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.”