CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR




A WORD ON PANTOMORPHOPSYCHOLONOSOPHILOSOPHY, INCLUDING ARTHUR MACHEN.





   Would I could write a glacous ineluctable novel, like John Cowper Powys! With no more outfit than an ulcerated duodenum, he produced Rodmoor. He presses seaweed into the service of sadism, picks glacous and amphibian diatoms from moonwort, and makes them inelectable and nearly everything glaucous. And that is a very jolly feeling, when one has a bout of malaria, as I have to-night, filling myself with quinine, strychnine, arsenic, and cascara sagrada, almost ineluctably so. I expect to be pretty glacous in the morning. What a lot of words there are which are more atmosphere than meaning! Definition is the curse of art; we want to wander in exotic heady gardens amid small glaucous govins, mellicose at our costals, ineluctably dalmatic! There should Euphorion woo Eumolpe with pantoums and purfled wisps of moonrise, the fritillaries of their pomegranate cusps fluttering mopishly in the flambiance of Ra's cadenza. The wigsbane should plex its arpling alianelle about their rampled olio; mammet and maropial flooze emplishly upon the szyenite. See? You remember Arthur Machen -- of the Angels of Mons, that gallant company! -- in his ``White People'' how he gets his horror from ``wicked Voorish domes'' by simply failing to explain ``Voorish,'' and his final tragedy by just not saying what occurred. I must do this (or somewhat aequipollent, albeit solipsistically mine) for Sir Roger Bloxam: what rotten asses writers are! They're alwasys introducing `great Poets' without giving us a single line to taste them by, and so on. They're always leaving everything to the imagination of the reader. Poor fool of a reader! If he had any imagination, he'd be a creative artist himself. Anyhow, Rule One for writing a novellisim shall be to cross the `i's and dot the `t's: except in the one show chapter, which I shall put in to prove that I can do it. It can come in here, as well as anywhere else; (be quiet, Elsie! I wasn't thinking of you) so good-night. Sleep well, wake fresh, and tackle Chapter XXXV in all its glaucous ineluctability. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came!