Let us admit that supernatural fiction, supernatural tales, have quite a respectable lineage. It must not be imagined, as some intellectuals do, that the tale of terror is something to which only the readers of pulp magazines are addicted. The supernatural tale has been the subject of several excellent studies. One has only to mention the work of such admirable scholars as Dorothy Scarborough, Edith Birkhead, Montague Summers and Eino Railo.
It has been said by some of these scholarly investigators that almost every English writer of any importance has, at one time or another, written at least one story or novel that fits somewhere into one of these categories. And then, of course, the scholarly investigators proceed to give reasons for the interest in such stories, and they point out that the interest as well as the belief in such matters is always in direct proportion to the ruggedness of the terrain. And they also list, as evidence of the extent of their research, the means whereby the best effects may be achieved in this particular field. Basically these have to do with landscape, architecture, antiquity and a whole collection of odds and ends, of props and stage settings that form the background for the venerable school of Gothic literature started many years ago by Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto.
One thing all of these tales have in common is, naturally enough, strangeness. A strangeness in landscape, a strangeness in character. Basically too, one supposes, these stories are written about, and because of, men’s fears. That is why they are called ghost stories, or horror stories, or tales of terror. This fear is not merely a fear of the dead returned, but of the past. For these stories concern themselves, even when not with actual ghosts, with past glories, past powers, past civilizations, and ancient ceremonies.
It is not that man seeks to frighten himself that he reads these stories and is fascinated by them. Psychologists, of one sort or another, have said that the popularity of ghost stories and mystery novels can be traced to a desire to enjoy vicariously the precarious situations in which characters in these tales find themselves; and that by substituting themselves for the characters involved the readers may obtain a certain stimulation which is lacking in their humdrum, calm and civilized lives. This, it seems to me, is not particularly true. It is rather because the past is the past—simply that and nothing more. For the past is the one thing man can never alter, although it has become fashionable for us to try even that. The present is here, the future is attainable and forseeable and it may even be influenced. The past is unattainable and will always remain so, therefore man remains fascinated by it. The more shrouded in the mists of time and of antiquity, the more fascinating. Man does not read of the past to frighten himself any more than he drinks in order to experience a hang-over. Nor does the average reader of supernatural stories identify himself with primitive men’s fears any more than he identifies himself with the abstract forces for good or evil when reading detective stories. Man is a curious creature and his curiosity leads him into strange places. His curiosity concerning his amazing curiosity leads him to even stranger conclusions.
This preoccupation with the Past is part of man’s eternal preoccupation with Time; is now, and always shall be, world without end; from the days of the early Greeks, who knew that Chronos was the father of great Jupiter himself—the parent of the father of the Gods. Many years ago J. W. Dunne wrote a strange and tantalizing book, An Experiment with Time, a book much remarked by critics and book reviewers in the practice of their trade, but seldom quoted beyond a mere mention of its title. This is an extraordinary book, perhaps out-dated now, in this age of the supersonic and the expanding universe and the expanding ego. Nevertheless, H. G. Wells and Kipling have been influenced by it; and many another creator of the marvelous and the wonderful. One may read many strange and wonderful books, one may even read strong and powerful and significant books—but one never forgets such books and plays written about the Time theme as The Time Machine and Berkeley Square, Priestley’s I Have Been Here Before, Ford Madox Ford’s Ladies Whose Bright Eyes and many others.
3
The magic of Machen is due no less to his wonderful style than to his wonderful material. In these days when one can scarcely speak of style without being considered stuffy and perhaps even pedantic, to praise a writer for his style is almost to damn him with faint praise. This is undoubtedly because we have had no stylists for the last several decades, for which, on the whole, we may well be grateful! It is possible that stylists fell into disrepute because so many of them, in the past, concealed a tremendous vacuum and a cavernous nothingness beneath and behind a facile facade of fluency.
Yet Arthur Machen has a distinctive style, the perfection of which, while it appeals to the pedantic and soothes the scholarly, must be apparent even to the readers of those horrendous anthologies which have reprinted Machen while the scholars were busily interring him in their fascinating mausoleums. This matter of style is rather a tricky one. It is the sort of thing of which one might say, as some have, and when all definitions fail, “Either one has it, or—one hasn’t!” However feelingly and with whatever academic finality this axiom may be delivered—style is obviously more than that, and more than the man. More, too, than words and a certain way of putting them together, and much more than a mere choice of words or dexterity in manipulating them. We have come to think that many of these things do constitute style. Indeed, a certain publisher recently hailed a new book (one of his own, of course) as being in the “tradition of the English Stylists.” Simply because the writer employed, here and there, a compound-complex sentence, composed with a certain felicity and manufactured of polysyllabic words or those with a certain antique charm. It is felt, then, that a matter of phrases makes a Fielding—which is no more the case than that the use of a quotation from Donne makes a writer one to stand with the Elizabethans.
Style is, like so many other things, more apparent in the breach than in the observance, which comes perilously close to the didactic dictum, “Either you have it, or—you haven’t.” But not quite. To be sure, every written word or group of words has style, even roadsigns, notices of trespass, mayors’ proclamation, editorials in the Daily Worker, even soap operas have style. The most popular writers of pot-boilers have a style—and many of them have so pronounced a style that they can be and have been recognizably parodied.