One tantalising topographical question arises: the hill and its environs described at the beginning of the girl’s ‘Green Book’ narrative resembles the imaginary hillfort of The Hill of Dreams. Whether this was an unconscious repetition by Machen or deliberate design can hardly be determined now.

What renders Machen’s achievement in ‘The White People’ even more remarkable is that his wife Amy, to whom he was devoted, was in the late stages of terminal cancer while he was writing the story.

The death of his wife in 1899, and his inability to get his imaginative work published—Hieroglyphics, his treatise on ecstasy in literature, appeared in 1902—led Machen to a stage career and into journalism for some years. Machen was surely thinking of his own fractured literary life when he wrote to Colin Summerford in 1925, proffering advice on how to proceed in the art of letters: ‘try hard for a dozen years or more, break your heart half-a-dozen times, go down into desolation and come up again, and then begin all anew. A nice life, isn’t it?’

It took the Great War to bring Machen back to his vocation. ‘The Bowmen’ (1914) is one of the lesser tales in this selection—Machen dismissed it as ‘an indifferent piece of work’—but not only did it lead to the birth of the legend of the Angels of Mons, it clearly encouraged him to resume fiction. The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (1915) collected together a cycle of slight fantasies written in a valiant attempt to show that Heaven was on the side of the Allies, and they doubtless gave comfort to many readers—the book was a bestseller—even if they add little to Machen’s reputation.

Machen continued to write occasional tales, long and short, until the mid-1930s, though he felt that his creative fire had been extinguished. These later stories may not have the power of the fantasies of the 1890s, but they too have their advocates. Certain scenes and passages in them are as good as anything Machen ever wrote in the fantastic vein. We think of Olwen’s poignant vision in The Great Return (1915) which prefaces the triumphant appearance of the guardians of the Grail in the church at Llantrisant. There is the siege at Treff Loyne Farm which provides an atmospheric climax to The Terror (1917), revealing that Machen could indeed create dramatic conflict when he chose. And there is the masterly extract from the Revd Thomas Hampole’s book in ‘N’ (1936), an imaginary work, of course, but such is Machen’s skill in leading the reader on step by step, it is difficult to believe A London Walk does not exist.

‘The Bowmen’ perhaps had a further effect on his fiction. In his role as an investigative newspaper reporter, Machen became a character in his own stories. He is rarely at the centre of events, but acts as a guide and interpreter. We know it is intended to be Machen rather than a fictional persona (though he calls himself Meyrick in ‘The Children of the Pool’, written in 1935), for in The Great Return the rector of Llantrisant berates him for his attacks on Protestantism, implicitly comparing him unfavourably with one of Machen’s ancestors, the Revd Hezekiah Jones. In his Wartime tales Machen makes slighting references to ‘The Bowmen’ and the Angels of Mons myth in order to reinforce the verisimilitude of whatever story he is recounting: ‘The Bowmen’ was a product of his imagination, he says, but this story is the record of genuine events . . . of course Machen was not seriously attempting to perpetrate hoaxes, but he seemed pleased when readers were unable to distinguish between fact and fancy. The passage of fake medieval prose in ‘The Happy Children’ (1916), the best of his short war fables, apparently deceived a liturgiologist of some experience.

It seems unlikely that Machen altered his course from infernal to supernal subject matter in the hopes of gaining new readers and increasing sales. He realised that his admirers would always be limited. His ‘first principle’ in literature was ‘that nothing that I have written, am writing, or am to write can possibly be of the faintest use or profit to myself or to anybody else’. As the elderly Machen explained to Oliver Stonor:

As a writer I can only deal with matters which are of very little interest to the vast majority of readers—of educated readers. Consequently; if I had looked for liberal praise and plentiful pudding as a reward for my labours; I should have hanged myself long ago.

. . . when I had a will of my own, roughly from 1888 to 1902, I used it to write a number of books, entirely to please myself. I don’t care twopence what anyone else thinks of the said books: the writing of them amused me, and for me that is good enough.

How grimly amused Machen would be to see the rise of the fashionable genre of magic realism, which is but old wine in new bottles, whose practitioners win the applause of our most fastidious critics. Machen lived to see the acceptance in certain quarters of his thesis that art must be rooted in the spiritual and the eternal. Much modern fiction has escaped the straitjacket of photographic realism; it is a great paradox, but Machen, old-fashioned traditionalist that he was, illuminated much of the way.

Where present-day fabulists now venture, Machen stood a century ago, walking that lonely white road, his paces in an unknown world; scaling what appeared to be insurmountable peaks and at last gazing out on to the strange lands beyond. For Machen, it was a long and difficult journey.