The White People and Other Weird Stories (3 page)

But what purpose could Machen have in seemingly dynamiting the seriousness and power of the episodes in
The Three Impostors
by putting them in the mouths of dubious characters? There may be no clear answer to this question, but perhaps some clues can be provided by considering Machen's general philosophy. I hesitate to call his view of the world a philosophy, for really it was a set of dogmatic prejudices that changed little through the whole of his long life; but at its essence was a violent hostility to and resentment at what he perceived to be the growing secularism and “scientism” of the modern world. To Machen, the religious mystic, the triumphs of nineteenth-century science were anything but victories; instead, it seemed to him that science was coming to rule all aspects of life, even those aspects—the spiritual life and its corollary, art—where it had no place.

In
The Three Impostors,
Phillipps clearly espouses the hardheaded scientific skepticism Machen wishes to combat. It is no surprise that the woman who calls herself Miss Lally tells him the “Novel of the Black Seal”; for in this story it is Professor Gregg who embodies what Machen believes to be the genuinely scientific attitude of open-mindedness to unusual phenomena: “Life, believe me, is no simple thing, no mass of grey matter and congeries of veins and muscles to be laid naked by the surgeon's knife; man is the secret which I am about to explore, and before I can discover him I must cross over weltering seas indeed, and oceans and the mists of many thousand years.” Indeed, it seems quite likely that Miss Lally tells Phillipps this story only in order to overcome his innate skepticism; for Phillipps “required a marvel to be neatly draped in the robes of Science before he would give it any credit . . .”

Perhaps the subtitle of
The Three Impostors
—“or The Transmutations”—provides a further clue. Exactly what transmutations are in question? To be sure, on a superficial level the various “novels” and other episodes transmute scenery, as we flit from the suburbs of London (“Novel of the Iron Maid,” “Novel of the White Powder”) to the wilds of the American West (“Novel of the Dark Valley”) to the “wild, domed hills” of Wales (“Novel of the Black Seal”). Miss Lally casually notes that “I looked out of my window and saw the whole landscape transmuted before me.” But the reference here is merely to topography; elsewhere there are much more profound transmutations going on. When Professor Gregg finally decodes the cryptic black seal that appears to confirm his theory of the “Little People,” he states with awed solemnity: “I read the key of the awful transmutation of the hills.” Here it is not landscape but Gregg's entire outlook on life that has been transmuted; as H. P. Lovecraft would say, Gregg has stumbled upon “that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”
⁴

The “Novel of the White Powder” confirms this view. Miss Leicester, who tells the tale (and who is presumably identical to the Miss Lally of the earlier narrative), speaks offhandedly of “the transmutation of my brother's character” after he begins taking the strange drug from a careless apothecary's shop. But what really happens to the hapless student is the transmutation of his very being, physically and morally, leading a doctor to write harriedly, “my old conception of the universe has been swept away.” This is the ultimate transmutation. That doctor, in effect, gives voice to Machen's own view of the world: “The whole universe . . . is a tremendous sacrament; a mystic, ineffable force and energy, veiled by an outward form of matter; and man, and the sun and the other stars, and the flower of the grass, and the crystal in the test-tube, are each and every one as spiritual, as material, and subject to an inner working.” It was this view that Machen was determined to convey to his audience over a lifetime of writing.

In the final years of his “great decade” of fiction writing (1887–1901) Machen produced several of the works for which he is known today. Even excluding the marginally weird novel
The Hill of Dreams
(written in 1895–97 but not published until 1907), which Lovecraft rightly described as a “memorable epic of the sensitive aesthetic mind,”
⁵
we are faced with such works as “The Red Hand” (1897), the prose poems collected in
Ornaments in Jade
(1924), “The White People” (the second-greatest horror tale ever written, according to Lovecraft, next to Algernon Blackwood's “The Willows”), and the unclassifiable novella “A Fragment of Life.” Had Machen written nothing else, these works alone would be sufficient to grant him a place in weird literature—or in literature as a whole.

“The Red Hand” (written in 1895) is a pendant to
The Three Impostors,
resurrecting the two central figures in that novel, Phillipps and Dyson, as they continue their intellectual dispute over the nature of reality while becoming involved in what proves to be an exceptionally clever supernatural detective story. Dyson, the mystic (hence the stand-in for Machen), evokes a “theory of improbability” to account for the remarkable series of coincidences that leads him to the solution of the case; but this is less interesting than the overall philosophical thrust of the tale, in which Machen utilizes the tools of rationalism (specifically, the forensic analysis of evidence in regard to the murder at the heart of the case) to undermine rationalism and thereby to “prove” to his satisfaction that the matter can only be accounted for by appealing to the supernatural—in this case, the continued existence of “Little People.”

Of the prose poems in
Ornaments in Jade
it is difficult to speak in detail. These delicate vignettes may in some sense be pendants to
The Hill of Dreams
—not in terms of plot, but in terms of style and substance. Just as, in that novel, he strove valiantly to rid himself of the incubus of Stevenson's flippancy, so do these prose poems—comparable only to those of Clark Ashton Smith as the finest in English—complete Machen's transformation from clever imitator to independent artist. If there is any dominant theme that unites them, it is the constant contrast between mundane modernity and the hoary past—a past that is simultaneously terrifying in its primitivism and awesome in its suggestions of intimate, symbolic connections with the essence of life and Nature. However brutalized modern people are by the dominant materialism of the age, their sense of spirituality can well up in spite of themselves in the practice of ancient rituals.

As for “The White People,” in a sense it returns to the theme of “The Great God Pan” (1890) in its emphasis on illicit sex. For Machen, the orthodox Anglo-Catholic, sexual aberrations represented a kind of violation of the entire fabric of the universe. This is the substance of the remarks by Ambrose at the beginning of the tale, especially his comment that sin is “the attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a
forbidden
[my italics] manner” and “the effort to gain the ecstasy and knowledge that pertain alone to angels . . .” This story—in which a young girl unwittingly reveals in her diary her inculcation into a witch-cult and, evidently, her impregnation by some nameless entity—transmogrifies illicit sex into a cosmic sin that will either lift us up into the ranks of the angels or plunge us down into the company of demons.

“A Fragment of Life” is an altogether different proposition. If this short novel is only on the very edge of the weird, it deserves far wider recognition as one of Machen's most finished works. The exquisitely gradual way in which the stolid bourgeois couple, Edward and Mary Darnell, slowly awaken to their sense of wonder and abandon London for their native Wales is one of Machen's great literary accomplishments. Amid all the mundane details of the small-scale social life of the Darnells, we receive small hints that their love of beauty has not been entirely destroyed, as it has for so many who live too fully in the modern world. Machen delivers an unanswerable criticism of the narrowing of vision that such a life engenders: “So, day after day, he lived in the grey phantasmal world, akin to death, that has, somehow, with most of us, made good its claim to be called life.” And yet, something so simple as birdsong heard by Edward (“That night was the night I thought I heard the nightingale . . . and the sky was such a wonderful deep blue”) provides an anticipation of the coming change. Mary, too, although seemingly more hard-headedly practical than Edward, senses the alteration in her being (“one would have almost said that they were the eyes of one who longed and half expected to be initiated into the mysteries, who knew not what great wonder was to be revealed”). The entire novel is a kind of instantiation of the critical theories in Machen's idiosyncratic treatise on aesthetics,
Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature
(1902), in which he criticized such writers as Jane Austen and George Eliot for being too closely tied to mundane reality and failing to include that modicum of “ecstasy” which ought, in Machen's eyes, to inform all literature. We may well believe that Machen was insufficiently attuned to the “ecstasy” that is in fact present in the work of the social realists he disdains, but we can hardly gainsay that he himself has flawlessly embodied his own principles in “A Fragment of Life.”

After writing this novel (which was itself worked on sporadically over five years, 1899–1904), Machen appeared to lose focus as far as fiction writing was concerned. In 1907 he wrote the curious novel
The Secret Glory
(not published until 1922), but that was the extent of his creative output between 1904 and 1914. With his inheritance gone, Machen was forced to produce mountains of journalism; the book publications of his fiction—specifically
The House of Souls
(1906) and
The Hill of Dreams
(1907)—brought him fleeting attention, but not much in the way of income. It was only in 1914 that he resumed fiction writing—but he did so in a peculiar way.

Machen had, since 1910, been serving on the staff of one of the leading newspapers in London, the
Evening News,
as reporter and columnist. At least two of the four stories that comprised
The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War
(1915)—“The Bowmen” (September 29, 1914) and “The Soldiers' Rest” (October 20, 1914)—appeared in the
Evening News.
The well-known story of how “The Bowmen”—a tale about the ghosts of medieval British soldiers who come to the aid of a beleaguered British unit at the battle of Mons in late August 1914—came to be regarded as the account of a real occurrence, with angels rescuing the soldiers and supposedly first-hand accounts by the soldiers themselves testifying to the miracle, need not be discussed in detail; Machen himself recounts the matter in his long introduction to
The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War
. His repeated protestations that the story was entirely a product of his imagination went for naught; the outbreak of the European war—which had commenced less than two months prior to the publication of “The Bowmen”—was so traumatic that the emergence of such legendry was inevitable. Machen himself alludes to Kipling's “The Lost Legion” as a central literary influence on the tale, although other literary sources reaching back to Herodotus's
Histories
have recently been postulated.
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But what is more significant is Machen's own attempt to pull off a kind of hoax with “The Bowmen.” The mere fact that it was published in a newspaper—even though newspapers at this time published more fiction than they do now—and the fact that it was written with the plain-spoken sobriety expected of factual articles, suggest that Machen is not wholly blameless in the subsequent furor caused by his little tale.

Much the same could be said for “The Great Return,” which also appeared in the
Evening News
(October 21–November 16, 1915) and was subsequently published in book form by a religious publisher, Faith Press. Here Machen seeks no more than to present, in the most orthodox reportorial manner, a series of curious incidents in Wales that, to his mind, suggest the actual rediscovery of the Holy Grail. Once again, as in “The Red Hand,” although in a somewhat cruder way, Machen seeks to use the tools of rationalism to undermine rationalism: Here the outwardly skeptical newspaper reporter—who is none other than Machen himself, with no attempt made to establish a distance between author and persona—becomes gradually convinced of the reality of the phenomena described. Machen is content to present a scenario whereby something miraculous
might
have happened: This is sufficient for his current purpose of attacking the godless materialism of his age.

The European war was obviously a highly disturbing event to Machen. Already alienated from his time by his own religious mysticism, so much in contrast with the prevailing scientific rationalism of the later nineteenth century, he found his own faith shaken by a war in which Christians were killing other Christians with great gusto. Toward the end of the conflict he wrote a series of sophistical articles attempting to justify the ways of God to man; they were collected as
War and the Christian Faith
(1918). But a much more interesting response to the war came in the short novel
The Terror
(1917), which was also serialized in the
Evening News
(October 16–31, 1916). Once again we are faced with a reportorial account—sober, factual, even a bit bland—but again the purpose is to demonstrate that “science deals only with surfaces” and that the true causes for the revolt of animals against the domination of mankind lie much deeper.

The Terror
reveals several features characteristic of Machen's later fiction. The first, perhaps, is frank autobiography. Not only does the first-person narrative voice seem, as in “The Great Return” and “Out of the Earth,” to be Machen himself, but he plays upon his own role as a journalist and reporter. Is he attempting to pass off the narrative as a “true” story? To be sure, there is no deliberate intent to deceive; but the circumstantiality of his account, and its generally reportorial tone, make one wonder whether Machen is hoping to convey a deeper truth—the truth that the brief, fitful, and ultimately temporary “revolution” of the animals against humanity's reign over the earth is a signal that human morals are collapsing as a result of the hideous and unprecedented warfare that had broken out two years earlier.