Author(s): Arthur Machen

Fantasy Science Fiction Horror

An excerpt from "The Independent and the Weekly Review," Volume 108: IF "readers who are lucky enough to possess a copy of the new edition of "The House of Souls" (Knopf) by Arthur Machen will turn past the middle of the volume and read the story called "The Great God Pan," they will find the work of this remarkable writer at its best, and can know whether they like it or not. Some critics, especially those who despise a story with a plot, may prefer the two first items in the book: "A Fragment of Life" and "The White People." Arthur Machen's work has always pleased most of the critics; he deserves popularity, and for that reason I am sorry that "The Great God Pan" does not stand at the beginning of this volume. The other two stories-if stories they be-(there is a fourth, called "The Inmost Light") have much of his strange beauty, mysticism, and weird, diabolical power of suggestion, but they may discourage the average reader. "The White People"-a wonderful thing-runs for nearly forty pages with only two paragraphs, and all this solid type is little calculated to attract the uninitiated. Arthur Machen is a native of Wales; he was born in 1863. He has been a journalist in London for most of his life, and according to Vincent Starrett, author of a brief monograph about him, was for a time a strolling actor. He has written, in addition to the books named above: "The Chronicle of Clemendy" (an excursion into the field of the "Heptameron"), "The Hill of Dreams" (a mystical romance), "Dr. Stiggins" (a savage satire upon certain national sins of America, such as lynching), "Hieroglyphics" (conversations upon literature), "The Bowmen" (fanciful stories of the Great War, which, as "The Angel of Mons," the spiritualists of England insisted on accepting as fact-violently attacking Mr. Machen because he refused to lie about it and say that it was true), "The Terror" (another story of the War), and a novel of the present year, called "The Secret Glory," and published in London by Martin Seeker. In addition, he has made translations from the French, including the "Heptameron," "Le Moyen. He acknowledges his debt to Poe, and his admiration for certain other Americans-Miss Mary Wilkins and Mark Twain-but otherwise America is for him that brutal and disgusting land which might exist in the imagination of any Englishman, thirty years ago, who learned of it chiefly through London papers which emphasized its crimes: a country given over to lynching mobs, corrupt politicians, and Puritanical humbugs. The coming of national prohibition will undoubtedly strengthen this dislike. Mr. Machen is in perpetual wrath about Non-Conformists; the sight of a Wesleyan or Presbyterian chapel moves him to fury. He can view hecatombs to Zeus with sympathy, or even human sacrifices to any pagan deity; but never the Wednesday evening prayer-meeting! He possesses a beautiful prose style, and, so far as I can see, is the master of all living writers in English of the supernatural tale. Dr. Montague James is supreme in the old-fashioned ghost-story; and Mr. Algernon Blackwood's essays in superstition have explored every known and unknown corner. Mr. Blackwood, however, fires ten duds for every shell which explodes; he can build up a towering edifice of horror only to have its top-story crumble; he often spreads a small amount of ghostliness over so large a surface that its effect is hardly sufficient to make you shiver. But Mr. Machen's "The Great God Pan," and the other stories seem to me to be unsurpassed, even by Poe, for horror, and suggestion of diabolism.