The Saturday Review (London),
11 January 1896, pp. 48-49
“The Three Impostors.” By Arthur Machen. London: John Lane. 1895.
Mr. Machen is an unfortunate man. He has determined to be
weird, horrible, and as outspoken as his courage permits in an age which is
noisily resolved to be “ ’ealthy” to the pitch of blatancy. His particular
obsession is a kind of infernal matrimonial agency, and the begetting of
human-diabolical mules. He has already skirted the matter in his previous book,
the “Great God Pan,” and here we find it well to the fore again. This time,
however, it simply supplies one of a group of incoherent stories held together
in a frame of wooden narrative about a young man with spectacles. This young
man falls into a circle of Black Magicians, who are practising indecorums and
crimes at which Mr. Machen dare only hint in horror-struck whispers. Aghast—all
Mr. Machen’s characters are aghast sooner or later—the young man takes to
flight, and, instead of informing the police, runs to and fro about London,
trying to hide. The chase assumes this form: Again and again a Mr. Dyson sees
the young man, and again and again this Mr. Dyson is accosted by people who
tell him stories, remotely apropos of the unhappy fugitive. They are members of
the secret society, and bent apparently upon inciting Mr. Dyson to murder him.
Mr. Dyson proving sluggish, the young man in spectacles is caught by other
hands, tied down to the floor of a deserted house in the west of London, and
live coals are, very properly, piled upon his chest, He smells of cooking, and
perishes, and the ubiquitous Mr. Dyson comes in and sees his remains. Tableau.
“They clung hard to one another, shuddering at the sight they saw,” did Mr.
Dyson and Mr. Phillips, his friend. That is the climax of Mr. Machen’s
invention; he ends there. Other effects are the murder of a respectable
citizen, whose remains are, for no earthly reason, outraged by being
incontinently mummified; a man who, also for no earthly reason, vanishes; a
witches’ meeting in California;
the inventor of an instrument of torture caught in his own trap, and the
mongrel creature already alluded to. Mr. Machen has one simple expedient
whereby he seeks to develop his effects. He piles them up very high, and makes
his characters horror-struck at them.
This kind of thing:—
“He seemed to pour forth an infamous jargon, with words, or what seemed like words, that might have belonged to a tongue dead since untold ages, and buried beneath Nilotic mud, or in the inmost recesses of the Mexican forest. For a moment the thought passed through my mind, as my ears were still revolted by that infernal clamour, ‘Surely this is the very speech of hell’; and then I cried out again and again, and ran away shuddering to my inmost soul.”
But it fails altogether to
affect the reader as it is meant to do. It fails mainly because Mr. Machen has
not mastered the necessary trick of commonplace detail which renders horrors
convincing, and because he lacks even the most rudimentary conception of how to
individualize characters. The framework of the book is evidently imitated from
Mr. Stevenson’s “New Arabian Nights,” a humourous form quite unsuited, of
course, to realistic horrors. Mr. Machen writes with care and a certain
whimsical choice of words, so that his style is at least distinctive.
