In three recent articles, I’ve argued
that Arthur Machen probably drew upon the writings of Ovid, the
historian Josephus, and the Bible to suggest, subtly rather than
explicitly, the nature of the horror of violation that occurs in “The
Great God Pan” and “The Inmost Light.”
Here, I’ll comment on “Fragments of
Paper” (also called “Psychology”), which is a sketch, and “The
Novel of the White Powder.” Where in “Pan” and “Light”
the innocent sufferers were women, in these two pieces the sufferer
is a man, and he is not innocent.
The “fragments of paper” are scraps
that Mr. Dale wrote on during a sunny day at home, which was mostly
busy with unspecified work. “On them he had carefully
registered all the secret thoughts of the day” without thinking
about them, getting back to work till he jotted the next note and put
it aside. When he reviewed them, he was shocked by “the crazy
lusts, the senseless furies, the foul monsters that his heart had
borne” that the scraps recorded.
He has learned that “every day we
lead two lives. … I say I am a man, but who is the other that hides
in me?”
“Powder” is narrated by the sister
of Francis Leicester, a diligent student of law. Miss Leicester
became anxious about the toll on her brother’s health of such long,
sedentary hours, so he reluctantly consulted the family physician,
Dr. Haberden.
Francis had his prescription filled,
despite his sister’s misgivings, at a neighborhood shop kept by an
elderly pharmacist. Francis perked up and exhibited a new taste
for London night life, but eventually sequestered himself in his
room. There is a horrified glimpse of a monstrous face and paw
at his window, some nasty black fluid drips from his room into the
room below, his door is at last broken down, and a vile bubbling
black pool of corruption is revealed, which is what Francis has
become thanks to the drug. It turns out to have been identical
with the “wine” of the Witches’ Sabbath.
What may lift this shocker above the
level of a pulp thriller are its superior generation of suspense, its
narrative and descriptive craftsmanship (including a bit of Machen’s
famous evocation of Strange London) -- and the final few pages.
A wrap-up that conveniently explains things is a familiar device in
popular fiction, but uncommon is writing such as this:
“There [in some forest depth or
remote cave], in the blackest hours of night, the Vinum Sabbati was
prepared,” and the neophytes “partook of an evil sacrament. … And
suddenly, each one that had drunk found himself attended by a
companion” of alluring evil, which was, “awful as it is to
express, the man himself. … the worm which never dies, that which
lies sleeping within us all, was made tangible and an external thing,
and clothed with a garment of flesh. And then, in the hour of
midnight, the primal fall was repeated.”
These sonorous lines were written to
Dr. Haberden by the friend who analyzed the white powder and detected
its real nature. The friend comments, “for so terrible an act
as [the partaking of the “wine”], in which the very inmost place
of the temple was broken up and defiled, a terrible vengeance
followed. What began with corruption ended also with
corruption.”
We’ve seen that imagery of the
violated temple before, when the victims were women. Exactly
how to reconcile that imagery with the imagery of the inmost “worm”
and the reference to the Fall is more than I will attempt here.
Mysteries of theology, unlike mysteries
of detection, may be contemplated but not exhaustively explained.
Machen’s imagery points to a mystery of theological anthropology.
To take one authority on it: the
Lutheran theologian Johann Gerhard – who was hardly likely to
minimize sin – taught, on one hand, that “the very essence of the
soul” was not lost at the Fall. Sinful man does not
require a new soul in order to be saved, nor does he acquire a new
soul at Baptism.
Yet, on the other hand, Gerhard added,
man “from being righteous and holy became impious and
unrighteous … Having lost the most beautiful image of God, man put on
the dark specter of the devil.” (That sounds Machenian,
doesn’t it?) Gerhard says, “we bear no longer the image of
God and of the heavenly Adam, but the image of the earthly Adam. … we
are by nature alienated from God,” although we possess “remnants
of that original divine image,” etc.; hence the new birth in Christ
is necessary.
Machen drew upon beliefs such as these
for the purposes of literary art when he took pen in hand to write
weird fiction; he was a poet more than a mystic, theologian, or
parson; but he took those beliefs seriously, verbal signs of
contradiction though they were in his time as they are in ours.
I think that Machen would have liked
this statement:
“Only fools have clear conceptions of
everything. The most cherished ideas of the human mind are
found in the depths and in twilight: around these [perplexing] ideas
which we cannot [master] revolve clear thoughts, extending,
developing, and becoming elevated. If this deeper mental plane
were to be taken away, there would remain but geometricians and
intelligent animals; even the exact sciences should lose their
present grandeur, which depends upon a hidden correlation with
eternal truths, of which we can catch a glimpse only at rare
moments. Mystery is the most precious possession of mankind.
Not in vain did Plato teach that all below is but a weak image of the
order reigning above. It may be, indeed, that the grandest
function of the loveliness we see is the awakening of desire for a
higher loveliness we see not; and that the enchantment of great poets
springs less from the pictures they paint than from the distant
echoes they awaken from the invisible world.”
© Dale Nelson
Notes
Johann Gerhard (1582-1637) is quoted
from pp. 61 and 63 of The Doctrine of Man in the Writings of
Martin Chemnitz and Johann Gerhard, edited by Preus and Smits
(Concordia Publishing House, 2005), pp. 61 and 63.
The long unattributed quotation (“Only
fools”) is from the Russian reactionary and anti-Semite Konstantin
Pobedonostsev, Ober-Procurator of the Most Holy Synod (1827-1907).
Curiously, it is possible that Machen saw the book, Reflections of a Russian Statesman, in which the
quotation appears. It was issued by Machen’s own eventual
publisher, Grant Richards, in 1898, translated by Robert Crozier
Long. I quote from the Ann Arbor Paperback reprint, 1968, p.
188.
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