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In 1890, although he had begun to write in the modern manner and had even “fluttered the dovecotes” and startled the readers of the St. James Gazette with his stories, the Rabelaisian enthusiasm was still upon Machen. It had, it is true, abated somewhat of late, but when his translation of Le Moyen de Parvenir came from the bindery, all brave in blue and cream and gilt lettering, Machen still felt the spell strongly enough to set out, finally, for Touraine.
Actually, he had already determined to leave London before Fantastic Tales came out. He had been living in Soho Street in two rooms where took place the grim battle of the fleas. London seemed to pall and to pale after that and he arranged to take a cottage in the Chiltern Hills. He had already written some of the tales in his most famous manner; The Shining Pyramid, The Iron Maid among them; the idea of The Great God Pan had been born and the country seemed the place to allow it to mature. There were certain alterations and repairs to be made on the cottage and he decided to go to France in the interim. It seemed, one must suppose, the thing to do—when one has a handsome set of new volumes one has translated from the French.
Much has been said herein, and sometimes somewhat slightingly, of the amazing effect of La Belle France upon the literate Anglo-Saxon. It has been intimated that Paris has always been something of an occupational disease among writers and minor poets. And here is Machen, off to France, like any puerile poetaster upon the publication of his first “slender volume.” To those who feel some word of explanation is due, some apology for an opinion seemingly shattered, it will be noted that Machen went to the South of France, to the countryside—and not to the northern cities and carefully manicured meadows and pompadoured pleasure-grounds of the Bois.
Moreover, and this is important, Machen went to a land that never was. For when he arrived at last in the land of Rabelais, of Beroalde, of Balzac—he was greatly disappointed. “The fact was,” he says, “that I had taken for granted Dore’s wonderful illustrations.” He had supposed that the enchanted heights, the profound and somber valleys, the airy abysses of these amazing plates had reprinted, as faithfully at least as a Chamber of Commerce brochure, the veritable scenery of Touraine.
The actuality was, alas! pitifully inadequate. Nevertheless Machen did what all sensible tourists do when the lands of enchantment fail to live up to the four-color posters—he visited the local taverns. This has always seemed to offer consolation and compensation in such cases. At any rate, the “Faisan d’Or” and “Le Caveau de Rabelais” provided noteworthy compensation for Dore. It took Machen a few days to get over his disappointment—but it was not too long before he could sit at his little table in the courtyard at the Faisan and say to himself, “This night I have had as much good red wine as ever I could drink.” And this was one of the great moments of his visit to Touraine. It encouraged him, moreover, and despite his disappointment over Dore, to return to Touraine every summer for the next ten years or so.
The landscape of Touraine and the vintages of the Vouvray pleased Machen, as Paris pleased the poetasters and absinthe appealed (in theory at least) to the young men who burned with a “hard gem-like flame” and who wore their passions and their shoes to tatters in their feverish quest for la vie. He discovered that there are, here and there, gardens that address the heart and spirit and not the florist—as Poe well knew.
In the autumn of 1890 Machen returned to London and, the cottage in the Chilterns still lacking thatch or drains or some other matters, he took rooms in Guilford Street. Now it was in Guilford Street, by one account, that he was struck by the idea for The Great God Pan. It was, he says, on a dark and foggy afternoon, and with no delay he proceeded to lay out the story. In another place, however, he relates that it was in the summer of 1890 that he wrote the first chapter of The Great God Pan. Whichever it was, the tale was completed before he went to his cottage in the country. It appeared in The Whirlwind, Vol. ii for 1890, which also carried A Wonderful Woman, The Lost Club and an almost entirely unknown item—An Underground Adventure. Another story, The Red Hand, is of this period for it appeared in the Christmas number of Chapman’s Magazine under the title, The Telling of a Mystery. These matters attended to, Machen retired to the Chilterns early in 1891.
Of his stay in the country we know remarkably little. He spent two years there and, when he returned to London in 1893, he reported that he had “found it nothing.” However that may be, he did accomplish a certain amount of work. He wrote a number of his best stories there and completed two books which he promptly destroyed. The contents of these books have not been entirely lost however, for much of what was in them came to light another day. At any rate, it was in the Chilterns that he wrote The Inmost Light.
This famous story was written to a special commission, one of the few he received in his life. His stories for the Globe and St. James Gazette had attracted, as has been noted, considerable attention, and a Miss Bradden wrote Machen, asking him to contribute a tale to an annual she was getting out. The Inmost Light was written for Miss Bradden and packed off to her from the cottage in the hills. The affrighted lady returned it after what must have been one of the most rapid readings on record.
At any rate, in 1894, when “yellow bookery was at its yellowest,” John Lane of the Bodley Head published these two tales under the title The Great God Pan as Volume V of the Keynote Series. There was a title page decoration by Aubrey Beardsley—this, and the imprint of the Bodley Head, indicated that the book was, as one might say today, “aimed at a particular market.” Presumably it hit the mark, for the tale achieved a fame that has lasted to this day. For this is the best known of Machen’s stories and—even though Machen deprecatingly remarks that the book had “made a storm in a tiny tot’s tea cup”—there was a considerable tempest aroused. The Manchester Guardian went on record as feeling that Machen had “succeeded only in being ridiculous.” The Lady’s Pictorial found it “gruesome, ghastly and dull.” The Westminster Gazette decided that it was “an incoherent nightmare of sex.” Nevertheless, the book was well received and gained considerably more of a readership for Machen than had his previously published exercises in the antique. One wonders what the Boston reviewers thought of it—for the book was published by Roberts Brothers of Boston in the same year.
The Manchester Guardian’s reviewer, a staunch fellow with advanced ideas, had refrained from saying more about The Great God Pan “for fear of giving such a work advertisement.” This did not prove to be particularly effective for the Bodley Head was compelled to bring out a second edition in 1895. There were other editions: Grant Richards included the tale in The House of Souls in 1906, and again in 1913. It was translated into the French in 1901, and reissued again by Simpkins, Marshall in 1916. Knopf brought it out in 1924, and the story has been included in numerous anthologies.
The story of The Great God Pan is simple enough—but it has the touch of magic. There is a doctor with strange theories and strange knowledge. He performs an operation on the brain of a simple country girl—an operation which permits her to see, for a moment, the great god Pan, with results that were in accordance with the ancient and traditional legends concerning what might follow such a vision.
Of course we are all prone, today, to interpret literature according to our own lights, and we employ, with facility if not always felicity—the great gift of hind-sight. We may, in 1948, judge the tale neither as startling nor as horrifying as any one of a score or more pulp masterpieces. We may find Machen’s doctor not too much unlike Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll or Wells’s Dr. Moreau.
It may even be that The Great God Pan doesn’t stir us a bit—although that cannot be credited. But in 1894 the story was an amazing one—and even the comfortably righteous reviewer on the Manchester Guardian might have pondered, in the depths of the night, this passage: “Suppose that an electrician of today were suddenly to perceive that he and his friends have merely been playing with pebbles and mistaking them for the foundations of the world; suppose that such a man saw uppermost space lie open before the current, and words of man flash forth to the sun and beyond the sun into the system beyond, and the voices of articulate speaking men echo in the waste void that bounds our thought.”
Well, our young Manchester guardian of the public welfare very probably cried, “Bosh!”—and went resolutely back to sleep.
Machen, having written it, couldn’t sleep on it. In 1924, in a book called The London Adventure, Machen quotes the above passage and says, “It seems to me that the passage from The Great God Pan is a distinct prophecy of ‘wireless’; and what would logic have said to it, in 1890, when that chapter was written?”
And what, for that matter, says logic in 1948—for we have perceived again, in another way, that we have been playing with pebbles and mistaking them for the foundations of the world. For now we think not only of sending sound to the outermost reaches of space—but man himself, and at speeds greater than the speed of sound.
There is another thought that might have bothered the young man of Manchester. A character in the story has quoted Oswaldus Crollius, “In every grain of wheat there lies hidden the soul of a star.” Now in 1894 the reviewer, any reviewer, even the Bostonian, would have muttered something about “muddled mysticism” and skipped over the sage utterance of Oswaldus to get along into the “incoherent nightmare of sex.” What Machen thought of this in ’94 we do not know—but in 1923 or thereabouts he wrote that he thought this a wonderful saying; “a declaration, I suppose that all nature is one, manifested under many forms; and so far as I can gather, modern science is rapidly coming around to the view of this obscure speculator of the XVII century; and, in fact, to the doctrine of the Alchemists.”
Now this was a brave thing to say—even in 1923. The muddled mysticisms of the ’90’s is today’s theorum—as has been amply demonstrated. The most fantastic fable or the most ingenious fiction of one decade may become the newest discovery in the laboratory of today.