1
In 1890, although he had begun to write in the modern manner and had
even “fluttered the dovecotes” and startled the readers of the _St.
James Gazette_ with his stories, the Rabelaisian enthusiasm was still
upon Machen. It had, it is true, abated somewhat of late, but when his
translation of _Le Moyen de Parvenir_ came from the bindery, all brave in
blue and cream and gilt lettering, Machen still felt the spell strongly
enough to set out, finally, for Touraine.
Actually, he had already determined to leave London before _Fantastic
Tales_ came out. He had been living in Soho Street in two rooms where
took place the grim battle of the fleas. London seemed to pall and to
pale after that and he arranged to take a cottage in the Chiltern Hills.
He had already written some of the tales in his most famous manner; _The
Shining Pyramid_, _The Iron Maid_ among them; the idea of _The Great
God Pan_ had been born and the country seemed the place to allow it to
mature. There were certain alterations and repairs to be made on the
cottage and he decided to go to France in the interim. It seemed, one
must suppose, the thing to do—when one has a handsome set of new volumes
one has translated from the French.
Much has been said herein, and sometimes somewhat slightingly, of the
amazing effect of La Belle France upon the literate Anglo-Saxon. It has
been intimated that Paris has always been something of an occupational
disease among writers and minor poets. And here is Machen, off to France,
like any puerile poetaster upon the publication of his first “slender
volume.” To those who feel some word of explanation is due, some apology
for an opinion seemingly shattered, it will be noted that Machen went to
the South of France, to the countryside—and not to the northern cities
and carefully manicured meadows and pompadoured pleasure-grounds of the
Bois.
Moreover, and this is important, Machen went to a land that never was.
For when he arrived at last in the land of Rabelais, of Beroalde, of
Balzac—he was greatly disappointed. “The fact was,” he says, “that I
had taken for granted Dore’s wonderful illustrations.” He had supposed
that the enchanted heights, the profound and somber valleys, the airy
abysses of these amazing plates had reprinted, as faithfully at least as
a Chamber of Commerce brochure, the veritable scenery of Touraine.
The actuality was, alas! pitifully inadequate. Nevertheless Machen did
what all sensible tourists do when the lands of enchantment fail to
live up to the four-color posters—he visited the local taverns. This
has always seemed to offer consolation and compensation in such cases.
At any rate, the “Faisan d’Or” and “Le Caveau de Rabelais” provided
noteworthy compensation for Dore. It took Machen a few days to get over
his disappointment—but it was not too long before he could sit at his
little table in the courtyard at the Faisan and say to himself, “This
night I have had as much good red wine as ever I could drink.” And this
was one of the great moments of his visit to Touraine. It encouraged him,
moreover, and despite his disappointment over Dore, to return to Touraine
every summer for the next ten years or so.
The landscape of Touraine and the vintages of the Vouvray pleased Machen,
as Paris pleased the poetasters and absinthe appealed (in theory at
least) to the young men who burned with a “hard gem-like flame” and who
wore their passions and their shoes to tatters in their feverish quest
for _la vie_. He discovered that there are, here and there, gardens that
address the heart and spirit and not the florist—as Poe well knew.
In the autumn of 1890 Machen returned to London and, the cottage in the
Chilterns still lacking thatch or drains or some other matters, he took
rooms in Guilford Street. Now it was in Guilford Street, by one account,
that he was struck by the idea for _The Great God Pan_. It was, he says,
on a dark and foggy afternoon, and with no delay he proceeded to lay
out the story. In another place, however, he relates that it was in the
summer of 1890 that he wrote the first chapter of _The Great God Pan_.
Whichever it was, the tale was completed before he went to his cottage
in the country. It appeared in _The Whirlwind, Vol. ii_ for 1890, which
also carried _A Wonderful Woman_, _The Lost Club_ and an almost entirely
unknown item—_An Underground Adventure_. Another story, _The Red Hand_,
is of this period for it appeared in the Christmas number of _Chapman’s
Magazine_ under the title, _The Telling of a Mystery_. These matters
attended to, Machen retired to the Chilterns early in 1891.
Of his stay in the country we know remarkably little. He spent two years
there and, when he returned to London in 1893, he reported that he had
“found it nothing.” However that may be, he did accomplish a certain
amount of work. He wrote a number of his best stories there and completed
two books which he promptly destroyed. The contents of these books have
not been entirely lost however, for much of what was in them came to
light another day. At any rate, it was in the Chilterns that he wrote
_The Inmost Light_.
This famous story was written to a special commission, one of the few
he received in his life. His stories for the _Globe_ and _St. James
Gazette_ had attracted, as has been noted, considerable attention, and a
Miss Bradden wrote Machen, asking him to contribute a tale to an annual
she was getting out. _The Inmost Light_ was written for Miss Bradden and
packed off to her from the cottage in the hills. The affrighted lady
returned it after what must have been one of the most rapid readings on
record.
At any rate, in 1894, when “yellow bookery was at its yellowest,” John
Lane of the Bodley Head published these two tales under the title _The
Great God Pan_ as Volume V of the Keynote Series. There was a title
page decoration by Aubrey Beardsley—this, and the imprint of the Bodley
Head, indicated that the book was, as one might say today, “aimed at a
particular market.” Presumably it hit the mark, for the tale achieved a
fame that has lasted to this day. For this is the best known of Machen’s
stories and—even though Machen deprecatingly remarks that the book had
“made a storm in a tiny tot’s tea cup”—there was a considerable tempest
aroused. _The Manchester Guardian_ went on record as feeling that Machen
had “succeeded only in being ridiculous.” _The Lady’s Pictorial_ found
it “gruesome, ghastly and dull.” The _Westminster Gazette_ decided that
it was “an incoherent nightmare of sex.” Nevertheless, the book was well
received and gained considerably more of a readership for Machen than
had his previously published exercises in the antique. One wonders what
the Boston reviewers thought of it—for the book was published by Roberts
Brothers of Boston in the same year.
The _Manchester Guardian’s_ reviewer, a staunch fellow with advanced
ideas, had refrained from saying more about _The Great God Pan_ “for
fear of giving such a work advertisement.” This did not prove to be
particularly effective for the Bodley Head was compelled to bring out
a second edition in 1895. There were other editions: Grant Richards
included the tale in _The House of Souls_ in 1906, and again in 1913. It
was translated into the French in 1901, and reissued again by Simpkins,
Marshall in 1916. Knopf brought it out in 1924, and the story has been
included in numerous anthologies.
The story of _The Great God Pan_ is simple enough—but it has the touch
of magic. There is a doctor with strange theories and strange knowledge.
He performs an operation on the brain of a simple country girl—an
operation which permits her to see, for a moment, the great god Pan, with
results that were in accordance with the ancient and traditional legends
concerning what might follow such a vision.
Of course we are all prone, today, to interpret literature according to
our own lights, and we employ, with facility if not always felicity—the
great gift of hind-sight. We may, in 1948, judge the tale neither
as startling nor as horrifying as any one of a score or more pulp
masterpieces. We may find Machen’s doctor not too much unlike Stevenson’s
Dr. Jekyll or Wells’s Dr. Moreau.
It may even be that _The Great God Pan_ doesn’t stir us a bit—although
that cannot be credited. But in 1894 the story was an amazing one—and
even the comfortably righteous reviewer on the _Manchester Guardian_
might have pondered, in the depths of the night, this passage: “Suppose
that an electrician of today were suddenly to perceive that he and his
friends have merely been playing with pebbles and mistaking them for the
foundations of the world; suppose that such a man saw uppermost space
lie open before the current, and words of man flash forth to the sun
and beyond the sun into the system beyond, and the voices of articulate
speaking men echo in the waste void that bounds our thought.”
Well, our young Manchester guardian of the public welfare very probably
cried, “Bosh!”—and went resolutely back to sleep.
Machen, having written it, couldn’t sleep on it. In 1924, in a book
called _The London Adventure_, Machen quotes the above passage and says,
“It seems to me that the passage from _The Great God Pan_ is a distinct
prophecy of ‘wireless’; and what would logic have said to it, in 1890,
when that chapter was written?”
And what, for that matter, says logic in 1948—for we have perceived
again, in another way, that we have been playing with pebbles and
mistaking them for the foundations of the world. For now we think not
only of sending sound to the outermost reaches of space—but man himself,
and at speeds greater than the speed of sound.
There is another thought that might have bothered the young man of
Manchester. A character in the story has quoted Oswaldus Crollius, “In
every grain of wheat there lies hidden the soul of a star.” Now in 1894
the reviewer, any reviewer, even the Bostonian, would have muttered
something about “muddled mysticism” and skipped over the sage utterance
of Oswaldus to get along into the “incoherent nightmare of sex.” What
Machen thought of this in ’94 we do not know—but in 1923 or thereabouts
he wrote that he thought this a wonderful saying; “a declaration, I
suppose that all nature is one, manifested under many forms; and so far
as I can gather, modern science is rapidly coming around to the view
of this obscure speculator of the XVII century; and, in fact, to the
doctrine of the Alchemists.”
Now this was a brave thing to say—even in 1923. The muddled mysticisms
of the ’90’s is today’s theorum—as has been amply demonstrated. The most
fantastic fable or the most ingenious fiction of one decade may become
the newest discovery in the laboratory of today.
2
The sojourn in the Chilterns was not as unproductive as Machen has
implied. He had written perhaps more than we shall ever know—most of his
stories lived with him for years before they were written, and a book or
two destroyed did not cease to exist. Many of his best tales were born
and others matured in the Chiltern cottage. Still, two years in the
country seemed quite enough.
When Machen returned to London in 1893 he was a man of property or, if
not property in the Galsworthian sense, of substance in his own. For the
various legacies from deceased Scottish relations that might have meant
so much a few years earlier, had been coming through and accumulating,
and there were now between three and four thousand pounds in the bank.
The days of Clarendon Road, of green tea and stale bread and tobacco,
were over and there were rooms in Great Russel Street and later in Gray’s
Inn. There was Benedictine in the buffet and a growing circle of friends
and companions.
The possession of several thousand pounds presented problems—at least
the semi-important one of how to invest it. After looking about for
a “good thing,” in a characteristically casual way, Machen thought
of the Brothers—that courteous pair under whose benevolent auspices
he had translated Casanova in a basement. They had, as Machen knew,
a proposition now and then, and he thought perhaps they might have
suggestions. They had, as it happened, an excellent one. The _Memoirs
of Casanova_, which he had translated some years before, was about to
be published. A thousand pounds invested in the project might be a good
thing indeed. Machen had at least that much confidence in the Brothers,
or in his own work—at any rate, he invested. It was then that one of the
Brothers, the more benevolent of the two no doubt, suggested that he
might, since he was now financially interested, wish to polish up here
and there.
Machen was content, however, to limit his contribution to the
translation and the thousand pounds, and let him polish who so desired.
The monumental memoirs came out in 1894. Machen’s translation was the
first in the English language and, I believe, the only complete one to
this day. So it is likely to remain until some unsuspecting scholar may
once more be imposed upon, or some highly solvent professor or richly
subsidized fellow undertakes the task.
3
Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, Fanny to her friends and Scheherezade to
her husband, shared or perhaps inspired her husband’s view of London as
a fabulous Bagdad of the West, a city of encounters in which all things
were probable—even such things as might rival the tales of the Arabian
Nights Entertainment.
Stevenson, that prince of story tellers, who knew as well as any man
how to invent marvelous tales and to tell them in a marvelous manner,
occupied himself and Fanny during an illness by creating _The Dynamiter_.
The book was published in 1885 and came to Machen’s attention at some
time before or during his retreat to the Chilterns.
Machen had been under the Stevensonian influence for some years. In 1890
he published a story, _The Lost Club_, which exhibits marked family
resemblance to one of the early adventures in the _New Arabian Nights_.
At any rate the _Three Impostors_, Machen’s next book, is derived from
Stevenson’s _Dynamiter_, and was written somewhere in this period when
_The Great God Pan_ was creating a stir. The manuscript was sent, late in
the winter of 1894, to Heinemann who expressed interest, enthusiasm, and
then, unaccountably, regrets. The reader in the publisher’s office had
been wonderfully encouraging and gloriously flattering. It was better,
said Heinemann excitedly, than Stevenson’s best. Even a man as modest
as Machen marveled at his artistry—and marveled still more when, early
in 1895, the House of Heinemann returned his manuscript with the usual
regrets and the usual phrase about being unable to use the enclosed
manuscript.
And so, later that year, _The Three Impostors_ was issued by John Lane,
once again in the Keynote Series and once again with the title page
decoration by Beardsley. It failed, Machen says, to set Fleet Street
afire—but it is, of course, one of his best stories.
Once again, as with so many of Machen’s stories, there were those who
wrote to inquire whether there was not some foundation of fact, some
basis of truth upon which the tale had been built. So willing are men to
suspend their disbelief! People were forever asking him if his stories
were not based upon some legend current in his part of the country and,
of course, there were those who were willing to relate incidents and
occurrences which closely paralleled the fantastic fictions of Machen’s
inventions.
_The Three Impostors_ combined a number of popular elements. There
was, first of all, a portrait of America, or the American West, as
rugged and rough and uncouth as any Briton could desire. It rivaled
and even surpassed, in some respects, Stevenson’s Western episode in
_The Dynamiter_. The Stevenson story had also served as a model for the
Mormon episode in Conan Doyle’s _A Study in Scarlet_. The resemblances
here are even more marked than in Machen’s tale. As a matter of fact,
Christopher Morley has suggested (in the Saturday Review late in 1947)
that Doyle found the Mormon episode in his occiput following a reading
of _The Dynamiter_ on a rainy evening in 1885. However this may be, _The
Three Impostors_ is a remarkable and absorbing story, even if it did not
do as well as _The Great God Pan_—but it has done remarkably well in the
fifty-odd years since it was written.
Back in 1923 Knopf published _The Three Impostors_ in the famous
yellow binding, and again in 1930 in a Borzoi Pocket Edition. In his
introduction to the latter book Machen wrote:
“In the course of a quarter of a century, I have received a good many
letters of serious enquiry about _The Three Impostors_. My correspondents
ask me in various terms and turns of phrase whether there is any
foundation for the strange circumstances and tales narrated in the
book.... I began to get them pretty soon after _The Three Impostors_
was published in 1895. Then, on the whole, I was rather displeased
than pleased at the question.... I was strongly inclined to resent the
implication that I had embroidered rather than invented.”
Machen pointed out that the events described in his book not only did not
happen, but could not have happened. That, at least, was his attitude
just after he had written the book. In later years he changed his mind,
for in the Nineteen-twenties he wrote, “I have had experiences which
debar me from returning the absolute negative of earlier years....
These experiences of mine were trifling enough, but they suggest the
possibility of far greater things and far more extraordinary things for
those with the necessary qualifications.... I am inclined to urge that
the things which I have known may suggest the probable existence of a
world very far and remote from the world of common experience.
“It may turn out after all that the weavers of fantasy are the veritable
realists.”
4
Just why _The Three Impostors_, certainly not the most sensational story
published in that sensational year, should have inspired such widespread
belief, or at least so much willing suspension of disbelief, is not too
difficult to understand. The story concerns itself largely with matters
having to do with superstitions and, even if the superstitions involved
were not familiar ones, they had something of the common quality of all
superstitions based on folk-lore.
The story is told through a series of episodes, in the manner made
popular by Stevenson and Doyle. Certain episodes are represented as being
taken from the journals of some of the characters concerned; others
are set forth in lengthy interviews with still other interested (and
interesting) characters. The story is not overburdened with machinery and
technical tricks, it manages to hang together without evident strain.
Some of the episodes could stand by themselves as tales in the Gothic
genre—indeed, some of them have so appeared in anthologies and
collections. It is in the telling of these tales that Machen’s skill as
a story teller becomes evident. There is no one manner, but several, and
each is peculiarly Machen’s own—with clever overtones and undertones of
parody and satire. The satire, be it noted, is directed always at the
manner and never the matter of the tale.
As for the subject matter, _The Three Impostors_ concerns the Little
People and strange powers that have persisted until this very day and
other speculations. If we accept, as did William Gregg, F.R.S., who
figures in one of the stories, the theory that much of the folk-lore of
the world is but exaggeration of things that really happened, we are well
on our way to accepting _The Three Impostors_ as wholeheartedly as did
the people who wrote Machen such curious letters back in 1895. Such is
Machen’s magic, moreover, that we are easily persuaded into accepting
almost anything.
_The Three Impostors_ also introduces one of the most engaging figures
in English literature. Mr. Dyson is not as well known, perhaps, as Henry
Ryecroft or Stephen Daedalus or Charteris, but he has, it may be, as fine
a future as they.
Mr. Dyson (if he had a first name, I cannot recall ever having read
it) is a “man of letters” who, in pursuit of his quiet profession (the
chase of the phrase, he called it) does a great deal of wandering about
odd quarters of London. He stumbles into and out of the most amazing
adventures, none of which appreciably affect his composure and seldom
indeed is he startled out of his pompous pedantry.
Dyson’s companion in adventure and the recipient of his pronouncements
is a Mr. Charles Phillips. Phillips is somewhat younger than Dyson, but
they shared a certain gravity of character and pomposity of manner that
made them mutually acceptable. They met frequently in each other’s rooms
or in the tobacco shop in Queen Street where “their talk robbed the
tobacconist’s profit of half its charm.” Dyson exalted the claims of pure
imagination, while Phillips insisted that all literature ought to have a
scientific basis.
This precious pair, who shared silence as amiably as they conversed,
wander sedately enough through the astonishing episodes involving the
Young Man With Spectacles, Miss Lally, the sinister Mr. Davis and others.
They are encountered in several other tales of this period. Dyson is
actually an old acquaintance. He first made his bow, and a very courtly
gesture it was, in _The Red Hand_ or _The Shining Pyramid_, whichever
tale, in truth, came first; but it is in _The Three Impostors_ that we
really came to know him. We shall meet again.
_Chapter Four_