Part 5

Why then had Machen come to London, again and again? Why had this shy and retiring scribbler left the orchards and fields of Gwent, the pleasant rectory in Caerleon, to live in the great stone city on the Thames? Perhaps it was because his Welsh blood stirred within him and drove him to see the White Tower under which, centuries ago, they had buried the head of Bran, facing to the sea to guard against invasion. Perhaps it was to see the city that had been a city even before the legions came, the city fortified by King Llud, brother to Caesar’s great opponent, Cassibelaunus, for whom the city was called Caer Llud and later Caer London and then Londinium and Londres by the foreigners; that king who was buried at the gates still called Ludgate in his honor. Or perhaps it was because in London one could walk into a book shop and ask for Swinburne’s _Songs Before Sunrise_ as casually as one might walk into the Hanbury Arms in Caerleon and ask for ale.

For London was first and always a fascinating city to Machen. It is apparent in every page of his books. This countryman who could never forget his beloved country, delighted in the twistings and turnings of the streets and roads that led through London and eventually emerged from straggling suburbs into open fields. He notes with pleasure the streets whose crossings and corners he knew in the ’eighties and ’nineties; he misses them when, thirty years later, they have been absorbed by some great block of buildings. He remembers the facades, if such edifices could be dignified by the term, of the raw, red-brick villas that were then springing up all about London. He remembers the restaurants and even the menus, the taverns and the dwellings in the older sections of London, and the queer individuals and even queerer incidents he encountered over several decades.

London was for many years (and perhaps it still is) a city in which anything might happen. Strange encounters, mysterious strangers—these seemed to abound in the backwaters and byways of London. The city became to Machen a sort of Stevensonian Bagdad-on-the-Thames ... and he found in its streets and lanes, its Inns and Courts, the materials that went into _The Three Impostors_, _The London Adventure_, _A Fragment of Life_ and many another story.

This was true of Machen, and it was true of other writers in that decade. Despite the great calm postulated by Waugh, and in spite of the tremendous vacuum in which Waugh and other eminent Victorians fondly believed England and the world existed, there were great things stirring ... and the stirring was mostly centered about London. Being neither pamphleteers nor journalists, the writers of that day did not boil and bubble nor forecast trouble as they might today. To be sure, there was considerable pother about the New Woman, and the New This and That. But for the most part they did not try to portray their times. The poets were quite unaware of the peasants and “bourgeoise” was merely an epithet to be tossed at an unsympathetic critic on one of the more conservative journals. Time-conscious they most certainly were, but they aimed only slightly this side eternity. The delicate decadents, the most prolific and the best publicized group of that time, scarcely bothered to mention the undercurrents, but their very activity, their prodigious outpourings, were one of the manifestations of the stirrings beneath the surface. Then too, there was but one Shaw for every score of sonnetteers, one Wells for every dozen dilettante novelists, one Machen for every daring dramatist of the moment.

The beginnings of social-conscience and the vanguard of scientific thought were there, obscured for the moment by the lurid vapors given off by the writers of the purple phrase. There was, in short, a renascence of wonder, not another revival of mediaevalism or of neo-Gothicism, but of the wonder of things that existed behind the veil and seethed beneath the surface.

This was reflected as much by the lack of reticence in literature as in the development of new kinds of fiction ... fiction looking to new horizons. Shaw had already begun to puncture the balloons of Victorian complacency, Wells was writing of things that might come, things beyond our time and beyond our world. Machen began to postulate the existence of things behind the veil of common appearances. If Wells looked forward, Machen looked backward. He created a past as strange and as fearful as the future on some Wellsian planet. He was interested in the strange sciences of yesterday as Wells was in the sciences of tomorrow. Machen had read the treatises on alchemy, occult sciences, hypnotism, spiritualism—and in all of these he found a grain of truth. Alchemy, especially, interested him. The search for the basic power of the universe, the power and the ability to transform metals ... he could not dismiss completely the possibility. Machen was no scientist but he had, like Wells, a vast respect for the potentialities of science, and a keen instinct regarding probabilities. These men, at least, were not bringing in “the mean objects of the roadside” and subjecting them to the cold stare of the microscope.

Certainly we cannot afford to overlook the development of the detective story by Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes was presented not as a member of the existing force of law and order but as a radical departure from it. Holmes substituted cerebration for mere procedure. There was then, in London in the nineties, a small band of adventurers ... men who ventured to hold new beliefs, who sought for adventure in social as well as scientific fields, who looked forward (or backward) for strange worlds to visit. Note how they title their tales—each chapter, each episode is captioned in the Stevensonian manner as “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” or “The Novel of the Black Seal.” They searched farther afield than Paris for their magic—to the South Seas, to India, to the very Poles themselves—even to America.

Whatever was new and strange was usable. About this time London began to hear tales of the Mormons, and of the band called the Destroying Angels. Stevenson had them in mind when he wrote _The Dynamiters_, Doyle used them for his _Study in Scarlet_, and Machen used them as the genesis of an episode of _The Three Impostors_.

Wonder was in the air—whether it was expressed by a minor poet in terms of languishing eroticism or by Sherlock Holmes in the cataloguing of endless varieties of cigar ash. Something was stirring and it stirred most vigorously in London. Behind the facade of London lurked who knew what marvels or horrors. Behind the faces of Londoners lurked who knew what good or evil? London was filled with groups and clubs in search of the unusual. There were suicide clubs, freak clubs, cults of the horrible, Hellfire clubs and many others. Man, wondering about his future and his world, wonders also about himself. The word psychology was used hardly at all, but men were becoming aware of their minds and its quirks. Who was there among a group, a club, who might not have been another Jekyll?

This, then, was London in the 90’s ... a city on the threshold of still another century. Machen could not have forgotten that it had been Caer Llud, that the Romans had been there, and before them the Cymry. The very stones might burst into bloom, the pavements might ripple and surge and become as soft under foot as turf, the fogs and vapors of its chimney pots might become clouds of fragrance as in an orchard, or of incense as in a great cathedral.

_Chapter Three_

THE WEAVER OF FANTASY

1

In 1890, although he had begun to write in the modern manner and had even “fluttered the dovecotes” and startled the readers of the _St. James Gazette_ with his stories, the Rabelaisian enthusiasm was still upon Machen. It had, it is true, abated somewhat of late, but when his translation of _Le Moyen de Parvenir_ came from the bindery, all brave in blue and cream and gilt lettering, Machen still felt the spell strongly enough to set out, finally, for Touraine.

Actually, he had already determined to leave London before _Fantastic Tales_ came out. He had been living in Soho Street in two rooms where took place the grim battle of the fleas. London seemed to pall and to pale after that and he arranged to take a cottage in the Chiltern Hills. He had already written some of the tales in his most famous manner; _The Shining Pyramid_, _The Iron Maid_ among them; the idea of _The Great God Pan_ had been born and the country seemed the place to allow it to mature. There were certain alterations and repairs to be made on the cottage and he decided to go to France in the interim. It seemed, one must suppose, the thing to do—when one has a handsome set of new volumes one has translated from the French.

Much has been said herein, and sometimes somewhat slightingly, of the amazing effect of La Belle France upon the literate Anglo-Saxon. It has been intimated that Paris has always been something of an occupational disease among writers and minor poets. And here is Machen, off to France, like any puerile poetaster upon the publication of his first “slender volume.” To those who feel some word of explanation is due, some apology for an opinion seemingly shattered, it will be noted that Machen went to the South of France, to the countryside—and not to the northern cities and carefully manicured meadows and pompadoured pleasure-grounds of the Bois.

Moreover, and this is important, Machen went to a land that never was. For when he arrived at last in the land of Rabelais, of Beroalde, of Balzac—he was greatly disappointed. “The fact was,” he says, “that I had taken for granted Dore’s wonderful illustrations.” He had supposed that the enchanted heights, the profound and somber valleys, the airy abysses of these amazing plates had reprinted, as faithfully at least as a Chamber of Commerce brochure, the veritable scenery of Touraine.

The actuality was, alas! pitifully inadequate. Nevertheless Machen did what all sensible tourists do when the lands of enchantment fail to live up to the four-color posters—he visited the local taverns. This has always seemed to offer consolation and compensation in such cases. At any rate, the “Faisan d’Or” and “Le Caveau de Rabelais” provided noteworthy compensation for Dore. It took Machen a few days to get over his disappointment—but it was not too long before he could sit at his little table in the courtyard at the Faisan and say to himself, “This night I have had as much good red wine as ever I could drink.” And this was one of the great moments of his visit to Touraine. It encouraged him, moreover, and despite his disappointment over Dore, to return to Touraine every summer for the next ten years or so.

The landscape of Touraine and the vintages of the Vouvray pleased Machen, as Paris pleased the poetasters and absinthe appealed (in theory at least) to the young men who burned with a “hard gem-like flame” and who wore their passions and their shoes to tatters in their feverish quest for _la vie_. He discovered that there are, here and there, gardens that address the heart and spirit and not the florist—as Poe well knew.

In the autumn of 1890 Machen returned to London and, the cottage in the Chilterns still lacking thatch or drains or some other matters, he took rooms in Guilford Street. Now it was in Guilford Street, by one account, that he was struck by the idea for _The Great God Pan_. It was, he says, on a dark and foggy afternoon, and with no delay he proceeded to lay out the story. In another place, however, he relates that it was in the summer of 1890 that he wrote the first chapter of _The Great God Pan_. Whichever it was, the tale was completed before he went to his cottage in the country. It appeared in _The Whirlwind, Vol. ii_ for 1890, which also carried _A Wonderful Woman_, _The Lost Club_ and an almost entirely unknown item—_An Underground Adventure_. Another story, _The Red Hand_, is of this period for it appeared in the Christmas number of _Chapman’s Magazine_ under the title, _The Telling of a Mystery_. These matters attended to, Machen retired to the Chilterns early in 1891.

Of his stay in the country we know remarkably little. He spent two years there and, when he returned to London in 1893, he reported that he had “found it nothing.” However that may be, he did accomplish a certain amount of work. He wrote a number of his best stories there and completed two books which he promptly destroyed. The contents of these books have not been entirely lost however, for much of what was in them came to light another day. At any rate, it was in the Chilterns that he wrote _The Inmost Light_.

This famous story was written to a special commission, one of the few he received in his life. His stories for the _Globe_ and _St. James Gazette_ had attracted, as has been noted, considerable attention, and a Miss Bradden wrote Machen, asking him to contribute a tale to an annual she was getting out. _The Inmost Light_ was written for Miss Bradden and packed off to her from the cottage in the hills. The affrighted lady returned it after what must have been one of the most rapid readings on record.

At any rate, in 1894, when “yellow bookery was at its yellowest,” John Lane of the Bodley Head published these two tales under the title _The Great God Pan_ as Volume V of the Keynote Series. There was a title page decoration by Aubrey Beardsley—this, and the imprint of the Bodley Head, indicated that the book was, as one might say today, “aimed at a particular market.” Presumably it hit the mark, for the tale achieved a fame that has lasted to this day. For this is the best known of Machen’s stories and—even though Machen deprecatingly remarks that the book had “made a storm in a tiny tot’s tea cup”—there was a considerable tempest aroused. _The Manchester Guardian_ went on record as feeling that Machen had “succeeded only in being ridiculous.” _The Lady’s Pictorial_ found it “gruesome, ghastly and dull.” The _Westminster Gazette_ decided that it was “an incoherent nightmare of sex.” Nevertheless, the book was well received and gained considerably more of a readership for Machen than had his previously published exercises in the antique. One wonders what the Boston reviewers thought of it—for the book was published by Roberts Brothers of Boston in the same year.

The _Manchester Guardian’s_ reviewer, a staunch fellow with advanced ideas, had refrained from saying more about _The Great God Pan_ “for fear of giving such a work advertisement.” This did not prove to be particularly effective for the Bodley Head was compelled to bring out a second edition in 1895. There were other editions: Grant Richards included the tale in _The House of Souls_ in 1906, and again in 1913. It was translated into the French in 1901, and reissued again by Simpkins, Marshall in 1916. Knopf brought it out in 1924, and the story has been included in numerous anthologies.

The story of _The Great God Pan_ is simple enough—but it has the touch of magic. There is a doctor with strange theories and strange knowledge. He performs an operation on the brain of a simple country girl—an operation which permits her to see, for a moment, the great god Pan, with results that were in accordance with the ancient and traditional legends concerning what might follow such a vision.

Of course we are all prone, today, to interpret literature according to our own lights, and we employ, with facility if not always felicity—the great gift of hind-sight. We may, in 1948, judge the tale neither as startling nor as horrifying as any one of a score or more pulp masterpieces. We may find Machen’s doctor not too much unlike Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll or Wells’s Dr. Moreau.

It may even be that _The Great God Pan_ doesn’t stir us a bit—although that cannot be credited. But in 1894 the story was an amazing one—and even the comfortably righteous reviewer on the _Manchester Guardian_ might have pondered, in the depths of the night, this passage: “Suppose that an electrician of today were suddenly to perceive that he and his friends have merely been playing with pebbles and mistaking them for the foundations of the world; suppose that such a man saw uppermost space lie open before the current, and words of man flash forth to the sun and beyond the sun into the system beyond, and the voices of articulate speaking men echo in the waste void that bounds our thought.”

Well, our young Manchester guardian of the public welfare very probably cried, “Bosh!”—and went resolutely back to sleep.

Machen, having written it, couldn’t sleep on it. In 1924, in a book called _The London Adventure_, Machen quotes the above passage and says, “It seems to me that the passage from _The Great God Pan_ is a distinct prophecy of ‘wireless’; and what would logic have said to it, in 1890, when that chapter was written?”

And what, for that matter, says logic in 1948—for we have perceived again, in another way, that we have been playing with pebbles and mistaking them for the foundations of the world. For now we think not only of sending sound to the outermost reaches of space—but man himself, and at speeds greater than the speed of sound.

There is another thought that might have bothered the young man of Manchester. A character in the story has quoted Oswaldus Crollius, “In every grain of wheat there lies hidden the soul of a star.” Now in 1894 the reviewer, any reviewer, even the Bostonian, would have muttered something about “muddled mysticism” and skipped over the sage utterance of Oswaldus to get along into the “incoherent nightmare of sex.” What Machen thought of this in ’94 we do not know—but in 1923 or thereabouts he wrote that he thought this a wonderful saying; “a declaration, I suppose that all nature is one, manifested under many forms; and so far as I can gather, modern science is rapidly coming around to the view of this obscure speculator of the XVII century; and, in fact, to the doctrine of the Alchemists.”

Now this was a brave thing to say—even in 1923. The muddled mysticisms of the ’90’s is today’s theorum—as has been amply demonstrated. The most fantastic fable or the most ingenious fiction of one decade may become the newest discovery in the laboratory of today.

2

The sojourn in the Chilterns was not as unproductive as Machen has implied. He had written perhaps more than we shall ever know—most of his stories lived with him for years before they were written, and a book or two destroyed did not cease to exist. Many of his best tales were born and others matured in the Chiltern cottage. Still, two years in the country seemed quite enough.

When Machen returned to London in 1893 he was a man of property or, if not property in the Galsworthian sense, of substance in his own. For the various legacies from deceased Scottish relations that might have meant so much a few years earlier, had been coming through and accumulating, and there were now between three and four thousand pounds in the bank. The days of Clarendon Road, of green tea and stale bread and tobacco, were over and there were rooms in Great Russel Street and later in Gray’s Inn. There was Benedictine in the buffet and a growing circle of friends and companions.

The possession of several thousand pounds presented problems—at least the semi-important one of how to invest it. After looking about for a “good thing,” in a characteristically casual way, Machen thought of the Brothers—that courteous pair under whose benevolent auspices he had translated Casanova in a basement. They had, as Machen knew, a proposition now and then, and he thought perhaps they might have suggestions. They had, as it happened, an excellent one. The _Memoirs of Casanova_, which he had translated some years before, was about to be published. A thousand pounds invested in the project might be a good thing indeed. Machen had at least that much confidence in the Brothers, or in his own work—at any rate, he invested. It was then that one of the Brothers, the more benevolent of the two no doubt, suggested that he might, since he was now financially interested, wish to polish up here and there.

Machen was content, however, to limit his contribution to the translation and the thousand pounds, and let him polish who so desired.

The monumental memoirs came out in 1894. Machen’s translation was the first in the English language and, I believe, the only complete one to this day. So it is likely to remain until some unsuspecting scholar may once more be imposed upon, or some highly solvent professor or richly subsidized fellow undertakes the task.

3

Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, Fanny to her friends and Scheherezade to her husband, shared or perhaps inspired her husband’s view of London as a fabulous Bagdad of the West, a city of encounters in which all things were probable—even such things as might rival the tales of the Arabian Nights Entertainment.

Stevenson, that prince of story tellers, who knew as well as any man how to invent marvelous tales and to tell them in a marvelous manner, occupied himself and Fanny during an illness by creating _The Dynamiter_. The book was published in 1885 and came to Machen’s attention at some time before or during his retreat to the Chilterns.

Machen had been under the Stevensonian influence for some years. In 1890 he published a story, _The Lost Club_, which exhibits marked family resemblance to one of the early adventures in the _New Arabian Nights_. At any rate the _Three Impostors_, Machen’s next book, is derived from Stevenson’s _Dynamiter_, and was written somewhere in this period when _The Great God Pan_ was creating a stir. The manuscript was sent, late in the winter of 1894, to Heinemann who expressed interest, enthusiasm, and then, unaccountably, regrets. The reader in the publisher’s office had been wonderfully encouraging and gloriously flattering. It was better, said Heinemann excitedly, than Stevenson’s best. Even a man as modest as Machen marveled at his artistry—and marveled still more when, early in 1895, the House of Heinemann returned his manuscript with the usual regrets and the usual phrase about being unable to use the enclosed manuscript.

And so, later that year, _The Three Impostors_ was issued by John Lane, once again in the Keynote Series and once again with the title page decoration by Beardsley. It failed, Machen says, to set Fleet Street afire—but it is, of course, one of his best stories.

Once again, as with so many of Machen’s stories, there were those who wrote to inquire whether there was not some foundation of fact, some basis of truth upon which the tale had been built. So willing are men to suspend their disbelief! People were forever asking him if his stories were not based upon some legend current in his part of the country and, of course, there were those who were willing to relate incidents and occurrences which closely paralleled the fantastic fictions of Machen’s inventions.

_The Three Impostors_ combined a number of popular elements. There was, first of all, a portrait of America, or the American West, as rugged and rough and uncouth as any Briton could desire. It rivaled and even surpassed, in some respects, Stevenson’s Western episode in _The Dynamiter_. The Stevenson story had also served as a model for the Mormon episode in Conan Doyle’s _A Study in Scarlet_. The resemblances here are even more marked than in Machen’s tale. As a matter of fact, Christopher Morley has suggested (in the Saturday Review late in 1947) that Doyle found the Mormon episode in his occiput following a reading of _The Dynamiter_ on a rainy evening in 1885. However this may be, _The Three Impostors_ is a remarkable and absorbing story, even if it did not do as well as _The Great God Pan_—but it has done remarkably well in the fifty-odd years since it was written.