The Arthur Machen Megapack: 25 Classic Works (2 page)

The Occult Detective Megapack

The Vampire Megapack

The Werewolf Megapack

WESTERNS

The B.M. Bower Megapack

The Max Brand Megapack

The Buffalo Bill Megapack

The Cowboy Megapack

The Zane Grey Megapack

The Western Megapack

The Second Western Megapack

The Wizard of Oz Megapack

YOUNG ADULT

The Boys’ Adventure Megapack

The Dan Carter, Cub Scout Megapack

The Doll Story Megapack

The G.A. Henty Megapack

The Girl Detectives Megapack

The Penny Parker Megapack

The Pinocchio Megapack

The Rover Boys Megapack

The Tom Corbett, Space Cadet Megapack

The Tom Swift Megapack

AUTHOR MEGAPACKS

The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

The Edward Bellamy Megapack

The B.M. Bower Megapack

The E.F. Benson Megapack

The Second E.F. Benson Megapack

The Algernon Blackwood Megapack

The Second Algernon Blackwood Megapack

The Max Brand Megapack

The First Reginald Bretnor Megapack

The Wilkie Collins Megapack

The Ray Cummings Megapack

The Guy de Maupassant Megapack

The Philip K. Dick Megapack

The Erckmann-Chatrian Megapack

The Jacques Futrelle Megapack

The Randall Garrett Megapack

The Second Randall Garrett Megapack

The Anna Katharine Green Megapack

The Zane Grey Megapack

The Edmond Hamilton Megapack

The Dashiell Hammett Megapack

The M.R. James Megapack

The Selma Lagerlof Megapack

The Murray Leinster Megapack

The Second Murray Leinster Megapack

The George Barr McCutcheon Megapack

The Talbot Mundy Megapack

The Andre Norton Megapack

The H. Beam Piper Megapack

The Mack Reynolds Megapack

The Rafael Sabatini Megapack

The Saki Megapack

The Robert Sheckley Megapack

OTHER COLLECTIONS YOU MAY ENJOY

The Great Book of Wonder, by Lord Dunsany
(it should have been called “The Lord Dunsany Megapack”)

The Wildside Book of Fantasy

The Wildside Book of Science Fiction

Yondering: The First Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories

To the Stars—And Beyond! The Second Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories

Once Upon a Future: The Third Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories

Whodunit?—The First Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories

More Whodunits—The Second Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories

X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries

ARTHUR MACHEN: A NOVELIST OF ECSTASY AND SIN, by Vincent Starrett

Originally published in 1918.

Some thirty odd years ago, a young man of twenty-two, the son of a Welsh clergyman, fresh from school and with his head full of a curiously occult mediaevalism, privately acquired from yellowed palimpsests and dog-eared volumes of black letter, wrote a classic. More, he had it published. Only one review copy was sent out; that was to
Le Livre
, of Paris. It fell into the hands of Octave Uzanne, who instantly ordered Rabelais and Boccaccio to “shove over” on the immortal seats and make room by their side for the author. The book was
The Chronicle of Clemendy
; the author, Arthur Machen.

Three years ago, about, not long after the great war first shook the world, a London evening newspaper published inconspicuously a purely fictional account of a supposed incident of the British retreat from Mons. It described the miraculous intervention of the English archers of Agincourt at a time when the British were sore pressed by the German hordes. Immediately, churchmen, spiritualists, and a host of others, seized upon it as an authentic record and the miracle as an omen. In the hysteria that followed, Arthur Machen, its author, found himself a talked-of man, because he wrote to the papers denying that the narrative was factual. Later, when his little volume,
The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War
, appeared in print, it met with an extraordinary and rather impertinent success.

But what had Machen been doing all those long years between 1885 and 1914?

In a day of haphazard fiction and rodomontade criticism, the advent of a master workman is likely to be unheralded, if, indeed, he is fortunate enough to find a publisher to put him between covers. Mr. Machen is not a newcomer, however, as we have seen; no immediate success with a “best seller” furnishes an incentive for a complimentary notice. He is an unknown, in spite of
Clemendy
, in spite of “The Bowmen,” in spite of everything. For thirty years he has been writing English prose, a period ample for the making of a dozen reputations of the ordinary kind, and in that time he has produced just ten books. In thirty years Harold Bindloss and Rex Beach will have written one-hundred-and-ten books and sold the moving picture rights of them all.

Of course, it is exactly because he does not write books of the ordinary kind that Arthur Machen’s reputation as a writer was not made long ago. His apotheosis will begin after his death. The insectial fame of the “popular” novelist is immediate; it is born at dawn and dies at sunset. The enduring fame of the artist too often is born at sunset, but it is immortal.

More than Hawthorne or Tolstoy, Machen is a novelist of the soul. He writes of a strange borderland, lying somewhere between Dreams and Death, peopled with shades, beings, spirits, ghosts, men, women, souls—what shall we call them?—the very notion of whom stops vaguely just short of thought. He writes of the life Satyric. For him Pan is not dead; his votaries still whirl through woodland windings to the mad pipe that was Syrinx, and carouse fiercely in enchanted forest grottoes (hidden somewhere, perhaps, in the fourth dimension!). His meddling with the crucibles of science is appalling in its daring, its magnificence, and its horror. Even the greater works of fictional psychology—
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, if you like—shrink before his astounding inferences and suggestions.

It is his theory that the fearful and shocking rites of the Bacchic cultus survive in this disillusioned age; that Panic lechery and wickedness did not cease with the Agony, as Mrs. Browning and others would have us believe.

Of Hawthorne, Arthur Symons wrote: “He is haunted by what is obscure, dangerous, and on the confines of good and evil.” Machen crosses those perilous frontiers. He all but lifts the veil; himself, indeed, passes beyond it. But the curtain drops behind him and we, hesitating to follow, see only dimly the phantasmagoria beyond; the ecstasies of vague shapes with a shining about them, on the one hand; on the other the writhings of animate gargoyles. And we experience, I think, a distinct sense of gratitude toward this terrible guide for that we are permitted no closer view of the mysteries that seem to him so clear.

We glimpse his secrets in transfiguring flashes from afar, as Launcelot viewed the San Graal, and, like that tarnished knight, we quest vainly a tangible solution, half in apprehension, always in glamour. But it is like Galahad we must seek the eternal mysteries that obsess Arthur Machen. There is no solution but in absolution, for it is the mysteries of life and death of which he writes, and of life-in-death and death-in-life. This with particular reference to Machen’s two most important books,
The House of Souls
and
The Hill of Dreams
, in which he reaches his greatest stature as a novelist of the soul.

There are those who will call him a novelist of Sin, quibbling about a definition. With these I have no quarrel; the characterizations are synonymous. His books exhale all evil and all corruption; yet they are as pure as the fabled waters of that crystal spring De Leon sought. They are pervaded by an ever-present, intoxicating sense of sin, ravishingly beautiful, furiously Pagan, frantically lovely; but Machen is a finer and truer mystic than the two-penny occultists who guide modern spiritualistic thought. If we are to subscribe to his curious philosophy, to be discussed later, we must believe that there is no paradox in this.

But something of what we are getting at is explained in his own pages, in this opening paragraph from his story, “The White People,” in
The House of Souls
: “‘Sorcery and sanctity,’ said Ambrose, ‘these are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life.’” And, a little later, in this: “‘There is something profoundly unnatural about sin…the essence of which really is in the taking of heaven by storm.’”

One gathers from a general vagueness on the subject that sin is not popular in these times. There are, of course, new sins and advanced sins and higher sins, all of which are intensely interesting. The chief puzzle to the lay mind is why they should bear these names, since they are usually neither new, advanced and high, nor particularly sinful. I am speaking of sin as an offense against the nature of things, and of evil in the soul, which has very little to do with the sins of the statute book. Sin, according to the same Ambrose I have quoted, is conceivable in the talking of animals. If a chair should walk across a room, that would be sinful, or if a tree sat down with us to afternoon tea. The savage who worships a conjurer is a far finer moralist than the civilisé who suspects him—and I use the name moralist for one who has an appreciation of sin.

This is not the sin of the legal code. Ambrose I conceive to be Arthur Machen. There are only two realities; sorcery and sanctity—sin and sainthood—and each is an ecstasy. Arthur Machen’s is the former.

Perhaps his most remarkable story—certainly I think his most terrible story, is “The Great God Pan,” at first published separately with “The Inmost Light”; now occurring in
The House of Souls
. It is the story of an experiment upon a girl, as a result of which, for a moment, she is permitted a sight of the Great God, beyond the veil, with shocking consequences. Yet it is told with exquisite reticence and grace, and with a plausibility that is as extraordinary as it is immoral. Here is the conclusion of that story:

“What I said Mary would see, she saw, but I forgot that no human eyes could look on such a vision with impunity. And I forgot, as I have just said, that when the house of life is thus 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… The blackened face, the hideous form upon the bed, changing and melting before your eyes from woman to man, from man to beast, and from beast to worse than beast, all the strange horror that you witnessed, surprises me but little. What you say the doctor you sent for saw and shuddered at, I noticed long ago; I knew what I had done the moment the child was born, and when it was five years old I surprised it, not once or twice, but several times, with a playmate, you may guess of what kind.. . And now Helen is with her companions.”

There is the very quintessence of horror in the unutterable suggestion of such passages. As for
The Hill of Dreams
, I have found its reading one of the most desolate and appalling experiences in literature. Reading it, himself, years after publication, its author decided that it was a “depressing book.” That is undoubtedly true, but spiritually as well as technically it marks to date the topmost pinnacle of his tormented genius. It reaches heights so rarefied that breathing literally becomes painful. To the casual reader this sounds absurd; hyperbolical if not hypocritical rant; but in a day when a majority of critics find it difficult to restrain themselves in speaking of Harold Bell Wright, and place Jeffery Farnol beside Fielding and Thackeray, one cannot go far wrong in indulging a few enthusiasms for so genuine an artist as Arthur Machen.

Of the reviewers into whose hands fell this remarkable book, in the year of its publication, 1907, only one appears to have valued it at its real worth—the editor of
The Academy
, who, carried away by the tale and its telling, turned out a bit of critical prose which might have been lifted from the book, itself. “There is something sinister in the beauty of Mr. Machen’s book,” he wrote. “It is like some strangely shaped orchid, the colour of which is fierce and terrible, and its perfume is haunting to suffocation by reason of its intolerable sweetness. The cruelty of the book is more savage than any of the cruelty which the book describes. Lucian shuddered at the boys who were deliberately hanging an ungainly puppy; he had thrashed the little ruffian who kicked the sick cat, before he wrapped himself away from the contact of such infamy in the shelter of his own imaginings. For in
The Hill of Dreams
you seem to be shown a lovely, sensitive boy who has fashioned himself a white palace of beauty in his own mind. He has had time only to realize its full beauty when disease lays its cold touch upon him, and gathers him into her grasp, until he lies decaying and horrible, seeing his own decay and seeing that his decay makes the white palace foul. The boys did not chant songs as they looped the string round the neck of the uncouth puppy. Mr. Machen fashions prose out of the writhings of Lucian, who is dear to him: and his prose has the rhythmic beat of some dreadful Oriental instrument, insistent, monotonous, haunting; and still the soft tone of one careful flute sounds on, and keeps the nerves alive to the slow and growing pain of the rhythmic beat. Lucian in ecstacy of worship for the young girl whose lips have given him a new life, pressed his body against sharp thorns until the white flesh of his body was red with drops of blood. That, too, is the spirit of the book. It is like some dreadful liturgy of self-inflicted pain, set to measured music: and the cadence of that music becomes intolerable by its suave phrasing and perfect modulation. The last long chapter with its recurring themes is a masterpiece of prose, and in its way unique.”