Part 1
[Illustration: _265 copies of this book have been printed_
_15 for presentation (A-O)_
_250 subscribed (1-250)_
_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_]