Supernatural Horror: Authors and Themes

A World of Great Majesty
The pattern in Arthur Machen's carpet

In The London Adventure (1924), which is, possibly, one of the longest shaggy-dog stories ever told, Arthur Machen mentions a short story by Henry James entitled "The Pattern in the Carpet". Machen summarizes this story, in which a great author tantalizingly points out to an admirer that there is a single unifying theme or pattern to all his large and varied output, which can be discerned by those able to see it (1).

In this article I wish to show that the same can be said of Machen's own work. The majority of his varied output over some fifty years points to one central insight, explores one theme, displays in differing ways a single overall pattern in the carpet:

Here, then, is the pattern in my carpet, the sense of the eternal mysteries, the eternal beauty hidden beneath the crust of common and commonplace things; hidden and yet burning and glowing continually if you care to look with purged eyes. (2)

In his fiction, his essays, his more overtly auto-biographical work, Machen remains true to this belief. He was, effectively, engaged in nothing less than the creation of an alternative religion (3).

Perhaps 'alternative' is not quite the right word to use. Machen would never have contemplated setting up anything as a replacement for, or a competitor with, Christianity (at least, the Christian tradition that he preferred and adhered to). But he was aware and concerned that the truths and insights, as he saw them, of Christianity were slipping into irrelevance and disdain for most people. Machen was highly critical of those he held to be largely responsible for this state of affairs: the churches themselves, including his own Church of England:

Well, I have long maintained that on the whole the average church, considered as a house of preaching, is a much more poisonous place than the average tavern... And the main responsibility for this dismal state of affairs undoubtably lies on the shoulders of the majority of the clergy of the Church of England....They pass their time in preaching, not the eternal mysteries, but a twopenny morality, in changing the Wine of Angels and the Bread of Heaven into gingerbeer and mixed biscuits: a sorry transubstantiation, a sad alchemy, as it seems to me. (4)

Machen was not quite such an orthodox Christian as he might sometimes have liked his readers to think. For a time at the turn of the century he was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn (5). But this sort of affiliation can be seen as a part of Machen's need to augment Christianity as he -- and most people -- encountered it. The 'Holy Things' and the eternal mysteries were not on offer in most English churches. The ‘numinous’ was scarcely to be found. Machen wished to change that, and to raise people's consciousness of them, to do the job that the Christian churches seemed unable or unwilling to (6).

The pattern in the carpet of Machen's work, then, was to provide what he felt to be lacking in contemporary Christianity, and in his modern world.

In his essay on Machen in The Weird Tale (1990) S T Joshi sums up Machen's concept in one sentence: '...the awesome and utterly unfathomable mystery of the universe.' (7). Machen sought to build a body of work that tried to put over this most central aspect of religion as it should be -- now as then -- by a variety of means in work as diverse as articles in popular newspapers, 'yellow' stories and novels that scandalized certain parts of literary society, to the volumes of autobiography and theory of literature that attracted a small but dedicated following.

For those of a conventionally religious mind, Machen’s work can provide, if desired, a welcome extra dimension to their thought and practice. For both the initiated, and those for whom organised religion holds little or no appeal, Machen's work can resonate with the instinctive need for, and awe of, the numinous that most people seem to have.

Machen was an early doubter of the notion that humanity's progression is to be largely an unstoppable upward and onward one -- the faith in a mechanistic science and an eventual utopian future seen as characterized by many of the works of writers like H G Wells.

Machen was convinced that the religious insight of humanity being in need of redemption, and the need for the restoration of a true and God-intended nature was a valid one. The myth of the Fall and the doctrine of Original Sin symbolised these truths, which needed to be remembered as an antidote of realism.

As far as Machen was concerned, as mentioned above, the organized religion of the churches tended simply to moralize rather than restate this central truth. An awesome and mysterious universe, with its eternal truths that gave a place, a reason, and a destiny for humanity, needed to be recalled for our own mental and spiritual benefit, let alone out of any more conventional religious motive.

Machen felt that the churches were failing in their mission to put this over to people. The traditional methods, practices, and language of Christianity were not reaching (if they ever really had) the majority of people who needed to receive the message. It is not far-fetched to imagine that Machen felt that he had to assume some responsibility to help promote his values through use of his talents.

Machen, in his career as a writer for over half a century, pursued a mission that had as its basis the idea that art -- literature -- can aid the restoration of humanity, and point it towards eternal values so easily overlooked in everyday life, and not touched upon by organized religion in its system of expression and activity.

This is the theme in his exploration of literary theory Hieroglyphics (1902). The test that separates literature from writing that is not literature is simply that

literature is the expression, through the aesthetic medium of words, of the dogmas of the Catholic Church....No literal compliance with Christianity is needed, no, nor even an acquaintance with the doctrines of Christianity. ...unless you have assimilated the final dogmas -- the eternal truths upon which these things rest, consciously if you please, but subconsciously of necessity, you can never write literature, however clever and amusing you may be. (8)

The point is that the 'final dogmas' need to be assimilated, by any means, even secular ones. The churches were basically exclusive institutions, despite the best efforts of the Victorians to bring religion, through the churches, to the people. Machen had a unique opportunity, as an author and popular journalist, to reach people that the churches never could, or failed to hold.

If the churches were regarded as places to attend once a week, or to use for occasional rites of passage, then Machen made it clear that the eternal values as he wrote about and promoted them, were to be found anywhere and at anytime. Awe could be found in the most 'unreverend' places, and in situations and language distinctively different to that offered by the churches (9).

Machen understood that, especially in a fast-changing and increasingly materialistic world, there was still a need and desire for the numinous, for Mystery.

If the utterly awesome nature and mystery of the universe was the main connecting theme of Machen's work, then London and Gwent were the physical settings in which he played out his and his characters' understandings of Machen's mission (10).

London becomes 'the concrete image of the eternal', a place for the sort of encounters that would otherwise only occur in the privileged lives of official saints and other holy people (11). Machen is emphatic that 'miracles need to be taken out of Judaea'. So they can as well occur in Bethnal Green as Bethlehem, and to Dyson as well as God's Son (12).

Enraptured by his own experiences and understanding of the universe, Machen set himself up as a spokesman for Miracle and Mystery. Increasingly suspicious and dismissive of science, and exasperated at the churches' moralizing tendency, Machen wanted to show that humanity's real existence was not to be lost, cut off from its roots, in the great cities, with nothing but the dullness and grimness surrounding it.

It is a pity that Machen so consistently distrusted science, and only ever wrote about it with ferocity and disdain -- and massive ignorance. It was as if science and religion had to be in conflict, and contradictory, for Machen's assertions about the awesomeness of the universe, and humanity's place in it, to be views worth holding and propagating. This certainly need not be the case. The world as we know it -- and humanity itself -- is literally star-dust! Everything that now is, animate or not, is comprised of elements created from the material of stars now dead. This is a discovery of modern science that can only begin to bolster Machen's point of view, and not diminish it. (13)

Machen wished to remind people that they held a special place on earth -- and if traditional Christian doctrines cannot make clear the consequences and responsibilities that come with that, then he would do so through fiction. The Terror (1917) is an example of the consequences of humanity's unfeeling rejection of its spiritual birthright.

If people were dust, and would return to dust, then at least that dust was the dust of stars, to which while alive, if they but knew it and wished it, all the mystery and glory of God's creation was there for them. Machen did not use a building or a pulpit, but a city and a countryside, and the resources of his art, to put his message across.

It is a message that, like that of traditional religion, seems to only ever speak to a few. Like the message of Christianity, it is both old and always new:

Man from the beginning has been profoundly irrational; that is, he has sought for God, and truth, and beauty, by the ways of religion, philosophy, and art. What is the convinced rationalist to say to this? There is only one thing that I can say. ...There was a creature which, by its mere existence, reduced all the arguments of rationalism to rubbish.  That creature is man: the eternally irrational. ...It is by this madness that man is differentiated from other animals, and it is the business of rationalism to bring back man to sanity; that is, to bestiality. (14)

By embracing and promoting the 'irrational' Machen's outlook, which, like conventional religion, will not go away, can bring esteem and an illusion-free conviction of its status to humanity. Both are needed as much now as they were in Machen's lifetime.

NOTES

1.  The London Adventure pp 73-4

2.  The London Adventure p 75

3.  See the definitions of 'religion' in A New Dictionary of Christian Theology ed. Alan Richardson and John Bowden. I intend the term to have something to do with transcendence and the Transcendent.

4.  Introduction to "The Bowmen" reprinted in The Collected Arthur Machen pp 296ff

5.  Aidan Reynolds and William Charlton, Arthur Machen

6.  See Ninian Smart The Religious Experience of Mankind p 49f for a discussion of 'numinous'. Smart defines it as 'an experience of unseen presences that can range from the uncanny to the sublime and holy'.

7.  The Weird Tale p l3

8.  Hieroglyphics pp l6Off

9.  See The London Adventure p l3; The Collected Arthur Machen p 323

10.  As in, for example, The Three Impostors, "The Great Return" etc.

11.  See The Secret of the Sangraal p 9O

12.  See The Collected Arthur Machen p 298

13.  For a concise view of Machen’s negativity towards science, see S T Joshi, The Weird Tale, pp 15-16. For a consistently Christian and scientific account of science and theology, see John Polkinghorne, Science and Christian Belief (1994). Chapter 4 on ‘Creation’ is especially worth reading in the context of Machen and science.

14.  See The Secret of the Sangraal p 181

A slightly different version of this article was first published in Avallaunius 17, 1997

Copyright (c) 1996, 2001 Ro Pardoe and John Howard