The Secret Glory

By Arthur Machen

New York
Alfred A Knopf
Mcmxxii

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.

Published August, 1922

Set up and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y.
Paper furnished by W. F. Etherington & Co., New York, N. Y.
Bound by the H. Wolff Estate, New York, N. Y.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
VINCENT STARRETTh3

CONTENTS

Note
PREFACE
I
II
III
IV
EPILOGUE

BOOKS BY ARTHUR MACHEN

Note

One of the schoolmasters in "The Secret Glory" has views on the subjectof football similar to those entertained by a well-known schoolmasterwhose Biography appeared many years ago. That is the only link betweenthe villain of invention and the good man of real life.

PREFACE

Some years ago I met my old master, Sir Frank Benson—he was Mr. F. R.Benson then—and he asked me in his friendly way what I had been doinglately.

"I am just finishing a book," I replied, "a book that everybody willhate."

"As usual," said the Don Quixote of our English stage—if I knew anynobler title to bestow upon him, I would, bestow it—"as usual; runningyour head against a stone wall!"

Well, I don't know about "as usual"; there may be something to be saidfor the personal criticism or there may not; but it has struck me thatSir Frank's remark is a very good description of "The Secret Glory," thebook I had in mind as I talked to him. It is emphatically the history ofan unfortunate fellow who ran his head against stone walls from thebeginning to the end. He could think nothing and do nothing after thecommon fashion of the world; even when he "went wrong," he did so in ahighly unusual and eccentric manner. It will be for the reader todetermine whether he were a saint who had lost his way in the centuriesor merely an undeveloped lunatic; I hold no passionate view on eitherside. In every age, there are people great and small for whom the timesare out of joint, for whom everything is, somehow, wrong and askew.Consider Hamlet; an amiable man and an intelligent man. But what a messhe made of it! Fortunately, my hero—or idiot, which you will—was notcalled upon to intermeddle with affairs of State, and so only broughthimself to grief: if it were grief; for the least chink of the doorshould be kept open, I am inclined to hold, for the other point of view.I have just been rereading Kipling's "The Miracle of Purun Bhagat," thetale of the Brahmin Prime Minister of the Native State in India, who sawall the world and the glory of it, in the West as well as in the East,and suddenly abjured all to become a hermit in the wood. Was he mad, orwas he supremely wise? It is just a matter of opinion.

The origin and genesis of "The Secret Glory" were odd enough. Once on atime, I read the life of a famous schoolmaster, one of the most notableschoolmasters of these later days. I believe he was an excellent man inevery way; but, somehow, that "Life" got on my nerves. I thought thatthe School Songs—for which, amongst other things, this master wasfamous—were drivel; I thought his views about footbal