Chapter I: Part 1

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_This is No. 62._

_Signature_

_Arthur Machen_]

Precious Balms

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

ELEUSINIA
THE ANATOMY OF TOBACCO
THE CHRONICLE OF CLEMENDY
THE GREAT GOD PAN
THE THREE IMPOSTORS
HIEROGLYPHICS
DR STIGGINS
THE HOUSE OF SOULS
THE HILL OF DREAMS
THE BOWMEN
THE GREAT RETURN
THE TERROR
WAR AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH
THE SECRET GLORY
FAR OFF THINGS
THINGS NEAR AND FAR
THE SHINING PYRAMID
STRANGE ROADS
DOG AND DUCK

Precious Balms
By Arthur Machen

_Let the righteous smite me friendly and reprove me, but let not
their precious balms break my head._—Ps. cxli

London: Spurr & Swift
123 Pall Mall, S.W.1 1924

_Printed in Great Britain
by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh_

MELINA PLACE
LONDON

_May 1, 1924_

_My dear Spurr_,

_I am grieved, indeed, to hear your news about “Precious Balms.” You say that during your recent visit to America, you were made acquainted with some very serious misconceptions as to a phrase in the “Precious Balms” prospectus. This document stated that for a certain period I was “languishing in the cells of Carmelite House, serving a term of eleven years’ ‘hard’ for a series of obscure crimes.” And now you tell me that in the United States, this small piece of jocularity has been taken in the most serious way. People were anxious to be informed as to the exact nature of the crimes aforesaid, and confused Carmelite House with such establishments as The Tombs, Sing Sing, Pentonville and Wandsworth._

_I am extremely sorry. I had no intention of hurting anybody’s feelings. I hope you will present my sincere regrets and apologies—in the proper quarters._

_Yours sincerely_,

_ARTHUR MACHEN_

_Harry Spurr, Esq. Messrs Spurr & Swift Pall Mall, London_

CONTENTS

PAGE

_Introduction_ ix

_The Great God Pan and The Three Impostors_ 1

_Hieroglyphics_ 37

_The House of Souls_ 56

_The Hill of Dreams_ 89

_The Secret Glory_ 108

_Far Off Things and Things Near and Far_ 121

_Dog and Duck_ 139

_The Other Side_ 151

INTRODUCTION

Now and again I glance at the correspondence columns of a paper devoted to the affairs of those interested in writing—and find to my astonishment that authors have a great dislike of unfavourable criticism. I note, for example, the letter of a hurt and angry man, who protests that he has had hard measure from the critic of the _Cosmopolitan_, that the _Daily Mercury_ has clearly not read more than three pages of his book, that “Judex” in the _Lyre_ says he is ignorant of the elements of prosody: “a harsh judgment,” the poor man exclaims, “when directed against one who has the privilege of signing himself ‘M.A. Oxon.’” And sometimes the reviewer is entreated to remember that authors have their living to get; the suggested inference being, as I suppose, that the critic should do nothing but praise the books submitted to him. In fact, there are, it seems, authors who conceive that a word of blame is a word of injury, and that a harsh notice is a hardship.

In my opinion, nothing can be farther from the truth. Could anything be duller than a monotonous song of praise? Is it not obvious that there is no sport in easy paths? If this were not so, what would become of the Alpine Clubs? A mountaineer would not thank you for a free excursion ticket to Romney Marsh or the Bedford Level. Opposition, whether it be that of a mountain side or a body of critical opinion, is one of the chiefest zests and relishes of life; and so profoundly have I felt this that for the last thirty years I have hoarded up my “notices,” with a very special eye of favour on those “notices” which are foolishly termed bad. Foolishly, for many reasons, some of which I have suggested; but chiefly because there is only one sort of notice that is really bad, and that is no notice at all. I do not know whether there are critical writers who desire to extinguish, make to cease, and bring to nought this, that or the other author; but if there be such, I take it that they are far too skilled in their craft to think that a man can be blotted out by a column of words, be they fierce or jeering. Silence is the only fatal sentence; from that there is no appeal, for it there is no remedy.

But this must be done thoroughly; and here I would submit is the error of the critic of _The Referee_, the late David Christie Murray, who will be found quoted in the chapter devoted to “The House of Souls.” The writer desired to “slate” the book with all his heart, and devoted the entire front page of his paper to that excellent endeavour. He compared the book to an obscene waxwork anatomical museum at a country fair: “it poisoned everything.” He was light: he said it was all “baby-Satanic-tommy-rot,” that it was “buried nastiness.” He declared that I was taking the ha’pence of the public and making a very decent “(and most indecent)” living by exhibiting the bestial side of my nature. All very well; but the critic tried to combine the method of the hearty attack with the method of silence: he neither mentioned the name of the book nor that of the author. This was faulty technique: for the next few months the Editor of _The Referee_ was pestered by correspondents who wanted to know all about it; to ascertain for themselves the extent of the author’s depravity.

A more delicate method was employed—in perfect good faith, very likely—by _The Bystander_. Here the critic gave the name of the book and of the author, and praised the stories. _But he pretended that I had no existence._ He said that he had a very strong suspicion that I was, in reality, Mr Montagu Wood, the author of “A Tangled I.” He added that Mr Montagu Wood’s humour was recognised in “Pop” at Eton, and afterwards at the Canning Club at Oxford.

Now, let us be fair. Honour to whom honour is due; I confess that the dart of this reviewer penetrated my armour. I was genuinely annoyed—I was a lad of 44 at the time—at being practically wiped out of existence. But, on calm reflection, I wonder what Mr Wood thought of it. Perhaps he, too, was not over-pleased. But I shall always think of _The Bystander_ with the respect that one gives to a cunning craftsman.

There are some very tolerable examples to be found in the collection relating to “The Great God Pan” and “The Three Impostors.” Of course I reject the violent, especially the morally violent. These are not in the true tradition of the fine art of reviewing. When _The Manchester Guardian_ said that “The Great God Pan” was “the most acutely and intentionally disagreeable” book it had seen in English, the _Guardian_ blundered. Deplorable as it may be, we must confess that such a sentence constitutes a valuable free advertisement; and _The Manchester Guardian_ did not desire to advertise the work. Indeed it said so; and thus blundered again. And so again _The Lady’s Pictorial_: “Men and women who are morbid and unhealthy in mind may find something that appeals to them.” This is all wrong. Again we must deplore the anfractuosities of human nature; but to say that a book is morbid and unhealthy is to perform the office of a spielman, not of a censor.

No; the way to go about it, if you must leave the safe way of silence, is to take things lightly. Thus, in _The National Observer_: “In all the glory of the binder’s and printer’s arts we have two tales of no great distinction.” So _The Sketch_: “his bogles don’t scare”; _The Daily Chronicle_: “his horror, we regret to say, leaves us quite cold”; _The Observer_: “one shakes with laughter rather than with dread.” All these are very well; and another manner is, I think, successful. The _Belfast News Letter_ suggested that “sensationalism is the order of the day, and must be pandered to to make the author’s pot boil.” There is something intimate in this knowledge of the author’s very disastrous private affairs which has a strange, elusive charm. Another favourite of mine is Mr Walkely’s review of “Hieroglyphics” in _The Morning Leader_: here again you will find intimate knowledge of the writer’s life which could not have been gathered from title pages. Thus, the opening sentence:

“I do not know whether Mr Machen is to be described as an actor who amuses his leisure with writing books or as an author who fills up his evenings by appearing on the stage.” But the article which follows, though decisive as to the demerits of the book under review, is much too long. Brevity in these affairs is of the utmost importance. If you want to say that an author is an unimportant ass, you should say it in a paragraph, not in a column.

Other reviews which I should like to recommend to the notice of the _virtuoso_ are _The Manchester Guardian_ on “The Hill of Dreams,” and on “Far Off Things”; also _The Boston Evening Transcript_ review of “Things Near and Far.” The heading of this article is: “The Reflections of a Man of Self-Conceit.” The article displays my mean, sponging, irritable nature in a very masterly manner. And the very choice collection of “Outlook” reviews should not be neglected. And I have said that in my opinion the review of vehement denunciation is not of the highest merit: but I except Mr Murry’s notice of “The Secret Glory” in _The Nation and Athenæum_. There is a completeness about it which satisfies.

* * * * *

Finally, it would not be honest to conceal that there is another side to this as to most other questions. I have had “good” reviews in my day, and I give a few specimens of these. The writers of these articles I leave to the judgment of their own conscience. I only hope that, in the words of Mr Pecksniff, they have not voluntarily deserted the flowery paths of purity and peace.

THE GREAT GOD PAN AND THE THREE IMPOSTORS

[Sidenote: _The Observer_]

... He imagines for us the horrible results of attempting by means of a surgical experiment to make a young woman “see the god Pan.” Interference with the nerve centres of the young woman’s brain turns her into an idiot; but that is not the worst of it, for she becomes in due course the mother of a sort of she-devil who goes through life frightening people out of their wits, and eventually causes a “terrible epidemic of suicide” amongst fashionable men about town. What is it about this mysterious heroine which sends the friends of her girlhood crazy, which ruins her husband “body and soul,” and which causes her later admirers to go out and hang themselves—this is never definitely explained. The intention evidently is to make us shudder by vague allusions to “awful unspeakable elements,” which are “triumphant in human flesh,” and produce “a horror one dare not name.” It is not Mr Machen’s fault, but his misfortune, that one shakes with laughter rather than with dread over the contemplation of his psychological bogey. His art has been hampered by the limitations imposed upon it through his having to leave his ingenious horror “indescribable” and “unutterable” from first to last. Mr Aubrey Beardsley has no doubt come gallantly to the rescue with the admirably-realised repulsiveness of the nymph designed by him as an appropriate frontispiece. But the general effect of “The Great God Pan,” as well as of the kindred tale which follows it in “The Inmost Light,” is, we fear, hardly so creepy as it would have been if it had dared to be intelligible.

[Sidenote: _The Daily Chronicle_]

... His horror, we regret to say, leaves us quite cold. Gallant gentlemen commit suicide at the mere sight of the accursed thing; here be murders, inquests, alarums and excursions—and our flesh obstinately refuses to creep. Why? Possibly because we have had a surfeit of this morbid thaumaturgy of late, and “ken the biggin’ o’t.” Possibly, too, because, while Mr Machen describes the (literally) panic terror of the various people who behold the monster, he never lets us have so much as a glimpse of the monster for ourselves. How can we be petrified unless we see Medusa’s head? To be told that others have been turned to stone won’t do. That is only what the soldier said: it is not evidence....

[Sidenote: _Belfast News Letter_]

... Sensationalism is the order of the day, and must, we suppose, be pandered to to make the author’s pot boil; but, despite the ability in this direction—for the conception is cleverly carried out—we fail to see why such absurdities should be presented to intelligent readers. The Great God Pan, with his syrinx, cloven hoof, and pointed ears, may have been a serious bogey to the rustics Theocritus sings about; but to call in this mythical monstrosity’s aid to work on our _fin-de-siècle_ nerves is far-fetched, to say the least of it. Mr Machen’s ability is worthy of a better _motif_ than mystifying innocent people about the devil, or poking fun at his intellectual admirers about the unseen.

[Sidenote: _The Westminster Gazette_]

If Mr Arthur Machen’s object were to make our flesh creep, we can only speak for ourselves and say that we have read the book without an emotion. There are nameless horrors hinted at in every other page, which make other people turn green and sick, but it is beyond the power of the most susceptible reader to shudder at the shudders of these fictional people. The story is, in fact, most elaborately absurd—so absurd, indeed, as to save it from the less agreeable charge of being nasty, as it would inevitably be if Mr Machen meant us to take it seriously. We can at least congratulate him on having failed in the courage to make plain the mysterious horrors which are supposed to be in the background of this story, but the result is to leave an inchoate and confused series of impressions, as of a man who is trying to tell a story and fails to express himself. What the intention of the writer could possibly have been we cannot even conjecture. Mr Machen was possibly under the impression that he was writing a new “Jekyll and Hyde,” but “The Great God Pan” is as meaningless as an allegory as it is absurd from any other point of view.

[Sidenote: _The Echo_]

Mr Arthur Machen’s story, “The Great God Pan,” published by Mr John Lane, is a failure and an absurdity. His meaning, if there is any, seems to be the presentation, or rather the suggestion, of Pan as a hideous being or force behind nature, of which being the men who fall victims to an abandoned woman that appears in various disguises and under various _aliases_ in the story catch glimpses, from the mere fact that they have yielded to her power—the obscene nature deity revealing himself in the person of the said woman.... Mr Machen tells us that the victims saw the horrors, but that is not enough. Doubtless the horrors would turn out to be mere grotesques, even if we did see them. Not the ghost of a “creepy” feeling will this story produce in the mind of anybody who reads it.

[Sidenote: _The Speaker_]

... If we may believe Mr Machen, those doings are of the most horrible character; but as he omits to tell us what they are, and leaves us merely with the impression that she is “a bold, bad woman” of a very ordinary description, we are compelled to take her special horrors upon trust. Fortunately for everybody, and for the readers of the story in particular, she comes to a speedy end, though whether she is hanged or dissolved into “a substance as jelly” the record fails to explain. All that we know is that Mr Machen writes of this unfortunate female as if he were in deadly earnest and she were something too terrible to be plainly revealed. There is another story, called “The Inmost Light,” bound up with “The Great God Pan.” It deals with a lady who is represented as having been in every way as horrible as the heroine of the first tale; but as the only explicit fact recorded of her is that she frightened the passers-by by the faces she made at the window of her husband’s house, the reader is left as much in the dark about her as he is about her sister in misfortune....

[Sidenote: _The Sketch_]

Mr Machen’s “Great God Pan” (John Lane) is concerned more with the nerves than with the imagination. We respect such things as, aiming at the ghastly, do actually make us afraid in the dark and give us hideous dreams. Mr Machen’s inhuman conceptions are put into ingenious forms, and exhibit many different clevernesses; only, his bogles don’t scare. In his next attempt, however, he may come out on the right side.

[Sidenote: W. L. Courtney in _The Daily Telegraph_]

“Really,” laughed the Hostess, “is the Yellow Book a disease?”

“Assuredly,” said the Physician, “a very virulent form of jaundice, due to an imperfect digestion and a morbid condition of liver.”

“Yes,” continued the Philosopher, meditatively, “and ‘Theodora’ is a form of typhoid, due to ethical blood poisoning. ‘Little Eyolf’ and ‘The Rat-Wife’ are varieties of cerebral mania, Mr Aubrey Beardsley’s figures are salient examples of locomotor ataxy, and as for ‘The House of Shame’ and ‘The Great God Pan’—well, there are some kinds of maladies which are not mentioned outside medical treatises!”

[Sidenote: _The Manchester Guardian_]

The meaning of “The Great God Pan,” by Arthur Machen, is very carefully veiled, and on the whole we are inclined to think it is quite as well that it is so, since such glimpses as we are vouchsafed of it are singularly repulsive. In fact, so far as we have been able to make out, to shock would seem to have been Mr Machen’s sole intention. To achieve this desirable end he has ransacked the dark and hidden corners of Greek mythology, and so piled up innuendo and suggestion, to say nothing of the mere vulgar horror of five mysterious suicides and other unspeakable crimes, that we are afraid he only succeeds in being ridiculous. The book is, on the whole, the most acutely and intentionally disagreeable we have yet seen in English. We could say more, but refrain from doing so for fear of giving such a work advertisement. The same remarks apply to “The Inmost Light,” the second story in the book, in only slightly lesser degree.

[Sidenote: _The Queen_]

“The Great God Pan” comes near being a book of genius with its originality and weirdness; but it distinctly misses it, because Mr Machen has not the power of indicating, even by a hint, the nature of the horror which made strong men destroy themselves rather than live with such a memory. There are two stories in the book, both dealing with villainous doctors, who make surgical experiments with the brains of living women in the hope, apparently, of turning human beings into devils. In each case the result is terrifying beyond human endurance, according to Mr Machen, but he does not succeed in imparting any of the terror to his readers....

[Sidenote: _The Westminster Gazette_]

_The English School of Diabolists._—I pass now to the fourth class, that of the lurid and nonsensical. These, I take it, are written under the inspiration of the French School of Diabolists. That school, as the reader knows, is possessed with ideas of black magic, spirits of evil, devils become incarnate, and numerous other nightmares of corruption. You are introduced to modern alchemists who use Latin incantations, pour mysterious fluids out of green phials, and by the black arts transform men into monsters, or penetrate the corrupt mysteries of their being. Several English imitators of this school have come into my hands recently, but the wildest is, perhaps, Mr Machen’s “Great God Pan,” published in the Keynotes Series. Here we have a physician who practises the black art, and by an operation on the brain releases for the time being the spirit of a woman, that she may visit the spirit world and “see the Great God Pan.” She awakes, a lunatic “convulsed with an unknowable terror.” Shortly afterwards she has a child whom we gather from certain lurid hints to be a she-devil incarnate. “When the House of Life is thrown open there may enter in that for which we have no name, and human flesh may become the veil of a horror one dare not express.” (That is Mr Machen’s favourite style. The unnameable, the unknowable, the inexpressible, and the unmentionable have a nameless fascination for him.) ...

_Sex-Mania Incoherent._—The wild absurdity of all this really makes comment superfluous. But note the sex-mania in it all. It is an incoherent nightmare of sex and the supposed horrible mysteries behind it, such as might conceivably possess a man who was given to a morbid brooding over these matters, but which would soon lead to insanity if unrestrained. I imagine, however, that Mr Machen’s desire has simply been to emulate certain French practitioners in this line; indeed, the fact that he is so often reduced to gasping negatives proves that he has not made it clear even to himself what he is after. His work is innocuous from its absurdity, but the type is most truly decadent....

[Sidenote: _The National Observer_]

In all the glory of the binder’s and printer’s arts, we have two tales of no great distinction. Indeed paper and form are worthy of much better things. We look for literature and find the old, old tale of man or woman who is possessed of a devil. Mr J. Sheridan Le Fanu made our youthful scalp tingle years ago with something of the nature (but infinitely cleverer) of these tales. The doctor who performs weird operations we have met before but not one so fortunate as the hero of “The Inmost Light,” the second story in this volume. For this gentleman digs for the soul and finds it in the convenient form of an opal—a dangerous theory surely. Men have committed murder for less. Dr Black murders his own wife, quite unnecessarily it appears to us, and it is her soul in the form of a jewel which he keeps for inexplicable reasons in a leather case in the back parlour of a toy shop in London. Mr Machen does his very best to thrill, and relates his horrors in a style which should carry conviction but fails. The incidents are too loosely strung together, and the form of narration, bringing in as it does characters who take no part in the central idea of the tale, inevitably cools the interest of the reader. Again, there is no motive assigned to any action except a vague love of science which certainly fails to convince. Men do not pursue an idea as does Villiers in the first story—doctors do not kill their wives as does Dr Black in the second tale—without strong incentive, and it is painfully obvious that in the present case their actions are a mere necessity to the author. Mr Machen writes somewhat conventionally and without affectation. It is in construction that he is as yet markedly deficient.

[Sidenote: _The Lady’s Pictorial_]

This book is gruesome, ghastly, and dull. Mr Machen has done his best with an impossible subject, but although men and women who are morbid and unhealthy in mind may find something that appeals to them in the description of Dr Raymond’s experiment and its results, the majority of readers will turn from it in utter disgust. From first to last there is not one human touch in the story, and not a trace of psychology to awaken our interest in the actions of any one of the characters. Dr Raymond’s apparent conviction that to see the Great God Pan would make up for any loss or suffering entailed by the sight, is almost childish; and as I waded through the dull list of horrors, which the too vivid imagination of Mr Machen inspired him to write, I bethought me of the curious old legend, so exquisitely told in verse by Mrs Browning, of the death of “The Great God Pan.” It was waste of time for Mr Machen to bring him to life again....

[Sidenote: _The Guardian_]

Mr Machen has apparently tried to produce a novelty in fiction by borrowing from Mr Conan Doyle some of the tricks of style of his detective stories, and uniting them with the rather gruesome studies in dehumanisation which Mr Stevenson justified by the fine turn he gave them in his “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” and Mr Rudyard Kipling essayed less successfully in “The Mark of the Beast.” According to Mr Machen’s postulate, “a slight lesion in the grey matter” of the brain is all that is needed to “level utterly the solid wall of sense,” and enable “a spirit to gaze on a spirit-world.” Fantastically enough, this is called “seeing the god Pan,” with whom it appears to us to have about as much to do as the vulgar figure which Mr Aubrey Beardsley has placed on the title-page. The result on a lady of seeing the god Pan is that people feel cold shivers when they look on her, and that she initiates her male acquaintances into mysteries which either kill them outright with horror or send them home to commit suicide—also that she herself has eventually to be put to death by her husband or the amateur detective, and turns into all sorts of remarkable shapes in the process. Mr Machen frequently informs us that his story is very terrible, and tries to keep up the mystery by breaking off every now and then as if his tale were too dread for words—but these tricks have also their ludicrous side. Perhaps the most discreditable paragraph in a not very creditable book is the “note” at the end of the first story, asserting that the woman of whom it is told “was born on August 5th, 1865, at the Red House, Breconshire, and died on July 25th, 1888, in her house in a street off Piccadilly, called Ashley Street in the story.” Mr Machen should make his choice between the art of fiction and penny-a-lining.

[Sidenote: _The Cork Examiner_]

... Arthur Machen wants to thrill us, and sets about his task by mixing surgical experiments, devil-possessed women of weird beauty, Latin phrases, and fantastic art, reminiscent of craftsmen of ages agone, into a pottage which, for our part, we find mawkish. The trick of the thing is at once apparent. Ever so many circumstances, feelings, sights, thoughts, etc., are unutterable, unnameable, unknowable, and unwhisperable, and there are nameless horrors by the hundred.... In our judgment this is what children call “a frightened story,” and, as an artistic piece of fiction, it calls for no serious consideration.

[Sidenote: _The Chronicle_]

With this new volume Mr Machen boldly challenges comparison with Mr Stevenson’s “Dynamiters.” The plan of the book is the same; that is to say, a number of short stories are woven into the fabric of a long one. Mr Machen’s literary method, too, is not unlike Stevenson’s; there is the same careful turning of the phrase, the nice choice of epithets, the use of certain words in their correct, but not in their common meaning.... Mr Machen’s intention in all these stories is to give us a grue, to curdle our blood, to make us think twice and thrice ere we mount the stairs and face the possible horror awaiting us in our dimly-lighted bedroom. Well, all we can say is that he has failed where few writers have succeeded. Edgar Allan Poe has done this thing over and over again. Le Fanu did it once; so did the author of a volume called “Phantasms” reviewed in these columns some months ago; but here the delightful thrill never quite comes off. Mr Machen lacks the power to create the necessary atmosphere, the atmosphere in which we shiver with apprehension as we breathe it. We all know how in dreams events in themselves commonplace and trifling enough, suddenly become ghastly, horrible, soul-devastating. And all because of our own state of mind. Now an author must somehow or other produce that state of mind in us before he puts us face to face with his creepy situation. He must compel “poetic faith” in us as Coleridge has it; bring us into the mental condition in which we are ready to believe anything. This Mr Machen never once succeeds in accomplishing. We are interested in his stories, and pleased extremely with the exceedingly careful and polished style in which they are told; we enjoy his humour and marvel at his ingenuity, but that worked-for and longed-for grue never happens.... The fact is that to triumph in the particular literary line which Mr Machen seems to have marked out for himself a certain peculiar sort of genius is, above all things, necessary. With this peculiar sort of genius the fates have not endowed Mr Machen, and the sooner he frankly recognises his want of it the better, for he has many other and most excellent literary accomplishments.

[Sidenote: _The Dundee Advertiser_]

As tragedy and comedy go hand in hand, so the weird is seldom far removed from the ridiculous. Arthur Machen’s volume, “The Three Impostors,” furnishes an excellent case in point. The stories it contains form a connected narrative such as Poe himself might have evolved. These nameless horrors, however, weirdly fascinating as they are, have something in common with the dreaded gnomes and goblins by whose aid intelligent nursemaids are wont to charm little folk to sleep. What place the book will occupy in the literature of entertainment we cannot take upon ourselves to say. We can only regret that the author’s singular inventiveness and great story-telling gifts have been employed in so undesirable a cause. What can any healthy-minded reader think of this: “There, upon the floor, was a dark and putrid mass, seething with corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting and changing before our eyes, and bubbling with unctuous, oily bubbles like boiling pitch. And out of the midst of it shone two burning points like eyes, and I saw a writhing and stirring as of limbs, and something moved and lifted up that might have been an arm.” Such visions have before been given to little boys who complained of headache and divers other pains. The family doctor generally diagnosed the case as “mince pies and pickles.”

[Sidenote: _Punch_]

“The Three Impostors,” a novel (“Keynote” Series) by Arthur Machen, opens well, which, by the way, is more than the book does, being a bit stiff; but, though it has the machens of a good story in it, there is very little worth reading after page 64.

[Sidenote: _Glasgow Herald_]

There are some books that produce a positive physical repulsion in their reader. Mr Machen’s extremely disagreeable story is one of them. One may be fond of the gruesome, and even take pleasure in an occasional sup of horror, administered in the piquant and artistic style of which Poe and Baudelaire had the secret. Mr Machen himself, in his previous volume, led some of us to imagine that a share of the same gift might be found in him. But “The Three Impostors” changes our view. The horror in it is palpably and very literally sickening. Nothing but a smart turn in brisk air can cleanse the feelings of the person who has been unfortunate enough to read this volume through.

[Sidenote: _Black and White_]

“The Three Impostors,” by Arthur Machen, lacks the vivid sense of actuality genius alone can impart to the grotesque. In less able hands, as Mr Machen’s, the weird tends to merge into the ridiculous. His connecting chain, too, is clumsily wielded, and you close the book, which opens with cleverness and promise, with disappointment.

[Sidenote: _The Observer_]

“The Three Impostors: or, The Transmutations,” by Arthur Machen, is a puzzling book. It is both good and bad; good in the clear presentation of some parts of it, in clever handling of some difficult characters, and bad because of the indefinite and unreal impression which, as a whole, it leaves on the reader’s mind. It also reminds us a little too strongly to be agreeable of a work with which it cannot for a moment be compared—with Mr Stevenson’s “New Arabian Nights.” ...

[Sidenote: _Birmingham Post_]

This is a singular effort of the imagination, suggestive of a mixture of Conan Doyle, Douglas Jerrold, and the author of the “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” seasoned with grim touches of German mysticism. It is not over-delightful reading, but to those, and they are legion, who are fond of being steeped in blood and mystery the book will commend itself highly. It is cleverly constructed, and that is about the best thing we can say of it. No doubt the author’s true intent is all for our delight; but, all the same, it is a matter of wonderment to us how it is that men with evident literary talents, which might be pointed to fine issues, should exercise their brain power in the noble cause of bewildering the brains of other people, and this without an adequate purpose.

[Sidenote: _The Guardian_]

We never expected to see the day when we should be tempted to regret that Stevenson had written “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” Nevertheless, when we had waded through the pages of Mr Machen’s last production, we were disposed to feel that even that book was dearly bought at the price of so repulsive an imitation as that contained in “The Three Impostors.” For the impressive and true use of the præternatural in “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” we have senseless and sickening—we can use no other word—pictures of mysterious scenes and of men returning to the bestial form which are meant to inspire terror and intense dread, but really leave us entirely unmoved, although he may imagine that his reader, like his hero, is left “white and shuddering with sweat pouring from my flesh.” Language seems almost to fail the author at times; he heaps up epithets of horror, the words “bubbled and boiled out” of one man’s mouth “in the fury of his emotion”; another person stands “shuddering and quaking as with the grip of ague, sick with unspeakable agonies of fear and loathing”; a doctor goes to see a patient, and reappears with “an unutterable horror shining in his eyes.” If we are not mistaken members of the medical profession would welcome the chance of investigating such a case as that of the gentleman who took the witches’ Sabbath drug. Wearied with this hysterical rubbish the reader hurries on to the end, to find in the last chapter that the unfortunate youth who has got tired of the fauns and the mysteries, and all the rest of the Greek burlesque, has been murdered amid most horrible tortures, which, together with his sufferings, are graphically described.

[Sidenote: _Pall Mall Gazette_]

... Mr Machen errs by never trusting sufficiently to his reader’s imagination, and his most elaborate horrors leave us “more than usual calm,” except when, by borrowing from Catlin, they make us feel slightly unwell. It is impossible to admire the construction of Mr Machen’s romance so much as if one did not know one’s Stevenson. Its framework, with its amateurs of the odd in London; its set of characters who break at sight into ingenious tales of absolute and elaborate falsehood with no particular motive for using the decorative imagination; its choice of a tobacco divan for the amateurs’ place of meeting, and sundry other details, is curiously reminiscent of “The Dynamiter.” So, again, the incident of the powder, strangely altered from its pure condition until it obtained the power of “riving asunder the house of life and dissolving the human trinity,” and giving a human form to “that which lies sleeping within us all,” argues an uncommon boldness in the man who ventures to use it after its being worked into “Dr Jekyll.” However, if Mr Machen thinks he can wear the armour of Achilles with grace, that is his affair. He has a sense of style, as witness his pictures of the deserted house and his conception of the possible history of a street. He is strong enough to walk alone, in fact; and we heartily wish him a little more invention and a little less anxiety to make his reader’s flesh creep.

[Sidenote: _Saturday Review_]

Mr Machen is an unfortunate man. He has determined to be weird, horrible, and as outspoken as his courage permits in an age which is noisily resolved to be “’ealthy” to the pitch of blatancy. His particular obsession is a kind of infernal matrimonial agency, and the begetting of human-diabolical mules. He has already skirted the matter in his previous book, “The Great God Pan,” and here we find it well to the fore again. This time, however, it simply supplies one of a group of incoherent stories held together in a frame of wooden narrative about a young man with spectacles. This young man falls into a circle of Black Magicians, who are practising indecorums and crimes at which Mr Machen dare only hint in horror-struck whispers.... But it fails altogether to affect the reader as it is meant to do. It fails mainly because Mr Machen has not mastered the necessary trick of commonplace detail which renders horrors convincing, and because he lacks even the most rudimentary conception of how to individualise characters. The framework of the book is evidently imitated from Mr Stevenson’s “New Arabian Nights,” a humorous form quite unsuited, of course, to realistic horrors....

[Sidenote: _Lady’s Pictorial_]

If you like the Prologue read the stories. I did not like the Prologue, but I was obliged to read the stories. They are a shade less odious than “The Great God Pan,” but the comparison says but little in their favour, for, in the former, Mr Machen gave to the world a most gruesome and _unmanly_ book. I should like to know how the imagination of the author would work upon clean and wholesome lines.

[Sidenote: _The Athenæum_]

... “The Three Impostors” produces on the normal waking mind much the same effect as a hearty supper of pork chops on the dream fancies of a person of delicate digestion: “velut ægri somnia, vanæ finguntur species.” It is Mr Machen’s chief joy, in the words of one of his characters, to dabble “with the melting ruins of the earthly tabernacle”; to hint, rather than describe, the unholy joys and infamous orgies of those whose diet is framed in accordance with the recipes of the devil’s cookery book, and whose esoteric acquaintance with the black art enables them to practise short cuts to the sundering of body and spirit. The result is never agreeable, occasionally disgusting, but seldom really blood-curdling, since in the last resort Mr Machen generally takes refuge in a copious use of such words as “unutterable,” “hideous,” “loathsome,” “appalling,” and so on....

[Sidenote: _The Graphic_]

... It is a pity, I think, that he does not confine himself to the marvellous pure and simple, and eschew the gruesome—that he should not be content with following in the footsteps of Stevenson instead of entering into competition with Poe. For Mr Machen, though he has, it must be admitted, an occasional inspiration of “the creepy,” is too anxious to produce “goose-flesh” in the readers, and in his desire to do so he is apt to seek his efforts in what I cannot but consider an “unsportsmanlike” fashion. For instance, he is too much addicted to the artifice of describing by telling you that things are indescribable. This is a device which, though perhaps not absolutely illegitimate, ought obviously to be very sparingly used; but in “The Three Impostors,” as even more conspicuously in Mr Machen’s earlier volume in the same series, “The Great God Pan,” it is employed to an extent which is almost provocative of parody. A writer must, of course, leave something to our imagination; but when we are continually meeting with creatures whose aspect is too hideous to be portrayed in human language, who utter words too awful to be repeated, and take part in orgies so abominable and revolting that they must for ever remain nameless, even the most indulgent reader may reasonably begin to feel that he is getting rather short measure for his money.

[Sidenote: _The Echo_]

... “The Three Impostors” is plainly based on Stevenson’s “Dynamiters.” The story opens in the same way, by a meeting of the principal characters in a West London tobacco-shop, and we have brought before us the same kind of house of mystery, and extraordinary men who haunt Italian restaurants, talk in archaic language, and unceasingly tell each other stories. Mr Machen would have stood a better chance of favourable judgment if he had not so needlessly invited comparison with one of Stevenson’s masterpieces. He has a powerful imagination, and a careful, laborious style. The adventures he tells, centred around a golden coin of Tiberius, are exciting enough to satisfy the most jaded palate. There is no effort made to retain even a reasonable verisimilitude, and probability is cast to the winds. A gentleman looking in an Oxford Street bun-shop is accosted by a stranger, who takes him into an Italian restaurant to dine. There the stranger pours out, with little provocation, a long tale about how, when starving and shabby, he had answered an advertisement for a private secretary, been accepted, gone to America, and the adventures he met with there. Another sits down in the gardens of Leicester Square, when an unknown young lady turns on him and narrates all her family history. Some of the tales are as weird and horrible as anything written in recent years, and there are murders without number. Frankly, the subject matter of “The Three Impostors” is not to our taste....

[Sidenote: _Literary World_]

... There are scoundrels who stop at nothing to get possession of magic seals and coins; there are foul creatures that come out of man; there are attempts to make our blood run cold. These all signally fail. We remain unthrilled; we pass from Mr Machen to our luncheon as easily as we change from one coat into another. He never stirs us. He tells his stories well, and that is all. Why are we so unmoved? Does the fault reside in us or in the author? We are willing to admit that as reviewers we run a risk of having our sensibilities blunted. We do not cry or tremble as easily as we wept and shook a few years ago, but we _can_ shed an occasional tear over a book, and we _can_ shudder when the real literary magician has us in his conduct. To this title, however, Mr Machen has no claim, a fact which explains our passive acceptance of his tame horrors.

[Sidenote: _The New Age_]

Mr Arthur Machen’s attempts are the more ambitious and elaborate and the least successful. He well illustrates the limitations and dangers of this class of composition. With all his fertile fancy and constructive ingenuity he cannot create that magic atmosphere of creepiness that we presume it is his chief object to attain. Both “The Great God Pan” and “The Three Impostors” are clever and ingenious stories; but as blood-curdlers they are almost failures. All the materials are there, none of the conjuring paraphernalia are wanting, but alas! we are not in the least deceived by the tricks, and vainly wish that the would-be magician would prevent us from seeing how the thing is done. The fact is that, while recognising the value of “suggestive” writing, and the imaginative effects to be obtained from obscure hints of “unknowable” and “unspeakable horrors,” he works this style—that ought to be used with fine reticence—to death, and reduces the “suggestive” theory _ad absurdum_.

[Sidenote: Louis Weitzenkorn in _The New York Herald_]

To climb Mount Everest is a great achievement, but there is always a secret hate in the heart of the man who did it first for the man who ascended after him. I do not mean to write this article on Arthur Machen and compare him to Mount Everest. Let us reserve the crests for an Ibsen, a France or a Plato. What I mean by my first sentence is that Machen, at present, seems to be the prized property of a very few persons. He has escaped what Ernest Boyd is pleased to call the æsthete, 1924 model, and sunk to the next lower circle of the intelligentsia, who have an exceedingly happy time springing him upon the ignorami. It has not been my achievement to have read all his work, and there is not enough genuine entertainment in him for me to do it unless The World pays me for the job. But I have managed to stow away “The Hill of Dreams,” “Things Near and Far” (a truly beautiful book, by the way), “Hieroglyphics,” a volume issued under the presentation of Vincent Starrett called “The Shining Pyramid,” and his latest publication here, “Dog and Duck.”

Without going through the rest of his writings I feel rather confident that I know something of him, and so far I have not yet read, in the encomiums of his enthusiasts, the one characteristic of Machen that, to me, lifts the man out of the ruck of those who just have a “beautiful style.” It is idle to talk in praise of Machen’s writing, as writing. He has polished up the language to a glittering surface. Each word he uses is carefully chosen, so carefully, indeed, that the writing often becomes of greater interest than the substance and the thought.

His latest volume, “Dog and Duck,” is Machen taking a day off. The book is uninteresting except to his worshippers, it being a kind of vaudeville, essays under such titles as “Why New Year?” “April Fool,” “Roast Goose: With a Dissertation on Apple Sauce and Sage and Onions.” (Notice the recurrent “ands” for a clue to the man’s careful style.) In the volume there is nothing of the Machen which brings him, for me, out in the first rank of the modern minors. But in “The Hill of Dreams” and perhaps, strangely, that imitative of Stevenson, “The Three Impostors,” there is the trade-mark of the man, a psychological insight almost uncanny. Machen has plumbed to the foundations, not of obscenity, but of the obscene.

For something over a decade I have watched what is known to the surface observers of Greenwich Village as the Greenwich Villager, the type of the kidding newspaper story, of the Webster Hall dance and the table-d’hote, where bootleg liquor hides behind the entree. They are a much more interesting study under the lights of Arthur Machen than the Sunday magazines know. Nor is it true that they alone are a lost tribe in this world. What they represent, I should say, in a rough guess, is about 20 per cent. of the habitable Occident and more of the Orient, and their kindred are to be found in all corners. One, specifically, is a prominent restaurant proprietor. Another is a fairly well-known business man, a third is an editor—in fact I could run pretty near the plane of professions and pick out striking examples of men and women who fall in the category discovered, so far as I know, by Arthur Machen.

It is an exceedingly difficult task to express the thing, to present with clarity what I think Machen means in his major efforts. In “The Three Impostors” there is an episode that symbolically pictures what I mean.

A young man is infected by some loathsome disease. As the malady grows upon him he takes to his room, locks himself in, and his food is left at his door. Finally his sister discovers the food is untouched. Several days go by and the door of that room is unopened. Then the ceiling above the inhabitants below the room begins to leak. The door of the horrible chamber is burst, and upon the floor is a slimy mass from which two human eyes glitter.

I think Machen has intended a symbol here. It is quite possible, of course, that I am doing that famous trick of interpreting into an author something he never senses. Thanking myself for the compliment, I believe, however, that Machen has deliberately intensified a certain type of human being, too populous, alas, and that this slime with its eyes, and the eyes are the most significant part of the picture, is the emphatic point Machen makes. I know this, that after reading and swallowing and then chewing the cud of this particular fantasy I found myself casting up accounts with the world and making of myself a kind of census-taker. I began to remember that certain persons I knew were slimy. Perhaps if I put it this way I would be clearer. Certain persons I knew were possessed of a hidden sexual rottenness, and those persons fell under vastly different indexes. Let me make it specific.

A young man, connected with the theatre, to almost every one who met him was “clean cut, charming, boyish.” I think I, alone, held a violent dislike for him, in spite of the fact that he was kindly, confidential, open, toward me—an almost irresistible combination. I was accused of jealousy. My oath of neutrality was sneered at. However, he was then the particular idol of a particular girl. That was two years ago. A few nights past I met that girl and asked about him.

“You never saw such a change,” she said. “His face is grotesque. Over it is written the most bestial lines I have ever seen. Everything that was in his soul has come out—in his face. He is horrible.”

I think Arthur Machen has penetrated to the bottom of a certain type of man. He chooses to add to this type a touch of the unnatural or supernatural, the latter a wrong term. He speaks of mysterious demons, hill people, horrors that feed upon and devour human beings. He plays upon mythology and Welsh legend, which is all very well; but beneath this penchant for legend there is revealed in this writer a knowledge of vile degeneracy, of inherited devilry that is as accurate as simple mathematics. These invented demons of Machen destroy and devour. In our own specific haunt of so-called Bohemia there exists the type of person who devours and destroys, and beyond this section of the city there are scattered innumerable individuals, the more dangerous because the better disguised, men and women whose foundation is slime, who cannot be caught and held because they slide from beneath the grasp and one says: “I cannot quite catch hold of this person, I cannot quite pin him down, he slips away from me, and yet I have him under my hand, I want to hold him and it makes me sick to feel the touch of his soul.”

Those who have read “The Hill of Dreams” will recall the mystical woman of the slums who flits in and out of the night like a bird of darkness, who, not touching the story, gives it an odour—the odour of decay and flesh. To me, as the book has gotten farther away from my first reading, I get to thinking of this woman as a human skull possessed of two full, rich, red lips, the only living thing upon the bones. Perhaps I am heightening the symbolism of Arthur Machen, but then he has revealed in his method specific creatures to me, creatures, however, of the same general base, the same compound of greasy, poisonous elements.

Of course, that which Arthur Machen has been tortured with must necessarily be expressed in symbolism. Gorgeous, magnificent symbolism that is at once satire and tragedy. For these inhuman characteristics in human beings present unexplored windings and twistings. So far psychology does not light up the crooked pathways and metaphysics give little to the pragmatic mind. This unwholesome or unholy nucleus of certain persons is a basic quality which is not a quality, it is something which can be felt and never named, sensed and never touched. It is directly inhuman, remorseless, impenetrable. It is partial atavism, perhaps, but I can’t see how much and to guess would be poetic.

All of this does not say one word to the person who has not come up against this quality, who has not felt it, not been made aware of “something wrong” in some one, who has not been pained and stricken with the fear of having looked at a weird and uncanny manifestation. The place to find it most often is in the eyes.

HIEROGLYPHICS

[Sidenote: A. B. Walkley in _The Morning Leader_]