Part 2

This book is gruesome, ghastly, and dull. Mr Machen has done his best with an impossible subject, but although men and women who are morbid and unhealthy in mind may find something that appeals to them in the description of Dr Raymond’s experiment and its results, the majority of readers will turn from it in utter disgust. From first to last there is not one human touch in the story, and not a trace of psychology to awaken our interest in the actions of any one of the characters. Dr Raymond’s apparent conviction that to see the Great God Pan would make up for any loss or suffering entailed by the sight, is almost childish; and as I waded through the dull list of horrors, which the too vivid imagination of Mr Machen inspired him to write, I bethought me of the curious old legend, so exquisitely told in verse by Mrs Browning, of the death of “The Great God Pan.” It was waste of time for Mr Machen to bring him to life again....

[Sidenote: _The Guardian_]

Mr Machen has apparently tried to produce a novelty in fiction by borrowing from Mr Conan Doyle some of the tricks of style of his detective stories, and uniting them with the rather gruesome studies in dehumanisation which Mr Stevenson justified by the fine turn he gave them in his “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” and Mr Rudyard Kipling essayed less successfully in “The Mark of the Beast.” According to Mr Machen’s postulate, “a slight lesion in the grey matter” of the brain is all that is needed to “level utterly the solid wall of sense,” and enable “a spirit to gaze on a spirit-world.” Fantastically enough, this is called “seeing the god Pan,” with whom it appears to us to have about as much to do as the vulgar figure which Mr Aubrey Beardsley has placed on the title-page. The result on a lady of seeing the god Pan is that people feel cold shivers when they look on her, and that she initiates her male acquaintances into mysteries which either kill them outright with horror or send them home to commit suicide—also that she herself has eventually to be put to death by her husband or the amateur detective, and turns into all sorts of remarkable shapes in the process. Mr Machen frequently informs us that his story is very terrible, and tries to keep up the mystery by breaking off every now and then as if his tale were too dread for words—but these tricks have also their ludicrous side. Perhaps the most discreditable paragraph in a not very creditable book is the “note” at the end of the first story, asserting that the woman of whom it is told “was born on August 5th, 1865, at the Red House, Breconshire, and died on July 25th, 1888, in her house in a street off Piccadilly, called Ashley Street in the story.” Mr Machen should make his choice between the art of fiction and penny-a-lining.

[Sidenote: _The Cork Examiner_]

... Arthur Machen wants to thrill us, and sets about his task by mixing surgical experiments, devil-possessed women of weird beauty, Latin phrases, and fantastic art, reminiscent of craftsmen of ages agone, into a pottage which, for our part, we find mawkish. The trick of the thing is at once apparent. Ever so many circumstances, feelings, sights, thoughts, etc., are unutterable, unnameable, unknowable, and unwhisperable, and there are nameless horrors by the hundred.... In our judgment this is what children call “a frightened story,” and, as an artistic piece of fiction, it calls for no serious consideration.

[Sidenote: _The Chronicle_]

With this new volume Mr Machen boldly challenges comparison with Mr Stevenson’s “Dynamiters.” The plan of the book is the same; that is to say, a number of short stories are woven into the fabric of a long one. Mr Machen’s literary method, too, is not unlike Stevenson’s; there is the same careful turning of the phrase, the nice choice of epithets, the use of certain words in their correct, but not in their common meaning.... Mr Machen’s intention in all these stories is to give us a grue, to curdle our blood, to make us think twice and thrice ere we mount the stairs and face the possible horror awaiting us in our dimly-lighted bedroom. Well, all we can say is that he has failed where few writers have succeeded. Edgar Allan Poe has done this thing over and over again. Le Fanu did it once; so did the author of a volume called “Phantasms” reviewed in these columns some months ago; but here the delightful thrill never quite comes off. Mr Machen lacks the power to create the necessary atmosphere, the atmosphere in which we shiver with apprehension as we breathe it. We all know how in dreams events in themselves commonplace and trifling enough, suddenly become ghastly, horrible, soul-devastating. And all because of our own state of mind. Now an author must somehow or other produce that state of mind in us before he puts us face to face with his creepy situation. He must compel “poetic faith” in us as Coleridge has it; bring us into the mental condition in which we are ready to believe anything. This Mr Machen never once succeeds in accomplishing. We are interested in his stories, and pleased extremely with the exceedingly careful and polished style in which they are told; we enjoy his humour and marvel at his ingenuity, but that worked-for and longed-for grue never happens.... The fact is that to triumph in the particular literary line which Mr Machen seems to have marked out for himself a certain peculiar sort of genius is, above all things, necessary. With this peculiar sort of genius the fates have not endowed Mr Machen, and the sooner he frankly recognises his want of it the better, for he has many other and most excellent literary accomplishments.

[Sidenote: _The Dundee Advertiser_]

As tragedy and comedy go hand in hand, so the weird is seldom far removed from the ridiculous. Arthur Machen’s volume, “The Three Impostors,” furnishes an excellent case in point. The stories it contains form a connected narrative such as Poe himself might have evolved. These nameless horrors, however, weirdly fascinating as they are, have something in common with the dreaded gnomes and goblins by whose aid intelligent nursemaids are wont to charm little folk to sleep. What place the book will occupy in the literature of entertainment we cannot take upon ourselves to say. We can only regret that the author’s singular inventiveness and great story-telling gifts have been employed in so undesirable a cause. What can any healthy-minded reader think of this: “There, upon the floor, was a dark and putrid mass, seething with corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting and changing before our eyes, and bubbling with unctuous, oily bubbles like boiling pitch. And out of the midst of it shone two burning points like eyes, and I saw a writhing and stirring as of limbs, and something moved and lifted up that might have been an arm.” Such visions have before been given to little boys who complained of headache and divers other pains. The family doctor generally diagnosed the case as “mince pies and pickles.”

[Sidenote: _Punch_]

“The Three Impostors,” a novel (“Keynote” Series) by Arthur Machen, opens well, which, by the way, is more than the book does, being a bit stiff; but, though it has the machens of a good story in it, there is very little worth reading after page 64.

[Sidenote: _Glasgow Herald_]

There are some books that produce a positive physical repulsion in their reader. Mr Machen’s extremely disagreeable story is one of them. One may be fond of the gruesome, and even take pleasure in an occasional sup of horror, administered in the piquant and artistic style of which Poe and Baudelaire had the secret. Mr Machen himself, in his previous volume, led some of us to imagine that a share of the same gift might be found in him. But “The Three Impostors” changes our view. The horror in it is palpably and very literally sickening. Nothing but a smart turn in brisk air can cleanse the feelings of the person who has been unfortunate enough to read this volume through.

[Sidenote: _Black and White_]

“The Three Impostors,” by Arthur Machen, lacks the vivid sense of actuality genius alone can impart to the grotesque. In less able hands, as Mr Machen’s, the weird tends to merge into the ridiculous. His connecting chain, too, is clumsily wielded, and you close the book, which opens with cleverness and promise, with disappointment.

[Sidenote: _The Observer_]

“The Three Impostors: or, The Transmutations,” by Arthur Machen, is a puzzling book. It is both good and bad; good in the clear presentation of some parts of it, in clever handling of some difficult characters, and bad because of the indefinite and unreal impression which, as a whole, it leaves on the reader’s mind. It also reminds us a little too strongly to be agreeable of a work with which it cannot for a moment be compared—with Mr Stevenson’s “New Arabian Nights.” ...

[Sidenote: _Birmingham Post_]

This is a singular effort of the imagination, suggestive of a mixture of Conan Doyle, Douglas Jerrold, and the author of the “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” seasoned with grim touches of German mysticism. It is not over-delightful reading, but to those, and they are legion, who are fond of being steeped in blood and mystery the book will commend itself highly. It is cleverly constructed, and that is about the best thing we can say of it. No doubt the author’s true intent is all for our delight; but, all the same, it is a matter of wonderment to us how it is that men with evident literary talents, which might be pointed to fine issues, should exercise their brain power in the noble cause of bewildering the brains of other people, and this without an adequate purpose.

[Sidenote: _The Guardian_]

We never expected to see the day when we should be tempted to regret that Stevenson had written “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” Nevertheless, when we had waded through the pages of Mr Machen’s last production, we were disposed to feel that even that book was dearly bought at the price of so repulsive an imitation as that contained in “The Three Impostors.” For the impressive and true use of the præternatural in “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” we have senseless and sickening—we can use no other word—pictures of mysterious scenes and of men returning to the bestial form which are meant to inspire terror and intense dread, but really leave us entirely unmoved, although he may imagine that his reader, like his hero, is left “white and shuddering with sweat pouring from my flesh.” Language seems almost to fail the author at times; he heaps up epithets of horror, the words “bubbled and boiled out” of one man’s mouth “in the fury of his emotion”; another person stands “shuddering and quaking as with the grip of ague, sick with unspeakable agonies of fear and loathing”; a doctor goes to see a patient, and reappears with “an unutterable horror shining in his eyes.” If we are not mistaken members of the medical profession would welcome the chance of investigating such a case as that of the gentleman who took the witches’ Sabbath drug. Wearied with this hysterical rubbish the reader hurries on to the end, to find in the last chapter that the unfortunate youth who has got tired of the fauns and the mysteries, and all the rest of the Greek burlesque, has been murdered amid most horrible tortures, which, together with his sufferings, are graphically described.

[Sidenote: _Pall Mall Gazette_]

... Mr Machen errs by never trusting sufficiently to his reader’s imagination, and his most elaborate horrors leave us “more than usual calm,” except when, by borrowing from Catlin, they make us feel slightly unwell. It is impossible to admire the construction of Mr Machen’s romance so much as if one did not know one’s Stevenson. Its framework, with its amateurs of the odd in London; its set of characters who break at sight into ingenious tales of absolute and elaborate falsehood with no particular motive for using the decorative imagination; its choice of a tobacco divan for the amateurs’ place of meeting, and sundry other details, is curiously reminiscent of “The Dynamiter.” So, again, the incident of the powder, strangely altered from its pure condition until it obtained the power of “riving asunder the house of life and dissolving the human trinity,” and giving a human form to “that which lies sleeping within us all,” argues an uncommon boldness in the man who ventures to use it after its being worked into “Dr Jekyll.” However, if Mr Machen thinks he can wear the armour of Achilles with grace, that is his affair. He has a sense of style, as witness his pictures of the deserted house and his conception of the possible history of a street. He is strong enough to walk alone, in fact; and we heartily wish him a little more invention and a little less anxiety to make his reader’s flesh creep.

[Sidenote: _Saturday Review_]

Mr Machen is an unfortunate man. He has determined to be weird, horrible, and as outspoken as his courage permits in an age which is noisily resolved to be “’ealthy” to the pitch of blatancy. His particular obsession is a kind of infernal matrimonial agency, and the begetting of human-diabolical mules. He has already skirted the matter in his previous book, “The Great God Pan,” and here we find it well to the fore again. This time, however, it simply supplies one of a group of incoherent stories held together in a frame of wooden narrative about a young man with spectacles. This young man falls into a circle of Black Magicians, who are practising indecorums and crimes at which Mr Machen dare only hint in horror-struck whispers.... But it fails altogether to affect the reader as it is meant to do. It fails mainly because Mr Machen has not mastered the necessary trick of commonplace detail which renders horrors convincing, and because he lacks even the most rudimentary conception of how to individualise characters. The framework of the book is evidently imitated from Mr Stevenson’s “New Arabian Nights,” a humorous form quite unsuited, of course, to realistic horrors....

[Sidenote: _Lady’s Pictorial_]

If you like the Prologue read the stories. I did not like the Prologue, but I was obliged to read the stories. They are a shade less odious than “The Great God Pan,” but the comparison says but little in their favour, for, in the former, Mr Machen gave to the world a most gruesome and _unmanly_ book. I should like to know how the imagination of the author would work upon clean and wholesome lines.

[Sidenote: _The Athenæum_]

... “The Three Impostors” produces on the normal waking mind much the same effect as a hearty supper of pork chops on the dream fancies of a person of delicate digestion: “velut ægri somnia, vanæ finguntur species.” It is Mr Machen’s chief joy, in the words of one of his characters, to dabble “with the melting ruins of the earthly tabernacle”; to hint, rather than describe, the unholy joys and infamous orgies of those whose diet is framed in accordance with the recipes of the devil’s cookery book, and whose esoteric acquaintance with the black art enables them to practise short cuts to the sundering of body and spirit. The result is never agreeable, occasionally disgusting, but seldom really blood-curdling, since in the last resort Mr Machen generally takes refuge in a copious use of such words as “unutterable,” “hideous,” “loathsome,” “appalling,” and so on....

[Sidenote: _The Graphic_]

... It is a pity, I think, that he does not confine himself to the marvellous pure and simple, and eschew the gruesome—that he should not be content with following in the footsteps of Stevenson instead of entering into competition with Poe. For Mr Machen, though he has, it must be admitted, an occasional inspiration of “the creepy,” is too anxious to produce “goose-flesh” in the readers, and in his desire to do so he is apt to seek his efforts in what I cannot but consider an “unsportsmanlike” fashion. For instance, he is too much addicted to the artifice of describing by telling you that things are indescribable. This is a device which, though perhaps not absolutely illegitimate, ought obviously to be very sparingly used; but in “The Three Impostors,” as even more conspicuously in Mr Machen’s earlier volume in the same series, “The Great God Pan,” it is employed to an extent which is almost provocative of parody. A writer must, of course, leave something to our imagination; but when we are continually meeting with creatures whose aspect is too hideous to be portrayed in human language, who utter words too awful to be repeated, and take part in orgies so abominable and revolting that they must for ever remain nameless, even the most indulgent reader may reasonably begin to feel that he is getting rather short measure for his money.

[Sidenote: _The Echo_]

... “The Three Impostors” is plainly based on Stevenson’s “Dynamiters.” The story opens in the same way, by a meeting of the principal characters in a West London tobacco-shop, and we have brought before us the same kind of house of mystery, and extraordinary men who haunt Italian restaurants, talk in archaic language, and unceasingly tell each other stories. Mr Machen would have stood a better chance of favourable judgment if he had not so needlessly invited comparison with one of Stevenson’s masterpieces. He has a powerful imagination, and a careful, laborious style. The adventures he tells, centred around a golden coin of Tiberius, are exciting enough to satisfy the most jaded palate. There is no effort made to retain even a reasonable verisimilitude, and probability is cast to the winds. A gentleman looking in an Oxford Street bun-shop is accosted by a stranger, who takes him into an Italian restaurant to dine. There the stranger pours out, with little provocation, a long tale about how, when starving and shabby, he had answered an advertisement for a private secretary, been accepted, gone to America, and the adventures he met with there. Another sits down in the gardens of Leicester Square, when an unknown young lady turns on him and narrates all her family history. Some of the tales are as weird and horrible as anything written in recent years, and there are murders without number. Frankly, the subject matter of “The Three Impostors” is not to our taste....

[Sidenote: _Literary World_]

... There are scoundrels who stop at nothing to get possession of magic seals and coins; there are foul creatures that come out of man; there are attempts to make our blood run cold. These all signally fail. We remain unthrilled; we pass from Mr Machen to our luncheon as easily as we change from one coat into another. He never stirs us. He tells his stories well, and that is all. Why are we so unmoved? Does the fault reside in us or in the author? We are willing to admit that as reviewers we run a risk of having our sensibilities blunted. We do not cry or tremble as easily as we wept and shook a few years ago, but we _can_ shed an occasional tear over a book, and we _can_ shudder when the real literary magician has us in his conduct. To this title, however, Mr Machen has no claim, a fact which explains our passive acceptance of his tame horrors.

[Sidenote: _The New Age_]

Mr Arthur Machen’s attempts are the more ambitious and elaborate and the least successful. He well illustrates the limitations and dangers of this class of composition. With all his fertile fancy and constructive ingenuity he cannot create that magic atmosphere of creepiness that we presume it is his chief object to attain. Both “The Great God Pan” and “The Three Impostors” are clever and ingenious stories; but as blood-curdlers they are almost failures. All the materials are there, none of the conjuring paraphernalia are wanting, but alas! we are not in the least deceived by the tricks, and vainly wish that the would-be magician would prevent us from seeing how the thing is done. The fact is that, while recognising the value of “suggestive” writing, and the imaginative effects to be obtained from obscure hints of “unknowable” and “unspeakable horrors,” he works this style—that ought to be used with fine reticence—to death, and reduces the “suggestive” theory _ad absurdum_.

[Sidenote: Louis Weitzenkorn in _The New York Herald_]

To climb Mount Everest is a great achievement, but there is always a secret hate in the heart of the man who did it first for the man who ascended after him. I do not mean to write this article on Arthur Machen and compare him to Mount Everest. Let us reserve the crests for an Ibsen, a France or a Plato. What I mean by my first sentence is that Machen, at present, seems to be the prized property of a very few persons. He has escaped what Ernest Boyd is pleased to call the æsthete, 1924 model, and sunk to the next lower circle of the intelligentsia, who have an exceedingly happy time springing him upon the ignorami. It has not been my achievement to have read all his work, and there is not enough genuine entertainment in him for me to do it unless The World pays me for the job. But I have managed to stow away “The Hill of Dreams,” “Things Near and Far” (a truly beautiful book, by the way), “Hieroglyphics,” a volume issued under the presentation of Vincent Starrett called “The Shining Pyramid,” and his latest publication here, “Dog and Duck.”

Without going through the rest of his writings I feel rather confident that I know something of him, and so far I have not yet read, in the encomiums of his enthusiasts, the one characteristic of Machen that, to me, lifts the man out of the ruck of those who just have a “beautiful style.” It is idle to talk in praise of Machen’s writing, as writing. He has polished up the language to a glittering surface. Each word he uses is carefully chosen, so carefully, indeed, that the writing often becomes of greater interest than the substance and the thought.

His latest volume, “Dog and Duck,” is Machen taking a day off. The book is uninteresting except to his worshippers, it being a kind of vaudeville, essays under such titles as “Why New Year?” “April Fool,” “Roast Goose: With a Dissertation on Apple Sauce and Sage and Onions.” (Notice the recurrent “ands” for a clue to the man’s careful style.) In the volume there is nothing of the Machen which brings him, for me, out in the first rank of the modern minors. But in “The Hill of Dreams” and perhaps, strangely, that imitative of Stevenson, “The Three Impostors,” there is the trade-mark of the man, a psychological insight almost uncanny. Machen has plumbed to the foundations, not of obscenity, but of the obscene.