the lost club
First published in 1890 in The Whirlwind, 2 (20 December); reprinted in the 1923 collection The Shining Pyramid (Covici-McGee; not to be confused with the 1925 Martin Secker collection of the same name; see headnote to ‘The Shining Pyramid’).
3 Piccadilly Deserta: cf. Arabia Deserta (‘deserted Arabia’), a classical denomination. Possibly the phrase was in part suggested by the recently published, and much-praised, two-volume work
Travels in Arabia Deserta, by the explorer Charles Montagu Doughty (1843–1926). Also, the
One Thousand and One Nights or
Arabian Nights, which had been translated into English twice in the previous decade (by John Payne in 1882–4 and Richard Burton in 1885), was an important influence on Machen, as was Robert Louis Stevenson’s
New Arabian Nights, published in 1882 (‘The
Lost Club’ has, indeed, been dismissed by some as little more than an imitation of one of its episodes, ‘The Suicide Club’).
3 a true son of the carnation: the phrase indicates a connection to the Decadent movement; Oscar Wilde had taken the green carnation as his emblem.
the Phœnix . . . the Row . . . Hurlingham: there was a Phoenix Club in St James’s Place, though not by this time. ‘The Row’ refers to Rotten Row (a corruption of ‘Route du Roi’) in Hyde Park, a track for horse riding and once a fashionable spot. The Hurlingham Club in Fulham, still in operation, was founded in 1869 — initially for pigeon shooting, then polo, and finally a broad range of sports and games.
bus: horse-drawn omnibus.
‘White Horse Cellars’: old coaching inn.
‘Badminton’: the Badminton Club in Piccadilly was founded in 1875.
Briar Rose . . . the Beauty . . . was fast asleep: the briar rose is both a flowering plant ( Rosa rubiginosa) and the title of a folk tale (‘Little Briar Rose’ or ‘Dornröschen’, recorded by the Brothers Grimm), corresponding to the story of ‘Sleeping Beauty’.
Johnny: the OED quotes an 1889 issue of the Daily News: ‘An idle and vacuous young aristocrat, of the class popularly known as “Johnnies” ’.
4 a quiet dinner at Azario’s: Luigi Azario’s Florence Restaurant, in Rupert Street. Machen dined there in 1890 with Oscar Wilde, who praised his story ‘A Double Return’ as having ‘fluttered the dovecotes’ of public opinion.
the Junior Wilton: probably fictitious; there was a Junior Carlton Club in Pall Mall, a Junior Athenaeum Club in Piccadilly, and so on.
Green Chartreuse: a green-tinged liqueur, made by the Carthusian monks.
‘Hansom!’: hansom cab (short for ‘cabriolet’), a speedy two-wheeled carriage then at the height of its popularity as a mode of urban transport. They are plentiful, for instance, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s contemporaneous Sherlock Holmes stories.
The Great God Pan
The first part of what would become ‘The Great God Pan’ was published in 1890; further chapters were completed at intervals, and the whole published, together with ‘The Inmost Light’, by John Lane in 1894. ‘Pan’ has been associated with the Decadent movement since its first appearance when, in Machen’s words, ‘yellow bookery was at its yellowest’.
9 phantasmagoria: a projector-based light show, introduced in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century and in London (where it became very popular) at the beginning of the nineteenth. With its moving ghosts and skeletons which appeared to rush towards the audience, sound effects, and eerie musical accompaniment, the original Phantasmagoria provided an overwhelming, and often terrifying, sensory experience. By extension,
‘a rapidly transforming collection or series of imaginary (and usually fantastic) forms, such as may be experienced in a dream or fevered state’ (
OED).
10 “chases in Arras, dreams in a career”: from ‘Dotage’, in
The Temple, by the Welsh-born clergyman and poet George Herbert (1593–1632). Raymond’s exposition to Clarke suggests ‘a classic neo-Platonist view of reality’ (Luckhurst, 279); Herbert’s tropes of the illusory and evanescent, which also include ‘Foolish night-fires [will o’wisps] . . . guilded emptinesse, | Shadows well mounted . . . Embroider’d lyes’, thus join Raymond’s other figures — the phantasmagoria, the lifted veil — as he paints a portrait of the unreality of the material world.
the god Pan: Greek (originally Arcadian) deity of shepherds and flocks, half-man and half-goat. Through a false etymology (his name is in fact connected with the word for ‘herdsman’), Pan came to be associated with ‘the All’ (‘pan’ in Greek). The phrase ‘The Great God Pan’ had been used by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her poem ‘A Musical Instrument’, included in the posthumous collection Last Poems (1862).
grey matter: one of two kinds of brain tissue (the other being white matter), associated with cerebration.
Digby’s theory, and Browne Faber’s discoveries: fictitious, perhaps suggesting, respectively, the natural philosopher Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–65) and the neurologist Charles Édouard Brown-Séquard (1817–94) (Luckhurst, 279).
11 this world of ours is pretty well girded now with the telegraph wires and cables: the first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1858 and promptly failed — to be replaced, successfully, by 1866. After this major hurdle had been cleared, the following decades saw the prodigious extension of a (largely British-dominated ) telegraph network across much of the globe, one which formed, by the 1890s, a veritable ‘World Wide Web’.
articulate-speaking men: a Homeric phrase which often recurs in Machen.
Oswald Crollius: (
c.1560–1609) Paracelsian iatrochemist (combination chemist and physician) known for his ‘theory of signatures’. Machen came across his writings while working his way through an enormous occult library for which he had to prepare a bookseller’s catalogue. Years later he would write:
Now and then in the older books I came across striking sentences. There was Oswaldus Crollius, for example — I suppose his real name was Osvald Kroll — who is quoted by one of the characters in ‘The Great God Pan’. ‘In every grain of wheat’, says Oswaldus, ‘there lies hidden the soul of a star’. A wonderful saying; a declaration, I suppose, that all matter is one, manifested under many forms; and, so far as I can gather, modern science is rapidly coming round to the view of this obscure speculator of the seventeenth century; and, in fact, to the doctrine of the alchemists. ( TNF, 27)
15 homœopathic: in a medical context, curing like with like. The principle of ‘homoeopathic magic’, by which ‘like produces like’, is discussed at length by James George Frazer in
The Golden Bough, first published in 1890.
a place of some importance in the time of the Roman occupation: the village is near Machen’s birthplace of Caerleon, barely disguised here, as in his novel
The Hill of Dreams, as ‘Caermaen’. The town was the site of the
castra (legionary fortress) of Isca (from the river Usk) Augusta, built around 75
ce. In his twelfth-century
Itinerarium Kambriae, or ‘Journey around Wales’, Gerald of Wales wrote:
Caerleon means the city of Legions, Caer, in the British language, signifying a city or camp, for there the Roman legions, sent into this island, were accustomed to winter, and from this circumstance it was styled the city of legions. This city was of undoubted antiquity, and handsomely built of masonry, with courses of bricks, by the Romans. Many vestiges of its former splendour may yet be seen; immense palaces, formerly ornamented with gilded roofs, in imitation of Roman magnificence, inasmuch as they were first raised by the Roman princes, and embellished with splendid buildings; a tower of prodigious size, remarkable hot baths, relics of temples, and theatres, all inclosed within fine walls, parts of which remain standing. (trans. Richard Colt Hoare (London, 1806), i. 103–4).
No doubt Machen also has in mind the nearby village of Caerwent, of which he wrote, years later: ‘Caerwent, also a Roman city, was buried in the earth, and gave up now and again strange relics — fragments of the temple of “Nodens, god of the depths” ’ ( FOT, 19). See note to p. 53.
18 charcoal burners: the production of charcoal from wood was a traditional occupation in Wales, dating back at least to Roman times.
19 faun or satyr: mythological half-human, half-goat creatures. See also note to p. 36.
21 et diabolus incarnatus est. et homo factus est.: ‘And the devil was made incarnate. And was made man’; a travesty of the Nicene Creed, in which Christ ‘By the power of the Holy Spirit . . . became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man’ (Luckhurst, 279).
Wadham: Wadham College of the University of Oxford, founded in 1610.
Rupert Street: see note to p. 4.
Vaughan: one of several surnames used recurrently in Machen’s fiction. He had in mind not the Welsh metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan (1621–95) but his twin brother Thomas (1621–66), the alchemist and hermetic philosopher. The latter, author of the occult treatise
Lumen de Lumine; or a New Magicall Light Discovered and Communicated to the World (published under the pseudonym ‘Eugenius Philalethes’), was an important influence on Machen’s fiction. Helen Vaughan’s ultimate end, in ‘Pan’s’ denouement, exemplifies the alchemical theories of her seventeenth-century namesake, who
declare[d] that all human beings are bisexual, and that first matter is a cool slime: ‘When I consider the system or fabric of this world I find it to be a certain series, a link or chain, which is extended “a non gradu ad non gradum” . . . Beneath all degrees of sense there is a certain horrible, inexpressible darkness. The magicians call it “tenebrae activae” ’ (Reynolds and Charlton, 46)
26 the Treasury: the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions had been combined with that of the Treasury Solicitor in 1884.
29 model lodging-house: in response to the squalid and overcrowded conditions of many common lodging houses in the early Victorian era, Prince Albert spearheaded efforts to construct new tenements for the London poor. American novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote from London in 1853: ‘This morning Lord Shaftesbury came, according to appointment, to take me to see the Model Lodging Houses. He remarked that it would be impossible to give me the full effect of seeing them, unless I could first visit the dens of filth, disease, and degradation, in which the poor of London formerly were lodged’ (
Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (Boston, 1854), ii. 209).
35 Ainu jugs: the Ainu are a people indigenous to parts of Japan, in particular the island of Hokkaido, and the Russian Far East. Scottish anthropologist Neil Gordon Munro (1863–1942) describes a ‘curious’ Ainu ceremony involving the ladling out of beer with ‘a lacquered jug (
etunup)’ (
Ainu Creed and Cult (London and New York, 2011), iv. 76). In
The Golden Bough, James George Frazer discusses ‘the bear-sacrifice offered by the Aino or Ainu’, which involves the eating of flesh ‘in special vessels of wood finely carved’ and drinking of blood from a cup. There is no mention here, however, of a jug (Frazer, 524, 530).
Silet per diem . . . per oram maritimam: from the Collectanea Rerum Memorabilum of classical geographer Gaius Julius Solinus, a work largely plagiarized from Pliny the Elder and Pomponius Mela ( OCD, 786). The passage ‘describes a Bacchic orgy on the seashore beside Mount Atlas’, complete with ‘Aegipans and Satyres’ (Luckhurst, 279).
36 Walpurgis Night: English rendering of the German
Walpurgisnacht, 30 April (May Day’s eve). The feast day of the eighth-century St Walpurga, it is associated with the Witches’ Sabbath and unholy revelry by the powers of darkness more generally. Frazer writes: ‘In Central Europe it was apparently on Walpurgis Night, the Eve of May Day, above all other times that the baleful powers of the witches were exerted to the fullest extent’ (Frazer, 574–5).
Fauns and Satyrs and Ægipans: there is a strong family resemblance, to say the least, among these mythological caprine hybrids; an Aegipan is described in the OED as ‘A goat-like creature similar to a satyr. . . . [also] a Greek god resembling, and sometimes considered to be identical to, the god Pan’. In ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, a tale Machen greatly admired, Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) writes of ‘passages in Pomponius Mela, about the old African Satyrs and Œgipans [ sic], over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours’ ( Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1861), i. 302).
37 bachelor’s gown: in other words, a university degree.
37 Zulu assegais: one of the relations standing between Charles Aubernoun and the title was presumably an officer killed during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, perhaps the disastrous (from a British perspective) Battle of Isandlwana. An assegai is a spear.
38 the sordid murders of Whitechapel: a reference to the unsolved ‘Ripper’ murders of 1888, which remain to this day a source of fascination and seemingly endless speculation. (One wonders what Machen would have thought of the numerous conspiracy theories that arose in the later twentieth century linking the murders to Freemasonry, Black Magic rituals, and other occult matters, explored most famously, perhaps, in Alan Moore’s graphic novel
From Hell.)
40 the labyrinth of Dædalus: in Greek mythology, the master artificer Daedalus was responsible for devising such marvels as the Minotaur’s labyrinth in Crete — an inescapable maze inhabited by a monstrous man-bull — and the famous waxen wings with which his son Icarus flew too close to the sun.
the Row: see note to p. 3.
41 Carlton Club: founded in 1832; associated with the Conservative Party.
Scotland Yard: the Metropolitan Police force of London, founded in 1829, had moved from Great Scotland Yard to new headquarters (New Scotland Yard) on the Victoria Embankment in 1890.
44 Queer Street: slang expression indicating a state of financial embarrassment; a metaphorical place. Here, presumably by extension, Villiers seems to be referring, less figuratively, to a particular seedy locale and its underworldly denizens.
45 cicerone: a learned guide, one ‘who shows and explains the antiquities or curiosities of a place to strangers’. Derived from the name of the Roman philosopher Cicero (106–43
bce), with reference to his profound ‘learning or eloquence’ (
OED).
50 paintings which survived beneath the lava: a reference to Pompeii and/or Herculaneum, Roman cities destroyed in
79 ce by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
51 Caermaen: see note to p. 17.
53 the great god Nodens: alternatively Nodons, a Celtic deity with multiple associations, to whom a temple in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire (3rd century
bce) is dedicated. Described in the
Dictionary of Celtic Mythology (Oxford, 2004) as the ‘British god of healing . . . No physical depiction of Nodons survives, but votive plaques at the shrine indicate his associations with dogs. Another figure appears to show a man hooking a fish. Nodons has been likened to Mars the healer rather than Mars the warrior, as well as to Silvanus, a Roman god, of the hunt.’
The Inmost Light
Published with ‘The Great God Pan’ by John Lane in 1894 (see headnote to ‘The Great God Pan’). The story, or at least its most arresting moment, has
its origins in what Machen considered to be the hideous suburbanization of London:
I made the horrid apparition of the crude new houses in the midst of green pastures the seed of my tale, ‘The Inmost Light’, which was originally bound up with ‘The Great God Pan’. And so the man in my story, resting in green fields, looked up and saw a face that chilled his blood gazing at him from the back of one of those red houses that had once frightened me, when I was a sorry lad of twenty, wandering about the verges of London. The doctor of my tale lived in Harlesden. ( FOT, 123–4)
The tale marks the first appearance of Machen’s recurrent character Dyson, who would appear again in The Three Impostors, ‘The Red Hand’, and ‘The Shining Pyramid’ (all included here).
55 Rupert Street . . . his favourite restaurant: see note to p. 4.
56 salmi: a stew of roasted game.
Ratés: professional failures (French). In his autobiographical The London Adventure Machen would write: ‘Most of us have always found the career of the raté, the artist who misses fire, distinctly comic. The poet who can hardly get into the corner column of his country paper, the novelist whose novels are simply “rot”, the painter whose pictures are a joke: we laugh heartily at them all’ ( LA, 113–14). This sounds cruel until one realizes that Machen is self-deprecatingly including himself in this category.
57 Chaldee roots: i.e. of the Chaldean language.
Homers, not Agamemnons. Carent quia vate sacro: from Horace’s Odes, 4.9: ‘Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but, all unwept and unknown, are lost in the distant night, since they are without a divine poet (to chronicle their deeds).’ London, in other words, does not lack for ‘artistic crimes’ but for capable chroniclers.
Harlesden: once a country village (it is recorded in Domesday Book), Harlesden became progressively urbanized in the course of the nineteenth century, particularly in response to the spread of the railway. Machen’s story captures this sense of dramatic development in the later decades of the century (see headnote).
“because it was near the Palace”: the Crystal Palace, originally erected in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851, was moved in 1854 to Sydenham. After this ‘the Palace became the centre of [Norwood’s] existence. Visitors flocked to the Palace’s varied attractions, many of them brought by the Crystal Palace and West End Railway Line, opened in 1856’ (Weinreb and Hibbert, 906). Crystal Palace was destroyed by fire in 1936.
58 city: the City of London (or Square Mile), the oldest, most historic part of London; also its financial and business centre.
’bus: see note to p. 3.
red lamp: sign of a doctor’s establishment.
59 “General Gordon”: a pub named after Major General Charles George Gordon (1833–85), a martyr in the Victorian cultural imagination after his death in Khartoum at the hands of Mahdist forces, a comparatively recent event.
a fire that is unquenchable: see note to p. 236.
64 sudorific: a perspiration-promoting medicine.
65 agony column: newspaper columns devoted to personal advertisements. Sherlock Holmes perused them eagerly in his professional capacity; in ‘The Noble Bachelor’ he says, ‘I read nothing except the criminal news and the agony column. The latter is always instructive’, and in ‘The Adventure of the Red Circle’ we find him ‘[taking] down the great book in which, day by day, he filed the agony columns of the various London journals. “Dear me!” said he, turning over the pages, “what a chorus of groans, cries, and bleatings! What a rag-bag of singular happenings! But surely the most valuable hunting-ground that ever was given to a student of the unusual!” ’
gimp: a plaited trimming on furniture.
66 green rep and the oleographs: rep is a ‘plain-weave fabric (usually of wool, silk, or cotton) with a ribbed surface, used esp. for draperies and upholstery’ (
OED); oleography is a form of lithography that seeks to imitate oil painting (‘oleo-’ meaning ‘relating to oil’).
Benedictine: a French herbal liqueur, so called because originally made by French monks of that order.
68 char-woman: a charwoman or charlady was hired by the day to do cleaning and other domestic work. ‘Char’ is related etymologically to ‘chore’.
70 pennons: long, thin flags.
Paracelsus and the Rosicrucians: Paracelsus was Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (
c.1493–1541), Swiss physician, alchemist, and occultist. (There is a bust of Paracelsus in J. K. Rowling’s fictional Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, in the Harry Potter series.) The Rosicrucians were a society, or more properly a number of societies, inspired by a trio of early seventeenth-century manifestoes asserting the existence of a fictitious ‘Order of the Holy Cross’; the Order of the Golden Dawn, to which Machen later belonged, had Rosicrucian connections. Machen would write, years later, of his disappointment in learning of the spurious origins of Rosicrucianism:
It was a sad blow to me to find out afterwards, chiefly through the medium of A. E. Waite’s ‘Real History of the Rosicrucians’, that, as a cold matter of fact, there were no Rosicrucians. A Lutheran pastor who had read Paracelsus, wrote, early in the seventeenth century, a pamphlet describing a secret order which had no existence outside of his brain. Naturally enough, societies arose which imitated, so far as they could, the imaginary organisation described by the fantastic Johannes Valentinus Andrea; I should not be surprised, indeed, to be told that such societies are now in being in modern London; but these orders are late ‘fakes’; the ’seventies and ’eighties of the last century saw their beginnings. There are no Rosicrucians — and there never were any. ( FOT, 133)
71 dun: in this sense, persistently to demand payment.
Explicit: Latin; declaration of an ending; cf. Incipit, beginning.
73 Rabelaisian: François Rabelais (d. 1553), author of the Renaissance classic
Gargantua and Pantagruel, was on Machen’s shortlist of essential authors. ‘Rabelaisian’ usually suggests the presence of bawdy, earthy comedy; the reference here is to the giant, living sausages encountered by Pantagruel in the fourth book of
Gargantua and Pantagruel.
74 penny exercise-books: blank books used for school exercises.
story papers: periodicals containing fiction, especially aimed at a juvenile (male) audience. A prominent example from this period would be the Boy’s Own Paper.
The Three Impostors
Published by John Lane in 1895, also as part of the Keynotes Series. In Henry Danielson’s 1923 bibliography of his writings to that point, Machen commented:
The title of this book has a curious history. ‘De Tribus Impostoribus’ was a book much talked of by the learned in the seventeenth century. As far as I can remember, quoting without book, Browne of the ‘Religio Medici’ speaks of that ‘villain and secretary of hell that wrote the miscreant piece of “The Three Impostors” ’ . . . the three impostors, by the way, were Christ, Moses and Mohamet. Perhaps there never was such a book, perhaps such a book did exist in manuscript, was seen by a few and talked about by many. Anyhow, I liked the sound of the title, and noted it in ’85, and indicated in my notebook the sort of book — a picaresque romance — I should like to write under that head; and so had the title waiting for me in the spring of 1895. (Danielson, 26)
79 Lipsius: Machen has likely borrowed the surname (with slight modification) from Prussian archaeologist and Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius (1810–84), whose three-year expedition to Memphis and Thebes in 1843–5 filled Berlin’s Egyptian Museum with ancient artefacts.
80 dormer windows . . . Georgian wings; bow windows . . . and two dome-like cupolas: architectural terms; the house, redolent with unwholesome decay and Gothic menace, is described (yet) more fully in the last chapter of the novel. It is an architectural palimpsest, with later additions (both ‘Georgian wings’ and bow windows would date from, at least, the eighteenth century) to an original, late seventeenth-century town house.
a rusting Triton on the rocks: in Greek mythology, Triton was a sea-god, son of Poseidon, depicted as man above and fish below, and sounding a conch-shell trumpet.
81 Gold Tiberius: see note to p. 85.
Jeremy Taylor: (bap. 1613, d. 1667) English divine and author of devotional works, particularly Holy Living (1650) and Holy Dying (1651), which he wrote in south-west Wales. Admirers of Taylor’s prose style included favourite Machen authors Thomas De Quincey and William Hazlitt, who wrote of Taylor, ‘His style is prismatic. It unfolds the colours of the rainbow; it floats like the bubble through the air; it is like innumerable dew-drops that glitter on the face of the morning, and tremble as they glitter.’ When Machen translated Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron into English, he affected a ‘composite’ Caroline style blending ‘Herrick, Taylor, Browne, Pepys, Fuller, and Walton’ (Sweetser, 21).
“The grimy sash an oriel burns”: from the poem ‘All-Saints’ Day’ by James Russell Lowell (1819–91). An oriel is a recess with a window, but according to Victorian poetic convention could mean a stained-glass window. Lowell is picturing a ‘den’ of ‘Sin and Famine’ transfigured by the presence of saints: ‘The den they enter grows a shrine, | The grimy sash an oriel burns’.
cedarn: made of cedar.
Bentley’s favourite novelists: George Bentley (1828–95) was scion of one of the Victorian era’s great publishing families. His ‘favourite novels’ series was launched in 1862 with Ellen (‘Mrs Henry’) Wood’s sensational East Lynne; other bestselling authors in the series would include Rhoda Broughton and Marie Corelli.
82 Dyson was addicted to wild experiments in tobacco: Machen, an enthusiastic smoker, may be said to have begun his literary career with a ‘wild experiment in tobacco’, his first published book being a learned frolic, in imitation of Robert Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy, entitled
The Anatomy of Tobacco: or Smoking Methodised, Divided, and Considered after a New Fashion (1884).
83 ethnologist: ‘ethnology’ is a term seldom used today; approximately what we would call social or cultural anthropology.
Bohemianism: the French had long applied the word ‘Bohemian’ to gipsies; by extension a ‘gipsy of society; one who either cuts himself off, or is by his habits cut off, from society for which he is otherwise fitted; especially an artist, literary man, or actor, who leads a free, vagabond, or irregular life’ ( OED). Popular works like Henri Murger’s 1851 Scènes de la vie de bohème and its offshoots (most famously Giacomo Puccini’s great opera La Bohème, first performed in 1896) helped to establish the association between social Bohemianism and grinding poverty, which timely inheritances have helped Dyson and Phillipps to avoid.
Red Lion Square: ‘a quiet square’, as Machen says, ‘not far from Holborn’, it lies to the south of Theobald’s Road. It is named after the Red Lion Inn, where in 1661 Oliver Cromwell’s disinterred corpse lay before being hung in chains at Tyburn (Weinreb and Hibbert, 639).
chiaroscuro: in painting and other pictorial arts, the treatment of light and shadow.
the “criticism-of-life” theory: reference to the critical theory of Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822–88), who maintained that ‘poetry’, alternatively ‘literature’, ‘is a criticism of life’. Machen’s own theory of literature, which centred upon the idea of ‘ecstasy’, would be articulated a few years later in his book Hieroglyphics.
84 a huge pantechnicon warehouse: the original Pantechnicon (roughly, ‘place-of-all-arts’), built in 1830 in Belgrave Square, was part warehouse and part collection of craft shops. Generically, any building serving a similar purpose; a bazaar.
85 ‘Imp. Tiberius Cæsar Augustus’: 42
bce–37
ce; second emperor of the Roman Empire. While his successors Caligula and Nero may have blacker reputations today, Tiberius was accused by the ancient historians of considerable cruelty and depravity. Both Tacitus (
c.56–
c.120) and Suetonius (
c.70–
c.130) describe, for instance, infamous orgies on his island retreat of Capreae (Capri). It is not difficult to see how Suetonius’ account in particular could have influenced Machen, not only in his conception of Lipsius, but in other tales as well: ‘He [Tiberius] furthermore devised little nooks of lechery in the woods and glades of the island, and had boys and girls dressed up as Pans and nymphs, prostituting themselves in front of caverns or grottoes; so that the island was now openly and generally called “Caprineum” [“caper” = “goat”]’ (
The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves (London, 2003), 132). Tiberius’ love of ‘prolonged and exquisite tortures’ (142) also seems salient in the context of Lipsius and his society.
86 Sir Joshua Byrde: invented figure.
Aleppo: ancient Syrian city, then one of the most important cities of the Ottoman Empire.
virtuosi: plural of virtuoso, in this sense an expert on or connoisseur of antiques.
87 as ships were drawn to the Loadstone Rock in the Eastern tale: this story of a ship-destroying magnetic mountain is to be found in the Third Kalendar’s Tale in the
One Thousand and One Nights. As noted earlier (note to p. 3), the work had been translated into English twice in the previous decade: by John Payne in 1882–4 and Richard Burton in 1885. Possibly Machen had this ‘Burton’ in mind as well as the author of
Anatomy of Melancholy when he chose Mr Davies’s alias (see note to p. 158), though he was far from an admirer of the famous explorer’s translation: ‘I speak not of Burton, for I found myself unable to read a couple of pages of his detestable English, made more terrible by the imitations of the rhymed prose of the original.’ (
FOT, 39)
swims into my ken: Machen frequently invoked John Keats’s 1816 sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, in which the poet likens his experience of reading George Chapman’s Elizabethan translation of Homer’s works first to the exhilaration of an astronomer discovering a new planet, then to the astonishment of an explorer first glimpsing a new ocean.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
88 Aerated Bread Shop: the Aerated Bread Company was founded in 1861; ‘Over the next century hundreds of branches and many tea shops were opened all over the Greater London area’ (Weinreb and Hibbert, 8).
90 mignonette:
Reseda odorata, a strongly fragrant flower, popular in Victorian times.
Wilkins: perhaps Machen has borrowed the name from New England writer Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930), whose work he praised. ( Jane Austen’s characters he found ‘merely dull’ in comparison with those of ‘Miss Wilkins’, in whose fiction he detected a quality of ‘passion’ and ‘ecstasy’ throbbing beneath the surface ( Hieroglyphics (London, 1926), 152–3).)
a Touranian wine of great merit: Machen travelled annually to the Touraine region in France during the 1890s. Of one local vintage he wrote: ‘It was scented like flowers in June; it was in its entirely unpretending way quite exquisite. I drank it with relish, and towards the end of the dinner I had accounted for about three-parts of the decanter’ ( TNF, 76). His first wife owned a vineyard there as well (Reynolds and Charlton, 37).
91 novel of the dark valley: after allowing punningly that the novel ‘has the machens of a good story in it’,
Punch concluded that ‘there is very little worth reading after page 64’ — after this episode, in other words (quoted in Trotter, 157). Most readers would probably agree with Machen himself, however, in thinking the story much inferior to those that follow.
benefice: churchman’s living.
tors: rocky peaks or hills.
the brickfields about Acton: Acton, then a London suburb, was significantly industrialized in the later nineteenth century, known for both brickyards (where bricks are made) and laundries (earning South Acton the nickname ‘Soapsuds Island’).
92 a Free Library: the appearance in Britain of free public libraries, as opposed to for-profit circulating libraries, was a later nineteenth-century phenomenon, following in the wake of the Public Library Act of 1850. Wilkins’s presence in one is a further indication of his poverty.
94 The train stops at Reading: fictitious, like all the Colorado place names in this episode.
103 Vigilantes: originally members of a vigilance committee. The term is, appropriately, American in origin.
A Dalziel telegram: Davison Dalziel, Baron Dalziel of Wooler (1852–1928), founded Dalziel’s News Agency in 1890. Its ‘specialty was lurid American sensationalism, and nothing was too small or too sensational’ (Dennis Griffiths, Plant Here the Standard (London, 1996), 185).
105 Holothuria: marine animals, a genus within the phylum
Echinodermata which includes the sea slug; ‘they have an elongated form, a tough leathery integument, and a ring of tentacles around the mouth’ (
OED). A tentacular adumbration, perhaps, of the transformation of young Cradock in the ensuing tale.
protyle and the ether: a hypothetical primal substance and atmospheric medium respectively.
a dweller in a metaphorical Clapham: the Clapham Sect was a group of Anglican Evangelicals including William Wilberforce (1759–1833), Zachary Macaulay (1768–1838), Henry Thornton (1760–1815), and James Stephen (1758–1832), whose religious convictions led them to campaign against the slave trade, among other activities. Dyson is hammering home the point that he considers Phillipps to be the ‘true believer’ of the two.
the bat or owl . . . who denied the existence of the sun at noonday: something like this trope can be found in more than one (theological ) context — it is tempting to connect this reference, for instance, with certain remarks of Madame Blavatsky and other Theosophists — but Machen’s source seems most likely to have been one of the fables (‘The Owl that Wrote a Book’) by Victorian writer ‘Mrs Prosser’ (Sophie Amelia Prosser). In it an owl contends that ‘the sun was not full of light; that the moon was in reality much more luminous’. The other night-birds (and bats, to boot) are easily converted to this doctrine, which the wise eagle warns against: ‘Children of the light and of the day! beware of night-birds. Their eyes may be large, but they are so formed that they cannot receive the light; and what they cannot see, they deny the existence of’ ( The Child’s Friend (London, 1875), 90). This is obviously of a piece with the rest of Dyson’s rebuke.
110 habitué: habitual visitor.
112 civil engineer: as opposed to military engineer.
Descartes’ Meditationes: the Mediationes de Prima Philosophia or Meditations on First Philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650), published in 1641, builds a philosophical system from the ground up after provisionally dismissing all knowledge that can be doubted. Descartes’s project thus resonates with the Montaignian query quoted later by Miss Lally (see note to p. 114).
Gesta Romanorum: ‘Deeds of the Romans’, influential collection of tales in Latin, compiled in the late Middle Ages.
114 it is a fortified place . . . you had only to shout for these walls to sink into nothingness: an extended conceptual metaphor drawing upon the specialized language of siege warfare.
que sais-je?: ‘What do I know?’; sceptic’s slogan, associated with essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–92).
118 Caermaen: see note to p. 17.
119 blue-book: official governmental report or publication (British).
120 the gas that blazes and flares in the gin-palace was once a wild hypothesis: Scottish engineer William Murdock (1754–1839) pioneered the use of coal gas for lighting in the 1790s. Early public scepticism is captured by an incredulous question from a parliamentary committee member in 1809: ‘Mr. Murdock, do you mean to tell us we can have a light without a wick?’ (A. Murdock,
Light without a Wick: A Century of Gas-Lighting (Glasgow, 1892), 44).
the philosopher’s stone: legendary substance sought by the alchemists, supposed to have the power to change base metals into gold and confer immortality.
121 whin-berries: also whimberry, bilberry, chortleberry (the term ‘whinberry’ is commonly in use in Wales); a relative of the blueberry.
farriery: a farrier is one who shoes horses.
Poems by ‘persons of quality’: one possibility, given the setting (and author), is an early seventeenth-century collection entitled A New Miscellany: Being a Collection of Pieces of Poetry . . . Written Chiefly by Persons of Quality. To which is Added, Grongar Hill, a Poem; ‘Grongar Hill’ is by Welsh poet John Dyer (1699–1757).
Prideaux’s Connection: the two-volume Old and New Testament Connected by clergyman Humphrey Prideaux (1648–1724) traced the history of the Jews in biblical times. First published in 1716–18, it was still in print in the mid-nineteenth century ( ODNB).
an odd volume of Pope: the poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744).
fine old quarto printed by the Stephani: Henri Estienne or, in Latin, Henricus Stephanus was a Parisian printer of the early sixteenth century; his three sons (Estiennes or ‘Stephani’) carried on the family business. Machen himself possessed ‘Pomponius Mela[’s] “De Situ Orbis” in a noble Stephanus quarto’ ( FOT, 132).
Pomponius Mela, De Situ Orbis: author and title, respectively, of the first Latin geography, also known as De Chorographia (written c.43 ce). ‘Mela is interested in wonders and the mythological past, but little in geographical mathematics’ ( OCD, 1218).
Solinus: classical geographer (see note to p. 35). [Silet per diem] Solinus’ work Collectanea rerum memorabilium (also known as De mirabilibus mundi) does speak of a ‘sixtystone’, but the subsequent passage is fictitious ( Joshi, 361).
122 Sinbad the Sailor, or other of the supplementary Nights: the adventures of Sinbad, all of them highly fantastical, constitute a later addition to the original
Thousand and One Nights.
123 darkling: here, obscure, in the sense of keeping Miss Lally in the dark.
Scotch mist: ‘dense, soaking mist characteristic of the Scottish hills’ ( OED).
124 “naturals”: as the context suggests, an obsolete term for intellectually impaired persons.
125 the hissing of the phonograph: Thomas Edison invented the (cylindrical, tinfoil ) phonograph in 1877; wax would later replace the foil, and flat discs begin to compete with cylinders. The invention was little more than a curiosity until the 1890s; as late as 1898, a character in Richard Marsh’s story ‘The Adventure of the Phonograph’ could say, ‘It may seem odd, but I suppose there are a good many people — decent, respectable people — who never have seen a phonograph; at any rate, until that moment I had been one of them’ (
Curios (1898; Valancourt Books, 2007), 26).
Monmouth: Welsh town, also in Gwent.
espaliers: rows of fruit trees trained on stakes.
126 blind-worm: not a worm at all (or a snake, which it resembles) but a burrowing lizard,
Anguis fragilis; also called a ‘slow worm’.
128 the fairies — the Tylwydd Têg: y tylwyth teg, ‘the fair folk’ (Welsh); according to MacKillop’s
Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, ‘The most usual Welsh name for fairies. They are often known by the euphemism bendith y mamau [Welsh, mother’s blessings] to avert kidnapping, especially in Glamorgan. . . . They are described as fair-haired and as loving golden hair, and thus they covet mortal children with blond or fair hair. Their usual king is Gwyn ap Nudd. In general y tylwyth teg are portrayed as benevolent but still capable of occasional mischief.’
130 phantasmagoria: see note to p. 9.
a grimy-looking bust of Pitt: there is no shortage of likenesses, in various media, of either William Pitt — father (1708–78) or son (1759–1806). The early eighteenth-century contents of the bookcase in the morning room might point towards this being a representation of Pitt the Elder.
the inimitable Holmes: there is more than a hint of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, the immortal creations of Machen’s contemporary Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), in Dyson and Phillipps. One reviewer of The Three Impostors saw in it ‘a mixture of Conan Doyle, Douglas Jerrold, and the author of the Murders in the Rue Morgue [Poe], seasoned with grim touches of German mysticism’. (As for Doyle himself, Machen’s story frightened him out of a night’s sleep: ‘I don’t take him to bed with me again’) (Trotter, 160, 163).
131 the Zoo in London: the Zoological Gardens, one of London’s major attractions, were opened in Regent’s Park in 1828 by the newly established Zoological Society of London, with the aim of furthering ‘the advancements of Zoology and Animal Physiology’ (in that spirit, Richard Owen autopsied the collection’s first orangutan the following year) (Weinreb and Hibbert, 979).
132 Vestigia nulla retrorsum: ‘no steps backwards’ (Latin).
133 nothing so hazardous as ’Arry does a hundred times over in the course of every Bank Holiday: ‘Harry’ minus the aitch is a ‘low-bred fellow . . . of lively temper and manners’ (
OED). Drunkenness and rowdy behaviour were supposed to increase markedly on bank holidays among the lower orders. In 1897 John Lubbock wrote to the Chief Magistrate for London to ask for statistics regarding ‘Drunkenness and Assaults’ on those days: ‘A recent writer has made the extraordinary assertion that from ¼th to ⅛th of the poor (adult) population, including women, get drunk on these occasions’ (Horace G. Hutchinson,
Life of Sir John Lubbock, Lord Avebury (London, 1914), ii. 79).
134 the old logic manual: the specific reference, if not invented, is unknown, but Machen owned and relished a number of books on logic, including Richard Whately’s
Elements of Logic (1826).
135 diablerie: here, tale of devilry or witchcraft.
the hideous furies: the Erinyes, three terrible, snake-haired goddesses who pursue and torment the guilty. Euphemistically called the ‘Eumenides’ or ‘kind ones’ (the title of the final play in Aeschylus’ Oresteia).
136 a tumulus or a barrow: essentially synonymous; a burial mound. The nineteenth-century antiquarian Bernard Bolingbroke Woodward, considering ‘The sepulchral mounds or
tumuli’ of ancient Wales, wrote: ‘the form of the skulls discovered in these rude tombs . . . is rounder than that of the true Caucasian variety, and approaches the Mongolian type’ (
History of Wales (London, 1859), 21).
‘articulate-speaking men’ in Homer: see note to p. 11.
137 Shelta: ‘cryptic jargon used by tinkers, composed partly of Irish or Gaelic words, mostly disguised by inversion or by arbitrary alteration of initial consonants’ (
OED).
the Basques of Spain: ethnic and linguistic group whose historic homeland lies between France and Spain; the Basque language is unrelated to the Indo-European languages, and has been spoken in that region since antiquity, contributing to a characterization of the Basques as an unchanging ‘other’.
144 the approaches to the Empire: the Royal London Panorama in Leicester Square, built in 1881, was converted into the Empire Theatre in 1884. Not until 1887 did the venue, now reopened as a music hall, become popular.
Café de la Touraine: see note to p. 90.
house of call: place where practitioners of a particular trade gather; often, as here, a public house.
145 St Mary le Strand: a Baroque church built in 1714–17 by architect James Gibbs (1682–1754); at the eastern end of the Strand. Charles Dickens’s mother and father were married here.
as the gorse blossom to Linnæus: reference to an anecdote involving the reaction of pioneering taxonomist Carl Linnaeus (1707–78) when he encountered a field of gorse, also called furze ( Ulex europæus), during a visit to England: ‘The first time Linnæus crossed Putney Heath the sight of the gorse blossom in its blaze of May made him fall on his knees in rapture to thank God for making anything so beautiful’ (Florence Caddy, Through the Fields with Linnaeus (Boston and London, 1887), i. 329).
146 laureat: crowned, i.e. as victor, with laurels.
the Boulevards: in 1853 Georges-Eugène Haussmann was appointed ‘Prefect of the Seine’ by France’s Emperor Napoleon III, and charged with directing a massive public works programme in Paris. A major component of his subsequent transformation of the city involved the construction of a new network of broad avenues and boulevards, replacing the ancient tangle of medieval streets in the city centre. Burton and Dyson are grateful, in the next paragraph, that London has not been similarly ‘boulevardised’.
Romola . . . Robert Elsmere . . . Tit Bits: Romola (1862–3) may not be considered George Eliot’s most successful novel, but she is certainly acknowledged today as one of the titans of Victorian prose literature. She was too prosy for the visionary Machen, however, who called her ‘poor, dreary, draggle-tailed George Eliot’ ( Hieroglyphics, 58). Robert Elsmere (1888) was an enormously successful novel by Mary Augusta (‘Mrs Humphry’) Ward (1851–1920), treating of that most Victorian of themes, faith and doubt. Machen’s view of the novel can be seen in his criticism of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles as containing ‘much pseudo-philosophy of a kind suited to persons who think that Robert Elsmere is literature’ ( Hieroglyphics, 112). In 1881 newspaper proprietor George Newnes (1851–1910) founded the weekly magazine Tit-Bits, which would become ‘the matrix of twentieth-century popular journalism’ ( ODNB).
149 Sancho Panza: Don Quixote’s squire, in Miguel de Cervantes’s great novel
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha (1605, 1615).
150 our Museum at London: established in 1753 by an Act of Parliament, the British Museum initially comprised physician Sir Hans Sloane’s (1660–1753) rich and heterogeneous collection of antiquities, manuscripts, natural specimens and other materials. Originally housed in Montagu House in Bloomsbury, the Museum was opened to the public in 1759. Its collections grew steadily over the years through gifts, purchases, and, not to put too fine a point on it, plunder. In the early nineteenth century alone, the Museum acquired the Rosetta Stone and other loot from the British defeat of Napoleon at Alexandria (1802); Charles Townley’s famous collection of classical statuary (1805); and the Elgin Marbles, taken from the Parthenon in Athens (1816); among other treasures. A new, larger building with a classical Greek facade, completed in 1847, replaced Montagu House. A Reading Room was constructed during the following decade and became a famous research centre (Karl Marx wrote
Das Kapital there).
150 Birmingham art jewellery: Birmingham has long been a centre of jewellery production. ‘Brummagem [Birmingham] ware’ once had a reputation for shoddy cheapness, though this appears to be a disparaging reference to the Arts and Crafts design movement, which took early root there.
151 Socrates: Burton proceeds to engage Dyson in a process of Socratic dialectic, as depicted in Plato’s dialogues. Burton’s promise to ‘show you the real image which you possess in your soul’ particularly echoes the dialogue
Meno, in which Socrates questions a mathematically ignorant slave boy about geometry.
153 Lord Bacon: the first edition of Francis Bacon’s
Essayes appeared in 1597; on one level it is indeed, as Burton and Dyson are suggesting here, a book of advice for courtiers and politicians.
De Re Militari: Latin for ‘Of Military Matters’. There is a late Roman work of this name, written between 383 and 450 ce by Flavius Renatus Vegetius. ‘[A] Florentine in the fifteenth century’, on the other hand, sounds more like Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), who composed The Art of War ( Dell’arte della guerra) — though not until the early sixteenth century. Or perhaps Burton’s example is an invented one.
moyen de parvenir: French for ‘the way to attain’; the title of a book by Béroalde de Verville (1556–1626), which Machen had translated in 1889. He would later describe this sub-Rabelaisian work as ‘one of the most shapeless things ever compounded by the human brain . . . a collection of discourses, in dialogue form, on Reformation politics, on the correct idiom of the French language, on some unknown subject which has been conjectured to be Alchemy — on anything which came into the head of this crazy canon’ (Danielson, 18).
the Cromwell Road: a comparatively new road, begun in 1855, and given its name by Prince Albert.
the Nonconformist conscience: Nonconformists were Protestant dissenters from the Church of England, associated with the evangelizing strain which had such a large impact on mainstream Victorian culture. Dyson implies that theirs is a rigidly moralistic, unimaginative world view.
novels . . . of the old women and the new women: ‘New Woman’ novels by such authors as Sarah Grand and Olive Schreiner (as well as men like Thomas Hardy and Grant Allen) reflected late Victorian debates over issues including contraception, dress, and female suffrage. As Dyson’s earlier remark on George Eliot suggests, Machen had little less dislike for at least certain ‘old woman’ novelists.
154 cent nouvelles nouvelles:
Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles is the title of a fifteenth-century collection of French stories.
155 Waterloo Bridge: opened in 1817, on the second anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo; demolished in 1936.
158 his namesake’s Anatomy: Robert Burton’s (1577–1640) encyclopedic
Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621, was greatly admired by Machen,
who mimicked Burton’s approach and style, in miniature, in his own
Anatomy of Tobacco (see note to p. 82).
159 Grub Street: traditionally associated with hack authors.
slavey: (usually male) servant.
six ale: bitter ale sold at sixpence a quart.
160 Family Story Paper: likely meant in a generic sense here (there was, e.g., a ‘New York Family Story Paper’ and a ‘Daisy Family Story Paper’; this also sounds a good deal like the weekly story paper
Family Herald).
Balzac and the Comédie Humaine . . . Zola and the Rougon-Macquart family: two great nineteenth-century French novelists and their respective (and massive) novel sequences. The ‘Human Comedy’ of Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) is a sprawling portrait of French society, comprising some ninety novels and tales, including Père Goriot and Eugénie Grandet. Naturalist Émile Zola (1840–1902), influenced by Balzac’s magnum opus as Russell is by both novelists’ projects, wrote twenty novels in his own cycle focusing on the members of a single family tree, including L’Assommoir (1877) and Germinal (1885).
via dolorosa: literally ‘way of sorrows’ (Latin); in Jerusalem, the supposed route taken by Jesus on his way to Calvary.
These were my fancies; but when pen touched paper they shrivelled and vanished away: compare with Machen’s description of his own experiences confronting ‘the horrid gulf that yawns between the conception and the execution’. Every writer, he concludes, ‘dream[s] in fire’, but ‘work[s] in clay’ ( FOT, 100–1).
161 Levant morocco: metonymically, ‘morocco’ denotes the leather originally imported from there, associated with bookbinding; ‘Levant morocco’ refers to ‘a high-grade morocco, with a large grain, properly made from the skin of the Angora goat’ (
OED).
bibelots: trinkets, curios.
brocade of Lyons: the French city of Lyons is historically associated with textile, particularly silk, production.
162 Carthusian monk: the Carthusians are a monastic order, originating in France; see note to p. 4.
164 Lord Chancellor: high-ranking officer in the British Government, responsible for administration of the court system. Until 2005 the Lord Chancellor also presided over the House of Lords.
Bibliothèque Nationale: France’s National Library, which had taken up new quarters in the Rue de Richelieu in Paris in 1868.
165 malacca cane: Malacca or Melaka, a Malaysian state, was then a British colony. A ‘malacca cane’ is ‘a rich brown, often clouded or mottled, walking stick made from the stem of any of several Malaysian palms’ (
OED).
and hear the chimes at midnight: from Henry IV, Part Two, 3.2; Justice Shallow is reminiscing with Sir John Falstaff about their old college days. Falstaff replies, ‘We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.’ There is a clear suggestion of sexual dalliance on Leicester’s part here (Shallow gleefully reminds an irritated Falstaff of the pair’s former patronage of London brothels).
168 quinine: drug, derived from cinchona bark, used to treat malaria.
169 the earthly tabernacle: from 2 Corinthians 5:1, in which the mortal body is likened by St Paul to a temporary dwelling (the original meaning of ‘tabernacle’): ‘For we know that if our earthly house of
this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens’ (King James Version). Machen’s tale of corporeal ‘dissolution’ thus grotesquely literalizes Paul’s words.
173 mesmerisms, spiritualisms, materialisations, theosophies: mesmerism is the theory of ‘animal magnetism’ associated with Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815). Spiritualism, premised on the belief that the spirits of the dead not only live on but also wish to speak with the living, was extremely popular in the Anglosphere during the nineteenth century and beyond (the phenomenon of spirits ‘materializing’ belongs also to this belief system). ‘Theosophies’ could refer to ‘Any system of speculation which bases the knowledge of nature upon that of the divine nature’ (in this sense Thomas Vaughan spoke of ‘The Ancient, reall Theosophie of the Hebrewes and Egyptians’ (quoted in the
OED) ); however, the predominant association at this time would have been with the doctrines of Madame Blavatsky (1831–91) and her Theosophical Society. Rejection of such ‘occult’ doctrines — and there was much cross-pollination between and among all of these — establish the bona fides of the two men of science as hard-headed sceptics.
174 Omnia exeunt in mysterium: ‘All things pass into mystery’ (Latin). Machen’s source for the quotation is likely Coleridge’s
Aids to Reflection ( Jones, 501).
a peak in Darien: see note to p. 87.
the theory of telepathy: the word had been coined in the 1880s by one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) (see note to p. 313), a newly formed body which sought to apply scientific methods to the study of what we should today term paranormal phenomena.
175 Payne Knight’s monograph: Richard Payne Knight (1751–1824), British writer and art collector. Of this episode Machen would write: ‘The general hypothesis of “The White Powder” is obtained, very distantly, from Payne Knight; the special
machina, the magical division of personality, is, to the best of my belief, my own’ (Danielson, 27). (The magical, or at least chemical, ‘division of personality’ does, however, recall Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.) The relevant passage in Payne Knight’s
Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus (1786) reads: ‘The ineffable name [of God] also, which, according to the Massorethic punctuation, is pronounced
Jehovah, was anciently pronounced
Jaho . . . which was a title of
bacchus, the nocturnal sun; as was also
Sabazius, or
Sabadius, which is the same word as
Sabaoth, one of the scriptural titles of the true God, only adapted to the pronunciation of a more polished language’ ( Jones, 501).
Aryan man entered Europe: during the nineteenth century the linguistic category of ‘Aryan’ (Indo-European) became conceptualized as a racial one as well, with an ancient migration or invasion imagined from the East — or, in the case of Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists, the West (i.e., Atlantis).
sumentes calicem principis inferorum: ‘taking from the chalice of the prince of the shades below’ (Latin), invented by Machen ( Jones, 501–2).
the worm which never dies: see note to p. 236.
177 Milesian and Arabian methods of entertainment: the original ‘Milesian Tales’, written in the 2nd century
bce by Aristides of Miletus, were a collection of short stories, often salacious, often set in the Asia Minor city of Miletus; afterwards a group of stories resembling Aristides’. This genre has been linked with the practice of interpolating shorter, subordinate tales within a larger frame narrative, as in Apuleius’
Golden Ass (which begins, ‘I would like to tie together different sorts of tales for you in that Milesian style of yours’) — and, of course,
The Three Impostors. ‘Arabian methods of entertainment’ refers, once more, to the
One Thousand and One Nights (see note to p. 3).
subscribe to Mudie’s for a regular supply of mild and innocuous romance: the famous lending library established in 1842 by Charles Mudie (1818–90) was the Netflix of its day; for a guinea a year, one could borrow unlimited material, one volume at a time. Owing to the censoriousness of its founder, ‘Mudie’s’ was synonymous with inoffensive reading matter.
178 bookshelf of the Empire: from the period of Napoleonic rule (1800–15).
lacquered-work: work covered with lacquer, a wood varnish.
cagmag: unwholesome meat.
De Quincey’s after his dose: as a boy of around 12, Machen saw Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater at the railway station in Pontypool, Wales: ‘This . . . I instantly bought and as instantly loved, and still love very heartily’ ( FOR, 41).
179 Parthenon: the temple of Athena on the Acropolis in Athens.
180 Pamphylia and the parts about Mesopotamia: Pamphylia, ‘land of all tribes’, was a region in Asia Minor. The ‘parts about’ Mesopotamia (the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, as its name signifies) included the kingdoms of Assyria and Babylonia, perhaps leading associatively to the ‘babble of voices’ in the next sentence.
words that Chaucer wrote: late medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer ( c.1330–1400) used a number of words (‘ers’, ‘queynte’, ‘pisse’ come to mind) seldom to be found in the pages of Victorian books, even Decadent ones.
181 mystery play: medieval vernacular plays dramatizing such biblical episodes as the events connected with the Crucifixion and Resurrection.
182 the Reading-Room of the British Museum: see note to p. 150.
183 philosopher’s stone: see note to p. 120.
183 Rabelaisian . . .
Vivez joyeux: ‘Live joyfully’, motto on the title page of Rabelais’s
Gargantua (see note to p. 73). (Cf. the French expression
joie de vivre.)
185 baize door: door lined with baize, a woollen cloth also used to cover billiard tables.
Avallaunius: invented by Machen, or rather altered from a Romano-British name, Vallaunius: ‘Machen thought the word should be Avallanius, meaning the man of Avalon, a reference to the mystical region beyond the veil in Arthurian legend’ (Susan Johnston Graf, Talking to the Gods (Albany, NY, 2015), 74). The Garden of Avallaunius was Machen’s original title for the novel that would become The Hill of Dreams, and he took the name ‘Frater Avallaunius’ when initiated into the Order of the Golden Dawn.
186 Panurge: major character in Rabelais’s
Gargantua and Pantagruel (see note to p. 73). He is companion to Pantagruel, knavish and resourceful. Etymologically (ultimately from the Greek) the name suggests one ‘ready to do anything’, or who ‘knows how to do everything’.
style is everything in literature: suggests the followers of Walter Pater, author and aesthete, among them Oscar Wilde.
189 Irritability of Authors: proverbial. Machen likely has in mind a chapter in the collection
Curiosities of Literature by Isaac D’Israeli (1766–1848), a work he called ‘that singular magazine of oddities’ (
FOT, 132).
191 myrmidons: in Homer’s
Iliad, the Myrmidons were warriors led by Achilles; by extension, devoted followers or (as here) private gang or army.
they beat furiously after me in the covert of London, I remained perdu: Walter’s terms, and overarching metaphor, are drawn from the language of the chase; he is like a fox in hiding, with Lipsius’ crew hunting him.
194 flock paper: wallpaper with a raised pattern, akin to velvet in texture, made by applying dyed ‘flock’, a powdered wool, to the paper. Once a luxury item.
amorini: cupids.
195 damask: defined in
Chambers’s Encyclopaedia as ‘the name given to all textile fabrics in which figures of flowers, fruits, or others not of geometrical regularity, are woven. The word is supposed to be derived from the city of Damascus having been an early seat of these manufactures’ (Philadelphia, 1875), iii. 406.
a conté fleurettes to: i.e., flirting with.
The Red Hand
First appeared in Chapman’s Magazine in December 1895; published in book form in The House of Souls (1906).
‘drawing’ Phillipps: i.e. inducing him to go out; alternatively, irritating him (or perhaps both).
Gloria: the greater doxology of the Roman Catholic and Anglican Masses, ‘Gloria in Excelsis Deo’, here performed on a street-organ.
199 screever’s work: a screever is an ‘Artist in chalks’, as Machen later tells us; a pavement artist. Derived ultimately from
scribere (Latin, ‘to write’).
Abury: Avebury, name of village in Wiltshire and site of Neolithic henge. Sometimes called ‘Abury’, as by antiquarian William Stukeley (1687–1765) in his Abury: a Temple of the British Druids (1743). John Lubbock, author of Pre-Historic Times as Illustrated by Ancient Remains (1865), was made the first Lord Avebury in 1900.
202 the theory of the evil eye: a curse delivered by a look. The same year ‘The Red Hand’ first appeared, philologist Frederick Thomas Elworthy (1830–1907) published his book
The Evil Eye: An Account of this Ancient and Widespread Superstition, in which he writes, sounding very like Phillipps, ‘The origin of the belief is lost in the obscurity of prehistoric ages. The enlightened call it superstition; but it holds its sway over the people of many countries, savage as well as civilised, and must be set down as one of the hereditary and instinctive convictions of mankind’ (London, 1895), 3. Elworthy also discusses the ‘horrible old signs’ (in Phillipps’s words) used to avert the evil eye, such as the ‘mano pantea’ and the one mentioned here, the ‘mano fica’ (the quasi-obscene ‘fig hand’).
F.R.S.: Fellow of the Royal Society, the national academy of science in the UK.
mano in fica: see note above.
208 spirals and whorls . . . the pattern of a thumb: in a notebook of approximately this period, Machen records his musings on the recurrence of ‘the whorl, the spiral, Maori decoration. . . . Why was this form common to all primitive art’ (
LA, 107). It may also be worth noting that Francis Galton had just published three pioneering books on fingerprints, in 1892, 1893, and 1895.
211 shag tobacco: a strong tobacco also favoured by Sherlock Holmes.
216 “Stony-hearted step-mother”: from
Confessions of an English Opium Eater; Part II begins: ‘So then, Oxford-street, stony-hearted stepmother! thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of children, at length I was dismissed from thee’ (London, 1845), 20.
The Shining Pyramid
First published in 1895 in the short-lived journal The Unknown World, edited by Machen’s close friend, the occult writer A. E. Waite. The story subsequently appeared in two separate collections, both entitled The Shining Pyramid (published in 1923 and 1925 respectively), leading to a somewhat embarrassing situation for which Machen’s carelessness, and perhaps impecuniousness, seem to have been responsible. Machen himself spoke deprecatingly of the story, but it has been called ‘one of the most terrifying of all Machen’s horror tales’ (Carole Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples (Oxford, 1999), 146).
222 Doré: painter and illustrator Gustave Doré (1832–83) produced illustrations for editions of Milton’s
Paradise Lost, Dante’s
Divine Comedy, and the Bible, among other works. Doré did in fact depict London itself in a series of engravings (
London: A Pilgrimage, published in 1872), but it is unlikely that Machen has these pictured scenes of poverty and squalor in mind, given the sublime effect described by Dyson. (Five years before writing ‘The Shining Pyramid’, Machen had travelled to the French province of Touraine, and been disappointed by its failure to live up to ‘Doré’s wonderful illustrations to [Honoré de Balzac’s] “Contes Drolatiques” ’, with their representations of ‘enchanted heights . . . profound and somber valleys, [and] airy abysses’) (
TNF, 71).
“far in the spiritual city”: from ‘The Holy Grail’, one of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859–85). The words are spoken by Percivale’s sister to Galahad before he sets out on his quest: ‘Go forth, for thou shalt see what I have seen, | And break through all, till one will crown thee king | Far in the spiritual city.’
223 Castletown: presumably a stand-in for Newport, Wales, port city near Caerleon and site of Newport Castle.
226 Charles II punch-bowl: a silver punchbowl from the reign of the ‘Merry Monarch’ (1660–85) would have been, then as now, extremely valuable.
chasing: design engraved on metal.
227 Old red sandstone and limestone: the geological description of this region of south-west Wales is accurate.
mystic esses: plural of ‘ess’ (‘The name of the letter S; anything in the shape of an S’, OED). A favourite Machen word.
229 almost like the eye of a Chinaman: see note to p. 240.
232 the abbé in Monte Cristo: in Alexandre Dumas’s
The Count of Monte Cristo (serialized in 1844–5), the wrongfully imprisoned Edmond Dantès is aided in his escape from the Château d’If by his fellow prisoner, the Abbé Faria, a character Dumas based on a real historical figure.
Croesyceiliog: now a suburb of Cwmbran, a new town established in 1949 and comprising six villages. It lies to the north of Caerleon and Newport.
233 idol of the South Seas: the context suggests the great stone moai of Easter Island (see note to p. 347).
235 the awful words: i.e. of the consecration. Cf. Anglican theologian Edward Pusey’s description of ‘the awful words, whereby He consecrated for ever elements of this world to be His Body and Blood’ (
The Holy Eucharist a Comfort to the Penitent (Oxford, 1843), 20).
236 ‘the worm of corruption, the worm that dieth not’: a reference to the eternal punishment of hell, described in Mark 9:48 (‘Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched’), a passage which itself looks back to Isaiah
66:24 (‘for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh’).
237 phantasmagoria: see note to p. 9.
238 the old puzzle of Achilles and the Tortoise: famous paradox proposed by the pre-Socratic philosopher Zeno of Elea (active early fifth century
bce). Aristotle summarized it thus: ‘the so-called “Achilles” [argument] amounts to this, that in a race the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead’ (
Physics 6.9).
239 the days of Edmond Dantès: see note to p. 232.
oubliette: ‘secret dungeon with access only through a trapdoor in its ceiling’ ( OED).
240 de novo: from the beginning.
there is a “Devil’s Punch-bowl” in Surrey: natural amphitheatre. At a nearby Gibbet Hill, a memorial stone commemorates the 1786 murder of the ‘Unknown Sailor’. Perhaps Machen had in mind the site’s lurid history, as well as its shape, in conceiving of his own infernal ‘punch-bowl’ in Gwent; as a lover of Dickens, he would certainly have remembered Nicholas and Smike’s visit to the spot in Nicholas Nickleby (serialized in 1838–9).
Vigilantes: see note to p. 103.
prehistoric Turanian inhabitants: for his conception of the Welsh Tylwyth Teg, Machen drew upon a rich and heady brew of speculation and theorizing that bubbled up in the nineteenth century, mingling new scientific ideas with ancient folk legend and lore. A particularly salient example of this intellectual ferment was the hypothesis, advanced by antiquarian David MacRitchie in his Testimony of Tradition (1890), ‘that the fairies of Scotland and Ireland were really non-Aryan, Finno-Ugaric peoples . . . that there had been little, yellow, slant-eyed devils all over northern Europe’ (Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples, 138). The racial category invoked here is the ‘Turanian’ — an all but unknown term today, but one which in the nineteenth century stood alongside ‘Aryan’ and ‘Semite’ in a widely used taxonomical triad (though other classificatory schemes existed as well ). These designations could be applied in various contexts; indeed, the conceptual evolution of ‘Turanian’ makes for an exemplary case of the way in which language, culture, and race tended to be blurred together in the nineteenth century. Originally it was a philological category, a posited family of languages — and a deeply flawed one, a kind of omnium-gatherum of leftovers, ‘comprising the dialects of the nomad races scattered over Central and Northern Asia, the Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic, Samoyedic, and Finnic’ (Max Müller, Science of Language (London, 1885), i. 35). (Hence the connection here with ‘Mongolians’ and ‘Chinamen’.) The category was employed also in the comparative study of religion, as well as in systems of racial classification. Within the latter it was promiscuously employed; to give but one example in a British anthropological context, John Beddoe in his Races of Britain presented evidence of two distinct racial groups in Wales, one of which bears an ‘aspect . . . suggestive of a Turanian origin’ (London, 1885), 260). This idea may be responsible for the ambivalence or inconsistency one finds in Machen’s treatment of his own Celtic ancestry; sometimes the Celt is explicitly classified as ‘Aryan’ (as in Things Near and Far), while elsewhere Machen flirts with the notion of personal descent from the Little People (as in The Hill of Dreams). The Aryan–Semite–Turanian triad also appeared in occult texts with which Machen would likely have been familiar; Madame Blavatsky, for instance, borrowing from Ignatius Donnelly, presented the Turanians as one of her ‘root races’ which emigrated from Atlantis.
241 The old derivation from πυρ: accepted by Samuel Johnson in his
Dictionary (‘Pýramid. n.s. [
pyramide, Fr.
πύραμις, from
πῦρ, fire; because fire always ascends in the figure of a cone]’), but presented as an exemplary case of etymological spuriousness by renowned Victorian philologist Richard Chenevix Trench: ‘the Greeks assumed that the pyramids were so named from their having the appearance of
flame going up into a point, and so they spelt “pyramid”, that they might find
πῦρ or “pyre” in it; while in fact “pyramid” has nothing to do with flame or fire at all; being, as those best qualified to speak on the matter declare to us, an Egyptian word of quite a different signification’ (
English Past and Present (New York, 1858), 213–14).
The Turanians
This and the five following short pieces (‘The Idealist’, ‘Witchcraft’, ‘The Ceremony’, ‘Psychology’, ‘Midsummer’) were all written in 1897, and all first appeared in book form in Ornaments in Jade (1924).
For information about the word Turanians, see note to p. 240.
244 paten: during the Eucharist, a gold or silver plate to hold the host.
The Idealist
245 yahoos: in Part IV of Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Lemuel Gulliver encounters two races: the Houyhnhnms (intelligent, articulate horses) and the Yahoos (coarse, filthy humanoids). To Symonds, in other words, the other clerks are little better than subhuman brutes.
Etna: Mount Etna in Sicily (in Latin Aetna); the highest active volcano in Europe. The Greek fire-god Hephaestus, and later his Roman equivalent Vulcan, were supposed to reside underneath.
246 hoarding: a fence on which advertisements or bills are posted, or in this case the ‘icon’ (meaning, here, a portrait) of, apparently, a music-hall performer (prominent real-life woman singers of the time include Marie Lloyd, Bessie Bellwood, and Jenny Hill).
And that’s the way they do it . . . taike the bun?: lyrics, apparently of Machen’s invention, parodying a typical music-hall song in cockney dialect. I am grateful to Barry Faulk for identifying some hits of the day which Machen may have had in mind here, such as ‘The boy I love is up in the gallery’ (1885) (this less for its dialect than its depiction of adoring male fans), ‘Wot Cher Ria’ (1885), and ‘Knocked ’em on the Old Kent Road’ (1891).
247 Ombres Chinoises: ‘Chinese shadows’ (French); a shadow-puppet show.
detached and semi-detached: a semi-detached house is one of a pair of single-family dwellings sharing a wall, as opposed to a stand-alone (‘detached’) house.
entomologist: scientist who studies insects.
248 lay figure: a ‘jointed wooden figure of the human body, used by artists as a model for the arrangement of draperies, posing, etc.’ (
OED).
The Ceremony
253 Michaelmas daisy: the
aster amellus, a small, star-shaped flower ranging in colour from purple to pink to blue, which blooms near Michaelmas (29 September). ‘From the daffodil to the Michaelmas daisy’ thus spans the natural ‘calendar’ of rural life from early spring to autumn.
Psychology
Besides its inclusion in Ornaments in Jade, ‘Psychology’ also appeared, entitled ‘Fragments of Paper’, in The Glorious Mystery (1924).
255 purlieu: originally land bordering a forest; here, ‘a poor or disreputable area of a city, town, or district; a slum’ (
OED).
256 Tragic Comedians: title of an 1880 George Meredith novel, mentioned by Machen in his work of criticism
Hieroglyphics.
lupanar: a brothel.
The White People
Written in 1899, ‘The White People’ first appeared in Horlick’s Magazine in 1904, and was published in book form in the 1906 collection The House of Souls.
261 ecstasy: a key Machen term; his theory of literature, for instance, as articulated in his book
Hieroglyphics, is centred upon the concept.
forsake the imperfect copies and go to the perfect originals: a quintessentially Platonic formulation.
teetotal sect: non-drinkers. The term derives from the Total Abstinence Society, founded in 1832 by Joseph Livesey (1794–1884).
262 Romanée Conti: a highly esteemed vineyard in Burgundy.
four ale: cheap ale, originally sold at fourpence a quart.
quâ: ‘as being’; in other words, insofar as the killer merely kills, he does not qualify as a ‘sinner’ in Ambrose’s spiritual sense, since a soulless animal may do as much.
263 Highland caterans of the seventeenth century . . . moss-troopers: both terms refer to gangs of Scots marauders.
263 company promoters: those who solicit investors for a new corporation. An example from Victorian fiction is Augustus Melmotte, in Anthony Trollope’s
The Way We Live Now (1875).
264 Gilles de Raiz: the Baron de Retz, Rais, or Raiz (
c.1404–40) fought the English alongside Joan of Arc during the Hundred Years War and was made marshal of France, but achieved historical immortality for the ritualized torture, rape, and murder of children. He has been suggested as the original of the serial uxoricide Bluebeard, made famous by Charles Perrault’s fairy tale, though as French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans points out in his 1891 novel of Satanism
Là-bas, there is little similarity between the two. One reason to suppose that Machen may have read Huysmans’s novel (and may have been thinking of it here) lies in its description of de Rais, and of the fine line between ‘saint’ and ‘Satanist’: ‘this man . . . was a true mystic. . . . Association with Jeanne d’Arc certainly stimulated his desires for the divine. Now from lofty Mysticism to base Satanism there is but one step. In the Beyond all things touch. He carried his zeal for prayer into the territory of blasphemy’ (trans. Keene Wallace (New York, 1972), 52–4).
the “Blackwood” review of Keats: both the Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine reviewed Keats’s Endymion (1818) with great harshness; the reference here is to John Gibson Lockhart’s review, in which, gibing at Keats’s vocation, he wrote: ‘it is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop, Mr John, back to the “plasters, pills, and ointment boxes” ’. Shortly before Keats’s death from tuberculosis, Shelley would write: ‘Poor Keats was thrown into a dreadful state of mind by this review, which, I am persuaded, was not written with any intention of producing the effect, to which it has, at least, greatly contributed, of embittering his existence, and inducing a disease from which there are now but faint hopes of his recovery’ ( Letters from Italy, in Works (London, 1847), 147).
Hierarchs of Tophet: Tophet or Topheth is a place near Jerusalem associated in the Bible with child sacrifice; in extended use, hell itself. A ‘hierarch’ is a high priest.
flagrant “Hobson Jobson”: originally a British corruption of the Arabic ‘Yā H․asan! Yā H․usayn!’, the phrase can refer, as here, to the linguistic phenomenon described by H. L. Mencken as
a familiar effort to bring a new and strange word into harmony with the language — an effort arising from what philologists call the law of Hobson-Jobson. This name was given to it by Col. Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, compilers of a standard dictionary of Anglo-Indian terms. They found that the British soldiers in India, hearing strange words from the lips of the natives, often converted them into English words of similar sound, though of widely different meaning. Thus the words Hassan and Hosein, frequently used by the Mohammedans of the country in their devotions, were turned into Hobson-Jobson. The same process is constantly in operation elsewhere. By it the French route de roi has become Rotten Row in English, écrevisse has become crayfish, and the English bowsprit has become beau pré (= beautiful meadow) in French ( The American Language (New York, 1921), 51–2).
Perhaps it is the oblique invocation of Yule and Burnell’s glossary which suggests to Ambrose the word ‘Juggernaut’ (which is indeed included therein) for his subsequent example of superficial linguistic resemblance.
266 the Apostle . . . distinguishes between “charitable” actions and charity . . . one may give all one’s goods to the poor, and yet lack charity: in 1 Corinthians 13, Paul famously says, ‘And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.’ Feeding the poor is a charitable action; yet unaccompanied by true ‘charity’ (
agape, the highest form of Christian love), it will not lead to salvation.
De Maupassant’s tale: ‘Qui sait’ (‘Who Knows’) by Guy de Maupassant (1850–93), first published in 1890 in the newspaper L’Écho de Paris.
268 morocco binding: see note to p. 161.
the Aklo letters . . . or what voolas mean: an incantatory litany of inventions, singled out for mention by Lovecraft, who wrote admiringly in his influential essay on supernatural horror: ‘Mr. Machen’s narrative, a triumph of skilful selectiveness and restraint, accumulates enormous power as it flows on in a stream of innocent childish prattle; introducing allusions to strange “nymphs”, “Dôls”, “voolas”, “White, Green, and Scarlet Ceremonies”, “Aklo letters”, “Chian language”, “Mao games”, and the like’ ( Supernatural Horror in Literature (Mineola, NY, 1973), 91). Subsequent fantastical nomenclature in the tale is similarly invented, unless otherwise noted.
271 ‘Tales of the Genie’: eighteenth-century imitation of the
One Thousand and One Nights (then known, in England, as the
Arabian Nights’ Entertainments) by clergyman James Ridley (1736–65) (its full title was
The Tales of the Genii, or, The Delightful Lessons of Horam, the Son of Asmar, and its title page announced it to be ‘Faithfully translated from the Persian Manuscript; and Compared with the French and Spanish editions Published at Paris and Madrid’).
‘for ever and for ever, world without end, Amen’: the conclusion of the
Gloria Patri (‘glory to the Father’) doxology. As a young man Machen, climbing in Welsh hills, encountered
grey limestone rocks, something dread, threatening, Druidical about them. . . . And so onward, slope rising to a still higher slope and no end or limit that the eye could see. . . . And I remember — I was only twenty then — feeling that there was an expression for all this in words: ‘For ever and ever. Amen’. It was not till very many years afterwards that I learnt that the Welsh for ‘and ever shall be’ is ‘ac yn y wastad’ — and into the waste, the waste of time being understood. ( LA, 118–19)
284 aumbry: cupboard, with archaic flavour.
286 ‘Troy Town’: name given to a number of turf labyrinths throughout Britain. In his 1922 book
Mazes & Labyrinths: Their History and Development,
W. H. Matthews traces several specifically Welsh connections. Particularly close to home for Machen would have been the ‘oral tradition of a maze of some kind on a particular hill above [Caerleon] . . . quite distinct from the well-known Roman mosaic labyrinth’ (Mark Valentine, ‘Arthur Machen and the Maze Theme’,
Caerdroia (1991), 57).
292 Æschylus: Greek dramatist (
c.525–
c.456
bce).
THE BOWMEN
First appeared in 1914 in the Evening News. Published in book form in the 1915 collection The Angels of Mons.
294 the Retreat of the Eighty Thousand: British retreat from the Battle of Mons in 1914. Machen is surely also invoking the famous ‘Retreat of the Ten Thousand’ Greek mercenaries from deep in Persian territory, as narrated by Xenophon (
c.430–
c.355
bce) in his
Anabasis.
the Censorship: the Defence of the Realm Act of 1914 gave the British Government power ‘to prevent the spread of reports likely to cause disaffection, or alarm’. ‘The censorship’ plays a significant role in Machen’s 1917 novel The Terror, in which the animal kingdom revolts against humanity in wartime Britain.
salient: here, ‘a spur-like area of land, esp. one held by a line of offence or defence, as in trench-warfare; spec[ifically] . . . that at Ypres in western Belgium, the scene of severe fighting in the war of 1914–18’ ( OED).
Sedan: that is, a catastrophic defeat, as of the French by German forces in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War.
295 good-bye to Tipperary: from 1912 music-hall song ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’, popular with British soldiers during the war. The original song concludes: ‘It’s a long long way to Tipperary, | But my heart’s right there’.
‘What price Sidney Street?’: the 1911 ‘Siege of Sidney Street’, witnessed by Winston Churchill when he was Home Secretary (and also by Machen, in his capacity as a reporter), was a stand-off, and shootout, between the Metropolitan Police and a pair of Latvian anarchists holed up in a house in Stepney, ending in their fiery deaths. The sense here, given the context, seems to be something like, ‘Those anarchist chappies had nothing on us’, or ‘That was a picnic compared to this’.
‘World without end. Amen’: see note to p. 272.
a queer vegetarian restaurant . . . Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius: Machen may not have had a particular restaurant in mind, but historian of vegetarianism James Gregory tells me that ‘there were turn of the century vegetarians who might have made connections with saintly intervention’. In his introduction to
The Angels of Mons Machen wrote:
It was at about this period that variants of my tale began to be told as authentic histories. At first, these tales betrayed their relation to their original. In several of them the vegetarian restaurant appeared, and St. George was the chief character. In one case an officer — name and address missing — said that there was a portrait of St. George in a certain London restaurant, and that a figure, just like the portrait, appeared to him on the battlefield, and was invoked by him, with the happiest results.
Harow! Harow!: a call for aid, ultimately from Old French. Machen’s bowmen sound like Anglo-Normans, though it is not ‘likely that the Agincourt bowmen, most of whom came from Wales, would use the French expressions Machen evokes from them’ (Reynolds and Charlton, 117).
296 shooting at Bisley: site of the National Shooting Centre, approximately 30 miles from London.
the contemptible English: Kaiser Wilhelm II was supposed to have spoken dismissively of England’s ‘contemptible little army’.
Agincourt Bowmen: the Battle of Agincourt, immortalized by Shakespeare in Henry V, was fought on St Crispin’s Day (25 October) 1415. King Henry’s longbowmen, who as noted were largely from Machen’s own county of Gwent, played an important role in the English victory over a larger French force.
The Monstrance
First appearance in The Angels of Mons (see headnote to ‘The Bowmen’). The Monstrance is a receptacle for the Eucharistic host, or alternatively for the display of relics.
297 Then it fell out in the sacring of the Mass . . . Old Romance: apparently Machen’s invention.
sacring: consecration of the bread and wine during Mass.
enfiladed: subjected to gunfire along their entire line.
cannonade: continuous cannon fire.
the Crystal Palace in the old days: from 1865 to 1936 — with a hiatus during the 1910s — the Brock’s fireworks company put on annual displays (‘Brock’s benefits’) at the Crystal Palace site (see note to p. 57). Interestingly, in the 1920s the phrase ‘Brock’s benefit’ would begin to be used to describe artillery battles in the Great War ( OED).
Von und Zu: literally ‘of and at’; a joke involving German nobiliary nomenclature.
gehenna-fire: hellfire.
298 tinnitus: ringing in the ears.
St Lambart on that terrible day: widespread reports of what came to be known as ‘the German atrocities’, both real and inflated in Allied propaganda, followed in the wake of the German invasion of Belgium and France. Machen, inventing his own war atrocity, has out-Heroded Herod.
299 Ave Maria Stella: more likely the medieval plainsong hymn to Mary, ‘Ave Maris Stella’, ‘Hail Star of the Sea’.
N
First appeared as the only new story in the 1936 collection The Cosy Room and Other Stories.
301 of the sort that Mr Pickwick sits on: describes the frontispiece to Charles Dickens’s
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836–7), by Hablot Knight Browne (‘Phiz’) (1815–82).
Horace Walpole and his friend Mr Gray: Walpole was responsible for the first Gothic romance, The Castle of Otranto (1764), and the Gothic Revival house Strawberry Hill, at Twickenham; the poetry of Thomas Gray (1716–71) anticipated the Gothic movement in literature, while as a scholar he turned his attention from classical to medieval history, particularly the study of Gothic architecture.
302 landscapes of the Valley of the Usk, and the Holy Mountain, and Llanthony: all located in south-east Wales. The ‘Holy Mountain’ is a local name for Ysgyryd Fawr (Skirrid Fawr in English), Llanthony a village with an important medieval priory.
‘Bolton Abbey in the Olden Time’: engraving of a popular painting by Sir Edwin Landseer (1802–73).
“Te Deum Laudamus”: title and opening words of Latin hymn of praise; the words ‘Te Dominum Confitemur’ immediately follow, and together are translated as, ‘You are God: we praise you | You are the Lord: we acclaim you.’ The pair of prints seems to be invented, though Machen seems to suggest a family resemblance with the work of Frith (see note below).
Mafeking year: the Siege of Mafeking, during the Second Boer War, lasted from October 1899 to May 1900.
“Sherry, Sir”: after a painting by William Powell Frith (1819–1909). The title (properly ‘Sherry, Sir?’) was coined specifically for the engraving.
Bloomsbury, in the days when the bars were up, and the Duke’s porters had boxes beside the gates, and all was peace: before 1890, that is, when ‘parliament authorised the newly established London County Council to order the removal of London’s many private gates and bars, five of which were in the Duke of Bedford’s Bloomsbury’ (Rosemary Ashton, Victorian Bloomsbury (New Haven, 2012), 282). This is a good place to note that, in this story, subsequent glossing of London place names will be selective.
Christina Rossetti: (1830–94), poet associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and devout Anglican.
303 ‘The Shop of the Pale Puddings, where little David Copperfield might have bought his dinner’: Machen means to call to mind the following passage, from chapter 11 of the novel:
I remember two pudding shops, between which I was divided, according to my finances. One was in a court close to St Martin’s Church — at the back of the church, — which is now removed altogether. The pudding at that shop was made of currants, and was rather a special pudding, but was dear, twopennyworth not being larger than a pennyworth of more ordinary pudding. A good shop for the latter was in the Strand — somewhere in that part which has been rebuilt since. It was a stout pale pudding, heavy and flabby, and with great flat raisins in it, stuck in whole at wide distances apart.