[Sidenote: Thomas Lloyd in _The Sunday Sun_]
... He seeks only to entertain by what he considers legitimate forms of
art. Nevertheless, there is a distinct likeness between his professor and
himself—even to the suffering from overwork and brain exhaustion. The
tales strike one as the work of one who has overtasked his imagination
in London streets and been overcome by nightmares produced by excessive
reading of the discussions of the British Association. An unusual but not
uninteresting case! Time and a rest-cure may work wonders—may lead to
Mr Machen’s next book being altogether as acceptable as the first story
in this, and the successor to “The House of Souls” becoming a house of
bodies and hearts and minds.
[Sidenote: _Academy_]
... The particular mark at which this criticism is directed is the
mystical tale called “The White People.” This story, which is inset into
a not particularly well-executed discussion on the nature and spiritual
significance of sin, contains the narrative of a young girl, who as a
child had lit somehow upon some of the secrets of Fairyland and whose
initiation gradually widened as she grew. The thing is not wanting
either in imagination or in a certain painful beauty of its own. It is,
perhaps, the best-written piece in the book, and the childish, simple
language, admirably suggested and maintained, heightens its undeniable
pathos. But in the end the young girl is found dead, self-poisoned in
time—whatever that may mean—and prostrate before an image which we are
given vaguely to understand is symbolic of the “monstrous mythology of
the (witches’) Sabbath.” We cannot satisfactorily follow the process
by which this gruesome consummation is attained. Mr Machen has been
inspired, no doubt, by wild, weird places. Their anciently reported
spells, as Emerson has it, have crept upon him, but nowhere here does
the enchantment of nature make for sober healing. And why should these
influences be set to work upon a pure young spirit for sorcery rather
than for sanctification? If Mr Machen should answer: Why not? we can
only say how very greatly we should prefer the alternative. The other
experiments with the “gurgoylesque” are at least legitimate. Weird and
resourceful as they are, however, perhaps they rather fail of horror in
their super-psychical parts. Nothing elsewhere in “The Great God Pan”
approaches the effect produced upon the reader by the callousness of the
experiment of the doctor (in the preliminary chapter) upon the brain of
the girl who had once owed her life to him, and that incident is nearer
to the possibilities of a lust for science than any part of the resulting
coil, in which the devil became incarnate for a while and was made woman.
In neither this nor the clever arabesque entitled “The Three Impostors”
(which might well have been called “The Murderers’ Fantasia”) is the
elaborate surrounding scroll-work quite as effective as it might be; and
in the latter extravaganza we lose touch with the main event through
the plethora of side tales with which it is garnished, though a word of
praise is due to the various literary and artistic characters upon whose
vagaries and idiosyncrasies the action indirectly hinges....
[Sidenote: _The Standard_]
It is a pity that Mr Machen has done several things in connection with
his new volume of short stories. First and foremost, he might have
very well dispensed with his preface. Mr Machen is clever, of course,
but his bland references to the example of Mr Kipling and Edgar Allan
Poe as “fellow-authors” does not convince—it only irritates. Also his
diatribe about the Puritan elements in the English character is quite
out of date. Nearly every man who has written decadent fiction within
the past fifteen years has lashed himself into a similar fury because
he fancies that it has been “tacitly, if not openly, ordered that the
English novel is only great when it is a sermon, a tract, or a pamphlet
in disguise.” The success or failure of a book is not, as Mr Machen
seems to think, governed by hard-headed men of business, who have never
disguised their intolerance of imagination, _quâ_ imagination, and who
believe that “English fiction must justify itself either as containing
useful doctrine and information, or as a manifest transcript of life as
it is known to the average reader, due regard being had, of course, to
the salutary conventions of the social order.” It is almost invariably
limited by its own qualities. Only let Mr Machen produce a work of
genius—and his fame shall be known afar. Another source of difference
which we have with this writer is the inclusion of the first story, “A
Fragment of Life,” in “The House of Souls.” That story, in its particular
way, is almost perfect—tender, true, intimate, and restrained—in its
exhibition of how a small suburban clerk and his wife came to awake from
their dream of a London suburb, of daily labour, and of weary, useless
little things, and saw the things that really mattered in life, with
the result that “the voices of men and women came to sound with strange
notes, with the echo rather of a music that came over unknown hills.” Its
mystical qualities are both rare and beautiful, and, as a work of art
alone, it deserves to live. But the other stories of Black Magic—of Pan,
and of fauns and satyrs and other fearful wild-fowl of the occultist’s
stock-in-trade—frankly, they are failures. In one aspect, they would
shame any respectable sensational novelist who practises a certain amount
of natural illusion. In another—they are ineffective. They do not drive
home the intolerable horror of the mystery of Evil. They suggest, on
the contrary, the Fat Boy in “Pickwick.” Mr Machen may have ransacked
the whole British Museum for quaint and far-off ceremonies, simply to
make our flesh creep, but, in sober truth, all he has accomplished
is an engaging air of looking mysterious until the time comes for
explanation—and then—well, then we yawn. Now, his “fellow-author,”
Poe, would not have done this. If he had essayed to melt this too, too
solid flesh, if he had striven to throw into atoms and reconstitute
the primal elements of our existence, if he had essayed to summon the
eternal spirits of evil, the blind forces of ill that are hidden in the
constitution of man—we should have felt a rush of genuine terror, and
the breath of genius would have touched our cheeks. As it is—Mr Machen
only imparts a certain hot-house kind of atmosphere to several perfectly
familiar experiments, such as an obscure operation on a girl’s brain, the
secret of a wife’s disappearance, the reason why certain men of fashion
are driven irresistibly to suicide, and the cause of an obscure, and,
truth to tell, rather squalid murder in a deserted passage. He never
makes us believe in those Black Masses, or in his theory of demoniacal
possession, or in that wonderful jewel, the size of a pigeon’s egg, that
glowed and glittered, and was really a woman’s soul. He should realise
that poor Aubrey Beardsley, and the hot, impetuous souls that wrought as
he did, are quite dead, and now should turn his attention to other and
truer fragments of life.
[Sidenote: _The Bystander_]
My reference, a week or two back, to the new form of humour exploited
by Mr Montagu Wood in “A Tangled I,” a humour which amusingly combined
epigram and satire with literary power and imagination, has moved Mr
Grant Richards, the publisher of the book, to draw my attention to
another work of the same _genre_, entitled “The House of Souls,” by Mr
Arthur Machen. Certainly this book, which contains about six complete
novels, is a notable production. If it lacks the sparkle of Mr Wood’s
book, it is, nevertheless, the fruit of a curious talent which seems
to be of so very striking a resemblance to that work that I am moved
to a suspicion that it is the handiwork of the same brain. “The House
of Souls” stories are conceived largely with the desire to mix up the
humdrum in life with the transcendental—to indicate the “appeal of
Theosophy to atheists, men about town, journalists, and hard-headed men
of affairs.” The touch of humour is to be observed in the descriptions
in the various stories—particularly “A Fragment of Life”—of prosaic
suburban ways and manners, which reveal a very intimate knowledge of the
lower middle classes; and as to the Theosophical aspect of the stories,
undoubtedly it is interesting to find this theme exploited in fiction,
especially by so brilliant a descriptive and imaginative writer as Mr
Machen. I may add here, that Mr Montagu Wood’s humour was recognised in
“Pop” at Eton, and afterwards at the Canning Club at Oxford, and that his
skit, published some years ago, “An Island Story,” was highly successful
in those sets wherein it gained a reading. I am more than confident that
his is a literary talent which will, sooner or later, reach a wide and a
startled public.
[Sidenote: _Liverpool Daily Courier_]
... It is by no means a new trick, of course, but Mr Machen has it
to perfection, and he is shrewd enough to heighten its effectiveness
by sticking his nightmares in the very midst of the modern and the
circumstantial and the familiar—by transposing Edgar Allan Poe into the
key of “The New Arabian Nights.” Too obviously Poe, here and there,
perhaps; and too unmistakably the manner of “The Nights”; but in these
derivative days echoes of that sort will trouble none but the most
fastidious of readers, and certainly not those who have a healthy
appetite for robustious and not too conventional melodrama.
[Sidenote: _Illustrated London News_]
“My dear Sir,” says Dyson in “The House of Souls,” “I will give you
the task of a literary man in a phrase. He has got to do simply this:
to invent a wonderful story and to tell it in a wonderful manner.”
Judged by this test Mr Arthur Machen can scarcely be said to have made
literature. As the reader is conducted, Sherlock Holmes fashion, through
the House of Souls (there are six storeys to it) its wicked arabesques,
its old cabinets and prehistoric flints and faded pocket-books, wear an
unconvincing, property air. When wonderful gentlemen like Dyson having
drawn from some antique bureau a tattered paper or a black seal, and
presenting it for a chum’s inspection the chum exclaims, “Take it away;
never speak of this again. Are you made of stone, man? Why, the dread
and horror of death itself, the thoughts of the man who stands in the
keen morning air on the black platform, bound, the bell tolling in his
ears, and waits for the harsh rattle of the bolt, are as nothing compared
to this. I will not read it; I should never sleep again!”—then is the
breath held, and the mind prepared for any delicious thrill. But the
Manuscript at length, or the black seal fully deciphered, prove well-nigh
soporific. And both lack the power of evoking that spiritual terror
which, leaving Hawthorne and Poe and Coleridge out of the comparison,
surrounds “The Island of Dr Moreau,” by Mr Wells, and is imprinted in
“The Mark of the Beast,” by Mr Kipling.
[Sidenote: _Birmingham Gazette and Express_]
... Whilst admiring the literary workmanship and the weird fancifulness
of it all, one wonders what it means and why the tales were ever written.
Do they purport to be works of imagination only, then the author has
sought a singularly repulsive form of expression for his undoubted
talent; do they seek to promulgate a theory concerning the link between
the human and the bestial, between the natural and the supernatural in
its most depraved possibilities of manifestation, then we would prefer
to remain in ignorance, debating for not one moment the reasonableness
or otherwise of such a theory. Really and truly, these awful stories
strongly suggest the half-mad imaginings of a degenerate mind steeped in
morbidity. They are too completely nauseous ever to have been permitted
the publicity of print, and we sincerely trust they will secure few
readers.
[Sidenote: _Literary World_]
... But when our author attempts to handle such occult matters as
are treated of in “The Great God Pan,” he seems to lose his footing.
He succeeds in giving his readers an impression of very disagreeable
horrors, but he does not succeed in giving verisimilitude to his
record. We feel ourselves in the presence merely of a somewhat morbid
imagination. Mr Machen does not reveal, as he leads us to hope, any real
arcana.
[Sidenote: _East Anglian Daily Times_]
... We have conscientiously perused the 500 pages which the volume
contains, and our conclusion is that we would not willingly repeat the
experience. We have supped full with horrors, and the lurid abominations
which are very plainly hinted at have sickened us. It is probable that
there are some whose literary digestion is strong enough to swallow such
pabulum with impunity; but we fancy that the great majority of readers
will rise from the book with a shudder of loathing. Certainly persons
of a sensitive temperament ought not to read the gruesome tales after
dusk....
[Sidenote: _Light_]
... The promise of the first story is not redeemed, and the book is
given up to the blacker side of magical beliefs, wrapped up in a garb
suggestive of “Sherlock Holmes.” It is not Spiritualism, and we prefer
to believe that there is no truth in such auto-suggested horrors. The
book professes to indicate “the dangers of unauthorised research,” but
no such dangers as are here presented beset the path of the earnest and
conscientious Spiritualist investigator.
[Sidenote: _Speaker_]
Mr Arthur Machen writes a somewhat curious preface to his collection of
decadent stories in which he attempts to turn the Puritan’s flank in
an ingenious manner. He claims that “it is entirely from the Puritan
standpoint that I wish to rest my plea for these tales of mine ...
almost every page contains a hint (under varied images and symbols) of a
belief in a world that is not that of ordinary everyday experience....
I contend that as an English novelist I am within my right in doing so;
since Science, the guide of Life, has done as much, has admitted many
transcendental conceptions into her scheme of things.” This is a neat
apology for the subject matter, which may be summarised by the line, “the
flesh is aghast at the half-heard murmurs of horrible things,” but it
may surprise the author to be told that in these clever artificial and
decidedly sickly romances, penned apparently under the joint influence
of Oscar Wilde’s and Aubrey Beardsley’s artistic example, he has proved
his Puritan heritage better than he knows. There has always seemed to
us something a little pathetic in the desperate attempt of the small
school of young Oxford hedonists to break away from the moral code of the
healthy Philistine and encounter and glorify the mysterious forbidden
pleasures of Sin. For their world was an artificial make-believe affair,
with an exhausted atmosphere, in which affectation stood in the place
of real pleasure. We can respect in a measure the Puritan who cries out
that pleasure is a sin, because he shows us thereby that it has a secret
fascination for him, but the man who can only enjoy pleasure by making
out to himself that it is a sin shows himself a Puritan _manqué_. We are
not surprised, therefore, to find that Mr Arthur Machen’s stories fail to
thrill us, because the artificial horrors and nameless sins in which they
abound are all carefully concocted and have practically no correspondence
with the sins or horrors of real life. That is where our young school
of modern hedonists fails in art; it is divorced from nature, and its
would-be spontaneity is palpably a carefully laboured, artificial affair.
And this is a great pity, for the refined sense of beauty that the young
hedonist starts with possessing can only create a stale preciosity when
it is divorced from the freshness of nature. Practically all the stories
in “The House of Souls” are so much labour thrown away, and the more
carefully studied are their “nameless horrors,” the more meaningless are
they, and the worse as art. Take, for example, the story “The Inmost
Light.” Here is a most deliberate attempt to make our flesh creep, and
the only result is to make the reader exclaim “stuff and nonsense.” A
certain Dr Black secludes himself with his beautiful wife in his house at
Harlesden, and makes experiments in “occult science”:—
“... each night I had stolen a step nearer to that great abyss
which I was to bridge over, the gulf between the world of
consciousness and the world of matter.... In that work from
which even I doubted to escape with life, life itself must
enter; from some human being there must be drawn that essence
which men call the soul, and in its place (for in the scheme
of the world there is no vacant chamber)—in its place would
enter in what the lips can hardly utter, what the mind cannot
conceive without a horror more awful than the horror of death
itself. And when I knew this, I knew also on whom that fate
would fall; I looked into my wife’s eyes. Even at that hour, if
I had gone out and taken a rope and hanged myself, I might have
escaped, and she also, but in no other way. At last I told her
all. She shuddered, and wept, and called on her dead mother for
help, and asked me if I had no mercy and I could only sigh. I
concealed nothing from her; I told her what she would become,
and what would enter in where her life had been; I told her of
all the shame and all the horror.... That night she came down
to my laboratory, and there, with shutters bolted and barred
down, with curtains drawn thick and close, so that the very
stars might be shut out from the sight of that room, while the
crucible hissed and boiled over the lamp, I did what had to be
done, and led out what was no longer a woman. But on the table
the opal flamed and sparkled with such light as no eyes of man
have ever gazed on, and the rays of the flame that was within
it flashed, and glittered, and shone even to my heart. My wife
had only asked one thing of me; that when there came at last
what I had told her, I would kill her. I have kept my promise.”
Page 286.
This passage is a very fair sample of the school to which Mr Machen
belongs, and it illustrates its utter artificiality. No thrill can
possibly come, because there is falsity in every line and human nature
is violated at every turn. The leading idea of the opal gaining an
unholy lustre from the commission of an evil deed is paltry in itself,
and the whole psychological interest should lie in the study of the man’s
warped human instincts. But Dr Black is a lay figure in whom we do not
even begin to believe, and so the piled-up structure of horror appears
childishly inept. And so with the description of the strange sins in the
story of “The Three Impostors.” The strange sins are not real sins, that
is why they fail to interest even a morbid imagination. If the author
would go into the street and pick up with the first wastrel he meets and
describe faithfully the workings of the man’s mind, he would thrill us
fifty times more than can this collection of concocted effects all alien
to the truth of life, and so all remote from human feeling. In its horror
of nature, indeed, our young hedonistic school shows but another phase of
the old Puritan’s distrust of art.