[Sidenote: _The Observer_]
... He imagines for us the horrible results of attempting by means of a
surgical experiment to make a young woman “see the god Pan.” Interference
with the nerve centres of the young woman’s brain turns her into an
idiot; but that is not the worst of it, for she becomes in due course
the mother of a sort of she-devil who goes through life frightening
people out of their wits, and eventually causes a “terrible epidemic
of suicide” amongst fashionable men about town. What is it about this
mysterious heroine which sends the friends of her girlhood crazy, which
ruins her husband “body and soul,” and which causes her later admirers
to go out and hang themselves—this is never definitely explained. The
intention evidently is to make us shudder by vague allusions to “awful
unspeakable elements,” which are “triumphant in human flesh,” and produce
“a horror one dare not name.” It is not Mr Machen’s fault, but his
misfortune, that one shakes with laughter rather than with dread over
the contemplation of his psychological bogey. His art has been hampered
by the limitations imposed upon it through his having to leave his
ingenious horror “indescribable” and “unutterable” from first to last.
Mr Aubrey Beardsley has no doubt come gallantly to the rescue with the
admirably-realised repulsiveness of the nymph designed by him as an
appropriate frontispiece. But the general effect of “The Great God Pan,”
as well as of the kindred tale which follows it in “The Inmost Light,”
is, we fear, hardly so creepy as it would have been if it had dared to be
intelligible.
[Sidenote: _The Daily Chronicle_]
... His horror, we regret to say, leaves us quite cold. Gallant gentlemen
commit suicide at the mere sight of the accursed thing; here be murders,
inquests, alarums and excursions—and our flesh obstinately refuses
to creep. Why? Possibly because we have had a surfeit of this morbid
thaumaturgy of late, and “ken the biggin’ o’t.” Possibly, too, because,
while Mr Machen describes the (literally) panic terror of the various
people who behold the monster, he never lets us have so much as a
glimpse of the monster for ourselves. How can we be petrified unless we
see Medusa’s head? To be told that others have been turned to stone won’t
do. That is only what the soldier said: it is not evidence....
[Sidenote: _Belfast News Letter_]
... Sensationalism is the order of the day, and must, we suppose, be
pandered to to make the author’s pot boil; but, despite the ability in
this direction—for the conception is cleverly carried out—we fail to see
why such absurdities should be presented to intelligent readers. The
Great God Pan, with his syrinx, cloven hoof, and pointed ears, may have
been a serious bogey to the rustics Theocritus sings about; but to call
in this mythical monstrosity’s aid to work on our _fin-de-siècle_ nerves
is far-fetched, to say the least of it. Mr Machen’s ability is worthy
of a better _motif_ than mystifying innocent people about the devil, or
poking fun at his intellectual admirers about the unseen.
[Sidenote: _The Westminster Gazette_]
If Mr Arthur Machen’s object were to make our flesh creep, we can only
speak for ourselves and say that we have read the book without an
emotion. There are nameless horrors hinted at in every other page, which
make other people turn green and sick, but it is beyond the power of the
most susceptible reader to shudder at the shudders of these fictional
people. The story is, in fact, most elaborately absurd—so absurd, indeed,
as to save it from the less agreeable charge of being nasty, as it would
inevitably be if Mr Machen meant us to take it seriously. We can at
least congratulate him on having failed in the courage to make plain
the mysterious horrors which are supposed to be in the background of
this story, but the result is to leave an inchoate and confused series
of impressions, as of a man who is trying to tell a story and fails
to express himself. What the intention of the writer could possibly
have been we cannot even conjecture. Mr Machen was possibly under the
impression that he was writing a new “Jekyll and Hyde,” but “The Great
God Pan” is as meaningless as an allegory as it is absurd from any other
point of view.
[Sidenote: _The Echo_]
Mr Arthur Machen’s story, “The Great God Pan,” published by Mr John
Lane, is a failure and an absurdity. His meaning, if there is any, seems
to be the presentation, or rather the suggestion, of Pan as a hideous
being or force behind nature, of which being the men who fall victims to
an abandoned woman that appears in various disguises and under various
_aliases_ in the story catch glimpses, from the mere fact that they have
yielded to her power—the obscene nature deity revealing himself in the
person of the said woman.... Mr Machen tells us that the victims saw the
horrors, but that is not enough. Doubtless the horrors would turn out to
be mere grotesques, even if we did see them. Not the ghost of a “creepy”
feeling will this story produce in the mind of anybody who reads it.
[Sidenote: _The Speaker_]
... If we may believe Mr Machen, those doings are of the most horrible
character; but as he omits to tell us what they are, and leaves us
merely with the impression that she is “a bold, bad woman” of a very
ordinary description, we are compelled to take her special horrors upon
trust. Fortunately for everybody, and for the readers of the story in
particular, she comes to a speedy end, though whether she is hanged
or dissolved into “a substance as jelly” the record fails to explain.
All that we know is that Mr Machen writes of this unfortunate female
as if he were in deadly earnest and she were something too terrible
to be plainly revealed. There is another story, called “The Inmost
Light,” bound up with “The Great God Pan.” It deals with a lady who is
represented as having been in every way as horrible as the heroine of
the first tale; but as the only explicit fact recorded of her is that
she frightened the passers-by by the faces she made at the window of her
husband’s house, the reader is left as much in the dark about her as he
is about her sister in misfortune....
[Sidenote: _The Sketch_]
Mr Machen’s “Great God Pan” (John Lane) is concerned more with the
nerves than with the imagination. We respect such things as, aiming at
the ghastly, do actually make us afraid in the dark and give us hideous
dreams. Mr Machen’s inhuman conceptions are put into ingenious forms, and
exhibit many different clevernesses; only, his bogles don’t scare. In his
next attempt, however, he may come out on the right side.
[Sidenote: W. L. Courtney in _The Daily Telegraph_]
“Really,” laughed the Hostess, “is the Yellow Book a disease?”
“Assuredly,” said the Physician, “a very virulent form of jaundice, due
to an imperfect digestion and a morbid condition of liver.”
“Yes,” continued the Philosopher, meditatively, “and ‘Theodora’ is a
form of typhoid, due to ethical blood poisoning. ‘Little Eyolf’ and ‘The
Rat-Wife’ are varieties of cerebral mania, Mr Aubrey Beardsley’s figures
are salient examples of locomotor ataxy, and as for ‘The House of Shame’
and ‘The Great God Pan’—well, there are some kinds of maladies which are
not mentioned outside medical treatises!”
[Sidenote: _The Manchester Guardian_]
The meaning of “The Great God Pan,” by Arthur Machen, is very carefully
veiled, and on the whole we are inclined to think it is quite as well
that it is so, since such glimpses as we are vouchsafed of it are
singularly repulsive. In fact, so far as we have been able to make out,
to shock would seem to have been Mr Machen’s sole intention. To achieve
this desirable end he has ransacked the dark and hidden corners of Greek
mythology, and so piled up innuendo and suggestion, to say nothing of
the mere vulgar horror of five mysterious suicides and other unspeakable
crimes, that we are afraid he only succeeds in being ridiculous. The
book is, on the whole, the most acutely and intentionally disagreeable we
have yet seen in English. We could say more, but refrain from doing so
for fear of giving such a work advertisement. The same remarks apply to
“The Inmost Light,” the second story in the book, in only slightly lesser
degree.
[Sidenote: _The Queen_]
“The Great God Pan” comes near being a book of genius with its
originality and weirdness; but it distinctly misses it, because Mr Machen
has not the power of indicating, even by a hint, the nature of the horror
which made strong men destroy themselves rather than live with such a
memory. There are two stories in the book, both dealing with villainous
doctors, who make surgical experiments with the brains of living women in
the hope, apparently, of turning human beings into devils. In each case
the result is terrifying beyond human endurance, according to Mr Machen,
but he does not succeed in imparting any of the terror to his readers....
[Sidenote: _The Westminster Gazette_]
_The English School of Diabolists._—I pass now to the fourth class, that
of the lurid and nonsensical. These, I take it, are written under the
inspiration of the French School of Diabolists. That school, as the
reader knows, is possessed with ideas of black magic, spirits of evil,
devils become incarnate, and numerous other nightmares of corruption.
You are introduced to modern alchemists who use Latin incantations,
pour mysterious fluids out of green phials, and by the black arts
transform men into monsters, or penetrate the corrupt mysteries of
their being. Several English imitators of this school have come into
my hands recently, but the wildest is, perhaps, Mr Machen’s “Great God
Pan,” published in the Keynotes Series. Here we have a physician who
practises the black art, and by an operation on the brain releases for
the time being the spirit of a woman, that she may visit the spirit world
and “see the Great God Pan.” She awakes, a lunatic “convulsed with an
unknowable terror.” Shortly afterwards she has a child whom we gather
from certain lurid hints to be a she-devil incarnate. “When the House of
Life is thrown open there may enter in that for which we have no name,
and human flesh may become the veil of a horror one dare not express.”
(That is Mr Machen’s favourite style. The unnameable, the unknowable, the
inexpressible, and the unmentionable have a nameless fascination for
him.) ...
_Sex-Mania Incoherent._—The wild absurdity of all this really makes
comment superfluous. But note the sex-mania in it all. It is an
incoherent nightmare of sex and the supposed horrible mysteries behind
it, such as might conceivably possess a man who was given to a morbid
brooding over these matters, but which would soon lead to insanity if
unrestrained. I imagine, however, that Mr Machen’s desire has simply been
to emulate certain French practitioners in this line; indeed, the fact
that he is so often reduced to gasping negatives proves that he has not
made it clear even to himself what he is after. His work is innocuous
from its absurdity, but the type is most truly decadent....
[Sidenote: _The National Observer_]
In all the glory of the binder’s and printer’s arts, we have two tales
of no great distinction. Indeed paper and form are worthy of much better
things. We look for literature and find the old, old tale of man or woman
who is possessed of a devil. Mr J. Sheridan Le Fanu made our youthful
scalp tingle years ago with something of the nature (but infinitely
cleverer) of these tales. The doctor who performs weird operations we
have met before but not one so fortunate as the hero of “The Inmost
Light,” the second story in this volume. For this gentleman digs for the
soul and finds it in the convenient form of an opal—a dangerous theory
surely. Men have committed murder for less. Dr Black murders his own
wife, quite unnecessarily it appears to us, and it is her soul in the
form of a jewel which he keeps for inexplicable reasons in a leather case
in the back parlour of a toy shop in London. Mr Machen does his very
best to thrill, and relates his horrors in a style which should carry
conviction but fails. The incidents are too loosely strung together, and
the form of narration, bringing in as it does characters who take no part
in the central idea of the tale, inevitably cools the interest of the
reader. Again, there is no motive assigned to any action except a vague
love of science which certainly fails to convince. Men do not pursue an
idea as does Villiers in the first story—doctors do not kill their wives
as does Dr Black in the second tale—without strong incentive, and it is
painfully obvious that in the present case their actions are a mere
necessity to the author. Mr Machen writes somewhat conventionally and
without affectation. It is in construction that he is as yet markedly
deficient.
[Sidenote: _The Lady’s Pictorial_]
This book is gruesome, ghastly, and dull. Mr Machen has done his best
with an impossible subject, but although men and women who are morbid
and unhealthy in mind may find something that appeals to them in the
description of Dr Raymond’s experiment and its results, the majority of
readers will turn from it in utter disgust. From first to last there is
not one human touch in the story, and not a trace of psychology to awaken
our interest in the actions of any one of the characters. Dr Raymond’s
apparent conviction that to see the Great God Pan would make up for any
loss or suffering entailed by the sight, is almost childish; and as I
waded through the dull list of horrors, which the too vivid imagination
of Mr Machen inspired him to write, I bethought me of the curious old
legend, so exquisitely told in verse by Mrs Browning, of the death of
“The Great God Pan.” It was waste of time for Mr Machen to bring him to
life again....
[Sidenote: _The Guardian_]
Mr Machen has apparently tried to produce a novelty in fiction by
borrowing from Mr Conan Doyle some of the tricks of style of his
detective stories, and uniting them with the rather gruesome studies in
dehumanisation which Mr Stevenson justified by the fine turn he gave
them in his “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” and Mr Rudyard Kipling essayed
less successfully in “The Mark of the Beast.” According to Mr Machen’s
postulate, “a slight lesion in the grey matter” of the brain is all that
is needed to “level utterly the solid wall of sense,” and enable “a
spirit to gaze on a spirit-world.” Fantastically enough, this is called
“seeing the god Pan,” with whom it appears to us to have about as much
to do as the vulgar figure which Mr Aubrey Beardsley has placed on the
title-page. The result on a lady of seeing the god Pan is that people
feel cold shivers when they look on her, and that she initiates her male
acquaintances into mysteries which either kill them outright with horror
or send them home to commit suicide—also that she herself has eventually
to be put to death by her husband or the amateur detective, and turns
into all sorts of remarkable shapes in the process. Mr Machen frequently
informs us that his story is very terrible, and tries to keep up the
mystery by breaking off every now and then as if his tale were too dread
for words—but these tricks have also their ludicrous side. Perhaps the
most discreditable paragraph in a not very creditable book is the “note”
at the end of the first story, asserting that the woman of whom it is
told “was born on August 5th, 1865, at the Red House, Breconshire, and
died on July 25th, 1888, in her house in a street off Piccadilly, called
Ashley Street in the story.” Mr Machen should make his choice between the
art of fiction and penny-a-lining.
[Sidenote: _The Cork Examiner_]
... Arthur Machen wants to thrill us, and sets about his task by mixing
surgical experiments, devil-possessed women of weird beauty, Latin
phrases, and fantastic art, reminiscent of craftsmen of ages agone, into
a pottage which, for our part, we find mawkish. The trick of the thing is
at once apparent. Ever so many circumstances, feelings, sights, thoughts,
etc., are unutterable, unnameable, unknowable, and unwhisperable, and
there are nameless horrors by the hundred.... In our judgment this is
what children call “a frightened story,” and, as an artistic piece of
fiction, it calls for no serious consideration.
[Sidenote: _The Chronicle_]
With this new volume Mr Machen boldly challenges comparison with Mr
Stevenson’s “Dynamiters.” The plan of the book is the same; that is to
say, a number of short stories are woven into the fabric of a long one.
Mr Machen’s literary method, too, is not unlike Stevenson’s; there is the
same careful turning of the phrase, the nice choice of epithets, the use
of certain words in their correct, but not in their common meaning.... Mr
Machen’s intention in all these stories is to give us a grue, to curdle
our blood, to make us think twice and thrice ere we mount the stairs and
face the possible horror awaiting us in our dimly-lighted bedroom. Well,
all we can say is that he has failed where few writers have succeeded.
Edgar Allan Poe has done this thing over and over again. Le Fanu did it
once; so did the author of a volume called “Phantasms” reviewed in these
columns some months ago; but here the delightful thrill never quite comes
off. Mr Machen lacks the power to create the necessary atmosphere, the
atmosphere in which we shiver with apprehension as we breathe it. We all
know how in dreams events in themselves commonplace and trifling enough,
suddenly become ghastly, horrible, soul-devastating. And all because
of our own state of mind. Now an author must somehow or other produce
that state of mind in us before he puts us face to face with his creepy
situation. He must compel “poetic faith” in us as Coleridge has it; bring
us into the mental condition in which we are ready to believe anything.
This Mr Machen never once succeeds in accomplishing. We are interested
in his stories, and pleased extremely with the exceedingly careful and
polished style in which they are told; we enjoy his humour and marvel at
his ingenuity, but that worked-for and longed-for grue never happens....
The fact is that to triumph in the particular literary line which Mr
Machen seems to have marked out for himself a certain peculiar sort
of genius is, above all things, necessary. With this peculiar sort of
genius the fates have not endowed Mr Machen, and the sooner he frankly
recognises his want of it the better, for he has many other and most
excellent literary accomplishments.
[Sidenote: _The Dundee Advertiser_]
As tragedy and comedy go hand in hand, so the weird is seldom far removed
from the ridiculous. Arthur Machen’s volume, “The Three Impostors,”
furnishes an excellent case in point. The stories it contains form
a connected narrative such as Poe himself might have evolved. These
nameless horrors, however, weirdly fascinating as they are, have
something in common with the dreaded gnomes and goblins by whose aid
intelligent nursemaids are wont to charm little folk to sleep. What place
the book will occupy in the literature of entertainment we cannot take
upon ourselves to say. We can only regret that the author’s singular
inventiveness and great story-telling gifts have been employed in so
undesirable a cause. What can any healthy-minded reader think of this:
“There, upon the floor, was a dark and putrid mass, seething with
corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting
and changing before our eyes, and bubbling with unctuous, oily bubbles
like boiling pitch. And out of the midst of it shone two burning points
like eyes, and I saw a writhing and stirring as of limbs, and something
moved and lifted up that might have been an arm.” Such visions have
before been given to little boys who complained of headache and divers
other pains. The family doctor generally diagnosed the case as “mince
pies and pickles.”
[Sidenote: _Punch_]
“The Three Impostors,” a novel (“Keynote” Series) by Arthur Machen, opens
well, which, by the way, is more than the book does, being a bit stiff;
but, though it has the machens of a good story in it, there is very
little worth reading after page 64.
[Sidenote: _Glasgow Herald_]
There are some books that produce a positive physical repulsion in their
reader. Mr Machen’s extremely disagreeable story is one of them. One may
be fond of the gruesome, and even take pleasure in an occasional sup of
horror, administered in the piquant and artistic style of which Poe and
Baudelaire had the secret. Mr Machen himself, in his previous volume,
led some of us to imagine that a share of the same gift might be found
in him. But “The Three Impostors” changes our view. The horror in it is
palpably and very literally sickening. Nothing but a smart turn in brisk
air can cleanse the feelings of the person who has been unfortunate
enough to read this volume through.
[Sidenote: _Black and White_]
“The Three Impostors,” by Arthur Machen, lacks the vivid sense of
actuality genius alone can impart to the grotesque. In less able hands,
as Mr Machen’s, the weird tends to merge into the ridiculous. His
connecting chain, too, is clumsily wielded, and you close the book, which
opens with cleverness and promise, with disappointment.
[Sidenote: _The Observer_]
“The Three Impostors: or, The Transmutations,” by Arthur Machen, is a
puzzling book. It is both good and bad; good in the clear presentation of
some parts of it, in clever handling of some difficult characters, and
bad because of the indefinite and unreal impression which, as a whole, it
leaves on the reader’s mind. It also reminds us a little too strongly to
be agreeable of a work with which it cannot for a moment be compared—with
Mr Stevenson’s “New Arabian Nights.” ...
[Sidenote: _Birmingham Post_]
This is a singular effort of the imagination, suggestive of a mixture
of Conan Doyle, Douglas Jerrold, and the author of the “Murders in the
Rue Morgue,” seasoned with grim touches of German mysticism. It is not
over-delightful reading, but to those, and they are legion, who are fond
of being steeped in blood and mystery the book will commend itself
highly. It is cleverly constructed, and that is about the best thing we
can say of it. No doubt the author’s true intent is all for our delight;
but, all the same, it is a matter of wonderment to us how it is that men
with evident literary talents, which might be pointed to fine issues,
should exercise their brain power in the noble cause of bewildering the
brains of other people, and this without an adequate purpose.
[Sidenote: _The Guardian_]
We never expected to see the day when we should be tempted to regret
that Stevenson had written “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” Nevertheless, when
we had waded through the pages of Mr Machen’s last production, we were
disposed to feel that even that book was dearly bought at the price of so
repulsive an imitation as that contained in “The Three Impostors.” For
the impressive and true use of the præternatural in “Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde,” we have senseless and sickening—we can use no other word—pictures
of mysterious scenes and of men returning to the bestial form which are
meant to inspire terror and intense dread, but really leave us entirely
unmoved, although he may imagine that his reader, like his hero, is
left “white and shuddering with sweat pouring from my flesh.” Language
seems almost to fail the author at times; he heaps up epithets of horror,
the words “bubbled and boiled out” of one man’s mouth “in the fury of
his emotion”; another person stands “shuddering and quaking as with the
grip of ague, sick with unspeakable agonies of fear and loathing”; a
doctor goes to see a patient, and reappears with “an unutterable horror
shining in his eyes.” If we are not mistaken members of the medical
profession would welcome the chance of investigating such a case as that
of the gentleman who took the witches’ Sabbath drug. Wearied with this
hysterical rubbish the reader hurries on to the end, to find in the last
chapter that the unfortunate youth who has got tired of the fauns and the
mysteries, and all the rest of the Greek burlesque, has been murdered
amid most horrible tortures, which, together with his sufferings, are
graphically described.
[Sidenote: _Pall Mall Gazette_]
... Mr Machen errs by never trusting sufficiently to his reader’s
imagination, and his most elaborate horrors leave us “more than usual
calm,” except when, by borrowing from Catlin, they make us feel slightly
unwell. It is impossible to admire the construction of Mr Machen’s
romance so much as if one did not know one’s Stevenson. Its framework,
with its amateurs of the odd in London; its set of characters who break
at sight into ingenious tales of absolute and elaborate falsehood with
no particular motive for using the decorative imagination; its choice
of a tobacco divan for the amateurs’ place of meeting, and sundry other
details, is curiously reminiscent of “The Dynamiter.” So, again, the
incident of the powder, strangely altered from its pure condition until
it obtained the power of “riving asunder the house of life and dissolving
the human trinity,” and giving a human form to “that which lies sleeping
within us all,” argues an uncommon boldness in the man who ventures to
use it after its being worked into “Dr Jekyll.” However, if Mr Machen
thinks he can wear the armour of Achilles with grace, that is his affair.
He has a sense of style, as witness his pictures of the deserted house
and his conception of the possible history of a street. He is strong
enough to walk alone, in fact; and we heartily wish him a little more
invention and a little less anxiety to make his reader’s flesh creep.
[Sidenote: _Saturday Review_]
Mr Machen is an unfortunate man. He has determined to be weird, horrible,
and as outspoken as his courage permits in an age which is noisily
resolved to be “’ealthy” to the pitch of blatancy. His particular
obsession is a kind of infernal matrimonial agency, and the begetting of
human-diabolical mules. He has already skirted the matter in his previous
book, “The Great God Pan,” and here we find it well to the fore again.
This time, however, it simply supplies one of a group of incoherent
stories held together in a frame of wooden narrative about a young man
with spectacles. This young man falls into a circle of Black Magicians,
who are practising indecorums and crimes at which Mr Machen dare only
hint in horror-struck whispers.... But it fails altogether to affect the
reader as it is meant to do. It fails mainly because Mr Machen has not
mastered the necessary trick of commonplace detail which renders horrors
convincing, and because he lacks even the most rudimentary conception of
how to individualise characters. The framework of the book is evidently
imitated from Mr Stevenson’s “New Arabian Nights,” a humorous form quite
unsuited, of course, to realistic horrors....
[Sidenote: _Lady’s Pictorial_]
If you like the Prologue read the stories. I did not like the Prologue,
but I was obliged to read the stories. They are a shade less odious than
“The Great God Pan,” but the comparison says but little in their favour,
for, in the former, Mr Machen gave to the world a most gruesome and
_unmanly_ book. I should like to know how the imagination of the author
would work upon clean and wholesome lines.
[Sidenote: _The Athenæum_]
... “The Three Impostors” produces on the normal waking mind much the
same effect as a hearty supper of pork chops on the dream fancies of
a person of delicate digestion: “velut ægri somnia, vanæ finguntur
species.” It is Mr Machen’s chief joy, in the words of one of his
characters, to dabble “with the melting ruins of the earthly tabernacle”;
to hint, rather than describe, the unholy joys and infamous orgies of
those whose diet is framed in accordance with the recipes of the devil’s
cookery book, and whose esoteric acquaintance with the black art enables
them to practise short cuts to the sundering of body and spirit. The
result is never agreeable, occasionally disgusting, but seldom really
blood-curdling, since in the last resort Mr Machen generally takes refuge
in a copious use of such words as “unutterable,” “hideous,” “loathsome,”
“appalling,” and so on....
[Sidenote: _The Graphic_]
... It is a pity, I think, that he does not confine himself to the
marvellous pure and simple, and eschew the gruesome—that he should not
be content with following in the footsteps of Stevenson instead of
entering into competition with Poe. For Mr Machen, though he has, it
must be admitted, an occasional inspiration of “the creepy,” is too
anxious to produce “goose-flesh” in the readers, and in his desire to
do so he is apt to seek his efforts in what I cannot but consider an
“unsportsmanlike” fashion. For instance, he is too much addicted to the
artifice of describing by telling you that things are indescribable.
This is a device which, though perhaps not absolutely illegitimate,
ought obviously to be very sparingly used; but in “The Three Impostors,”
as even more conspicuously in Mr Machen’s earlier volume in the same
series, “The Great God Pan,” it is employed to an extent which is almost
provocative of parody. A writer must, of course, leave something to our
imagination; but when we are continually meeting with creatures whose
aspect is too hideous to be portrayed in human language, who utter
words too awful to be repeated, and take part in orgies so abominable
and revolting that they must for ever remain nameless, even the most
indulgent reader may reasonably begin to feel that he is getting rather
short measure for his money.
[Sidenote: _The Echo_]
... “The Three Impostors” is plainly based on Stevenson’s “Dynamiters.”
The story opens in the same way, by a meeting of the principal characters
in a West London tobacco-shop, and we have brought before us the same
kind of house of mystery, and extraordinary men who haunt Italian
restaurants, talk in archaic language, and unceasingly tell each other
stories. Mr Machen would have stood a better chance of favourable
judgment if he had not so needlessly invited comparison with one of
Stevenson’s masterpieces. He has a powerful imagination, and a careful,
laborious style. The adventures he tells, centred around a golden coin
of Tiberius, are exciting enough to satisfy the most jaded palate.
There is no effort made to retain even a reasonable verisimilitude, and
probability is cast to the winds. A gentleman looking in an Oxford
Street bun-shop is accosted by a stranger, who takes him into an
Italian restaurant to dine. There the stranger pours out, with little
provocation, a long tale about how, when starving and shabby, he had
answered an advertisement for a private secretary, been accepted, gone
to America, and the adventures he met with there. Another sits down in
the gardens of Leicester Square, when an unknown young lady turns on
him and narrates all her family history. Some of the tales are as weird
and horrible as anything written in recent years, and there are murders
without number. Frankly, the subject matter of “The Three Impostors” is
not to our taste....
[Sidenote: _Literary World_]
... There are scoundrels who stop at nothing to get possession of magic
seals and coins; there are foul creatures that come out of man; there are
attempts to make our blood run cold. These all signally fail. We remain
unthrilled; we pass from Mr Machen to our luncheon as easily as we change
from one coat into another. He never stirs us. He tells his stories well,
and that is all. Why are we so unmoved? Does the fault reside in us or in
the author? We are willing to admit that as reviewers we run a risk of
having our sensibilities blunted. We do not cry or tremble as easily as
we wept and shook a few years ago, but we _can_ shed an occasional tear
over a book, and we _can_ shudder when the real literary magician has us
in his conduct. To this title, however, Mr Machen has no claim, a fact
which explains our passive acceptance of his tame horrors.
[Sidenote: _The New Age_]
Mr Arthur Machen’s attempts are the more ambitious and elaborate and the
least successful. He well illustrates the limitations and dangers of
this class of composition. With all his fertile fancy and constructive
ingenuity he cannot create that magic atmosphere of creepiness that
we presume it is his chief object to attain. Both “The Great God Pan”
and “The Three Impostors” are clever and ingenious stories; but as
blood-curdlers they are almost failures. All the materials are there,
none of the conjuring paraphernalia are wanting, but alas! we are not
in the least deceived by the tricks, and vainly wish that the would-be
magician would prevent us from seeing how the thing is done. The fact
is that, while recognising the value of “suggestive” writing, and the
imaginative effects to be obtained from obscure hints of “unknowable”
and “unspeakable horrors,” he works this style—that ought to be used
with fine reticence—to death, and reduces the “suggestive” theory _ad
absurdum_.
[Sidenote: Louis Weitzenkorn in _The New York Herald_]
To climb Mount Everest is a great achievement, but there is always a
secret hate in the heart of the man who did it first for the man who
ascended after him. I do not mean to write this article on Arthur Machen
and compare him to Mount Everest. Let us reserve the crests for an Ibsen,
a France or a Plato. What I mean by my first sentence is that Machen,
at present, seems to be the prized property of a very few persons. He
has escaped what Ernest Boyd is pleased to call the æsthete, 1924 model,
and sunk to the next lower circle of the intelligentsia, who have an
exceedingly happy time springing him upon the ignorami. It has not been
my achievement to have read all his work, and there is not enough genuine
entertainment in him for me to do it unless The World pays me for the
job. But I have managed to stow away “The Hill of Dreams,” “Things Near
and Far” (a truly beautiful book, by the way), “Hieroglyphics,” a volume
issued under the presentation of Vincent Starrett called “The Shining
Pyramid,” and his latest publication here, “Dog and Duck.”
Without going through the rest of his writings I feel rather confident
that I know something of him, and so far I have not yet read, in the
encomiums of his enthusiasts, the one characteristic of Machen that, to
me, lifts the man out of the ruck of those who just have a “beautiful
style.” It is idle to talk in praise of Machen’s writing, as writing. He
has polished up the language to a glittering surface. Each word he uses
is carefully chosen, so carefully, indeed, that the writing often becomes
of greater interest than the substance and the thought.
His latest volume, “Dog and Duck,” is Machen taking a day off. The
book is uninteresting except to his worshippers, it being a kind of
vaudeville, essays under such titles as “Why New Year?” “April Fool,”
“Roast Goose: With a Dissertation on Apple Sauce and Sage and Onions.”
(Notice the recurrent “ands” for a clue to the man’s careful style.) In
the volume there is nothing of the Machen which brings him, for me, out
in the first rank of the modern minors. But in “The Hill of Dreams” and
perhaps, strangely, that imitative of Stevenson, “The Three Impostors,”
there is the trade-mark of the man, a psychological insight almost
uncanny. Machen has plumbed to the foundations, not of obscenity, but of
the obscene.
For something over a decade I have watched what is known to the surface
observers of Greenwich Village as the Greenwich Villager, the type
of the kidding newspaper story, of the Webster Hall dance and the
table-d’hote, where bootleg liquor hides behind the entree. They are a
much more interesting study under the lights of Arthur Machen than the
Sunday magazines know. Nor is it true that they alone are a lost tribe
in this world. What they represent, I should say, in a rough guess, is
about 20 per cent. of the habitable Occident and more of the Orient, and
their kindred are to be found in all corners. One, specifically, is a
prominent restaurant proprietor. Another is a fairly well-known business
man, a third is an editor—in fact I could run pretty near the plane of
professions and pick out striking examples of men and women who fall in
the category discovered, so far as I know, by Arthur Machen.
It is an exceedingly difficult task to express the thing, to present with
clarity what I think Machen means in his major efforts. In “The Three
Impostors” there is an episode that symbolically pictures what I mean.
A young man is infected by some loathsome disease. As the malady grows
upon him he takes to his room, locks himself in, and his food is left at
his door. Finally his sister discovers the food is untouched. Several
days go by and the door of that room is unopened. Then the ceiling above
the inhabitants below the room begins to leak. The door of the horrible
chamber is burst, and upon the floor is a slimy mass from which two human
eyes glitter.
I think Machen has intended a symbol here. It is quite possible, of
course, that I am doing that famous trick of interpreting into an author
something he never senses. Thanking myself for the compliment, I believe,
however, that Machen has deliberately intensified a certain type of
human being, too populous, alas, and that this slime with its eyes, and
the eyes are the most significant part of the picture, is the emphatic
point Machen makes. I know this, that after reading and swallowing and
then chewing the cud of this particular fantasy I found myself casting
up accounts with the world and making of myself a kind of census-taker.
I began to remember that certain persons I knew were slimy. Perhaps if I
put it this way I would be clearer. Certain persons I knew were possessed
of a hidden sexual rottenness, and those persons fell under vastly
different indexes. Let me make it specific.
A young man, connected with the theatre, to almost every one who met
him was “clean cut, charming, boyish.” I think I, alone, held a violent
dislike for him, in spite of the fact that he was kindly, confidential,
open, toward me—an almost irresistible combination. I was accused of
jealousy. My oath of neutrality was sneered at. However, he was then
the particular idol of a particular girl. That was two years ago. A few
nights past I met that girl and asked about him.
“You never saw such a change,” she said. “His face is grotesque. Over it
is written the most bestial lines I have ever seen. Everything that was
in his soul has come out—in his face. He is horrible.”
I think Arthur Machen has penetrated to the bottom of a certain type
of man. He chooses to add to this type a touch of the unnatural or
supernatural, the latter a wrong term. He speaks of mysterious demons,
hill people, horrors that feed upon and devour human beings. He plays
upon mythology and Welsh legend, which is all very well; but beneath
this penchant for legend there is revealed in this writer a knowledge
of vile degeneracy, of inherited devilry that is as accurate as simple
mathematics. These invented demons of Machen destroy and devour. In our
own specific haunt of so-called Bohemia there exists the type of person
who devours and destroys, and beyond this section of the city there are
scattered innumerable individuals, the more dangerous because the better
disguised, men and women whose foundation is slime, who cannot be caught
and held because they slide from beneath the grasp and one says: “I
cannot quite catch hold of this person, I cannot quite pin him down, he
slips away from me, and yet I have him under my hand, I want to hold him
and it makes me sick to feel the touch of his soul.”
Those who have read “The Hill of Dreams” will recall the mystical woman
of the slums who flits in and out of the night like a bird of darkness,
who, not touching the story, gives it an odour—the odour of decay and
flesh. To me, as the book has gotten farther away from my first reading,
I get to thinking of this woman as a human skull possessed of two full,
rich, red lips, the only living thing upon the bones. Perhaps I am
heightening the symbolism of Arthur Machen, but then he has revealed in
his method specific creatures to me, creatures, however, of the same
general base, the same compound of greasy, poisonous elements.
Of course, that which Arthur Machen has been tortured with must
necessarily be expressed in symbolism. Gorgeous, magnificent symbolism
that is at once satire and tragedy. For these inhuman characteristics in
human beings present unexplored windings and twistings. So far psychology
does not light up the crooked pathways and metaphysics give little to the
pragmatic mind. This unwholesome or unholy nucleus of certain persons
is a basic quality which is not a quality, it is something which can be
felt and never named, sensed and never touched. It is directly inhuman,
remorseless, impenetrable. It is partial atavism, perhaps, but I can’t
see how much and to guess would be poetic.
All of this does not say one word to the person who has not come up
against this quality, who has not felt it, not been made aware of
“something wrong” in some one, who has not been pained and stricken with
the fear of having looked at a weird and uncanny manifestation. The place
to find it most often is in the eyes.