Life & Wisdom Quote by Arthur Machen

Machen takes the most forgettable part of a book - the throat-clearing preface - and turns it into a sly little confidence trick. An introduction, he suggests, is a social signal masquerading as helpful apparatus: its mere presence announces consequence. The line works because it points at a familiar ritual of prestige. If you need an introduction, you must be worth ushering in; if you are being ushered in, the room must be important. It is self-authorizing architecture: a frame that implies a painting.

The adverbs "usually and fitly" do heavy lifting. Machen isn’t denying that some works deserve ceremony; he’s mocking how readily we accept ceremony as proof. The sentence’s genteel cadence feels like a Victorian host smoothing his gloves while quietly appraising the guests. Subtext: readers are primed to treat paratext as an endorsement, and writers (and publishers) know it. An introduction can be less a map than a bouncer.

Context matters here: Machen, a master of the uncanny and the half-seen, understood that atmosphere can be manufactured. His fiction often makes dread out of suggestion, not disclosure. This line applies that same logic to literary culture. Before you even reach the story, you’re being trained to feel that you’re approaching something serious, sanctioned, maybe even rare. It’s a warning and a wink: don’t confuse the velvet rope with the show, and don’t underestimate how badly we want the velvet rope to mean something.