Arthur Machen's Hieroglyphics presents itself as a record of conversations with an unnamed literary hermit in a decaying London house. The narrator describes the hermit's retreat in Barnsbury, a district between Pentonville and the Caledonian Road, where they talk of art and life while a laburnum branch beats against the window. The work is framed as a series of dialogues, but the catalog subjects—Literature—History and criticism; Criticism—only partially capture its content. The excerpts reveal a sustained argument about the nature of artistic expression, not a survey of critical methods.

A Hermit's Literary Theory

The hermit's central claim is that all genuine art originates in a form of ecstatic ritual, specifically the Bacchic cult of ancient Greece. He traces this through three disparate works: Sophocles' dramas, Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Dickens' The Pickwick Papers. The hermit insists that the drinking scenes in Pickwick—which he says "reek with brandy and water"—are not mere comic relief but a degraded version of the dithyrambic choruses sung in honor of Dionysus. He draws a direct line from the Greek festival to the Victorian novel, arguing that the "interior meaning is in each case the same." This is not a conventional work of criticism; it is a manifesto about the sacred origins of literature.

The Bacchic Key to Rabelais and Dickens

Machen's hermit devotes considerable attention to Rabelais, noting that the history begins with Grandgousier "aimant à boire net" and ends with the Oracle of the Holy Bottle pronouncing "Trinch"—"beuvez." He cites the priestess Bacbuc's declaration that "by wine is man made divine" and argues that readers who miss this key lose the book's highest value. Similarly, he identifies the "brandy and water scenes" in Pickwick as a Victorian equivalent of the Bacchic cultus. The hermit acknowledges the poverty of Dickens's materials—"the Cockneydom of Dickens" versus the Athens of Sophocles—but insists that the artistic impulse remains the same. This comparative analysis is specific and provocative, though the excerpts do not reveal whether the hermit addresses other works or develops a broader theory.

Setting as Argument

The physical setting of the dialogues is not incidental. The hermit occupies two rooms in a "big, mouldy house" with a laburnum that "had cast a green stain on the decaying wall." The room is hung with "flock paper, of a deep and heavy crimson colour" that "looked almost black" even on summer evenings. This atmosphere of decay and enclosure mirrors the hermit's retreat from the world and his obsessive focus on a single idea. The narrator notes that the hermit "avoided personalities" and forgot names repeatedly, suggesting a man wholly absorbed in his theory. The setting reinforces the sense that Hieroglyphics is not a balanced critical treatise but the record of a singular, almost hermetic vision.

Readers approaching Hieroglyphics should expect a dialogue that is part literary criticism, part personal confession. The hermit's arguments are not systematically defended; they are asserted with the fervor of a convert. The excerpts offer no evidence of counterarguments or alternative perspectives. The work's value lies in its audacious linking of high and low culture, and in the atmospheric frame that makes the reader feel like a visitor to that dark, crimson room in Barnsbury.