{
  "title": "ARTHUR MACHEN",
  "category": "[CHRONOLOGY]",
  "article": "Welsh writer that has been little-adapted for radio (or any other mass medium)…\n[Frank Wilson, “The writer of fiction is no mere copyist,” June 2, 2009, When Falls the Coliseum]\n“Among the many pleasures reading fiction can afford, perhaps the greatest and most lasting has\nto do with the people one encounters there… [They] can seem more real than the people one\nmeets in the street, perhaps because, through the exercise of our imagination, we have helped\nbring them to life. But how like the people we meet in real life are they really?\n“Welsh writer Arthur Machen, best known for that very strange book The Hill of Dreams,\nthought they weren’t “lifelike” at all. In a talk he gave on BBC radio in 1937 (available in a three-\nCD set called The Spoken Word: British Writers), Machen  said that “the supreme artists have no\ninterest in lifelike characters and don’t depict them save in casual moments of fatigue and\ndepression … the artist creates what neither he nor anybody else has ever seen in life or ever will\nsee in actual life.” According to Machen, it is “the artificer, the secondary man,” who “copies and\ncompounds from the life about him.”\n“The point of departure for Machen’s talk was a remark of G.K. Chesterton’s about the\ndifference between Dickens and Thackeray: “You admired Mr. Micawber but scarcely expected to\nmeet him … you admired Major Pendennis, but so far from not meeting him, the trouble was to\navoid meeting him.”  What this demonstrates, Machen said, is that “Dickens is an infinitely\ngreater artist than Thackeray,” the reason being that “Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller went about …\ninvisible to all eyes save those of Charles Dickens.”\nRadio appearances of Machen:\n(PROGRAMME)\n[\n???????? ??, 1937\n[talk included in British Writers]\nRadio presentations of Machen’s writings:\nFANTASTIC TALES (BBC 7)\n[Thursday—6:30-      PM]\nNovember ?, 2007\n“The White People”\n[“…The nature of good and evil and the origins of sin are explored in this\nintriguing tale…”]\nPERSONNEL: Louise Collins (reader), Ioan Meredith (reader).",
  "origination": "",
  "duration": "",
  "personnel": "",
  "extant_recordings": "",
  "chronology": "",
  "sources": "",
  "gallery": "",
  "images": []
}