The White People And Other Weird Stories

by Arthur Machen

  In my opinion, and it is only an opinion, the source of the great revolt of the beasts is to be sought in a much subtler region of inquiry. I believe that the subjects revolted because the king abdicated. Man has dominated the beasts throughout the ages, the spiritual has reigned over the rational through the peculiar quality man to be that which he is. And when he maintained this power and grace, I think it is pretty clear that between him and the animals there was a certain treaty and alliance. There was supremacy on the one hand, and submission on the other; but at the same time there was between the two that cordiality which exists between lords and subjects in a well-organised state. I know a socialist who maintains that Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” give a picture of true democracy. I do not know about that, but I see that knight and miller were able to get on quite pleasantly together, just because the knight knew that he was a knight and the miller knew that he was a miller. If the knight had had conscientious objections to his knightly grade, while the miller saw no reason why he should not be a knight, I am sure that their intercourse would have been difficult, unpleasant, and perhaps murderous.

  So with man. I believe in the strength and truth of tradition. A learned man said to me a few weeks ago: “When I have to choose between the evidence of tradition and the evidence of a document, I always believe the evidence of tradition. Documents may be falsified, and often are falsified; tradition is never falsified.” This is true; and, therefore, I think, one may put trust in the vast body of folklore which asserts that there was once a worthy and friendly alliance between man and the beasts. Our popular tale of Dick Whittington and his Cat no doubt represents the adaptation of a very ancient legend to a comparatively modern personage, but we may go back into the ages and find the popular tradition asserting that not only are the animals the subjects, but also the friends of man.

  All that was in virtue of that singular spiritual element in man which the rational animals do not possess. Spiritual does not mean respectable, it does not even mean moral, it does not mean “good” in the ordinary acceptation of the word. It signifies the royal prerogative of man, differencing him from the beasts.

  For long ages he has been putting off this royal robe, he has been wiping the balm of consecration from his own breast. He has declared, again and again, that he is not spiritual, but rational, that is, the equal of the beasts over whom he was once sovereign. He has vowed that he is not Orpheus but Caliban.

  But the beasts also have within them something which corresponds to the spiritual quality in men—we are content to call it instinct. They perceived that the throne was vacant—not even friendship was possible between them and the self-deposed monarch. If he were not king he was a sham, an impostor, a thing to be destroyed.

  Hence, I think, the Terror. They have risen once—they may rise again.

  Explanatory Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1 Far Off Things (London: Martin Secker, 1922), 116.

  2 “Folklore and Legends of the North,” Literature (September 24, 1898): 272. Rpt. in The Line of Terror and Other Essays, ed. S. T. Joshi (Bristol, RI: Hobgoblin Press, 1997), 31.

  3 “On Re-reading The Three Impostors and the Wonder Story,” unpublished ms., August Derleth Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin (Madison, WI). It appears that Machen wrote this essay for a contemplated reprint of The Three Impostors by Arkham House.

  4 H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927), in The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000), 23.

  5 The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, 61.

  6 See Phillip Ellis, “Spectral Soldiers: Possible Literary Antecedents for ‘The Bowmen,’” Studies in Weird Fiction no. 24 (Winter 1999): 5–10.

  THE INMOST LIGHT

  “The Inmost Light” was first published in The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (London: John Lane; Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1894) and reprinted in The House of Souls (London: Grant Richards, 1906; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922). It has gone on to become one of Machen’s most frequently reprinted stories, appearing in such anthologies as Joseph Lewis French’s Masterpieces of Mystery (1920), Montague Summers’s The Supernatural Omnibus (1932), and Carl Van Doren’s The Borzoi Reader (1936). Like “The Great God Pan,” it is the tale of a horrible experiment (the attempt to extract the soul from the body), although Machen’s treatment is more transcendent than horrific. It introduces us to Mr. Dyson, an interlocutor widely used throughout the episodic novel The Three Impostors (1895) and a few other works.

  1 Ratés: French for “failures.”

  2 “Because they lacked a sacred prophet [i.e., a poet].” Horace, Odes 4.9.28.

  3 A red lamp was the customary sign of a general practitioner in England. Cf. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories of medical life, Round the Red Lamp (1894).

  4 The pub is named after Major-General Charles George Gordon (1833–1885), a celebrated British army officer chiefly serving in China and Egypt. He was governor-general of the Sudan (1874–79) and heroically defended Khartoum during a siege by Mahdist rebels (1884–85); he died before British forces could lift the siege.

  5 Machen alludes to a celebrated passage in the Bible—“Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:44, 46, 48)—referring to the tortures of hell.

  6 Paracelsus was the pseudonym of Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541), a German-Swiss physician and alchemist who did pioneering work in medicine and chemistry. The Rosicrucians (Brethren of the Rose Cross) were an esoteric sect probably originating in Germany in the early seventeenth century and chiefly involved in alchemy, astrology, and healing. British novelists William Godwin and Edward Bulwer-Lytton based several of their Gothic novels on the Rosicrucian sect.

  NOVEL OF THE BLACK SEAL

  “Novel of the Black Seal” is a segment (under the heading “Adventure of the Missing Brother”) of the episodic novel The Three Impostors (London: John Lane; New York: Roberts Brothers, 1895). Machen appears to have endorsed the publication of this segment separately from the novel, as it appeared in Dorothy L. Sayers’s anthology Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (1928; also titled The Omnibus of Crime) during his lifetime; in this appearance, the first line has been slightly altered (it originally read: “‘I see you are a determined rationalist,’ she said”). The narrator is a Miss Lally, one of three individuals who are hunting down a “young man with spectacles” throughout The Three Impostors; her interlocutor is a Mr. Charles Phillipps, who acts as the recipient of the various “novels” told by the “three impostors.” The tale is one of the richest in Machen’s corpus, presenting with a wealth of convincing documentary evidence the possibility of the existence of “little people” on the underside of modern civilization.

  1 Meditationes de Prima Philosophiae (1641; Meditations on First Philosophy), a pioneering philosophical work by René Descartes (1596–1650).

  2 The Gesta Romanorum (Deeds of the Romans), a collection of moral anecdotes in Latin probably assembled in the thirteenth or fourteenth century.

  3 This passage suggests that Machen was drawing on his own impoverished life in London in the 1880s: “In the corner nearest the angle of the wall by the window I kept my provisions, that is to say, a loaf of bread and a canister of green tea. Morning and evening the landlady or ‘Marry’ would bring me up a tray on which were a plate, a knife, a teapot, a cup and saucer, and a jug of hot water. With the aid of a kettle and a spirit lamp.... I made the hot water to boil and brewed a great pot of strong green tea.” Far Off Things (London: Martin Secker, 1922), 118.

  4 “What do I know?” This archaic French expression became the motto of the skeptical philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592).

  5 Latin for “unknown land.”

  6 I.e., the care of horses’ hooves.

  7 Humphrey Prideaux (1648–1724), The Old and New Testament Connected in the History of the Jews and Neighbo
uring Nations (1716–18), commonly known as Prideaux’s Connection.

  8 Robert Estienne (1503–1559) and his sons, Henry, Robert, and François, celebrated printers in Renaissance France. “Stephanus” is a Latinization of Estienne.

  9 Pomponius Mela (c. 43 C.E.) was the earliest known Roman geographer. De Situ Orbis (On the Position of the World) is a small treatise in three books.

  10 C. Julius Solinus was a Latin grammarian of the fourth century C.E. In “The Great God Pan” Machen quotes from a work by Solinus titled De Mirabilibus Mundi (On the Wonders of the World). Although Solinus does in fact mention the “Sixtystone” (hexacontalithos: De Mirabilibus Mundi 31), the Latin passage that follows is of Machen’s invention.

  11 The story of Sindbad the Sailor occupies the 538th–566th nights of the Arabian Nights.

  12 Either William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham (1708–1778), prime minister of England (1757–61, 1766–68), or his son, William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806), prime minister of England (1783–1801, 1804–06).

  13 Literally, “no footsteps backward” (i.e., no turning back). A loose quotation from Horace, Epistles 1.1.74–75: “Quia me vestigia terrent, / Omnia te adversum spectantia, nulla retrorsum.”

  14 The Eumenides (literally, “well-meaning women”).

  15 Meropes anthropes (literally, “articulate human beings”), a phrase found frequently in Homer (e.g., Iliad 9.340).

  16 “Turanian” refers to an ancient language formerly thought to have been used by non-Aryan and non-Semitic peoples in Asia. Cf. Machen’s prose-poem “The Turanians” (in Ornaments in Jade, 1924). A “Shelta” is “A cryptic jargon used by tinkers, composed partly of Irish or Gaelic words, mostly disguised by inversions or arbitrary alteration of initial consonants” (Oxford English Dictionary). Machen uses the term here to denote a language or code understood only by a select band of initiates.

  NOVEL OF THE WHITE POWDER

  “Novel of the White Powder” is another segment of The Three Impostors (London: John Lane; Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1895), occurring under the heading “The Recluse of Bayswater.” It is narrated by a Miss Leicester, probably identical to the Miss Lally who told “Novel of the Black Seal”; she tells the story to Mr. Dyson, although he is never mentioned in the text. This story also appeared separately on several occasions in Machen’s lifetime, including such anthologies as V. H. Collins’s More Ghosts and Marvels (1927) and T. Everett Harré’s Beware After Dark! (1929). A clever fusion of science (chemistry) and superstition (the witch cult), it features one of the grisliest climaxes in Machen’s fiction.

  1 Latin for “Everything resolves into a mystery.” The saying was a commonplace among the scholastic philosophers (“Schoolmen”) of the Middle Ages.

  2 A paraphrase of John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816), l. 14: “Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” The reference is to the explorer Vasco Nuñez de Balboa’s first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean in the province of Darién in Panama in 1513.

  3 Apparently a reference to Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824), although he wrote no monograph explicitly about the witch-cult. Possibly Machen is referring to his notorious work The Worship of Priapus (1786), about phallic worship in the ancient and medieval period.

  4 “Taking up the chalice of the prince of darkness.” The Latin phrase is in fact of Machen’s own invention.

  THE RED HAND

  “The Red Hand” was first published in Chapman’s Magazine (December 1895) and included in The House of Souls (London: Grant Richards, 1906); when Alfred A. Knopf reprinted that large omnibus in two volumes, “The Red Hand” was included in the second volume, titled The Three Impostors (1923). It is, in a sense, a pendant to that episodic novel, featuring once again the interlocutors Mr. Dyson and Mr. Phillipps. On the surface it appears to be a detective story, but toward the end it becomes evident that the supernatural (in the form of the suspected existence of the “little people”) is involved.

  1 Abury is an archaic name for Avebury, a site in Wiltshire that features one of the most impressive surviving sets of Neolithic stone circles in England, analogous to Stonehenge. This circle was probably erected no more than five thousand years ago, but flints and other remains have been found that are as much as nine thousand years old.

  2 Fellow of the Royal Society. The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge was founded in 1660.

  3 Italian for “fig hand,” in which the hand is made into a fist and the thumb is interposed between the index and middle fingers. It is still considered a highly insulting gesture in Italy, equivalent to saying, “Go take a hike.”

  4 Peckham is a district in South London, in the borough of Southwark. In the late nineteenth century it was largely residential, although Rye Lane had become a popular shopping area. Willesden is a district in North West London, in the borough of Brent.

  5 dollar: British slang for a crown or five-shilling piece; hence, half a dollar is a half-crown.

  6 The Hittite Empire existed from roughly the sixteenth century B.C.E. to 1180 B.C.E. By “Hittite seal” Machen probably refers to one of the various cuneiform tablets found in Assyria in the later nineteenth century.

  7 St. Thomas’s Hospital, founded as early as the twelfth century and named after St. Thomas à Becket, was originally built in Southwark, but a new building was constructed in Lambeth in 1871.

  8 The phrase occurs at the very beginning of Part II of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) by Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859).

  THE WHITE PEOPLE

  “The White People” was written in 1899 and first published in Horlick’s Magazine (January 1904). It was gathered in The House of Souls (London: Grant Richards, 1906; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922). Because of its length, it has not appeared in a great many anthologies, but it was included in Alexander Laing’s The Haunted Omnibus (1937), Basil Davenport’s Tales to Be Told in the Dark (1953), and Jack Sullivan’s Lost Souls (1983), among others. H. P. Lovecraft regarded it as the second-greatest weird tale ever written, next to Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows.” In the introduction to The House of Souls Machen claimed to have composed the work from “odds and ends of folklore.”

  1 Romanée-Conti was a particularly rare and expensive wine made in the Middle Ages in a small region of that name in the Burgundy district of France.

  2 Caterans were fighting men in the Highlands of Scotland. Moss-troopers were disbanded soldiers from the Scottish wars of the seventeenth century.

  3 Gilles de Rais (or Retz) (1404–1440) was a French nobleman and soldier who was accused of torturing, raping, and killing dozens, perhaps hundreds, of boys and girls. Some (including Aleister Crowley) believe the charges against Gilles were trumped up.

  4 The critic John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854) wrote a famously hostile review of John Keats’s Endymion. His friend Percy Bysshe Shelley later exaggerated the influence of such reviews on Keats’s temperament, maintaining that Keats’s subsequent decline in health stemmed from his discouragement at the reception of his work.

  5 Tophet was originally a location near Jerusalem where the Canaanites were thought to have sacrificed children to Moloch. It was later used as a synonym for Hell.

  6 The word Juggernaut is an Anglicization of the Indian word Jaganna-tha; hence it would have no etymological connection to the Greek word Argonaut.

  7 It is not clear what biblical passage Machen is citing. The most celebrated passage relating to charity in the Bible is St. Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians 13:2f.

  8 A reference to the story “Qui sait?” (1890; usually translated as “Who Knows?”), by French novelist and short story writer Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893). Like many of his later tales, this story is a grim exploration of psychological aberration.

  9 In Greek mythology, “Alala!” was the war-god Ares’s battle cry.

  10 Tales of the Genii (1764) is a series of pseudo-Persian tales, written in imitation of the Arabian Nights by James Ridley (1736�
�1765).

  11 The final line of the Doxology.

  12 An aumbry was, in medieval times, a cupboard or cabinet, usually in a church and used to store chalices and other objects.

  13 Troy Town was a game played by Welsh shepherds in which mazelike paths were cut into the turf in imitation of certain aspects of the Trojan War and also the Labyrinth (the Cretan maze in which the Minotaur was housed).

  A FRAGMENT OF LIFE

  This short novel was begun in 1899; it is not clear when it was completed. An early version of it was serialized in Horlick’s Magazine (February, March, April, and May 1904), and the final version appeared in The House of Souls (London: Grant Richards, 1906; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922). It was separately published as A Fragment of Life (London: Martin Secker, 1928), but has otherwise not been reprinted aside from its appearance in reprints of The House of Souls. Because its supernatural or fantastic element is so attenuated, it was not included in Tales of Horror and the Supernatural (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948). In its depiction of Edward Darnell’s return to Wales after many years as a clerk in London, it anticipates Machen’s own migration to the small town of Amersham, Buckinghamshire, after nearly forty years in London.

  1 A hair-trunk is a large trunk, usually for storing clothes or other objects, with a hair covering.

  2 In this context, “kitcat” indicates the size of a portrait—not quite half-length, but showing the hands.

  3 Machen’s knowledge of tobaccos was exhibited in the early work of ponderous pseudo-scholarship, The Anatomy of Tobacco (1884).

  4 French for “to stroll.”