THE HOUSE OF SOULS

Thomas Lloyd in The Sunday Sun

... He seeks only to entertain by what he considers legitimate forms of art. Nevertheless, there is a distinct likeness between his professor and himself—even to the suffering from overwork and brain exhaustion. The tales strike one as the work of one who has overtasked his imagination in London streets and been overcome by nightmares produced by excessive reading of the discussions of the British Association. An unusual but not uninteresting case! Time and a rest-cure may work wonders—may lead to Mr Machen’s next book being altogether as acceptable as the first story in this, and the successor to “The House of Souls” becoming a house of bodies and hearts and minds.

Academy

... The particular mark at which this criticism is directed is the mystical tale called “The White People.” This story, which is inset into a not particularly well-executed discussion on the nature and spiritual significance of sin, contains the narrative of a young girl, who as a child had lit somehow upon some of the secrets of Fairyland and whose initiation gradually widened as she grew. The thing is not wanting either in imagination or in a certain painful beauty of its own. It is, perhaps, the best-written piece in the book, and the childish, simple language, admirably suggested and maintained, heightens its undeniable pathos. But in the end the young girl is found dead, self-poisoned in time—whatever that may mean—and prostrate before an image which we are given vaguely to understand is symbolic of the “monstrous mythology of the (witches’) Sabbath.” We cannot satisfactorily follow the process by which this gruesome consummation is attained. Mr Machen has been inspired, no doubt, by wild, weird places. Their anciently reported spells, as Emerson has it, have crept upon him, but nowhere here does the enchantment of nature make for sober healing. And why should these influences be set to work upon a pure young spirit for sorcery rather than for sanctification? If Mr Machen should answer: Why not? we can only say how very greatly we should prefer the alternative. The other experiments with the “gurgoylesque” are at least legitimate. Weird and resourceful as they are, however, perhaps they rather fail of horror in their super-psychical parts. Nothing elsewhere in “The Great God Pan” approaches the effect produced upon the reader by the callousness of the experiment of the doctor (in the preliminary chapter) upon the brain of the girl who had once owed her life to him, and that incident is nearer to the possibilities of a lust for science than any part of the resulting coil, in which the devil became incarnate for a while and was made woman. In neither this nor the clever arabesque entitled “The Three Impostors” (which might well have been called “The Murderers’ Fantasia”) is the elaborate surrounding scroll-work quite as effective as it might be; and in the latter extravaganza we lose touch with the main event through the plethora of side tales with which it is garnished, though a word of praise is due to the various literary and artistic characters upon whose vagaries and idiosyncrasies the action indirectly hinges....

The Standard

It is a pity that Mr Machen has done several things in connection with his new volume of short stories. First and foremost, he might have very well dispensed with his preface. Mr Machen is clever, of course, but his bland references to the example of Mr Kipling and Edgar Allan Poe as “fellow-authors” does not convince—it only irritates. Also his diatribe about the Puritan elements in the English character is quite out of date. Nearly every man who has written decadent fiction within the past fifteen years has lashed himself into a similar fury because he fancies that it has been “tacitly, if not openly, ordered that the English novel is only great when it is a sermon, a tract, or a pamphlet in disguise.” The success or failure of a book is not, as Mr Machen seems to think, governed by hard-headed men of business, who have never disguised their intolerance of imagination, quâ imagination, and who believe that “English fiction must justify itself either as containing useful doctrine and information, or as a manifest transcript of life as it is known to the average reader, due regard being had, of course, to the salutary conventions of the social order.” It is almost invariably limited by its own qualities. Only let Mr Machen produce a work of genius—and his fame shall be known afar. Another source of difference which we have with this writer is the inclusion of the first story, “A Fragment of Life,” in “The House of Souls.” That story, in its particular way, is almost perfect—tender, true, intimate, and restrained—in its exhibition of how a small suburban clerk and his wife came to awake from their dream of a London suburb, of daily labour, and of weary, useless little things, and saw the things that really mattered in life, with the result that “the voices of men and women came to sound with strange notes, with the echo rather of a music that came over unknown hills.” Its mystical qualities are both rare and beautiful, and, as a work of art alone, it deserves to live. But the other stories of Black Magic—of Pan, and of fauns and satyrs and other fearful wild-fowl of the occultist’s stock-in-trade—frankly, they are failures. In one aspect, they would shame any respectable sensational novelist who practises a certain amount of natural illusion. In another—they are ineffective. They do not drive home the intolerable horror of the mystery of Evil. They suggest, on the contrary, the Fat Boy in “Pickwick.” Mr Machen may have ransacked the whole British Museum for quaint and far-off ceremonies, simply to make our flesh creep, but, in sober truth, all he has accomplished is an engaging air of looking mysterious until the time comes for explanation—and then—well, then we yawn. Now, his “fellow-author,” Poe, would not have done this. If he had essayed to melt this too, too solid flesh, if he had striven to throw into atoms and reconstitute the primal elements of our existence, if he had essayed to summon the eternal spirits of evil, the blind forces of ill that are hidden in the constitution of man—we should have felt a rush of genuine terror, and the breath of genius would have touched our cheeks. As it is—Mr Machen only imparts a certain hot-house kind of atmosphere to several perfectly familiar experiments, such as an obscure operation on a girl’s brain, the secret of a wife’s disappearance, the reason why certain men of fashion are driven irresistibly to suicide, and the cause of an obscure, and, truth to tell, rather squalid murder in a deserted passage. He never makes us believe in those Black Masses, or in his theory of demoniacal possession, or in that wonderful jewel, the size of a pigeon’s egg, that glowed and glittered, and was really a woman’s soul. He should realise that poor Aubrey Beardsley, and the hot, impetuous souls that wrought as he did, are quite dead, and now should turn his attention to other and truer fragments of life.

The Bystander

My reference, a week or two back, to the new form of humour exploited by Mr Montagu Wood in “A Tangled I,” a humour which amusingly combined epigram and satire with literary power and imagination, has moved Mr Grant Richards, the publisher of the book, to draw my attention to another work of the same genre, entitled “The House of Souls,” by Mr Arthur Machen. Certainly this book, which contains about six complete novels, is a notable production. If it lacks the sparkle of Mr Wood’s book, it is, nevertheless, the fruit of a curious talent which seems to be of so very striking a resemblance to that work that I am moved to a suspicion that it is the handiwork of the same brain. “The House of Souls” stories are conceived largely with the desire to mix up the humdrum in life with the transcendental—to indicate the “appeal of Theosophy to atheists, men about town, journalists, and hard-headed men of affairs.” The touch of humour is to be observed in the descriptions in the various stories—particularly “A Fragment of Life”—of prosaic suburban ways and manners, which reveal a very intimate knowledge of the lower middle classes; and as to the Theosophical aspect of the stories, undoubtedly it is interesting to find this theme exploited in fiction, especially by so brilliant a descriptive and imaginative writer as Mr Machen. I may add here, that Mr Montagu Wood’s humour was recognised in “Pop” at Eton, and afterwards at the Canning Club at Oxford, and that his skit, published some years ago, “An Island Story,” was highly successful in those sets wherein it gained a reading. I am more than confident that his is a literary talent which will, sooner or later, reach a wide and a startled public.

Liverpool Daily Courier

... It is by no means a new trick, of course, but Mr Machen has it to perfection, and he is shrewd enough to heighten its effectiveness by sticking his nightmares in the very midst of the modern and the circumstantial and the familiar—by transposing Edgar Allan Poe into the key of “The New Arabian Nights.” Too obviously Poe, here and there, perhaps; and too unmistakably the manner of “The Nights”; but in these derivative days echoes of that sort will trouble none but the most fastidious of readers, and certainly not those who have a healthy appetite for robustious and not too conventional melodrama.

Illustrated London News

“My dear Sir,” says Dyson in “The House of Souls,” “I will give you the task of a literary man in a phrase. He has got to do simply this: to invent a wonderful story and to tell it in a wonderful manner.” Judged by this test Mr Arthur Machen can scarcely be said to have made literature. As the reader is conducted, Sherlock Holmes fashion, through the House of Souls (there are six storeys to it) its wicked arabesques, its old cabinets and prehistoric flints and faded pocket-books, wear an unconvincing, property air. When wonderful gentlemen like Dyson having drawn from some antique bureau a tattered paper or a black seal, and presenting it for a chum’s inspection the chum exclaims, “Take it away; never speak of this again. Are you made of stone, man? Why, the dread and horror of death itself, the thoughts of the man who stands in the keen morning air on the black platform, bound, the bell tolling in his ears, and waits for the harsh rattle of the bolt, are as nothing compared to this. I will not read it; I should never sleep again!”—then is the breath held, and the mind prepared for any delicious thrill. But the Manuscript at length, or the black seal fully deciphered, prove well-nigh soporific. And both lack the power of evoking that spiritual terror which, leaving Hawthorne and Poe and Coleridge out of the comparison, surrounds “The Island of Dr Moreau,” by Mr Wells, and is imprinted in “The Mark of the Beast,” by Mr Kipling.

Birmingham Gazette and Express

... Whilst admiring the literary workmanship and the weird fancifulness of it all, one wonders what it means and why the tales were ever written. Do they purport to be works of imagination only, then the author has sought a singularly repulsive form of expression for his undoubted talent; do they seek to promulgate a theory concerning the link between the human and the bestial, between the natural and the supernatural in its most depraved possibilities of manifestation, then we would prefer to remain in ignorance, debating for not one moment the reasonableness or otherwise of such a theory. Really and truly, these awful stories strongly suggest the half-mad imaginings of a degenerate mind steeped in morbidity. They are too completely nauseous ever to have been permitted the publicity of print, and we sincerely trust they will secure few readers.

Literary World

... But when our author attempts to handle such occult matters as are treated of in “The Great God Pan,” he seems to lose his footing. He succeeds in giving his readers an impression of very disagreeable horrors, but he does not succeed in giving verisimilitude to his record. We feel ourselves in the presence merely of a somewhat morbid imagination. Mr Machen does not reveal, as he leads us to hope, any real arcana.

East Anglian Daily Times

... We have conscientiously perused the 500 pages which the volume contains, and our conclusion is that we would not willingly repeat the experience. We have supped full with horrors, and the lurid abominations which are very plainly hinted at have sickened us. It is probable that there are some whose literary digestion is strong enough to swallow such pabulum with impunity; but we fancy that the great majority of readers will rise from the book with a shudder of loathing. Certainly persons of a sensitive temperament ought not to read the gruesome tales after dusk....

Light

... The promise of the first story is not redeemed, and the book is given up to the blacker side of magical beliefs, wrapped up in a garb suggestive of “Sherlock Holmes.” It is not Spiritualism, and we prefer to believe that there is no truth in such auto-suggested horrors. The book professes to indicate “the dangers of unauthorised research,” but no such dangers as are here presented beset the path of the earnest and conscientious Spiritualist investigator.

Speaker

Mr Arthur Machen writes a somewhat curious preface to his collection of decadent stories in which he attempts to turn the Puritan’s flank in an ingenious manner. He claims that “it is entirely from the Puritan standpoint that I wish to rest my plea for these tales of mine ... 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.... I contend that as an English novelist I am within my right in doing so; since Science, the guide of Life, has done as much, has admitted many transcendental conceptions into her scheme of things.” This is a neat apology for the subject matter, which may be summarised by the line, “the flesh is aghast at the half-heard murmurs of horrible things,” but it may surprise the author to be told that in these clever artificial and decidedly sickly romances, penned apparently under the joint influence of Oscar Wilde’s and Aubrey Beardsley’s artistic example, he has proved his Puritan heritage better than he knows. There has always seemed to us something a little pathetic in the desperate attempt of the small school of young Oxford hedonists to break away from the moral code of the healthy Philistine and encounter and glorify the mysterious forbidden pleasures of Sin. For their world was an artificial make-believe affair, with an exhausted atmosphere, in which affectation stood in the place of real pleasure. We can respect in a measure the Puritan who cries out that pleasure is a sin, because he shows us thereby that it has a secret fascination for him, but the man who can only enjoy pleasure by making out to himself that it is a sin shows himself a Puritan manqué. We are not surprised, therefore, to find that Mr Arthur Machen’s stories fail to thrill us, because the artificial horrors and nameless sins in which they abound are all carefully concocted and have practically no correspondence with the sins or horrors of real life. That is where our young school of modern hedonists fails in art; it is divorced from nature, and its would-be spontaneity is palpably a carefully laboured, artificial affair. And this is a great pity, for the refined sense of beauty that the young hedonist starts with possessing can only create a stale preciosity when it is divorced from the freshness of nature. Practically all the stories in “The House of Souls” are so much labour thrown away, and the more carefully studied are their “nameless horrors,” the more meaningless are they, and the worse as art. Take, for example, the story “The Inmost Light.” Here is a most deliberate attempt to make our flesh creep, and the only result is to make the reader exclaim “stuff and nonsense.” A certain Dr Black secludes himself with his beautiful wife in his house at Harlesden, and makes experiments in “occult science”:—

“... each night I had stolen a step nearer to that great abyss which I was to bridge over, the gulf between the world of consciousness and the world of matter.... In that work from which even I doubted to escape with life, life itself must enter; from some human being there must be drawn that essence which men call the soul, and in its place (for in the scheme of the world there is no vacant chamber)—in its place would enter in what the lips can hardly utter, what the mind cannot conceive without a horror more awful than the horror of death itself. And when I knew this, I knew also on whom that fate would fall; I looked into my wife’s eyes. Even at that hour, if I had gone out and taken a rope and hanged myself, I might have escaped, and she also, but in no other way. At last I told her all. She shuddered, and wept, and called on her dead mother for help, and asked me if I had no mercy and I could only sigh. I concealed nothing from her; I told her what she would become, and what would enter in where her life had been; I told her of all the shame and all the horror.... That night she came down to my laboratory, and there, with shutters bolted and barred down, with curtains drawn thick and close, so that the very stars might be shut out from the sight of that room, while the crucible hissed and boiled over the lamp, I did what had to be done, and led out what was no longer a woman. But on the table the opal flamed and sparkled with such light as no eyes of man have ever gazed on, and the rays of the flame that was within it flashed, and glittered, and shone even to my heart. My wife had only asked one thing of me; that when there came at last what I had told her, I would kill her. I have kept my promise.” Page 286.

This passage is a very fair sample of the school to which Mr Machen belongs, and it illustrates its utter artificiality. No thrill can possibly come, because there is falsity in every line and human nature is violated at every turn. The leading idea of the opal gaining an unholy lustre from the commission of an evil deed is paltry in itself, and the whole psychological interest should lie in the study of the man’s warped human instincts. But Dr Black is a lay figure in whom we do not even begin to believe, and so the piled-up structure of horror appears childishly inept. And so with the description of the strange sins in the story of “The Three Impostors.” The strange sins are not real sins, that is why they fail to interest even a morbid imagination. If the author would go into the street and pick up with the first wastrel he meets and describe faithfully the workings of the man’s mind, he would thrill us fifty times more than can this collection of concocted effects all alien to the truth of life, and so all remote from human feeling. In its horror of nature, indeed, our young hedonistic school shows but another phase of the old Puritan’s distrust of art.

AN IMPURE IDEAL A CHALLENGE TO PURITANISM

David Christie Murray in The Referee

The Philistine as Art’s Helper.—Every now and then some person rises up in England to protest against the restrictions by which a vulgar and uninstructed Philistinism cribs, cabins, and confines the imaginative artist. Sometimes the protest is made by a man of genius, and whenever that is the case it is triumphantly proved by events that there was not the slightest real need to make it. The more daring and robust the assault upon the proprieties the more assured is the attention of an immediate audience. Mr Swinburne’s career affords an excellent example of this truth. In some respects he is an artist of unique character, but it was not by virtue of his artistry that he made at his first coming so prodigious a noise in the world. Mr Swinburne’s admirers now appreciate him for his literary excellences, but his earliest fame was accorded to him because of his so delicious naughtiness. A man of genius with a narrow intellectual field in which to disport himself, but with extraordinary gifts of melody and energy, he has found his proper place in the poetic hierarchy in his own lifetime, and to pretend that his fame was retarded by his defiance of Puritanism is a task for a fool—and a task which only a fool would undertake. The plain truth is that it is the very shortest cut to notoriety in this country to make a mock of morals, and there are not a few men and women who enjoy a public vogue simply and merely because they flout the Puritan Ideal, whilst if they had been content to ally decency with their native dullness they would never have been heard of beyond their own doorsteps....

There has been sent to The Referee for review a book the pretensions of which I think it on several grounds desirable to examine. In an oddly pompous preface the writer expresses his surety that his fellow-authors will sympathise with him in the difficult task of finding for a collection of short stories a general title which is not obviously impertinent. He opines that the title he has chosen “will at all events hint at the nature of the contents.” To me it afforded no remotest suggestion, and it would be easy enough to write a book which would justify the title with at least equal completeness whilst it would embody the actual antithesis of its idea. Before I proceed to the exposition of that idea it is just to set out such reasons as the author has to give for its expression in a work of fiction. In France, we are told, “it is agreed that imagination and fantasy are to work as they will and as they can, and are to be judged by their own laws. He who carves gurgoyles admirably is praised for his curious excellence in the invention and execution of these grinning monsters; and if he is blamed it is for bad carving, not because he has failed to produce pet lambs.” In England we are said to judge very differently, and “Imagination itself is expected to improve the occasion, to reform whilst it entertains, and to instruct under the guise of story-telling.” ...

Where to Draw the Line.—It has to be objected here that the case is too broadly stated. It is not agreed that imagination and fantasy are to work as they will in France. There is a certain restraining sense which now and then moves the authorities to suppress a theatrical production like the “Timbale d’Argent” or a serial publication like “La Nature.” Fantasy is nowhere in any civilised community allowed an unrestricted play. There is a point at which all modern peoples divide the endurably coarse from the intolerably indecent and abominable. You must arrange with your own sensibilities the precise point at which you will say to fantasy, “Thus far shalt thou go and no further,” but every civilised man has a limit beyond which he will not permit himself to be carried. And, what is of at least equal importance, he has a limit beyond which he will not knowingly allow those innocences, ignorances, and inexperiences which are under his guardianship or control to travel....

There are many examples of literary, pictorial, and plastic art in the hands of lovers of the curious which are kept under lock and key. The owners are not necessarily persons of unclean mind, and they generally exercise some discretion as to the choice of the people by whom these objects shall be seen. The common sense of the world—not the art-hatred of the Philistine, but just the common-sense common decency of the world—has decided that they shall be jealously hidden from the immature in years and experience. The argument advanced by our author is that perfection in the presentation makes the nature of the thing presented of little consequence, I am not disposed to attach an exaggerated value to that contention, but even if it were wholly defensible in respect to a work of art in itself, it is impossible to argue that it is of little consequence to whom it shall be shown. There is nothing more sacred than that ingenuous shame which the growth of civilisation has fostered as a guarding instinct against the violation of the mind. I make no fight for prudery—pruriency aping modesty, and topping frank indecency by its lie. I have had my say in The Referee more than once already about those egregious persons who from time to time seek an arbiter elegantiarum in the police-courts. But I stand for cleanliness in art, and, above all, I stand for it in the modern novel, and not only because the novel goes into the hands of boys and girls whose premature introduction to certain dark places cannot fail to have disastrous results....

A Public Pleasaunce.—Now here, of course, is an excellent opportunity for those ladies and gentlemen who think it one of the privileges of Art to be indecent to ask if I expect the writer of the novel to address herself or himself exclusively to the Young Person—if I intend to tie his or her soaring genius to a boy’s coat-tails or a girl’s pinafore. I say in answer to that query that it is not I who choose the medium through which the writers concerned have elected to reveal their genius to the world. I say that having chosen that medium for themselves they cannot rightly ignore certain responsibilities which the choice imposes upon them. The field of the novelist is a very spacious pleasure-ground indeed, and you may legitimately lay out in it almost any sort of garden plot or plantation, and may erect in it almost any sort of palace or cottage or mansion. But it is an open space, and it is dedicated to the delectation of the public. Incidentally the wanderer in its precincts may be instructed or warned or spiritually lifted, but his purpose in going there is primarily to be entertained. The operating theatre and the dissecting-room are out of place there, though there are some people who can take their pleasure in such places and get no harm. Most out of place of all conceivable things in a pleasure-ground which is free to everybody is the mural picture gallery of the unburied cities....

An Intrusion on Privacy.—When I was a boy I was taken by a middle-aged fool who ought to have known better into a waxwork anatomical museum at a rural wake. The sight left an evil taste on my mental palate for years and years. A rural wake is no place for an anatomical museum. That was a day of days, and Wombwell’s menagerie and that booth of Thespis which belonged to Messrs Bennet and Patch, and the swinging-boats and the merry-go-rounds, and the gingerbread stalls and the spangled lady on the slack wire, and Mr Merriman and the shooting-galleries, and the whole gay, harmless medley make clear pictures in my mind this minute, though the rain and sunshine of a half-century have made many another of memory’s paintings dim. And the anatomical museum poisoned everything. The contention I desire to combat is that a literary craftsman has some right to intrude the most hateful side of his mind upon others because he is an artist. But who says he is an artist? A man may write fiction and be no more of an artist than a ledger clerk. “He who carves gurgoyles admirably is praised for his curious excellence in the invention and execution of those grinning monsters; and if he is blamed he is blamed for bad carving, not because he has failed to produce pet lambs.” But has he who carves “gurgoyles” the double right to carve revolting shapes and to plump them down in the public pleasure-ground for any unsuspecting wayfarer to sicken at?...

A Buried Symbolism.—I offer a most emphatic denial to the assumption that “imagination and fantasy” are anywhere justly to be “allowed to work as they can and will,” so long as their product is exposed for unrestricted sale in market overt. If I am to give fantasy free play I can quite easily imagine things which would excite the loathing of a savage. In every society which has raised itself above the intellectual level of the hog there are certain things which are not currently spoken of. There were certain obscure obscenities with which the ancients surrounded Nature-Worship. They expressed imaginatively the primal forces, and the emblems employed to represent them were candid and unashamed. Their open exposure and popular exhibition were the characteristic originally of a time of purest savagery and animalism. As civilisation grew these emblems became conventionalised, and finally they ceased to be symbolic. Some are in frequent use to-day, but their meaning is so completely lost to the popular mind that every modern cemetery displays an entire perversion of the meaning of one of them. Now, the root-idea of the book under consideration is the survival of all those old obscure obscenities into modern life. “It is in the character of a sober portrayer of a certain side of life,” writes the author in his own person, “that I hope to add to the pleasure of many pleasant Sunday afternoons.” I am armed beforehand against the simpering suggestion that I am impenetrable to the subtleties of irony. Solomon to the contrary notwithstanding, it is sometimes good to answer a controversialist according to his argument....

The Naked Untruth.—In pursuit of this purpose of adding to the pleasure of pleasant Sunday afternoons our author introduces his reader to a girl-child in a modern rural neighbourhood in Wales whose mind is unutterably debauched by her nurse, and who at the age of five has for her playmate the very bodily devil of licentiousness. The girl thrives under tuition to such advantage that when she comes to her demoniac womanhood she has arrived at a knowledge of evil so complete that the revelation of it drives men of the world to whom it is displayed to suicide. Speaking for myself, I can aver quite honestly that this sort of baby-Satanic-tommy-rot will not add to the pleasure of many pleasant Sunday afternoons. It is offered, as I have said already, with a kind of pomp, as a protest against the degraded state into which imagination and fantasy have slipped under the withering influences of Puritanism. Puritanism is as a red rag to the author. We all know, so he tells us, “how Hampden died that England might be free, first under the martial law of the Great Protector, and afterwards under the Whig oligarchy.” We are instructed that the Puritans hanged witches in Salem, and flogged the Quakers, baptised foals in cathedrals, hewed down the statues of the saints, shut up the theatres, and gave us the English Sunday. It is not quite a true bill. Hampden did not die for martial law and the beaux yeux of the Whigs. Nor did the Puritans—a really forbidding body of men, to my fancy, amongst whom I wouldn’t have lived for any money—spend all their energies in hanging witches and baptising foals in cathedrals. Like many a tribe which went before them, and many another which has followed after, they obscured a noble cause by gross excesses. But it does not become a professed Iconoclast to get dancing-mad at the sight of a hammer in another man’s hand....

The Little Pig.—It is an assured thing in our author’s mind that English Puritanism is going to take exception to his work. On the ground that it is a needless and offensive resurrection of the buried nastiness of early heathendom, I think it very likely that he is right. I was never very much of a Puritan myself, but my taste and inclination take me to the Puritan side for once. There was a dear old philosopher of a village doctor whom I knew years ago when I lived in the Belgian Ardennes. We were talking of the pornographies of French art one night, and with a shake of his wise old head he said, “Il y a, dans l’âme de chacun de nous, un petit cochon qui se grandit vite.” I know my own little pig, and though I am compelled to find him house-room I have no liking for him, and I certainly have no desire that his manners should be corrupted by association with the little pigs of other people....

I have myself been a modest market-gardener in the field of fiction now these thirty years, and I have been careful never to introduce my little pig to anybody who has come to look at my very humble patch. I try to keep him unseen and lonely in his sty. My attempt to starve him out of existence has unhappily met with but indifferent success; but I’ll be hanged if I will take anybody’s ha’pence to make a show of him. I decline to put him on exhibition either for praise or pudding. And yet I know that I could make a very decent (and most indecent) living out of him. For my little pig is not at all like your little pig, and it is the master-passion of the Artist to be different. We all know that a good half of the talk we hear about Art for Art’s sake, with its accompanying malediction on the English Puritan, means nothing more than that the artist is setting the little pig on view for the gratification of a prurient vanity.—Merlin.

The Athenæum

... Like Poe, Mr Machen sets himself to make the reader’s flesh creep; like Hawthorne, he abounds with subtle and suggestive symbolism, and, had neither of these writers existed, his work would thrill the reader even more ingeniously, although it lacks the originality of the one and the poetic austerity and wealth of imagination of the other. He deals in ancient mysteries; he is for ever hinting at the macabre, the sinister, the unspeakable. His puppets peep and mutter through an atmosphere of forbidden knowledge and obscure rites of remote antiquity, which, however, he would seem to suggest are not so remote as they ought to be, after all. He is an adept in the art of elusiveness—so much so, indeed, that some of his most horrific endings fail of their proper effect, and the piled-up agony topples to a fall, leaving the reader with just the ghost of a suspicion of the author’s sincerity, and a haunting reminiscence of turnip-headed spectres and clanking chains....

The Saturday Review

Mr Machen adds three new stories to the contents of two earlier volumes, and introduces the collection by a preface which is perhaps the best thing in the book. We remember reading “The Great God Pan” when it first appeared, and discussing it with brother-undergraduates. Most of us thought that the story was interesting chiefly as illustrating the difficulties which beset an ambitious English writer who wishes to describe transcendental beastliness. Probably we were right. Mr Machen’s literary monomania takes the form of postulating that behind the veil of matter, in the centre of the material universe, resides an obscene and terrible power, the revelation of which brings to mortals infamy and madness. This pretty fancy is hardly relevant to his spirited attack on Puritanism, for the Puritans had a lively sense of the demoniac. As regards the execution of the stories, Mr Machen has style, and a talent for the fantastic (though “The Three Impostors” is in its scheme reminiscent of Stevenson), but he has not the power of creating horror. One feels that he is carving gargoyles (to borrow his phrase) just for fun, and his readers’ blood will not run cold, though possibly their gorges may rise.

Tribune

The Great God Pan is finding himself extremely popular among the novelists just now. It was Mr Benson who began it, earlier in the year, and since that time the number of novels in which we are vouchsafed manifestations of the goat-god—complete even to the hoofs, and with an attendant murky odour thrown in—increases almost daily. Of course it is natural enough, for nobody, not even a novelist, knows much about Pan, whence unlimited possibilities of mystery and thrills. Mr Arthur Machen is one of those who see in him all the possibilities of a “hair-raiser.” Were it not disrespectful it might be said that “The House of Souls” is exactly the kind of book which would have been written by the Fat Boy in Pickwick, had he been possessed of literary ability. Had he also been, be it said, familiar with the works of Robert Louis Stevenson. For never was book more obviously written with the desire “to make your flesh creep.” What with Pans and witches and mysterious keepers of treasures in hills, the half-dozen stories contain quite a population of queer folk, not one of which but has the potentiality of raising the hair upon the reader’s head, until it resembles the quills upon a more than usually fretful porcupine. Potentialities only, however, for, truth to tell, the author never quite succeeds in raising our hair. He tells us either too much or too little. He so constantly hints at quite unmentionable horrors that we find ourselves mistrusting them, and when he does occasionally, greatly daring, venture to unveil a horror or two, they are a wee bit disappointing. This is, of course, as much the fault of the subject as of the author. None of us can take the great God Pan, nor witches, nor warlocks, very seriously nowadays—even if surgeons with alarming surgical instruments are introduced into the same story to keep them in countenance by their up-to-date associations. Because we know very well that did Pan put in a bodily appearance in a British wood to-day he would be given in charge by a stolid and unemotional gamekeeper for trespassing in pursuit of game. Pan was killed by the Game Laws, if not before, and not all the King’s horses and all the King’s men can put him together again—alas! Of the various stories in the volume “The Inmost Light” comes the nearest to being convincing, while lovers of Stevenson would feel interested in the story series, “The Three Impostors,” which at times is very successfully reminiscent of that writer.

Manchester Guardian

The stories in the volume entitled “The House of Souls,” by Arthur Machen, are all addressed to the ancient purpose of making the reader’s flesh creep. It is a favourite pastime for easy people to play with fear; from time immemorial men have amused their leisure by sitting round the fire capping horrors. It is not, we may concede, a very high form of art, but any essay in this kind must stand or fall by its success in imputing horror. Mr Machen has written a rather arrogant preface, in which the following passage occurs: “He who carves gargoyles admirably is praised for his curious excellence in the invention and execution of these grinning monsters; and if he is blamed it is for bad carving, not because he has failed to produce pet lambs.” Conceded! We may even call it a necessary postulate of the reviewer; if he is writing of gargoyles he has no business to say, “I do not like gargoyles”; he must look for the curious excellence in invention and execution, and it is not to be found in Mr Machen’s work. He understands what has long been known, that the emotion of fear is best induced by vagueness; he insists—rather heavily, indeed—on the mysterious power of the spirit, but he has not felt it; too often the horror adumbrated in his vagueness is no more than physically disgusting. Conjuring tricks with the grey matter of the brain, burning and mutilating of live bodies are the clumsy devices of an unimaginative man. The restrained intensity of feeling and economy of suggestion in such scenes as those of Maeterlinck’s early plays are infinitely more moving than these violent assaults.—H. M. S.