The exquisitely gradual way in which the stolid bourgeois couple, Edward and Mary Darnell, slowly awaken to their sense of wonder and abandon London for their native Wales is one of Machen’s great literary accomplishments. Amid all the mundane details of the small-scale social life of the Darnells, we receive small hints that their love of beauty has not been entirely destroyed, as it has for so many who live too fully in the modern world. Machen delivers an unanswerable criticism of the narrowing of vision that such a life engenders: “So, day after day, he lived in the grey phantasmal world, akin to death, that has, somehow, with most of us, made good its claim to be called life.” And yet, something so simple as birdsong heard by Edward (“That night was the night I thought I heard the nightingale . . . and the sky was such a wonderful deep blue”) provides an anticipation of the coming change. Mary, too, although seemingly more hard-headedly practical than Edward, senses the alteration in her being (“one would have almost said that they were the eyes of one who longed and half expected to be initiated into the mysteries, who knew not what great wonder was to be revealed”). The entire novel is a kind of instantiation of the critical theories in Machen’s idiosyncratic treatise on aesthetics, Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature (1902), in which he criticized such writers as Jane Austen and George Eliot for being too closely tied to mundane reality and failing to include that modicum of “ecstasy” which ought, in Machen’s eyes, to inform all literature. We may well believe that Machen was insufficiently attuned to the “ecstasy” that is in fact present in the work of the social realists he disdains, but we can hardly gainsay that he himself has flawlessly embodied his own principles in “A Fragment of Life.”

After writing this novel (which was itself worked on sporadically over five years, 1899–1904), Machen appeared to lose focus as far as fiction writing was concerned. In 1907 he wrote the curious novel The Secret Glory (not published until 1922), but that was the extent of his creative output between 1904 and 1914. With his inheritance gone, Machen was forced to produce mountains of journalism; the book publications of his fiction—specifically The House of Souls (1906) and The Hill of Dreams (1907)—brought him fleeting attention, but not much in the way of income. It was only in 1914 that he resumed fiction writing—but he did so in a peculiar way.

Machen had, since 1910, been serving on the staff of one of the leading newspapers in London, the Evening News, as reporter and columnist. At least two of the four stories that comprised The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (1915)—“The Bowmen” (September 29, 1914) and “The Soldiers’ Rest” (October 20, 1914)—appeared in the Evening News. The well-known story of how “The Bowmen”—a tale about the ghosts of medieval British soldiers who come to the aid of a beleaguered British unit at the battle of Mons in late August 1914—came to be regarded as the account of a real occurrence, with angels rescuing the soldiers and supposedly first-hand accounts by the soldiers themselves testifying to the miracle, need not be discussed in detail; Machen himself recounts the matter in his long introduction to The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War. His repeated protestations that the story was entirely a product of his imagination went for naught; the outbreak of the European war—which had commenced less than two months prior to the publication of “The Bowmen”—was so traumatic that the emergence of such legendry was inevitable. Machen himself alludes to Kipling’s “The Lost Legion” as a central literary influence on the tale, although other literary sources reaching back to Herodotus’s Histories have recently been postulated. 6 But what is more significant is Machen’s own attempt to pull off a kind of hoax with “The Bowmen.” The mere fact that it was published in a newspaper—even though newspapers at this time published more fiction than they do now—and the fact that it was written with the plain-spoken sobriety expected of factual articles, suggest that Machen is not wholly blameless in the subsequent furor caused by his little tale.

Much the same could be said for “The Great Return,” which also appeared in the Evening News (October 21–November 16, 1915) and was subsequently published in book form by a religious publisher, Faith Press. Here Machen seeks no more than to present, in the most orthodox reportorial manner, a series of curious incidents in Wales that, to his mind, suggest the actual rediscovery of the Holy Grail. Once again, as in “The Red Hand,” although in a somewhat cruder way, Machen seeks to use the tools of rationalism to undermine rationalism: Here the outwardly skeptical newspaper reporter—who is none other than Machen himself, with no attempt made to establish a distance between author and persona—becomes gradually convinced of the reality of the phenomena described. Machen is content to present a scenario whereby something miraculous might have happened: This is sufficient for his current purpose of attacking the godless materialism of his age.

The European war was obviously a highly disturbing event to Machen. Already alienated from his time by his own religious mysticism, so much in contrast with the prevailing scientific rationalism of the later nineteenth century, he found his own faith shaken by a war in which Christians were killing other Christians with great gusto. Toward the end of the conflict he wrote a series of sophistical articles attempting to justify the ways of God to man; they were collected as War and the Christian Faith (1918). But a much more interesting response to the war came in the short novel The Terror (1917), which was also serialized in the Evening News (October 16–31, 1916). Once again we are faced with a reportorial account—sober, factual, even a bit bland—but again the purpose is to demonstrate that “science deals only with surfaces” and that the true causes for the revolt of animals against the domination of mankind lie much deeper.

The Terror reveals several features characteristic of Machen’s later fiction. The first, perhaps, is frank autobiography. Not only does the first-person narrative voice seem, as in “The Great Return” and “Out of the Earth,” to be Machen himself, but he plays upon his own role as a journalist and reporter. Is he attempting to pass off the narrative as a “true” story? To be sure, there is no deliberate intent to deceive; but the circumstantiality of his account, and its generally reportorial tone, make one wonder whether Machen is hoping to convey a deeper truth—the truth that the brief, fitful, and ultimately temporary “revolution” of the animals against humanity’s reign over the earth is a signal that human morals are collapsing as a result of the hideous and unprecedented warfare that had broken out two years earlier.

The other feature that distinguishes The Terror is its mystery or even detective element. On the basis of several stories included here, one could easily imagine Machen writing an accomplished detective novel, but of course he would never have done so, for the notion of resolving all loose ends, and thereby emphasizing the rational intellect’s understanding of the world, was anathema to Machen. For him, something of mystery must remain as a bulwark against the relentless march of science. And yet, in its way The Terror is nothing more than a logical working out of all possibilities, so that, by a process of elimination, a single explanation—even if it is supernatural—remains as the only viable solution to the case.

By the 1920s Machen occupied a peculiar, even bizarre position in the English literary scene. In 1923 a first edition of The Hill of Dreams was fetching the fabulous price of £1,500, or $7,500, far more than most people earned in an entire year.