Their sole audience is a pair of friends, Mr. Dyson and Charles Phillipps, who wage an ongoing philosophical battle on the nature of reality and the nature of fiction, and it becomes gradually clear that the tales spun by the “three impostors” may be entirely fictitious, being instead somewhat laborious contrivances meant to dupe Dyson and Phillipps into leading them to the spectacled young man.

Toward the end it begins to dawn upon the two gentlemen that the stories they are hearing are perhaps not entirely reliable; Dyson finally resolves to “abjure all Milesian and Arabian methods of entertainment”—a reference to the Milesian tale (the Greek version of the tall tale) and, of course, to the Arabian Nights. This connects with a theme that runs throughout The Three Impostors and Machen’s work as a whole—the fantastic nature of the metropolis of London. “A Fragment of Life” (1904), a pensive novella on the borderline of the weird, conveys this conception poignantly: “London seemed a city of the Arabian Nights, and its labyrinths of streets an enchanted maze; its long avenues of lighted lamps were as starry systems, and its immensity became for him an image of the endless universe.”

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.