Machen had been under the Stevensonian influence for some years. In 1890 he published a story, The Lost Club, which exhibits marked family resemblance to one of the early adventures in the New Arabian Nights. At any rate the Three Impostors, Machen’s next book, is derived from Stevenson’s Dynamiter, and was written somewhere in this period when The Great God Pan was creating a stir. The manuscript was sent, late in the winter of 1894, to Heinemann who expressed interest, enthusiasm, and then, unaccountably, regrets. The reader in the publisher’s office had been wonderfully encouraging and gloriously flattering. It was better, said Heinemann excitedly, than Stevenson’s best. Even a man as modest as Machen marveled at his artistry—and marveled still more when, early in 1895, the House of Heinemann returned his manuscript with the usual regrets and the usual phrase about being unable to use the enclosed manuscript.

And so, later that year, The Three Impostors was issued by John Lane, once again in the Keynote Series and once again with the title page decoration by Beardsley. It failed, Machen says, to set Fleet Street afire—but it is, of course, one of his best stories.

Once again, as with so many of Machen’s stories, there were those who wrote to inquire whether there was not some foundation of fact, some basis of truth upon which the tale had been built. So willing are men to suspend their disbelief! People were forever asking him if his stories were not based upon some legend current in his part of the country and, of course, there were those who were willing to relate incidents and occurrences which closely paralleled the fantastic fictions of Machen’s inventions.

The Three Impostors combined a number of popular elements. There was, first of all, a portrait of America, or the American West, as rugged and rough and uncouth as any Briton could desire. It rivaled and even surpassed, in some respects, Stevenson’s Western episode in The Dynamiter. The Stevenson story had also served as a model for the Mormon episode in Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet. The resemblances here are even more marked than in Machen’s tale. As a matter of fact, Christopher Morley has suggested (in the Saturday Review late in 1947) that Doyle found the Mormon episode in his occiput following a reading of The Dynamiter on a rainy evening in 1885. However this may be, The Three Impostors is a remarkable and absorbing story, even if it did not do as well as The Great God Pan—but it has done remarkably well in the fifty-odd years since it was written.

Back in 1923 Knopf published The Three Impostors in the famous yellow binding, and again in 1930 in a Borzoi Pocket Edition. In his introduction to the latter book Machen wrote:

“In the course of a quarter of a century, I have received a good many letters of serious enquiry about The Three Impostors. My correspondents ask me in various terms and turns of phrase whether there is any foundation for the strange circumstances and tales narrated in the book.... I began to get them pretty soon after The Three Impostors was published in 1895. Then, on the whole, I was rather displeased than pleased at the question.... I was strongly inclined to resent the implication that I had embroidered rather than invented.”

Machen pointed out that the events described in his book not only did not happen, but could not have happened. That, at least, was his attitude just after he had written the book. In later years he changed his mind, for in the Nineteen-twenties he wrote, “I have had experiences which debar me from returning the absolute negative of earlier years.... These experiences of mine were trifling enough, but they suggest the possibility of far greater things and far more extraordinary things for those with the necessary qualifications.... I am inclined to urge that the things which I have known may suggest the probable existence of a world very far and remote from the world of common experience.

“It may turn out after all that the weavers of fantasy are the veritable realists.”

4

Just why The Three Impostors, certainly not the most sensational story published in that sensational year, should have inspired such widespread belief, or at least so much willing suspension of disbelief, is not too difficult to understand. The story concerns itself largely with matters having to do with superstitions and, even if the superstitions involved were not familiar ones, they had something of the common quality of all superstitions based on folk-lore.