The story is told through a series of episodes, in the manner made popular by Stevenson and Doyle. Certain episodes are represented as being taken from the journals of some of the characters concerned; others are set forth in lengthy interviews with still other interested (and interesting) characters. The story is not overburdened with machinery and technical tricks, it manages to hang together without evident strain.
Some of the episodes could stand by themselves as tales in the Gothic genre—indeed, some of them have so appeared in anthologies and collections. It is in the telling of these tales that Machen’s skill as a story teller becomes evident. There is no one manner, but several, and each is peculiarly Machen’s own—with clever overtones and undertones of parody and satire. The satire, be it noted, is directed always at the manner and never the matter of the tale.
As for the subject matter, The Three Impostors concerns the Little People and strange powers that have persisted until this very day and other speculations. If we accept, as did William Gregg, F.R.S., who figures in one of the stories, the theory that much of the folk-lore of the world is but exaggeration of things that really happened, we are well on our way to accepting The Three Impostors as wholeheartedly as did the people who wrote Machen such curious letters back in 1895. Such is Machen’s magic, moreover, that we are easily persuaded into accepting almost anything.
The Three Impostors also introduces one of the most engaging figures in English literature. Mr. Dyson is not as well known, perhaps, as Henry Ryecroft or Stephen Daedalus or Charteris, but he has, it may be, as fine a future as they.
Mr. Dyson (if he had a first name, I cannot recall ever having read it) is a “man of letters” who, in pursuit of his quiet profession (the chase of the phrase, he called it) does a great deal of wandering about odd quarters of London. He stumbles into and out of the most amazing adventures, none of which appreciably affect his composure and seldom indeed is he startled out of his pompous pedantry.
Dyson’s companion in adventure and the recipient of his pronouncements is a Mr. Charles Phillips. Phillips is somewhat younger than Dyson, but they shared a certain gravity of character and pomposity of manner that made them mutually acceptable. They met frequently in each other’s rooms or in the tobacco shop in Queen Street where “their talk robbed the tobacconist’s profit of half its charm.” Dyson exalted the claims of pure imagination, while Phillips insisted that all literature ought to have a scientific basis.
This precious pair, who shared silence as amiably as they conversed, wander sedately enough through the astonishing episodes involving the Young Man With Spectacles, Miss Lally, the sinister Mr. Davis and others. They are encountered in several other tales of this period. Dyson is actually an old acquaintance. He first made his bow, and a very courtly gesture it was, in The Red Hand or The Shining Pyramid, whichever tale, in truth, came first; but it is in The Three Impostors that we really came to know him. We shall meet again.
Chapter Four
A NOBLE PROFESSION
“I reflected, then, on my want of prospects, and I determined to embark in literature.”