Readers who are unfamiliar with the stories may prefer to treat the Introduction as an Afterword.
In 1895 the editors of a new magazine, The Unicorn, sought to make a splash by engaging a pair of literary hot properties to contribute parallel series of tales. The two writers were Arthur Machen and H. G. Wells, both fresh from recent publishing triumphs (perhaps in Machen’s case ‘scandal’ is closer to the mark), and their respective contributions were to offer readers distinct modes, or flavours, of what we should today call ‘genre fiction’. The magazine, unfortunately, folded after a mere three issues, in which only one of Wells’s stories, and none of Machen’s, appeared. Machen related the episode, nearly three decades later, in characteristically self-deprecating fashion:
‘The Great God Pan’ had made a storm in a Tiny Tot’s teacup. And about the same time, a young gentleman named H. G. Wells had made a very real, and a most deserved sensation with a book called ‘The Time Machine’; a book indeed. And a new weekly paper was projected by Mr. Raven Hill [sic] and Mr. Girdlestone, a paper that was to be called ‘The Unicorn’. And both Mr. Wells and myself were asked to contribute; I was to do a series of horror stories.1
This obscure episode in late Victorian publishing history is intriguing for a number of reasons. It would be interesting to know, for instance, just how Raven-Hill and Girdlestone phrased their offer; perhaps they requested ‘more stuff in the “Pan” line’. Writing in the 1920s, Machen speaks of ‘horror stories’ and ‘tales of horror’, but it is unlikely that these were the expressions used at the time2 (unlikely, too, that the editors asked the young Wells for more ‘scientific romances’, let alone the entirely anachronistic designation ‘science fiction’). This was, after all, precisely the period during which the still-fluid conceptual boundaries of emergent genre categories like ‘science fiction’, ‘fantasy’, and ‘horror’ were themselves beginning to be negotiated, shaped, and defined. But a more tantalizing question is this: if The Unicorn, and its editors’ scheme, had been a success, would the trajectory of Machen’s reputation have more closely resembled that of Wells, who went on to score triumph after triumph, as well as worldwide celebrity, in the years to come? Machen’s star, by contrast, sank slowly back towards the horizon line of relative obscurity, then followed an irregularly wave-like course throughout his later life (and afterlife), ascending and again declining at periodic intervals. For Wells, 1895 marked the beginning of fame; for Machen it meant something like the end of it, until the next century at any rate. But what if Machen had become, as it were, the ‘H. G. Wells of horror’?
In one sense, the question is moot for the simple reason that, in the event, Machen found himself quite unable to write anything further in the ‘Pan’ line. The 32-year-old author of a small body of inventively appalling tales, when pressed to produce more of the same, extruded a quartet of mediocrities, which he was entirely relieved to be able to consign to oblivion. In the short term at least, his imagination led him down less egregiously ‘horrific’ paths, while the fin-de-siècle reading public supped on such fresh terrors as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, to say nothing of Wells’s own bloodsucking octopus-Martians and surgically transformed beast-men. But it is also moot because in the end Machen would indeed become something very like ‘the H. G. Wells of horror’. Today he is widely accepted as a foundational figure — for some the foundational figure — in the development of modern horror fiction3 (though it is worth noting that he would have strenuously, and with justice, resisted the idea that he was simply or solely a ‘horror writer’). If, however, Machen is now so recognized, it is less by popular acclaim than by aristocratic consensus. Machen is, as Dante said of Aristotle, a ‘maestro di color che sanno’ — a master of those who know, a high priest retroactively canonized by later practitioners of his weird art. This process of canonization may be said to have begun with the influential essay Supernatural Horror in Literature by H. P. Lovecraft, who wrote:
Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen; author of some dozen tales long and short, in which the elements of hidden horror and brooding fright attain an almost incomparable substance and realistic acuteness. . . . his powerful horror-material of the ’nineties and earlier nineteen-hundreds stands alone in its class, and marks a distinct epoch in the history of this literary form.4
Whether Machen was in fact a purveyor of ‘cosmic fear’, as Lovecraft conceived it, is open to dispute; certainly he shared neither Lovecraft’s atheism nor his fundamental belief in an amoral, indifferent universe. The point here is that Lovecraft was only the first of a long line of Machen admirers, including Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker, and Guillermo del Toro, who have drawn upon Machen for inspiration in their own novels, stories, and films, which their own fans have been content to enjoy without necessarily feeling compelled to pursue Machen’s distinctive note of weirdness back to the source, his own writing. There are signs, however, that this may be changing. With ever-increasing interest in Machen on the part of both readers and literary scholars — there has been a veritable explosion of critical work on him in recent years — the acolytes of the ‘flower-tunicked priest of nightmare’ are in some danger of losing their proprietary claims on him and his fiction. And since that fiction represents both a high point in the history of horror and the weird and a fascinating window into the fin-de-siècle cultural milieu within which most of it was produced, this is an entirely good thing.
Machen was pre-eminently a writer of place — of, first of all, his native Monmouthshire (later he would discover London, completing the binary landscape of his imagination). It is significant that in his autobiography Machen privileges geography over genealogy, filling many lyrical pages with evocations of his birthplace before thinking to bring any of his relations onto the stage of memory. He is ever reminding the reader, too, of the decisive impact of the history of Wales — natural as well as human — upon his own. In an often-quoted passage near the beginning of the first of his memoirs, Far Off Things, he declares,
I shall always esteem it as the greatest piece of fortune that has fallen to me, that I was born in that noble, fallen Caerleon-on-Usk, in the heart of Gwent. . . . For the older I grow the more firmly am I convinced that anything which I may have accomplished in literature is due to the fact that when my eyes were first opened in earliest childhood they had before them the vision of an enchanted land.5
That land was a palimpsest, steeped in both history and legend from Celtic, Roman, and medieval times (for as we will see, if Machen was a writer of place, those places were deeply imbued with a sense of temporality):
I am a citizen of what was once no mean city . . . once the splendid Isca Silurum, the headquarters of the Second Augustan Legion. And, then again, a golden mist of legend grew about it; it became the capital of King Arthur’s court of faerie and enchantment, the chief city of a cycle of romance that has charmed all the world. . . . wonderful was it to stand in the evening on the green circle of the Roman amphitheatre, and see the sun flame above Twyn Barlwn, the mystic tumulus on the mountain wall of the west. So the old town dreamed the long years away, not forgetful of the Legions and the Eagles, murmuring scraps of broken Latin in its ancient sleep.6
Here in 1863 Machen was born, and baptized Arthur Llewellyn Jones. (The ‘Machen’ came later, from his mother’s family, and is a Scottish name, despite there being a village of ‘Machen’ near his birthplace.) His father was a Welsh clergyman, from a line of Welsh clergymen, and the rectory library furnished the second formative influence on the future writer’s life: there the young Machen devoured a heterogeneous collection of books and periodicals, supplemented by such treasured acquisitions as Don Quixote, De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and The Arabian Nights. There was money — for a while — for grammar school in Hereford, but this had entirely evaporated by the time he was to have followed in his father’s footsteps — to university and, in all likelihood, the Church.7 Plan B was a medical career. But a constitutional innumeracy, helped not at all by a preference for sub-Swinburnian versifying over cramming, ensured Machen’s failure of the examinations for the Royal College of Surgeons in London. He returned to Wales, where a long, self-published poem on the Eleusinian mysteries suggested to his family — oddly enough — that he might be a journalist; accordingly, he was sent back to London in June 1881, at the age of 18, to become one.
And Machen did, in fact, become a newspaperman, but not for twenty-nine years; in the meantime, he became something else, a ‘literary man’. To this end he spent most of the 1880s in severe poverty, serving an idiosyncratic apprenticeship: he translated Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron for a much-needed £20, wrote a pseudo-scholarly treatise on tobacco and a collection of pseudo-Renaissance tales in archaic English, and read his way through a garret crammed with esoteric literature to prepare a bookseller’s catalogue (entitled The Literature of Occultism and Archaeology). This last commission was to provide rich matter for Machen’s creative work, exposing him to ‘as odd a library as any man could desire to see’. As he would later write:
Occultism in one sense or another was the subject of [most] of the books. There were the principal and the most obscure treatises on Alchemy or Astrology, on Magic. . . . books about Witchcraft, Diabolical Possession, ‘Fascination’, or the Evil Eye; here comments on the Kabbala. Ghosts and Apparitions were a large family, Secret Societies of all sorts hung on the skirts of the Rosicrucians and Freemasons. . . . the semi-religious, semi-occult, semi-philosophical sects and schools were represented: we dealt in Gnostics and Mithraists, we harboured the Neoplatonists, we conversed with the Quietists and the Swedenborgians. These were the ancients; and beside them were the modern throng of Diviners and Stargazers and Psychometrists and Animal Magnetists and Mesmerists and Spiritualists and Psychic Researchers. In a word, the collection . . . represented thoroughly enough that inclination of the human mind which may be a survival from the rites of the black swamp and the cave or — an anticipation of a wisdom and knowledge that are to come, transcending all the science of our day.8
Most of these subjects would crop up somewhere or other in Machen’s later writing (though the ‘Ghosts and Apparitions’ that were the meat and drink of his contemporary M. R. James appear hardly at all ).9 In particular, the idea of an occult science ‘transcending all the science of our day’ lay behind the pair of tales which John Lane of The Bodley Head published together in 1894 as part of his ‘Keynote Series’. There are superficial resemblances between both ‘The Great God Pan’ and ‘The Inmost Light’ and science fiction; in each, a mad scientist figure engages in a forbidden experiment: in the first story, a surgical procedure performed on a woman’s brain to make her ‘see the god Pan’; in the second, the removal of a woman’s soul to a gemstone prison. Yet where science fiction depends upon the presence of what Darko Suvin has called a ‘novum’ or ‘new thing’,10 consistent with current scientific knowledge (What if time travel were possible? What if robots became smarter than humans?), these tales are premised on what might better be termed an ‘antiquum’, a recovered piece of older, occult knowledge. Without question Machen’s interest in, and treatment of, the brain in both of these stories draws upon contemporary developments in neuroscience; at the same time, however, he suggests that such modern disciplines are only catching up with the ‘sciences’ of a bygone age. And when the demonic Helen Vaughan in ‘Pan’ kills herself, her body undergoes a grotesque recapitulation of forms, but it is one which calls to mind less the evolutionary ideas of Darwin or Haeckel than the theories of the seventeenth-century alchemist Thomas Vaughan.11
Oscar Wilde called the novella ‘un succès fou’, but Machen treasured far more, as he would throughout his career, the abuse of critics. ‘Pan’ was ‘gruesome, ghastly, and dull’, ‘acutely and intentionally disagreeable’, ‘ludicrous’, ‘an incoherent nightmare of sex’, even — ‘unmanly’.12 Some condemned Machen for revealing not too much but too little: Richard le Gallienne wrote in a reader’s report that ‘The nature of the horror . . . is persistently shirked . . . mainly a dumb-show of ghastly interjections. Terrified asterisks, horrified notes of exclamations are not enough.’13 Many others echoed this criticism, a fact which points to Machen’s pioneering use of a trope which would become a commonplace of twentieth-century horror — that of the ‘unspeakable’ or ‘unnamable’ thing which utterly resists representation.14 This quality of obliqueness extends to other aspects of the novella as well, particularly its narrative structure — the reader pieces together the story from a sequence of seemingly disconnected episodes. H. P. Lovecraft saw the construction of ‘Pan’ as perhaps its greatest strength: ‘But the charm of the tale is in the telling. No one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds without following fully the precise order in which Mr. Machen unfolds his gradual hints and revelations.’15 But this is a minority view; modern readers have tended to be more disturbed by the story’s defects of plotting and characterization16 than by the improprieties which shocked its original audience. Whatever its weaknesses, ‘Pan’ has exerted an enormous influence on the course of horror fiction in the century and a quarter since its publication.
Despite Machen’s later disavowals, ‘Pan’ was, and remains today, closely associated with the Decadent movement, and benefited, if that is the right way to put it, from the association. The British version of the Decadence was influenced by an earlier French movement, as well as by the Aesthetic school associated with Walter Pater. Machen’s personal connection with the central figures of this movement was tangential: he had, for example, a slight and ambivalent relationship with Wilde (the Irishman praised the Welshman’s early story ‘A Double Return’ as well as ‘Pan’; for his part Machen considered Wilde a brilliant but superficial conversationalist). Another key figure, Aubrey Beardsley, designed the cover and title page for The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light, while the book’s publisher, John Lane, was also responsible for the periodical which gave its name to the ‘yellow nineties’. Despite these connections, Machen himself, writing in 1916, would have his readers believe that his work owed no debt at all to ‘yellow bookery’ (as he called it):
‘The Great God Pan’ was first published in December, 1894. So the book is of full age, and I am glad to take the opportunity of a new edition to recall those early ’nineties when the tale was written and published — those ’nineties of which I was not even a small part, but no part at all. For those were the days of ‘The Yellow Book’, of ‘Keynotes’, and the ‘Keynotes Series’, of Aubrey Beardsley and ‘The Woman Who Did’, of many portentous things in writing and drawing and publishing. ‘The Great God Pan’ had the good fortune to issue from The Bodley Head, which was the centre of the whole movement, and no doubt the book profitted by the noise that the movement was making. But this was in a sense an illegitimate profit; since the story was conceived and written in solitude, and came from far off lonely days spent in a land remote from London, and from literary societies and sodalities. So far as it stands for anything, it stands, not for the ferment of the ’nineties, but for the visions that a little boy saw in the late ’sixties and early ’seventies.17
Machen’s attempts to distance himself from that world are understandable, given its unsavoury reputation in the public mind, well into the twentieth century. This does not mean, however, that we are obliged to accept uncritically his self-portrait of the artist as autocosm. But opinion has divided over the question of just how ‘Decadent’ his fictions of this period are, how influenced by the cultural milieu in which Wilde, Beardsley, and others flourished. On one view (not very different from Machen’s own), the answer would seem to be, ‘very little indeed’:
for our purpose these dazzling and picturesque figures [of the English Decadent movement], however tragic, however intriguing, are irrelevant. They are irrelevant because they scarcely affected Machen at all. Although the atmosphere of the age and the opportunity to experiment had something to do with the themes he chose for his own stories, he followed no fashion and clung to no coterie.18
Even here, however, there is that tantalizing ‘something to do with’. Other critics, seeking to specify the nature and extent of this ‘something’, have faced first of all the challenge of satisfactorily defining ‘Decadence’, of agreeing on its characteristic qualities. Perhaps the best way to think about Decadence is in the spirit of what Ludwig Wittgenstein called ‘family resemblances’ — as a concept associated with a shifting but overlapping set of themes, tropes, and techniques. And indeed, Machen critics have painted various portraits of the Decadence — none exactly alike, but all bearing a strong likeness to the fiction he produced in the 1890s. Mark Valentine, for instance, has written:
While there has been no succinct and accurate encapsulation of what the Decadence meant, it may very broadly be considered as implying a devotion to exquisitely crafted style in literature, and in life to the quest for new sensations, involving variously the exploration of the occult, the exotic, the sexually unorthodox, the bohemian way of life, and a taste for strange drugs or drink.19
For Wesley Sweetser (thinking along similar but not identical lines), the ‘larger elements of Decadence’ are ‘intent to shock, emphasis on sensation, and fascination with evil’.20 John Simons, warning against the temptation ‘to dismiss Machen as just another of the throng of literati of the 1890s who have narrowly failed to achieve canonical status’, highlights other qualities:
Certainly, we find throughout Machen’s work all of those things which became the clichés of the 1890s. His work is lushly embroidered with the aureate diction of The Yellow Book, it breathes the atmosphere of the study in which a collection of rare erotica is displayed to only the closest friends, it is bathed in the pallid gleam of the Celtic Twilight.21
Then there is the fin-de-siècle fascination with paganism, and with the figure of Pan (and his various caprine avatars) in particular: ‘The Great God Pan should be seen . . . as a novel of the Decadence, of a piece with . . . [Florence Farr’s] The Dancing Faun, with Kenneth Grahame’s Pagan Papers ( John Lane, 1893), with Beardsley’s sly fauns and lascivious ladies.’22 One might go on.23 But these multifarious affinities with the spirit of the movement, and the age, are enough to demonstrate that such works as ‘Pan’, The Three Impostors, and The Hill of Dreams deserve to be considered important, perhaps indispensable, works of the English Decadence.
But if the Decadent brand was an asset, albeit an ambivalent one, in 1894, it would prove a liability in 1895 — or so Machen believed, blaming the comparative failure of The Three Impostors (also published by John Lane) in part on public revulsion at Wilde’s trial and conviction on charges of ‘gross indecency’: ‘there had been some ugly scandals . . . which had made people impatient with reading matter that was not obviously and obtrusively “healthy”; and so, for one reason or another, “The Three Impostors” failed to set the Fleet Ditch on fire’.24 To be sure, there have always been readers who have recognized its Gothic potency — it scared Conan Doyle to death, and John Betjeman — and today its status as a foundational work of horror fiction is generally acknowledged, among critics at any rate. In the 1980s Jorge Luis Borges included the novel in his ‘Personal Library’ of a hundred volumes, calling it one of literature’s ‘short and almost secret masterpieces’. But the text has remained an ‘almost secret masterpiece’ even to many who have read a fair bit of Machen, for the simple reason that it has so often, and for so long, been chopped up and sold, as it were, for parts. The Three Impostors, while to some extent written piecemeal, comprises a gratifyingly perplexing whole. A larger frame narrative — concerning a terrified ‘young man with spectacles’ fleeing from the occult society he has betrayed — contains a series of interpolated episodes told by unreliable narrators (this is one of those novels which demands a second reading at least).25 Two of these episodes, however — ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’ and ‘The Novel of the White Powder’ — have long been treated by anthologists as stand-alone tales.
And they are great tales. But there are losses as well as gains involved when one plucks them from the frame of the novel, which Machen would later describe as
a book which testifies to the vast respect I entertained for the fantastic, ‘New Arabian Nights’ manner of R. L. Stevenson, to those curious researches in the byways of London which I have described already, and also, I hope, to a certain originality of experiment in the tale of terror, as exemplified in the stories of the Professor who was taken by the fairies, and of the young student of law who swallowed the White Powder.26
Interestingly, this passage anticipates — seems even, perhaps, to sanction — the practice of harvesting individual ‘stories’ from the novel, even as it directs our attention to two fascinating aspects of the text which are almost entirely lost when this is done. The first of these aspects is precisely the narrative complexity noted earlier, for which Machen owes an explicit debt to Stevenson (especially to The Dynamiter, the 1885 sequel to his 1882 New Arabian Nights), and an implicit one to such works as the original Arabian Nights and (very likely) the Heptameron which, as we have seen, he had translated during the previous decade — all works using the device of an interlinked series of tales.27 The second feature is the novel’s depiction of London as a potent locus of wonder and terror; the text is in large part the product of a young writer’s fascinated urban wanderings — his ‘curious researches’, as he puts it, ‘in the byways of London’. As noted earlier, if Wales stood at one pole of Machen’s axial imagination, the great ‘City of Resurrections’ (as it is called in ‘The Great God Pan’) was firmly fixed at the other, and was as central to his literary vision as it was to those of Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens (both favourite authors). Machen’s London appears variously as a fantastic ‘Baghdad on the Thames’, site of impossible coincidences;28 a source of sudden, transfiguring epiphanies and ecstasies; a network redolent with occult menace; and a disorienting labyrinth. Machen saw himself — how facetiously it is difficult to know for certain — as a solitary practitioner of what he called ‘my London science’ and ‘the Great Art of London’: ‘I will listen to no objections or criticisms as to the Ars Magna of London, of which I claim to be the inventor, the professor and the whole school. Here I am artist and judge at once, and possess the whole matter of the art within myself.’29 But of course he was far from the only one ‘researching’ the city — its seedier side in particular — in the later nineteenth century. Kelly Hurley aligns Machen’s treatment of the city in The Three Impostors with the work of a host of ‘late-Victorian “social explorers” . . . middle-class reformers — sociologists, urban missionaries, government agents, journalists — [who] founded their discussions of urban poverty upon a central conceit: that the slum neighborhoods of London were as little known, mysterious, and fearsome as the more obscure reaches of the colonies’.30 This wider cultural context should be borne in mind when the reader follows the wanderings of Dyson (a peripatetic stand-in for Machen himself ) into ‘region[s] as remote as Libya and Pamphylia and the parts about Mesopotamia’ (p. 180). However, most readers of Machen’s fiction will probably agree that his vision of the metropolis is, ultimately, very much his own.
The second half of the decade was at least as productive for Machen as the first, yet this fact can only be appreciated in retrospect: in 1897 he wrote a novel, The Hill of Dreams, and a set of ten prose poems or short fantasies; 1899 saw the completion of ‘The White People’ — long reckoned, as much as ‘Pan’ or The Three Impostors, a key work of modern horror — and a book of literary criticism, Hieroglyphics, at which point the death of Machen’s wife interrupted his work on the novella A Fragment of Life, and indeed his writing life altogether. But none of these works — among them some of Machen’s finest — saw print until 1904 at the earliest; the prose poems would not appear complete until 1924, as Ornaments in Jade.
These latter pieces, each of which ‘recounts a single incident in which there is an encounter with the celestial or satanic’,31 represent yet another part of Machen’s oeuvre which deserves to be better known. While it is easy to dismiss them as derivative or secondary fragments — chips struck from The Hill of Dreams during its making, or tentative steps in the direction of ‘The White People’ — these compressed, ambiguous fictions are powerful in their own right. Reading them, one is particularly struck by their insistence on the ineluctability of rite and ritual, ceremony and mystery, as sources of meaning in an age of religious decline.32 They explore, too, the abiding appeal of sympathetic magic and other ‘primitive’ practices. One ‘young lady’ in these pieces imitates the ‘antique immemorial rite’ she had seen another girl perform at the flower-decked stone in the wood; another uses a ‘loathsome’, obscene image to ensnare a gentleman’s affection. At midnight the ‘quiet modest girls of [an] English village’ form a ‘writhing’ sylvan procession; in a London suburb, a City clerk makes and adores a dubious idol (pp. 254, 250, 260). Kindred scenarios are explored in the fragmentary sketches from this period which did not make it out of Machen’s notebooks: there is the ‘Story of a man who made for himself a god’ of clay, that of the ‘ordinary family living in the suburbs [who] shut themselves for certain days in the year to perform some horrible “cave” rites’, the ‘Girl who danced in the Maze [and] was afterwards beset by the influence she had in that manner invoked’, and so on.33 While Machen’s obsession with ritual was hardly new,34 in his earlier tales such practices had been largely associated with either the unambiguously diabolical or the primitive, subhuman ‘other’, or both, rather than with ordinary, modern Englishmen and women. It is no accident that these stories, and stories manqués, were conceived within a culture still under the spell of James George Frazer’s magisterial work of comparative mythology The Golden Bough (1890), a book whose core message was deeply troubling to many Victorians: ‘when all is said and done our resemblances to the savage are still far more numerous than our differences from him’.35
As the Victorian era came to an end, Machen had almost half a century of life ahead of him. It is fair to say that most of his best, and all of his most influential, tales of horror and the weird had been written, if not published, by this time. This is not to say, however, that he produced nothing of interest or value in the twentieth century. During the Great War he performed the remarkable feat of single-handedly, if unintentionally, splicing a myth into the collective imagination of a nation.36 On 29 September 1914, the Evening News carried an account of an embattled English company on the Western Front which is miraculously rescued from annihilation by the spectral bowmen of Agincourt. To say that Machen’s tale of providential delivery from the Hun found favour with the British public would be an understatement. Fantasy was taken for reality; Machen’s insistence that his tale had no basis in fact provoked angry and elaborate rebuttals in print. It was an object lesson in the kind of deeply rooted human connection to myth and the supernatural he explored in his fiction. The success of ‘The Bowmen’, published in book form with a few other war stories, led to several commissioned works, including The Great Return, one of a number of Machen’s writings, fictional and non-fictional, centring upon the Grail legend. Another tale of the War — the mystery-horror novel The Terror (1917), which describes a revolt of the animal kingdom against mankind — helped bring about a revival of interest in Machen, which his friend and biographer John Gawsworth called ‘the boom’. Collected editions of his work appeared on both sides of the Atlantic (with the American edition, by Knopf, bound in yellow covers: yellow books belatedly invoking the decade of ‘yellow bookery’). In the 1920s he wrote a trio of autobiographical books, as well as numerous essays. Finally, in 1936, Machen did what he could not do in 1895 — write a sheaf of fresh ‘tales of horror’ to order. But it is to Machen’s distinctive fin-de-siècle conception of the Gothic horror tale that we now turn.
The first literary form specifically associated with the generation of extreme sensations of horror and terror — the Gothic romance of the eighteenth century — was inextricably, constitutively bound up with a fascination for the past. The same impulse consciously to revive archaic forms prompted Horace Walpole both to build an imitation medieval castle as his home and to pen the foundational Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (1764); his literary successors, from Clara Reeve and Ann Radcliffe to Edgar Allan Poe, wrote about ancestral curses, restless spirits, ancient houses, ruined abbeys. In large measure this fascination was a historically specific one, part of the same broader interest in antiquity that helped give rise to such modern fields of historical inquiry as archaeology; as Clive Bloom notes, the original Gothic sensibility ‘grew from an antiquarian interest in the peoples of the long distant past’.37 Yet — precisely because of the nascent or non-existent state of such disciplines — the antiquarian imagination was necessarily hampered by what now appears to us as a crude and confused — and, above all, cramped — sense of history, to say nothing of prehistory. Many awoke in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to a new sense of wonder at the evidences of past ages to be found throughout Britain — Neolithic barrows, henge monuments, Roman ruins, Saxon artefacts — but lacked a framework for conceptualizing, or differentiating among, these historical periods with anything like the kind of precision which we take for granted today. Sir Thomas Browne’s 1658 prose masterpiece, Urne-Buriall, was inspired by his discovery of Anglo-Saxon pottery urns which he took to be Roman, and things had not changed much by the time the future author of The Castle of Otranto joined the Society of Antiquaries of London in the next century.
Things had changed, however, and radically, by the time Machen came to make his own distinctive contributions to the Gothic tradition, and not only in the development of historiography. Above all, the nineteenth century witnessed a revolution — one which would spread very quickly from the confines of scientific circles to the larger culture — in the conceptualization of temporality itself, a revolution whose dramatic — for some, traumatic — impact is difficult to overstate. The broad contours of this time revolution, while well known, are worth rehearsing briefly. Until comparatively recently the world was believed, on the best authority, to be no more than ‘Some fifty or sixty centuries’ old, a scripturally sanctioned span which was felt to be quite old enough ‘for the unfolding of the whole of known human history and therefore for the natural world, the stage on which it had been played out’.38 Famously, in the middle of the seventeenth century the historian and archbishop James Ussher, no ignoramus or, in our sense, religious fanatic, fixed a precise date of 4004 bce for the Creation. And while subsequent theories of societal development, as well as discoveries by natural historians, might have chafed at times against this compressed chronology, it was not until the nineteenth-century emergence of geology as a science that it was seriously challenged — and, in rather short order, demolished. The world was suddenly — overnight, as it were — millions of years old.39
The revelation of earth’s deep past engendered, variously, feelings of exhilaration, consternation, and anxiety, but seldom indifference. Religious faith, especially when rooted in biblical literalism, was often a casualty; John Ruskin famously lamented: ‘If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.’ On the other hand, the prospect of an all-but-bottomless well of time made for exciting possibilities in other sciences. Pioneering works in evolutionary biology and paleoarchaeology followed in geology’s wake, consolidating the conceptual revolution begun several decades earlier. Deep time was an indispensable ingredient in Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, as well as a spur to new disciplines exploring human ‘prehistory’, a word which now appeared for the first time. Archaeologists proposed the existence of Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages, while John Lubbock’s Pre-Historic Times as Illustrated by Ancient Remains (1865) introduced a further distinction between ‘Palaeolithic’ and ‘Neolithic’ humanity. Meanwhile historians, for their part, largely shrank back from the challenge of allowing so longue a durée to cast its dauntingly attenuated shadow over their discipline, ‘fashioning instead a view of history that begins with the rise of civilization’, and accepting ‘prehistory’ as a kind of conceptual ‘buffer zone’.40
But what has all this to do with Machen, or the literary form that originated with The Castle of Otranto? One way to characterize Machen’s core contribution to modern horror is to say that he engaged in a thoroughgoing reconceptualization — a ‘reboot’, as we might say today — of the Gothic mode in the aftermath of the Victorian time revolution. Arguably no earlier writer had attempted to inscribe the newly revealed abysses of deep temporality, with its disconcerting potentialities, within a recognizably Gothic framework — certainly none so extensively, or so influentially. Machen’s haunted Wales is charged with deep time — it is not a landscape dotted with ruins of vaguely antique provenance, but a coded, stratified space preserving traces of the historic, prehistoric, and prehuman pasts alike (even if these traces have a disconcerting habit of appearing where they are not supposed to be). And the historical sciences of geology, archaeology, and ethnology, as well as such kindred fields as philology and comparative mythology, are on prominent display in Machen’s fiction, where they are not mere window dressing but rather central to the articulation of his Gothic vision.
These disciplines are particularly conspicuous in the stories of the 1890s featuring Machen’s recurring character Dyson (a Sherlock Holmes figure whose mind, unlike that of Conan Doyle’s iconic detective, is ever musing on the mysteries of the deep past). In ‘The Shining Pyramid’, for instance, Dyson, seeking to account for the anomalous presence in Gwent of a number of prehistoric flints, asks casually, ‘By the way . . . what is your geological formation down there?’ His friend, while surprised, replies with promptitude and accuracy: ‘Old red sandstone and limestone, I believe. . . . We are just beyond the coal measures, you know’ (p. 227).41 As for the flints, their appearance prompts Dyson to deduce the agency of the sinister race which represents one of Machen’s favourite conceits — his reimagining of the fairies of Celtic lore as a survival from the prehistoric past. In this and other tales, Machen clearly draws upon contemporary works of archaeology and anthropology in associating the material culture of the ‘Little People’ with the Neolithic period. They possess ‘flint arrow-head[s] of vast antiquity’, ‘primitive stone axe[s]’, a ‘primitive stone knife’ resembling an ‘adze’ — all artefacts which might have come straight from Lubbock’s Pre-Historic Times (Dyson’s ethnologist companion declares the adze-knife, with authority, to have been ‘made about ten thousand years ago. One exactly like this was found near Abury [Avebury], in Wiltshire’, p. 200).
Other writers of the time, to be sure, engaged imaginatively with deep time, sometimes to create horrors; H. G. Wells once again comes to mind. Machen once described a sensation of ‘travelling in time — backwards, not forwards, as in Mr. Wells’s enchantment’,42 and subsequent commentators have imagined his and Wells’s countenances as the two faces of Janus — one looking to the past, the other to the future — seeing this as the essential difference between them.43 This is not quite right — Wells wrote, for instance, a set of ‘Stories of the Stone Age’ in the 1890s, dramatizing the transition from Palaeolithic to Neolithic culture — but there are indeed fundamental differences between Machen’s creative exploitation of deep time and its uses in science fiction. This can be seen quite clearly by simply comparing two subhuman, subterranean races, superficially not dissimilar, which appeared in works of British popular fiction in the same year, 1895: Wells’s Morlocks (in The Time Machine) and Machen’s Little People (in ‘The Shining Pyramid’, ‘The Red Hand’, and The Three Impostors). While the former are the product of Darwinian evolution, descended from men over the span of hundreds of thousands of years, the latter are, as another of Machen’s ethnologists puts it, ‘unchanged and unchangeable’, perennially ‘repeating the evil of Gothic legend’ (p. 137) — perpetuating the same rites, propagating the same symbols — throughout the ages. True, Professor Gregg, in a sop to the Darwinian idiom, suggests that they have ‘fallen out of the grand march of evolution’ (p. 136), but the enduring impression Machen leaves is of an utterly changeless evil, coeval with the geologic timescale itself; the ‘chronotope’ of these stories, as Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin would have put it, suggests the presence of a deep but not evolutionary time (in ‘The Red Hand’ Dyson, contemplating the inscriptions on one of the Little People’s tablets, is struck by ‘an impression of vast and far-off ages, and of a living being that had touched the stone with enigmas before the hills were formed, when the hard rocks still boiled with fervent heat’ (p. 208); in ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’ Miss Lally reflects upon ‘awful things done long ago, and forgotten before the hills were moulded into form’ (p. 129) ). Machen takes care, too, to draw an absolute, unbridgeable boundary line between the speech of these beings (‘a jargon but little removed from the inarticulate noises of brute beasts’) and that of humans, echoing the anti-Darwinian position of philologist Max Müller, who famously wrote, ‘language is our Rubicon, and no brute will dare to cross it’.44
And yet. They write. These ostensible ‘troglodytes’ possess systems of symbolic inscription exactly akin to those associated with the first human civilizations (Machen makes pointed reference to Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Hittite cultures), at just the moment in intellectual history when writing was being conceptualized as the defining marker of civilized man.45 They engrave their ‘hieroglyphics’ on seals of black stone, and scrawl them with bits of red earth on limestone rocks in Monmouthshire (aeons later, yet ‘without alteration of any kind’; they are radically static culturally as well as racially). In one story Machen describes ‘a kind of cuneiform character, a good deal altered’; in another, an elaborate system of ‘fantastic figures, spirals and whorls’ (pp. 139, 208). And this calculated blending of Neolithic and Postlithic cultural forms, and their backwards projection into the fathomless deeps of geologic time, is a good example of the kind of unsettling effect Machen sought to produce in these deep Gothic tales. The chief horror of Darwinism lies in its reminder that we come from beasts, its intimation that ‘underneath it all’ the respectable vicar or barrister is a savage. But Machen travesties the very categories that were emerging within Victorian intellectual culture, historiography in particular, to distinguish ‘civilized’ from ‘savage’, ‘history’ from ‘prehistory’ (and both of these from what came before). He articulates, in other words, the ‘deep history’ which the later Victorian era was keen to repress.46
In the fin-de-siècle fictions which earned Machen a measure of evanescent notoriety, he may, again, have sometimes gestured at horrors too awful to be named, but he can hardly be accused of denying his readers horrors of a more explicit, and graphic, nature as well. His ‘transmutations’ (the subtitle of The Three Impostors) of the human form — his depictions of corporeal corruption and deliquescence, of extreme torture, and other figured ‘ruinations of the human subject’ (in Kelly Hurley’s phrase)47 — evoke shock, disgust, and visceral fear, pointing the way unflinchingly to our contemporary genre of ‘body horror’. Yet even in his earlier writings — ‘The Lost Club’ is one example — one can detect another, subtler modality of unease, one which would help to lend a shared, distinctive tone to a number of his later stories in particular, and which often appears in Machen’s descriptions of London. The keynote here is one of dislocation, defamiliarization, and dread, rather than acute terror and revulsion. This is the Machen of labyrinthine urban spaces, of uncanny repetition, of bounded infinities; the Machen, perhaps most of all, of the alternate, the parallel, the counterfactual, the lost.
It is a note that has, for us, a distinctly modern, or postmodern, sound, as in an early article he wrote for the Evening News and later summarized in Things Near and Far:
I said the chief horror of the modern street was not to be sought in the poverty of the design . . . but in the fact that in the street of to-day each house is a replica of the other, so that the effect to the eye is, if the street be long enough, the prolongation of one house to infinity, in an endless series of repetitions. And I pointed out that even if you admired some particular picture or statue immensely, it would be rather awful to traverse a long gallery in which the picture or the statue were repeated again and again as far as the eye could see.48
If such passages as this seem to anticipate the imaginative world of Jorge Luis Borges, it is no accident; the Argentine writer whom David Foster Wallace called ‘the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism’ counted Machen among his influences.49 Indeed, Machen’s impact on postmodern literature, if only through his impact on Borges, has yet to be fully explored. For both writers, the figure of the labyrinth served as a master-trope; both, too, were fascinated with the theme of ‘forking paths’, in Borges’s phrase.50 In his (itself digressive, reflexive, furcating) book The London Adventure Machen would imaginatively populate an entire district of the metropolis, a kind of parallel neighbourhood, with those whose lives had taken a ‘wrong’ turn:
Here live, I know, the people who are a little aside from all our tracks, and, perhaps some of them have a wisdom of their own or a folly of their own which differs from all our common systems of sapience or stultification. . . . I always look upon this strange, unknown region as the country of the people who have lost their way. . . . I am sure that they are all secret people who live there, to the east of the Gray’s Inn Road; secret and severed people. . .51
Forking paths and parallel worlds become especially prominent themes in the stories from Machen’s last creative period. In ‘Out of the Picture’, for instance, we encounter a painter whose response to what he sees as the fatuities of modernism is to return, creatively, to the eighteenth century — to one of the branching points in the history of Western art — and from there to take an alternate path forward. Elsewhere Machen explores the prospect of discrete, multiple worlds, and the disconcerting possibility of their intrusion into our own — a theme which has since become a commonplace in science fiction and fantasy, as well as more ‘literary’ fictions. ‘N’ is about a parallel reality that can be glimpsed, under certain circumstances, from within the London suburb (as it then was) of Stoke Newington, through a process which Machen, borrowing a term from Christian theology, calls ‘a perichoresis, an interpenetration’. This particular world appears as a paradise; but Machen hints that there are others, less pleasant. The story ends as one character, comfortably seated in ‘the very heart of London’, is struck with a disagreeable thought:
‘. . . It is possible, indeed, that we three are now sitting among desolate rocks, by bitter streams.
. . . And with what companions?’ (p. 320)
Written shortly after ‘N’, the poignant ‘The Tree of Life’ displays Machen’s penchant for articulating counterfactual variants of the reality we know. The story begins prosaically enough, with the young invalid Teilo Morgan talking with his agent about potential improvements to his estate. Only gradually does the reader become aware that his proposed innovations are insane (there is to be cultivation of eggplants (aubergines) and arbor vitae, with ‘zebras for haulage’); the estate, which had indeed once belonged to his family, is now a madhouse. Yet it is far from clear that Teilo’s fantasies are to be understood as lunacy tout court (and not only because Machen had himself once advocated the British cultivation of eggplants52); he has, like the denizens of Machen’s secret London, ‘a wisdom of [his] own or a folly of [his] own’. As a young boy Teilo had been stricken with a brain illness, which changed him utterly. A tutor is hired to humour him:
And . . . young Teilo nearly drove the poor man off his head. He was far sharper in a way than he’d ever been. . . . But then the twist in the brain would come out. Mathematics brilliant; and at the end of the lesson he’d frighten that tutor of his with a new theory of figures, some notion of the figures that we don’t know of, the numbers that are between the others, something rather more than one and less than two, and so forth. It was the same with everything: there was the Secret Conquest of England a hundred years ago, that nobody was allowed to mention, and the squares that were always changing their shape in geometry, and the great continent that was hidden because Africa was on top of it, so that you couldn’t see it. Then, when it came to the classics, there were fresh cases for the nouns and new moods for the verbs: and all the rest of it. (p. 334)
The phrase ‘Tree of Life’ refers, among other things, to a Kabbalistic figure, an arrangement of ‘Sephiroth [which] tell in a kind of magic shorthand the whole history and mystery of man and all the worlds’.53 In which of these worlds, we may ask, was Teilo vouchsafed his knowledge of an alternate mathematics, historiography, geography, and grammar?
Machen’s fascination with parallel worlds or dimensions shows the convergence of many sources, Christianity and Platonism among them (even such tales as ‘Pan’ are premised upon the existence of a spiritual world ‘beyond the veil’). There are possible antecedents to be found, too, in his favourite reading: the tale of Buluqiya in his beloved Arabian Nights has been invoked as an early example of a parallel-worlds fantasy, and Isaac D’Israeli and Richard Whately were among the first to explore the theme of counterfactual historiography.54 Esoteric literature certainly makes a conceptual contribution to ‘The Tree of Life’ at least. Machen was also intrigued — despite his avowed mathematical ‘incompetence’ — by the multidimensional speculations of those initiated into the mysteries of what he called ‘the high geometry’. He knew (and mentions in The Terror) Edwin A. Abbott’s pioneering novel of parallel worlds Flatland (1884); in The London Adventure he writes: ‘For we, it is true, live in an illusory world, but there are other spheres of deception, beyond ours, and of a different order . . . the geometers tell us that there is a fourth dimension beyond our three, and so on, as I understand, to the nth and to infinity’ — perhaps the significance of the cryptic title ‘N’ lies in that ‘nth’?55
Yet it is difficult not to assign some part to Machen’s personal ambivalence about his literary achievements as well, one which led him to ruminate about paths not taken, or paths, as he seemed to believe, he was not capable of taking. He was haunted by the gap between vision and execution, the ideal and the real — by a sense of the writer he might have been. Indeed, if Machen had been permitted a glimpse of a world in which he had been transmuted into a ‘classic’, with his ‘shilling shocker’ ‘Pan’ included in a series alongside the masters he revered, he would surely have thought it the most improbable future imaginable. Modern readers of weird fiction, for their part, can be thankful for the particular sequence of forkings in Machen’s path which led him to London, unqualified for any vocation but the one he made for himself, in poverty and solitude. If, for instance, the Revd John Edward Jones had been able to send his son to Oxford, some smallish congregation in Monmouthshire might well have been edified by decades of lyrical, allusive sermons, known locally for their unusually vivid depictions of sin, death, and the punishments of hell. But the paths traced by the literature of fear and the uncanny, throughout the twentieth century and beyond, would have been profoundly different — and infinitely less interesting.