypotactic, highbrow style, and phatic expressions (deprived of any sense). Their dialogues include many discursive parasites: the use of double adverbs (‘quite too’), exclamations and interjections (‘oh!’), emphatic structures (‘Do look’), and the pronoun ‘you’ (‘you darling’). Lucian’s thoughts, on the contrary, are often summarised by the narrator, through the mediation of indirect speech: ‘Lucian said he should like an apple very much’ (Machen 97).

9The humble as feeling finds a spatial correlation in the destitute territories onto which it is projected. When Lucian only sees what he feels, the waste-land motif confers to Machen’s poetic prose a musical and figurative quality:

He looked out into the grey street, and it stood a symbol of his life, chill and dreary and grey and vexed with a horrible wind. And beyond, he knew, stretched the labyrinth of streets more or less squalid, but all grey and dull, and behind were the mud pits and the steaming heaps of yellowish bricks, and to the north was a great wide cold waste, treeless, desolate, swept by bitter wind. It was all like his own life, he said again to himself, a maze of unprofitable dreariness and desolation, and his mind grew as black and hopeless as the winter sky.
(Machen 174)

10As text, music and image fuse into each other in this poetic passage, the numerous privative suffixes (‘unprofitable,’ ‘hopeless’) together with the lifeless, monochromatic colours composing the scene turn the character’s existence into a deserted space. The use of accumulations and polysyndeta with iambic meters (repetition of ‘and’ in ‘chill and dreary and grey and vexed’) gives this text an impressionist dimension as a life-like scene is depicted through the subjective perception of an artist. An impression of timelessness is created by the absence of perspective and dimension and by the horizontality of all the elements, placed at the same level. However, this liturgy of humility and withdrawal turns into a pathology in which the ascetic himself uses the other as an audience in his experiences.

The Artist’s Self-Humiliation: a Poetics of Violence and Theatricality

11Through his works, Machen supported the Tractarians’ attempts to ritualise Anglican confession,11 which, unlike Catholic auricular (or private) confession, was reduced to the ‘Confiteor,’ a simple collective prayer. Since for Machen, as for the members of the Oxford Movement, expiation required real contrition, and not mere attrition, his character follows the Dolorist principle,12 which stresses the equation between physical pain and spiritual gain. This attitude originates in a sartorial custom, which, in the Old Testament, included ‘sackcloth and ashes.’13 In The Hill of Dreams, manifold mortifying instruments are used—flagella, cilices, and hair shirts—and in particular natural elements such as crowns of thorns and gorse boughs. Their presence is notably visible through the marks that they leave on Lucian’s body:

When he had lit the candle, he would draw out the gorse-boughs, and place them on the floor, and taking off his nightgown, gently lay himself down on the bed of thorns and spines and [. . .] he pressed the thorns into his flesh. At such moments he tasted in all its acute savor the joy of physical pain; [. . .] he was to inflict on himself this sweet torture [. . .] and he would rise up, joyful though weeping, and reverently set his thorny bed upon the floor, offering his pain with his praise. When he had whispered the last word, and had risen from the ground, his body would be all freckled with drops of blood; [. . .] On some nights when he had pressed with more fervor on the thorns his thighs would stream with blood, red beads standing out on the flesh, and trickling down to his feet. He had some difficulty in washing away the bloodstains so as not to leave any traces; and after a time he returned no more to his bed when his duty had been accomplished. [. . .] He would wrap his naked bleeding body, and lie down on the hard floor, well content to add an aching rest to the account of his pleasures. (Machen 133–134)

12In this figurative rewriting of the Calvary episode, which is close to a crucifixion painting, the humble is ritualised and Lucian becomes a Christ-like figure, due to the references to thorns, blood, the holy shroud and the consummatum est from John 19: 30 (‘the last word [. . .] his duty had been accomplished’ KJV). The vivid passage is reminiscent of the hypotyposes and ekphrases of decadent authors depicting paintings of martyrs.14 This extreme form of humbleness is no longer conveyed by a minimalist style but by a profusion of rhetorical tropes: in particular oxymorons (‘sweet torture,’ ‘aching rest’) and isocolons (‘joyful though weeping’). The paradoxical feeling of delight in pain is expressed by Swinburnian alliterations and assonances (‘pain’ is linked to ‘praise’). This physical discipline offers the ascetic mystical visions and a gift of prophecy:

He has deprived himself of a sensible good in order that an equally sensible but greater good may be secured [. . .] Next to this simple asceticism comes the ordinary discipline of the Church—the abandonment of sensible goods to secure spiritual ends, the turning away from the type to the prototype, from the sight of the eyes to the vision of the soul. (Machen 1905, 87)

13And yet Machen equally tests the limits of the humble as social attitude when the artist performs a more public form of humiliation called exomologesis (ἐξομολόγησις, -homologein: ‘confession,’ and exo-: ‘external’), an externalised expression of humbleness, a performance of humility. The theologian Tertullian (c. 160–c. 225 A.D.) defined it as:

The discipline which obliges a man to prostrate and humiliate himself and to adopt a manner of life that will draw down mercy. [. . .] usually he shall nourish prayer by fasting, whole days and nights, together he shall moan, and weep, and wail to the Lord his God, cast himself to the feet of the priests, fall on his knees . . .15

14An historical example is found in the twelfth century with Henry II, who had to walk barefoot up to the tomb of Thomas Becket in order to be purged from his responsibility in the murder of the Archbishop. In certain areas of South Wales such as Monmouthshire (Machen’s birthplace), where the Church has sometimes been more traditional than in England, public penance was still performed after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) until the Renaissance and even later in some villages. In ‘Performing Penance and Poetic Performance in the Medieval Court,’ Catherine Mackenna recalls that a Welsh version of exomologesis is also known as carenydd; according to this religious practice, the process of confession was not sufficient to be granted absolution, and humbleness had to be materialised by actions. The humble penitent had a part to play inside his community; he was compelled to perform humiliating actions in public—proportional to his faults, mainly exile and banishment. In Wales, this carenydd tradition was even part of the legal and ecclesiastical institutions and it was recognised as a medical protocol. Many examples may be found the episcopal registers of Welsh villages, notably the case of Jane Baschet, an adultress:

Jane Baschet had to stand outside the church at Beddeford on Sundays and feast days during the whole of Lent, until the Thursday before Easter, and then come to Exeter to be reconciled, as is the custom.16

15Sometimes endorsing the status of a scapegoat, Lucian takes refuge in peripheral, forlorn territories: ‘taking shelter sometimes in the gardens beneath the dense and gloomy ilex trees [. . .] Lucian shrank more and more from the small society of the countryside’ (Machen 96). His spatial reclusion into ‘remote and desolate places’ (Machen 122) is followed by long wakes, processions and retreats in both pagan and Christian outdoor shrines:

He shrank from all contact of actuality, not venturing so much as to imagine the inner place and sanctuary of the mysteries. It was enough for him to adore in the outer court, to know that within, in the sweet gloom, were the vision and the rapture, the altar and the sacrifice.
(Machen 210)

16The difference between poenitentiam occupere and poenitentiam agere makes it easier to understand Machen’s conception of humility and to distinguish him from most of his decadent fellow contemporaries. Catherine Mackenna defines the two concepts, stressing the role of performance in the penitential process of some parts of the United Kingdom:

The second term—poenitentiam agere—closely parallels the common usage in English ‘to perform penance.’ It describes the penitential activities both of those who were formally enrolled as penitents and of ordinary Christians engaged in the constant effort to recognize, renounce, and expiate their sins, an effort that was central to the system of private confession and tariffed penance. Much of what was made ‘public penance’ was the spectacle of the penitent’s humiliation. This was expressed in apparel and other aspects of self-presentation such as ashes and bare feet. Humiliation also found spatial expression as penitents stood in spaces clearly marked as outside the space of the Christian community. The body of the penitent abased itself, too, in gesture and movement, such as the gestures associated with prayer and the movement of pilgrimage.17

17Although poenitentiam agere does not constitute the main topic of The Hill of Dreams, and although the term carenydd is not explicitly mentioned in the novel, it accounts for Lucian’s unconventional habits in several chapters and adumbrates similar customs in Machen’s later text, ‘The White People’ (1899). The heroine of this short story engages in several expiatory gestures and actions, especially when she covers her head and her mouth with her hands,18 a ritual which Giraldus Cambrensis, analysing specifically Welsh traditions, explains thus: ‘In full view of the crowd they [Welsh penitents] mime with their hands and their feet what they have done contrary to the commandment on Sabbath days.’19 Lucian is often portrayed lonely, standing in the cold, outside:

And the sight of these homely fires, the thought of affection and consolation waiting by them, stung him the more sharply perhaps because of the contrast with his own chills and weariness and helpless sickness, and chiefly because he knew that he had long closed an everlasting door between his heart and such felicities. If those within had come out and had called him by his name to enter and be comforted, it would have been quite unavailing, since between them and him there was a great gulf fixed. (Machen 184)

18The attitude of withdrawal inherent in the humble is replaced by exhibitions and monstrations of the ascetic’s suffering, a performance of penance:

He was covered with scars, and those that healed during the day were torn open afresh at night; the pale olive skin was red with the angry marks of blood, and the graceful form of the young man appeared like the body of a tortured martyr. His relations noticed that he was not looking well. ‘Now, Lucian, it’s perfect madness of you to go on like this,’ said Miss Deacon, one morning at breakfast. ‘Look how your hand shakes.’ [. . .] Mrs. Dixon saw him one day in Caermaen; [. . .]. The scars on his body burnt and tingled. (Machen 134)

19The humble character is assimilated not only to the martyr Saint Sebastian—whose suffering was a paradigm, in decadent literature, for the artist’s condition—but also to the Medieval Fool figure from Wales’ first poets during the ‘Grand Narrative of Penance’ (1137–1287), composed by the beirdd y tywysogion (‘poets of the princes,’ dedicating their texts to the princes of Gwynedd, Powys and Deheubarth), Taliesin being the most renowned one.20 Although this penitential performance, which involves a return to seeming rather than being, is accountable for the ultimate death of the protagonist, it confers on him mystic visions of a latent sphere of reality (‘the gold of exquisite impressions,’ Machen 156). The vulnerability of Machen’s Celtic migrants and the minority of their Welsh cultural identity are sometimes compensated by strategies pertaining to the Celtic Revival, but remain quite discreet in The Hill of Dreams. The use of Welsh dialects, folklore and mythological figures is more typical of his later, twentieth century texts.

20For Arthur Machen, the humble is not only a source of Symbolist artistic creativity (‘Language, he understood, was chiefly important for the beauty of its sounds, [. . .] by its capacity, when exquisitely arranged, of suggesting wonderful and indefinable impressions,’ [Machen 155]) but also a standing point for mystical experiences. Although Machen, like many of his decadent fellow contemporaries, cultivated the turn-of-the-century tendency to aestheticise humbleness and suffering in an algolagniac perspective (algolagnia, from the Greek ἄλγος: álgos, ‘pain’ and λαγνεία: lagneía ‘intimacy,’ is the literary expression of sado-masochism), and although Lucian’s penance is compensated by his hyperesthesia and his synaesthetic self-indulgence, Machen nonetheless never considered the humble as a ‘chalice empty of wine.’21 By supporting the values of moderate asceticism, Machen both partook of and brought an end to decadence, ‘this literature typical of a civilization grown over-luxurious, over-inquiring, too languid for the relief of action, too uncertain for any emphasis in opinion or conduct.’22 Lucian’s conception of intimacy confirms that the humble becomes a paradigm in the novel: the protagonist’s love for Annie Morgan is deprived of any physicality and intensifies when she is married to another man; it becomes a Platonic form, ‘untarnished and spotless’ (Machen 165), which paradoxically enables him to experience deeper feelings for his beloved: ‘Truly now, and for the first time, he possessed Annie, as a man possesses the gold which he has dug from the rock and purged of its baseness’ (Machen 167). The final death of the hero is correlated with a vegetal metaphor, as a Welsh plant called Arctic Pilulifera is uprooted from its original territory (Caermaen in the story, no doubt a phonological distortion of Machen’s original village, Caerleon) before dying in an urbanised setting. Arthur Machen’s self-imposed exile to London, like Lucian’s, not only constituted a source of homesickness but furthermore exacerbated the status of ethnic and social minority that he acquired as a displaced subject. The move from rural to urban settings and the two-dimensional spaces of his stories, reflecting the England/Wales dichotomy, deserves further development in the field of ecopoetics, especially as Welsh ancestry, hagiography and folk history are bestowed growing importance in his next two novels, A Fragment of Life (1898) and The Secret Glory (1899–1908; 1922).