Chapter ThreeTHE WEAVER OF FANTASY
In 1890, although he had begun to write in the modern manner and had even “fluttered the dovecotes” and startled the readers of theSt. James Gazettewith his stories, the Rabelaisian enthusiasm was still upon Machen. It had, it is true, abated somewhat of late, but when his translation ofLe Moyen de Parvenircame 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 beforeFantastic Talescame 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 Maidamong them; the idea ofThe Great God Panhad 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 courtyardat 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 forla 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 forThe 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 ofThe Great God Pan. Whichever it was, the tale was completed before he went to his cottage in the country. It appeared inThe Whirlwind, Vol. iifor 1890, which also carriedA Wonderful Woman,The Lost Cluband an almost entirely unknown item—An Underground Adventure. Another story,The Red Hand, is of this period for it appeared in the Christmas number ofChapman’s Magazineunder thetitle,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 wroteThe Inmost Light.
This famous story was written to a special commission, one of the few he received in his life. His stories for theGlobeandSt. James Gazettehad 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 Lightwas 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 titleThe Great God Panas 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 astorm in a tiny tot’s tea cup”—there was a considerable tempest aroused.The Manchester Guardianwent on record as feeling that Machen had “succeeded only in being ridiculous.”The Lady’s Pictorialfound it “gruesome, ghastly and dull.” TheWestminster Gazettedecided 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.
TheManchester Guardian’sreviewer, a staunch fellow with advanced ideas, had refrained from saying more aboutThe 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 inThe House of Soulsin 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 ofThe Great God Panis 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 literatureaccording 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 thatThe Great God Pandoesn’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 theManchester Guardianmight 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 calledThe London Adventure, Machen quotes the above passage and says, “It seems to me that the passage fromThe Great God Panis 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 beenplaying 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.
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 andothers 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. TheMemoirs 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 contributionto 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.
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 creatingThe 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 theNew Arabian Nights. At any rate theThree Impostors, Machen’s next book, is derived from Stevenson’sDynamiter, and was written somewhere in this period whenThe Great God Panwas 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 Impostorswas 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 Impostorscombined 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 inThe Dynamiter. The Stevenson story had also served as a model for the Mormon episode in Conan Doyle’sA Study in Scarlet. The resemblances here are even more marked than inMachen’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 ofThe Dynamiteron a rainy evening in 1885. However this may be,The Three Impostorsis a remarkable and absorbing story, even if it did not do as well asThe Great God Pan—but it has done remarkably well in the fifty-odd years since it was written.
Back in 1923 Knopf publishedThe Three Impostorsin the famous yellow binding, and again in 1930 in a Borzoi Pocket Edition. In his introduction to the latter book Machen wrote:
“In the course of a quarter of a century, I have received a good many letters of serious enquiry aboutThe Three Impostors. My correspondents ask me in various terms and turns of phrase whether there is any foundation for the strange circumstances and tales narrated in the book.... I began to get them pretty soon afterThe Three Impostorswas published in 1895. Then, on the whole, I was rather displeased than pleased at the question.... I was strongly inclined to resent the implication that I had embroidered rather than invented.”
Machen pointed out that the events described in his book not only did not happen, but could not have happened. That, at least, was his attitude just after he had written the book. In later years he changed his mind, for in the Nineteen-twenties he wrote, “I have had experiences which debar me from returning the absolute negative of earlier years.... These experiences of mine were trifling enough, but they suggest the possibility of far greater things and far moreextraordinary things for those with the necessary qualifications.... I am inclined to urge that the things which I have known may suggest the probable existence of a world very far and remote from the world of common experience.
“It may turn out after all that the weavers of fantasy are the veritable realists.”
Just whyThe Three Impostors, certainly not the most sensational story published in that sensational year, should have inspired such widespread belief, or at least so much willing suspension of disbelief, is not too difficult to understand. The story concerns itself largely with matters having to do with superstitions and, even if the superstitions involved were not familiar ones, they had something of the common quality of all superstitions based on folk-lore.
The story is told through a series of episodes, in the manner made popular by Stevenson and Doyle. Certain episodes are represented as being taken from the journals of some of the characters concerned; others are set forth in lengthy interviews with still other interested (and interesting) characters. The story is not overburdened with machinery and technical tricks, it manages to hang together without evident strain.
Some of the episodes could stand by themselves as tales in the Gothic genre—indeed, some of them have so appeared in anthologies and collections. It is in the telling of these tales that Machen’s skill as a story teller becomes evident. There is no one manner, but several, and each is peculiarly Machen’s own—with clever overtones and undertones of parody and satire. The satire, be it noted, is directed alwaysat the manner and never the matter of the tale.
As for the subject matter,The Three Impostorsconcerns the Little People and strange powers that have persisted until this very day and other speculations. If we accept, as did William Gregg, F.R.S., who figures in one of the stories, the theory that much of the folk-lore of the world is but exaggeration of things that really happened, we are well on our way to acceptingThe Three Impostorsas wholeheartedly as did the people who wrote Machen such curious letters back in 1895. Such is Machen’s magic, moreover, that we are easily persuaded into accepting almost anything.
The Three Impostorsalso introduces one of the most engaging figures in English literature. Mr. Dyson is not as well known, perhaps, as Henry Ryecroft or Stephen Daedalus or Charteris, but he has, it may be, as fine a future as they.
Mr. Dyson (if he had a first name, I cannot recall ever having read it) is a “man of letters” who, in pursuit of his quiet profession (the chase of the phrase, he called it) does a great deal of wandering about odd quarters of London. He stumbles into and out of the most amazing adventures, none of which appreciably affect his composure and seldom indeed is he startled out of his pompous pedantry.
Dyson’s companion in adventure and the recipient of his pronouncements is a Mr. Charles Phillips. Phillips is somewhat younger than Dyson, but they shared a certain gravity of character and pomposity of manner that made them mutually acceptable. They met frequently in each other’s rooms or in the tobacco shop in Queen Street where “their talk robbed the tobacconist’s profit of half its charm.” Dyson exalted the claims of pure imagination, while Phillips insistedthat all literature ought to have a scientific basis.
This precious pair, who shared silence as amiably as they conversed, wander sedately enough through the astonishing episodes involving the Young Man With Spectacles, Miss Lally, the sinister Mr. Davis and others. They are encountered in several other tales of this period. Dyson is actually an old acquaintance. He first made his bow, and a very courtly gesture it was, inThe Red HandorThe Shining Pyramid, whichever tale, in truth, came first; but it is inThe Three Impostorsthat we really came to know him. We shall meet again.