In “The Great God Pan” we are asked to believe that a scientific experiment performed upon a young woman of seventeen results in her “seeing” the Great God Pan; she instantly loses her mind and becomes an idiot. Some years thereafter a strange woman named Helen Vaughan plagues London society, causing a rash of suicides and destroying the lives of several prominent men about town. In the end we learn that Helen is in fact the daughter of the young woman, born nine months after the fateful experiment.
Another scientific experiment is at the focus of “The Inmost Light,” written in 1892 and first published in 1894. Here we find that a doctor has persuaded his own wife to allow him to extract her soul and place it in a gem—the “inmost light” in that gem is her soul. The result is that the woman continues to live, but presents—like Helen Vaughan—a visage of mingled beauty and horror. One man who sees her in a window thinks of her as a “satyr.” To one of Machen’s conventional religiosity, a person without a (Christian) soul can only appear as a figure of pagan antiquity.
“The Shining Pyramid” (1895), although not included here, is worth discussing as one of Machen’s first expositions of what might be called his “Little People mythology.” Although it features a spectacularly potent scene in which the stunted, primitive denizens of Britain—now dwelling in caves, having been driven out by successive waves of fully human peoples—perform a hideous ritual around a pyramid of fire, “The Shining Pyramid” is perhaps too much of a detective story to be fully effective as a weird tale. But what might be called the “Little People mythology” (perhaps most exhaustively treated in “Novel of the Black Seal”) is of some interest in itself. Machen makes it clear that he himself believed in the former existence of just such a race of creatures as he depicts in these stories:
Of recent years abundant proof has been given that a short, non-Aryan race once dwelt beneath ground, in hillocks, throughout Europe, their raths have been explored, and the weird old tales of green hills all lighted up at night have received confirmation. Much in the old legends may be explained by a reference to this primitive race. The stories of changelings, and captive women, become clear on the supposition that the “fairies” occasionally raided the houses of the invaders.2
This was written more than two decades before the publication of Margaret A. Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), which gave a momentary stamp of approval to the thesis. But Machen knew that the really adventuresome aspect of his theory—or, rather, the radical extension of it that he made for fictional purposes—was that “the people still lived in hidden caverns in wild and lonely lands,” something he maintained was “wildly improbable.” 3
But behind all this speculative anthropology is the symbolism of the Little People. They are horrible and loathsome, to be sure, but they have at least one advantage over modern human beings: They have retained that primal sacrament (perverted, of course, by bestiality and violence) that links them with the Beyond. There is something of awe mingled with the horror experienced by the narrators when they witness the “pyramid of fire” summoned by the Little People in “The Shining Pyramid,” and this signals the truth uttered by the protagonist of “The White People”: “Sorcery and sanctity . . . these are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life.”
Probably Machen’s most sustained weird work is The Three Impostors, published in 1895. Also poorly received, it was criticized for being excessively imitative of Robert Louis Stevenson. It is commonly believed that the model for the novel—both in its episodic structure and in its somewhat flippant and jaunty style—is Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights (1882); but the true model is that novel’s sequel, The Dynamiter (1885), written by Stevenson in conjunction with his wife, Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson. Machen ultimately acknowledged this criticism, and for the next two years he worked with difficulty, even agony, to hammer out his own style; the result is that luminous novel of aesthetic sincerity, The Hill of Dreams.
What is The Three Impostors? On the surface, it appears to be a random collection of episodes strung together with the flimsiest kind of narrative thread. One episode—“Novel of the Iron Maid”—had in fact been written and published in 1890, and for copyright reasons it and its introductory segment (“The Decorative Imagination”) do not appear in many American editions of the novel. Other episodes—notably the celebrated “Novel of the Black Seal” and “Novel of the White Powder”—have been abstracted from the narrative fabric and reprinted as self-standing stories. This occurred on several occasions during Machen’s lifetime, and he appears to have registered no great complaint; but Machen was scarcely in a position to do so, as the period between 1901 and 1931 (when he received a Civil List pension of £100 a year) was of considerable poverty for him, and he could ill afford to pass up any revenue his writings yielded.
Both the title and the subtitle of The Three Impostors (the latter frequently omitted from reprints) may provide the clue to the interpretation of the novel. Who are the “three impostors” of the title? Who can they be but the two men and a woman we encounter in the prologue, who have at last captured and perhaps killed the “young man with spectacles” they have evidently been pursuing? For it is they who, under a series of guises, tell the various “novels” (from the French nouvelle, or tale, especially one of a romantic or fantastic character) scattered throughout the work. Their sole audience is a pair of friends, Mr. Dyson and Charles Phillipps, who wage an ongoing philosophical battle on the nature of reality and the nature of fiction, and it becomes gradually clear that the tales spun by the “three impostors” may be entirely fictitious, being instead somewhat laborious contrivances meant to dupe Dyson and Phillipps into leading them to the spectacled young man.
Toward the end it begins to dawn upon the two gentlemen that the stories they are hearing are perhaps not entirely reliable; Dyson finally resolves to “abjure all Milesian and Arabian methods of entertainment”—a reference to the Milesian tale (the Greek version of the tall tale) and, of course, to the Arabian Nights. This connects with a theme that runs throughout The Three Impostors and Machen’s work as a whole—the fantastic nature of the metropolis of London. “A Fragment of Life” (1904), a pensive novella on the borderline of the weird, conveys this conception poignantly: “London seemed a city of the Arabian Nights, and its labyrinths of streets an enchanted maze; its long avenues of lighted lamps were as starry systems, and its immensity became for him an image of the endless universe.”
But what purpose could Machen have in seemingly dynamiting the seriousness and power of the episodes in The Three Impostors by putting them in the mouths of dubious characters? There may be no clear answer to this question, but perhaps some clues can be provided by considering Machen’s general philosophy. I hesitate to call his view of the world a philosophy, for really it was a set of dogmatic prejudices that changed little through the whole of his long life; but at its essence was a violent hostility to and resentment at what he perceived to be the growing secularism and “scientism” of the modern world. To Machen, the religious mystic, the triumphs of nineteenth-century science were anything but victories; instead, it seemed to him that science was coming to rule all aspects of life, even those aspects—the spiritual life and its corollary, art—where it had no place.
In The Three Impostors, Phillipps clearly espouses the hardheaded scientific skepticism Machen wishes to combat. It is no surprise that the woman who calls herself Miss Lally tells him the “Novel of the Black Seal”; for in this story it is Professor Gregg who embodies what Machen believes to be the genuinely scientific attitude of open-mindedness to unusual phenomena: “Life, believe me, is no simple thing, no mass of grey matter and congeries of veins and muscles to be laid naked by the surgeon’s knife; man is the secret which I am about to explore, and before I can discover him I must cross over weltering seas indeed, and oceans and the mists of many thousand years.” Indeed, it seems quite likely that Miss Lally tells Phillipps this story only in order to overcome h
is innate skepticism; for Phillipps “required a marvel to be neatly draped in the robes of Science before he would give it any credit . . .”
Perhaps the subtitle of The Three Impostors—“or The Transmutations”—provides a further clue. Exactly what transmutations are in question? To be sure, on a superficial level the various “novels” and other episodes transmute scenery, as we flit from the suburbs of London (“Novel of the Iron Maid,” “Novel of the White Powder”) to the wilds of the American West (“Novel of the Dark Valley”) to the “wild, domed hills” of Wales (“Novel of the Black Seal”). Miss Lally casually notes that “I looked out of my window and saw the whole landscape transmuted before me.” But the reference here is merely to topography; elsewhere there are much more profound transmutations going on. When Professor Gregg finally decodes the cryptic black seal that appears to confirm his theory of the “Little People,” he states with awed solemnity: “I read the key of the awful transmutation of the hills.” Here it is not landscape but Gregg’s entire outlook on life that has been transmuted; as H. P. Lovecraft would say, Gregg has stumbled upon “that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”4
The “Novel of the White Powder” confirms this view. Miss Leicester, who tells the tale (and who is presumably identical to the Miss Lally of the earlier narrative), speaks offhandedly of “the transmutation of my brother’s character” after he begins taking the strange drug from a careless apothecary’s shop. But what really happens to the hapless student is the transmutation of his very being, physically and morally, leading a doctor to write harriedly, “my old conception of the universe has been swept away.” This is the ultimate transmutation. That doctor, in effect, gives voice to Machen’s own view of the world: “The whole universe . . . is a tremendous sacrament; a mystic, ineffable force and energy, veiled by an outward form of matter; and man, and the sun and the other stars, and the flower of the grass, and the crystal in the test-tube, are each and every one as spiritual, as material, and subject to an inner working.” It was this view that Machen was determined to convey to his audience over a lifetime of writing.
In the final years of his “great decade” of fiction writing (1887–1901) Machen produced several of the works for which he is known today. Even excluding the marginally weird novel The Hill of Dreams (written in 1895–97 but not published until 1907), which Lovecraft rightly described as a “memorable epic of the sensitive aesthetic mind,”5 we are faced with such works as “The Red Hand” (1897), the prose poems collected in Ornaments in Jade (1924), “The White People” (the second-greatest horror tale ever written, according to Lovecraft, next to Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows”), and the unclassifiable novella “A Fragment of Life.” Had Machen written nothing else, these works alone would be sufficient to grant him a place in weird literature—or in literature as a whole.
“The Red Hand” (written in 1895) is a pendant to The Three Impostors, resurrecting the two central figures in that novel, Phillipps and Dyson, as they continue their intellectual dispute over the nature of reality while becoming involved in what proves to be an exceptionally clever supernatural detective story. Dyson, the mystic (hence the stand-in for Machen), evokes a “theory of improbability” to account for the remarkable series of coincidences that leads him to the solution of the case; but this is less interesting than the overall philosophical thrust of the tale, in which Machen utilizes the tools of rationalism (specifically, the forensic analysis of evidence in regard to the murder at the heart of the case) to undermine rationalism and thereby to “prove” to his satisfaction that the matter can only be accounted for by appealing to the supernatural—in this case, the continued existence of “Little People.”
Of the prose poems in Ornaments in Jade it is difficult to speak in detail. These delicate vignettes may in some sense be pendants to The Hill of Dreams—not in terms of plot, but in terms of style and substance. Just as, in that novel, he strove valiantly to rid himself of the incubus of Stevenson’s flippancy, so do these prose poems—comparable only to those of Clark Ashton Smith as the finest in English—complete Machen’s transformation from clever imitator to independent artist. If there is any dominant theme that unites them, it is the constant contrast between mundane modernity and the hoary past—a past that is simultaneously terrifying in its primitivism and awesome in its suggestions of intimate, symbolic connections with the essence of life and Nature. However brutalized modern people are by the dominant materialism of the age, their sense of spirituality can well up in spite of themselves in the practice of ancient rituals.
As for “The White People,” in a sense it returns to the theme of “The Great God Pan” (1890) in its emphasis on illicit sex. For Machen, the orthodox Anglo-Catholic, sexual aberrations represented a kind of violation of the entire fabric of the universe. This is the substance of the remarks by Ambrose at the beginning of the tale, especially his comment that sin is “the attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden [my italics] manner” and “the effort to gain the ecstasy and knowledge that pertain alone to angels . . .” This story—in which a young girl unwittingly reveals in her diary her inculcation into a witch-cult and, evidently, her impregnation by some nameless entity—transmogrifies illicit sex into a cosmic sin that will either lift us up into the ranks of the angels or plunge us down into the company of demons.
“A Fragment of Life” is an altogether different proposition. If this short novel is only on the very edge of the weird, it deserves far wider recognition as one of Machen’s most finished works. The exquisitely gradual way in which the stolid bourgeois couple, Edward and Mary Darnell, slowly awaken to their sense of wonder and abandon London for their native Wales is one of Machen’s great literary accomplishments. Amid all the mundane details of the small-scale social life of the Darnells, we receive small hints that their love of beauty has not been entirely destroyed, as it has for so many who live too fully in the modern world. Machen delivers an unanswerable criticism of the narrowing of vision that such a life engenders: “So, day after day, he lived in the grey phantasmal world, akin to death, that has, somehow, with most of us, made good its claim to be called life.” And yet, something so simple as birdsong heard by Edward (“That night was the night I thought I heard the nightingale . . . and the sky was such a wonderful deep blue”) provides an anticipation of the coming change. Mary, too, although seemingly more hard-headedly practical than Edward, senses the alteration in her being (“one would have almost said that they were the eyes of one who longed and half expected to be initiated into the mysteries, who knew not what great wonder was to be revealed”). The entire novel is a kind of instantiation of the critical theories in Machen’s idiosyncratic treatise on aesthetics, Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature (1902), in which he criticized such writers as Jane Austen and George Eliot for being too closely tied to mundane reality and failing to include that modicum of “ecstasy” which ought, in Machen’s eyes, to inform all literature. We may well believe that Machen was insufficiently attuned to the “ecstasy” that is in fact present in the work of the social realists he disdains, but we can hardly gainsay that he himself has flawlessly embodied his own principles in “A Fragment of Life.”
After writing this novel (which was itself worked on sporadically over five years, 1899–1904), Machen appeared to lose focus as far as fiction writing was concerned. In 1907 he wrote the curious novel The Secret Glory (not published until 1922), but that was the extent of his creative output between 1904 and 1914. With his inheritance gone, Machen was forced to produce mountains of journalism; the book publications of his fiction—specifically The House of Souls (1906) and The Hill of Dreams (1907)—brought him fleeting attention, but not much in the way of income. It was only in 1914 that he resumed fiction writing—but he did so in a peculiar way.
Machen h
ad, since 1910, been serving on the staff of one of the leading newspapers in London, the Evening News, as reporter and columnist. At least two of the four stories that comprised The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (1915)—“The Bowmen” (September 29, 1914) and “The Soldiers’ Rest” (October 20, 1914)—appeared in the Evening News. The well-known story of how “The Bowmen”—a tale about the ghosts of medieval British soldiers who come to the aid of a beleaguered British unit at the battle of Mons in late August 1914—came to be regarded as the account of a real occurrence, with angels rescuing the soldiers and supposedly first-hand accounts by the soldiers themselves testifying to the miracle, need not be discussed in detail; Machen himself recounts the matter in his long introduction to The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War. His repeated protestations that the story was entirely a product of his imagination went for naught; the outbreak of the European war—which had commenced less than two months prior to the publication of “The Bowmen”—was so traumatic that the emergence of such legendry was inevitable. Machen himself alludes to Kipling’s “The Lost Legion” as a central literary influence on the tale, although other literary sources reaching back to Herodotus’s Histories have recently been postulated. 6 But what is more significant is Machen’s own attempt to pull off a kind of hoax with “The Bowmen.” The mere fact that it was published in a newspaper—even though newspapers at this time published more fiction than they do now—and the fact that it was written with the plain-spoken sobriety expected of factual articles, suggest that Machen is not wholly blameless in the subsequent furor caused by his little tale.
The White People And Other Weird Stories Page 2