Tales of Horror and the Supernatural

Tales of Horror and the Supernatural

Arthur Machen

Title: Tales of Horror and the Supernatural (1949)
Author: Arthur Machen
* A Project BookishMall.com Australia eBook *
eBook No.: 0800651.txt
Language: English
Date first posted: July 2008
Date most recently updated: October 2009

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Also includes the introduction by Roger Dobson from the 2011 ebook release (ASIN B005AO9GME), copyright to Tartarus Press.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION by Roger Dobson

THE NOVEL OF THE BLACK SEAL
(from The Three Impostors, published 1895 by John Lane)

THE NOVEL OF THE WHITE POWDER
(from The Three Impostors, published 1895 by John Lane)

THE GREAT GOD PAN
(from The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light, published 1894 by John Lane)

THE WHITE PEOPLE
(from The House of Souls, published 1906 by E. Grant Richards)

THE INMOST LIGHT
(from The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light, published 1894 by John Lane)

THE SHINING PYRAMID
(from The Shining Pyramid, published 1925 by Martin Secker)

THE BOWMEN
(from The Angel of Mons, published 1915 by Simpkin, Marshall Hamilton, Kent & Co.)

THE GREAT RETURN
(published 1915, by The Faith Press, London)

THE HAPPY CHILDREN
(from The Shining Pyramid, published 1925 by Martin Secker)

THE BRIGHT BOY
(from The Children of the Pool, published 1936 by Hutchinson & Co. Ltd.)

OUT OF THE EARTH
(from The Shining Pyramid, published 1925 by Martin Secker)

N
(from The Cosy Room, published 1936 by Rich & Cowan)

THE CHILDREN OF THE POOL
(from The Children of the Pool, published 1936 by Hutchinson & Co. Ltd.)

THE TERROR
(published 1917 by Duckworth & Co.)

INTRODUCTION

by Roger Dobson

The stories in this volume concern the interpenetration between the material world and ‘the world on the other side of the dark curtain’. Drawn from the beginning and the end of Arthur Machen’s literary career, all these works reflect the author’s absorption with the wondrous, the uncanny and the unknown. If the reader so desires, these tales can be regarded as nothing more than bizarre and baroque entertainments—supernatural thrillers to set the pulse racing on nights by the winter fireside—but all possess a philosophical dimension and a genuine artistic creed. Sensational as some of them are, the best of Machen’s fantasy stories transcend the humble genre of the shocker and aspire to high art. Their uniqueness in literature led Vincent Starrett, Machen’s earliest champion, to acclaim him ‘a novelist of the soul’, an explorer of heights and depths undreamed of by writers of greater renown.

‘In every grain of wheat there lies hidden the soul of a star’, Machen borrowed this visionary aphorism for an early page of The Great God Pan, and so sets the scene for the mystical doctrine that would inform all his principal writings. ‘The world is a cypher,’ he wrote. ‘He does best who hints most closely at the secret message latent in the signs exhibited to us.’

In a critique of Machen published in The Bookman in 1925 John Gunther observed that the author’s works could be considered as chapters in one long book. Although Machen took pride in pursuing new paths and experimenting with his fiction Gunther’s assessment is valid, Machen’s tales and novels (or romances as he preferred to call them—‘adventures of the spirit’) do possess a thematic unity. The Machenian magnum opus has two polarised strands running through it—terror and wonder—and occasionally they meet and intertwine. The necromantic fantasies produced by Machen in the 1890s later led to him being labelled ‘the Laureate of Evil’ when the American literati established him as a cult author. But by then he had thrown off this mantle and assumed another—that of ‘the Apostle of Wonder’. ‘Asking him why he always wrote of Hell,’ noted Lady Benson, ‘he replied that it was not given him to write of Heaven.’ Yet Arthur Machen’s fiction embraces a spiritual antimony—the diabolic and the divine lie at its heart.

In The London Adventure (1924) Machen encapsulated all his artistic endeavours in a sentence. ‘Here, then, is the pattern in my carpet,’ he wrote, alluding to Henry James’s story ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, ‘the sense of the eternal mysteries, the eternal beauty hidden beneath the crust of common and commonplace things; hidden and yet burning and glowing continually if you care to look with purged eyes.’ And that is why all these stories, incredible as the incidents in them are, take place in the real world. Even in those tales where Machen deals with unearthly landscapes he does not take the reader very far across their borders. The numinous draws its strength from a terrestrial reality. Machen insisted that the fantasy writer’s task was ‘to make wonder credible’: ‘If we are to see the vision of the Grail, however dimly,’ he wrote in The London Adventure, ‘it must no longer be in some vaulted chamber in a high tower of Carbonnek, over dreadful rocks and the foam of a faery sea. For us, the odour of the rarest spiceries must be blown through the Venetian blinds in some grey forgotten square of Islington . . .’

In Machen’s fiction the actual and the impossible are wedded. The ordinary is gradually transformed into the extraordinary, and the familiar is suffused by the miraculous. Thus the Grail returns to earth in a little seaside town in West Wales; the gateway to an Edenic realm is located amid the grim dwellings of Stoke Newington; and, in her death throes, Helen Vaughan, spawn of the God Pan, ascends and descends the evolutionary scale in a house off Piccadilly.

Literature itself, Machen stated, had mystical origins: it began with ‘charms, incantations, songs of mystery, chants of religious ecstasy, the Bacchic Chorus, the Rune, the Mass’. For Machen the matter was simple; life was an ineffable sacrament, and it was the duty of the artist to reflect this. Naturalistic or ‘photographic’ writers, concerned with ‘fidelity to life’, only reproduced the surface appearance of existence, not its essences. Truly great literature, he held, ‘is simply the expression of the eternal things that are in man.’ Of The House of Souls (1906), which collected his principal tales of the 1890s, Machen explained that ‘almost every page contains a hint (under varied images and symbols) of a belief in a world that is not that of ordinary, everyday experience, that in a measure transcends the experience of Bethel and the Bank’.

Machen’s devotion to the mysteries began early.