The White People And Other Weird Stories

by Arthur Machen

  Much the same could be said for “The Great Return,” which also appeared in the Evening News (October 21–November 16, 1915) and was subsequently published in book form by a religious publisher, Faith Press. Here Machen seeks no more than to present, in the most orthodox reportorial manner, a series of curious incidents in Wales that, to his mind, suggest the actual rediscovery of the Holy Grail. Once again, as in “The Red Hand,” although in a somewhat cruder way, Machen seeks to use the tools of rationalism to undermine rationalism: Here the outwardly skeptical newspaper reporter—who is none other than Machen himself, with no attempt made to establish a distance between author and persona—becomes gradually convinced of the reality of the phenomena described. Machen is content to present a scenario whereby something miraculous might have happened: This is sufficient for his current purpose of attacking the godless materialism of his age.

  The European war was obviously a highly disturbing event to Machen. Already alienated from his time by his own religious mysticism, so much in contrast with the prevailing scientific rationalism of the later nineteenth century, he found his own faith shaken by a war in which Christians were killing other Christians with great gusto. Toward the end of the conflict he wrote a series of sophistical articles attempting to justify the ways of God to man; they were collected as War and the Christian Faith (1918). But a much more interesting response to the war came in the short novel The Terror (1917), which was also serialized in the Evening News (October 16–31, 1916). Once again we are faced with a reportorial account—sober, factual, even a bit bland—but again the purpose is to demonstrate that “science deals only with surfaces” and that the true causes for the revolt of animals against the domination of mankind lie much deeper.

  The Terror reveals several features characteristic of Machen’s later fiction. The first, perhaps, is frank autobiography. Not only does the first-person narrative voice seem, as in “The Great Return” and “Out of the Earth,” to be Machen himself, but he plays upon his own role as a journalist and reporter. Is he attempting to pass off the narrative as a “true” story? To be sure, there is no deliberate intent to deceive; but the circumstantiality of his account, and its generally reportorial tone, make one wonder whether Machen is hoping to convey a deeper truth—the truth that the brief, fitful, and ultimately temporary “revolution” of the animals against humanity’s reign over the earth is a signal that human morals are collapsing as a result of the hideous and unprecedented warfare that had broken out two years earlier.

  The other feature that distinguishes The Terror is its mystery or even detective element. On the basis of several stories included here, one could easily imagine Machen writing an accomplished detective novel, but of course he would never have done so, for the notion of resolving all loose ends, and thereby emphasizing the rational intellect’s understanding of the world, was anathema to Machen. For him, something of mystery must remain as a bulwark against the relentless march of science. And yet, in its way The Terror is nothing more than a logical working out of all possibilities, so that, by a process of elimination, a single explanation—even if it is supernatural—remains as the only viable solution to the case.

  By the 1920s Machen occupied a peculiar, even bizarre position in the English literary scene. In 1923 a first edition of The Hill of Dreams was fetching the fabulous price of £1,500, or $7,500, far more than most people earned in an entire year. And yet, Machen himself was struggling along as a journalist for a variety of British magazines and newspapers, making ends meet only by writing with unrelenting regularity for such papers as the London Graphic, John O’London’s Weekly, the Lyons Mail, and the Observer; toward the end of the decade he had lapsed into such poverty that an extraordinary effort was made by British writers—T. S. Eliot among them—to garner a Civil List pension for him; the effort succeeded in 1931. Thereafter Machen had an annual income of £100 from the British government, and this allowed him to live in comfort at his home in Old Amersham, Buckinghamshire, for the remaining sixteen years of his life.

  Scarcely a year in the 1920s passed without some significant publication of Machen’s work, but in the great majority of instances these presented stories, novels, or essays that he had written years or decades before. His major original works of the period were his three sensitive autobiographies, Far Off Things (1922), Things Near and Far (1923), and The London Adventure (1924), which paint a bittersweet portrait of the poverty he endured when he left his native Wales in the early 1880s to work as a Grub Street hack during the day while spending the evenings writing those imperishable works of fantasy and terror that have earned him a small but choice readership. Alfred A. Knopf began issuing a multivolume edition of his major works in the United States in 1922, and those volumes, with their familiar yellow covers, are still highly soughtafter items for the book collector.

  One wonders whether Machen gained a sense of being posthumous in his own time. He was being hailed for works he had written as a young man in the 1890s, and little of his new work found either critical esteem or popular favor. He wrote relatively few actual works of fiction in the 1920s, aside from some stories for various anthologies edited by Cynthia Asquith. In the 1930s he resumed somewhat greater productivity in fiction writing and issued two late collections, The Cosy Room and The Children of the Pool, both published in 1936. The former volume contains stories written over a wide period, but the latter is an original collection of previously unpublished tales. They are, however, a sadly uneven mix. Machen’s wife of many years, Purefoy, died on March 30, 1947, and he himself died several months later, on December 15, 1947.

  Like many writers, Machen wrote too much, and wrote too often under the stress of economic necessity rather than aesthetic inspiration, but he should be judged by his best work, not his worst. In a career that spanned more than six decades, he produced some of the most evocative weird fiction in all literary history. Written with impeccably mellifluous prose, infused with a powerful mystical vision, and imbued with a wonder and terror that their author felt with every fiber of his being, his novels and tales will survive when works of far greater technical accomplishment fall by the wayside. Flawed as some of them are by certain crotchets—especially a furious hostility to science and secularism—that disfigure Machen’s own philosophy, they are nonetheless as effective as they are because they echo the sincere beliefs of their author, whose eternal quest to preserve the mystery of the universe in an age of materialism is one to which we can all respond.

  S. T. JOSHI

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  PRIMARY SOURCES

  Machen’s short stories were collected in his lifetime in the volumes The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (John Lane/ Roberts Brothers, 1894), The House of Souls (Grant Richards, 1906; abridged ed. Knopf, 1922), The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1915), Ornaments in Jade (Knopf, 1924), The Shining Pyramid (Martin Secker, 1925), The Children of the Pool and Other Stories (Hutchinson, 1936), and The Cosy Room and Other Stories (Rich & Cowan, 1936). After his death, Philip Van Doren Stern assembled Tales of Horror and the Supernatural (Knopf, 1948), which has stayed in print to the present day from various publishers, most recently Tartarus Press (1997). Successive editions of Ritual and Other Stories (Tartarus Press, 1992, 1997, 2004) gather the stories not included in Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. S. T. Joshi has assembled three volumes of Machen’s stories that contain nearly the totality of his short fiction: The Three Impostors and Other Stories (Chaosium, 2001), The White People and Other Stories (Chaosium, 2003), and The Terror and Other Stories (Chaosium, 2005).

  Novel-length works of fiction include The Chronicle of Clemendy (Society of Pantagruelists, 1888), a picaresque novel; The Three Impostors (John Lane/Roberts Brothers, 1895); The Hill of Dreams (Grant Richards, 1907), a powerful study of artistic expression; The Terror (Duckworth, 1917); The Secret Glory (Martin Secker, 1922), a satire of the British school system; and The Green Round (E
rnest Benn, 1933), a slight weird novel.

  Machen’s nonfiction writing is voluminous and largely uncollected. Important book-length works are The Anatomy of Tobacco (Redway, 1884), a tongue-in-cheek study of types of tobacco; Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature (Grant Richards, 1902), a significant statement of Machen’s aesthetic principles ; and The Canning Wonder (Chatto & Windus, 1925), an account of a mysterious disappearance in the eighteenth century. In a class by themselves are Machen’s three autobiographies, Far Off Things (Martin Secker, 1922), Things Near and Far (Martin Secker, 1923), and The London Adventure (Martin Secker, 1924); the first two were reprinted as The Autobiography of Arthur Machen (Richards Press, 1951). His periodical essays were gathered in Dog and Duck (Knopf, 1924), Dreads and Drolls (Martin Secker, 1926), Notes and Queries (Spurr & Swift, 1926), and in two volumes assembled by Vincent Starrett, The Shining Pyramid (Covici-McGee, 1923) and The Glorious Mystery (Covici-McGee, 1924), but the great majority—especially his hundreds of articles for the London Evening News (1910–21)—remain uncollected. An important recent volume of essays is The Secret of the Sangraal, edited by R. B. Russell (Tartarus Press, 1995). Russell has also edited an expanded edition of Dreads and Drolls (Tartarus Press, 2007).

  A slim collection of letters—A Few Letters from Arthur Machen (Rowfant Club, 1932)—appeared in Machen’s lifetime. A much more substantial volume is Selected Letters, edited by Roger Dobson, Godfrey Brangham, and R. A. Gilbert (Aquarian Press, 1989).

  The Caerleon Edition of Machen’s Works (Martin Secker, 1923; 9 vols.) is an impressive compilation. A more recent omnibus is The Collected Arthur Machen (Duckworth, 1988).

  SECONDARY SOURCES

  There is still no satisfactory biography of Machen; perhaps scholars have been intimidated by the brilliance of Machen’s own autobiographies. Three biographies—Aidan Reynolds and William Charlton’s Arthur Machen: A Short Account of His Life and Work (Richards Press, 1963); Mark Valentine’s Arthur Machen (Seren, 1994); and John Gawsworth’s The Life of Arthur Machen (Tartarus Press, 2005 [probably written in the 1930s])—all contain useful matter. Machen’s wife, Purefoy, wrote a memoir that has been published as Where Memory Slept: The Memoirs of Purefoy Machen, edited by Godfrey Brangham (Green Round Press, 1991). The best critical study remains Wesley D. Sweetser’s Arthur Machen (Twayne, 1964). Helpful criticism can be found in several small-press items, especially two booklets edited by Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson, Arthur Machen: Apostle of Wonder (Caermaen, 1985) and Arthur Machen: Artist and Mystic (Caermaen, 1986). Adrian Goldstone and Wesley Sweetser’s A Bibliography of Arthur Machen (University of Texas Press, 1965) is exhaustive but now very much out of date. The Arthur Machen Society published a number of interesting items, including the journal Avallaunius. A later organization, The Friends of Arthur Machen, continues to publish the journal Faunus.

  Other criticism can be found in the following:

  Adcock, Arthur St. John. “Arthur Machen.” In The Glory That Was Grub Street. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1928, 213–44.

  Bjärstorp, Sara. The Margins of Writing: A Study of Arthur Machen and the Literary Field of the 1890s. Lund, Sweden: Department of English, Lund University, 2005.

  Eckersley, Adrian. “A Theme in the Early Work of Arthur Machen: ‘Degeneration.’” English Literature in Transition 35 (1992): 277–87.

  Gekle, William Francis. Arthur Machen: Weaver of Fantasy. Millbrook, NY: Round Table Press, 1949.

  Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. “The Enchanted City: Arthur Machen and Locality.” Durham University Journal 87, no. 2 (July 1995): 301–13.

  Gunther, John. “The Truth about Arthur Machen.” Bookman (New York) 61 (July 1925): 571–574.

  Hillyer, Robert. “Arthur Machen.” Atlantic Monthly 179 (May 1947): 138–40.

  ———. “Arthur Machen.” Yale Review 13 (October 1923): 174–76.

  Jordan-Smith, Paul. “Black Magic: An Impression of Arthur Machen.” In On Strange Altars. New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1924, 214–35.

  Joshi, S. T. “Arthur Machen: The Mystery of the Universe.” In The Weird Tale. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990, 12–41.

  Krutch, Joseph Wood. “Tales of a Mystic.” Nation (September 13, 1922): 258–59.

  Leslie-McCarthy, Sage. “Re-vitalising the Little People: Arthur Machen’s Tales of the Remnant Races.” Australasian Victorian Studies Journal 11 (2005): 65–78.

  Lynch, Helen. “Arthur Machen.” Sewanee Review 47 (July–September 1939): 424–27.

  Matteson, Robert S. “Arthur Machen: A Vision of an Enchanted Land.” Personalist 46 (Spring 1965): 253–68.

  Miles, Hamish. “Machen in Retrospect.” Dial 74 (June 1923): 627–30.

  Owens, Jill Tedford. “Arthur Machen’s Supernaturalism: The Decadent Variety.” University of Mississippi Studies in English 8 (1990): 117–26.

  Roberts, R. Ellis. “Arthur Machen.” Bookman (London) 62 (September 1922): 240–42.

  Russell, R. B., ed. Machenalia (2 vols.). Lewes, UK: Tartarus Press, 1990.

  Sewell, Brocard, ed. Arthur Machen. Llandeilo, Wales: St. Albert’s Press, 1960.

  Shiel, M. P. “On Scholar-Artistry.” In Science, Life and Literature. London: Williams & Norgate, 1950, 95–100.

  Starrett, Vincent. “Arthur Machen: A Novelist of Ecstasy and Sin.” Reedy’s Mirror (October 5, 1917): 631–32. Reprinted in Starrett’s Buried Caesars . Chicago: Covici-McGee, 1923, 1–31.

  Tyler, Robert L. “Arthur Machen: The Minor Writer and His Function.” Approach (Spring 1960): 21–26.

  Van Vechten, Carl. “Arthur Machen: Dreamer and Mystic.” Literary Digest International Book Review 1 (February 1923): 36–37. In Van Vechten’s Excavations. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926, 162–69.

  ———. Peter Whiffle. New York: Knopf, 1922. [See chapter 10.]

  Wagenknecht, Edward. Seven Masters of Supernatural Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991.

  Wandrei, Donald. “Arthur Machen and The Hill of Dreams.” Minnesota Quarterly 3, no. 3 (Spring 1926): 19–24. Studies in Weird Fiction no. 15 (Summer 1994): 27–30.

  A Note on the Texts

  “The Inmost Light,” the two segments from The Three Impostors (“Novel of the Black Seal” and “Novel of the White Powder”), “The Red Hand,” “The White People,” and “A Fragment of Life” are taken from The House of Souls (Grant Richards, 1906). “The Bowmen” and “The Soldiers’ Rest” are taken from The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1915). “The Great Return” and The Terror are taken from the Caerleon Edition of Machen’s Works (Martin Secker, 1923), volume 7. “Out of the Earth” is taken from The Shining Pyramid (Martin Secker, 1925).

  I am grateful to Ray Russell and Gwilym Games for assistance in the preparation of the text and notes.

  THE INMOST LIGHT

  I

  One evening in autumn, when the deformities of London were veiled in faint blue mist, and its vistas and far-reaching streets seemed splendid, Mr. Charles Salisbury was slowly pacing down Rupert Street, drawing nearer to his favourite restaurant by slow degrees. His eyes were downcast in study of the pavement, and thus it was that as he passed in at the narrow door a man who had come up from the lower end of the street jostled against him.

  “I beg your pardon—wasn’t looking where I was going. Why, it’s Dyson!”

  “Yes, quite so. How are you, Salisbury?”

  “Quite well. But where have you been, Dyson? I don’t think I can have seen you for the last five years?”

  “No; I dare say not. You remember I was getting rather hard up when you came to my place at Charlotte Street?”

  “Perfectly. I think I remember your telling me that you owed five weeks’ rent, and that you had parted with your watch for a comparatively small sum.”

  “My dear Salisbury, your memory is admirable. Yes, I was hard up. But the curious thing is that soon after you saw me I became harder up. My financial state was described by a friend
as ‘stone broke.’ I don’t approve of slang, mind you, but such was my condition. But suppose we go in; there might be other people who would like to dine—it’s a human weakness, Salisbury.”

  “Certainly; come along. I was wondering as I walked down whether the corner table were taken. It has a velvet back you know.”

  “I know the spot; it’s vacant. Yes, as I was saying, I became even harder up.”

  “What did you do then?” asked Salisbury, disposing of his hat, and settling down in the corner of the seat, with a glance of fond anticipation at the menu.

  “What did I do? Why, I sat down and reflected. I had a good classical education, and a positive distaste for business of any kind: that was the capital with which I faced the world. Do you know, I have heard people describe olives as nasty! What lamentable Philistinism! I have often thought, Salisbury, that I could write genuine poetry under the influence of olives and red wine. Let us have Chianti; it may not be very good, but the flasks are simply charming.”

  “It is pretty good here. We may as well have a big flask.”

  “Very good. I reflected, then, on my want of prospects, and I determined to embark in literature.”

  “Really; that was strange. You seem in pretty comfortable circumstances, though.”

  “Though! What a satire upon a noble profession. I am afraid, Salisbury, you haven’t a proper idea of the dignity of an artist. You see me sitting at my desk—or at least you can see me if you care to call—with pen and ink, and simple nothingness before me, and if you come again in a few hours you will (in all probability) find a creation!”