Welsh writer that has been little-adapted for radio (or any other mass medium)…
“Among the many pleasures reading fiction can afford, perhaps the greatest and most lasting has
to do with the people one encounters there… [They] can seem more real than the people one
meets in the street, perhaps because, through the exercise of our imagination, we have helped
bring them to life. But how like the people we meet in real life are they really?
“Welsh writer Arthur Machen, best known for that very strange bookThe Hill of Dreams,
thought they weren’t “lifelike” at all. In a talk he gave on BBC radio in 1937 (available in a three-
CD set calledThe Spoken Word: British Writers), Machen said that “the supreme artists have no
interest in lifelike characters and don’t depict them save in casual moments of fatigue and
depression … the artist creates what neither he nor anybody else has ever seen in life or ever will
see in actual life.” According to Machen, it is “the artificer, the secondary man,” who “copies and
compounds from the life about him.”
“The point of departure for Machen’s talk was a remark of G.K. Chesterton’s about the
difference between Dickens and Thackeray: “You admired Mr. Micawber but scarcely expected to
meet him … you admired Major Pendennis, but so far from not meeting him, the trouble was to
avoid meeting him.” What this demonstrates, Machen said, is that “Dickens is an infinitely
greater artist than Thackeray,” the reason being that “Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller went about …
invisible to all eyes save those of Charles Dickens.”
[
???????? ??, 1937
Radio presentations of Machen’s writings:
November ?, 2007“The White People”
intriguing tale…”]
Louise Collins (reader), Ioan Meredith (reader).