5 Joseph Joffre (1852–1931) was commander in chief of the French army. He participated in the victorious First Battle of the Marne, but the enormous losses his army suffered at Verdun and the Somme led to his replacement in late 1916 by General Robert Nivelle.
6 A throwster is one who twists silk fibers into raw silk or raw silk into thread.
7 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote an effective horror tale on this subject, “The Horror of the Heights” (Strand, November 1913).
8 The towns Towy, Merthyr Tegveth, and Meiros are apparently fictitious, but the names are based on actual Welsh names. There is a river Towy in Carmarthenshire. Merthyr Tegveth (“the place of the martyrdom of Tegveth”) is the original name of the small parish of Llandegfeth, near Cardiff. Meiros is a place-name used elsewhere in Wales for towns, but none in the locale in question.
9 Llanfihangel means “St. Michael’s Church” in Welsh; there are at least eleven communities in Wales with this term in its name. Machen probably refers to Llanfihangel Aberbythych, a village in Monmouthshire.
10 The village of Llangibby is now spelled Llangybi.
11 Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a classic instance of the doppelgänger motif, first appeared in 1886. See Machen’s comment in Hieroglyphics: A Note on Ecstasy in Literature (1902): “Let us take the strange case of R. L. Stevenson, and especially his Jekyll and Hyde, which, in some ways, is his most characteristic and most effective book.... Many, I have no doubt, gave it a very high place in the ranks of imaginative literature, or (as we should now say) in the ranks of literature; while many other judges set it down as an extremely clever piece of sensationalism, and nothing more. Well, I think both these opinions are wrong; and I should be inclined to say that Jekyll and Hyde just scrapes by the skin of its teeth, as it were, into the shelves of literature, and no more.... It is on the conception, then, alone, that I justify my inclusion of Jekyll amongst works of art; for it seems to me that, lurking behind the plot, we divine the presence of an idea, of an inspiration. ‘Man is not truly one, but truly two,’ or, perhaps, a polity with many inhabitants, Dr. Jekyll writes in his confession, and received a vision of the mystery of human nature” (New York: Knopf, 1923, 70–72).
12 Mr. Tulkinghorn is a successful solicitor in Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53). By relentless investigation he discovers various secrets in the past of Lady Dedlock and is murdered for his pains.
13 Latin for “foreigner” or “stranger.”
14 The reference is to Thomas De Quincey’s celebrated essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827).
15 Porth is a town in Glamorganshire, in southeast Wales.
16 The Royal Flying Corps, founded in 1912 as a branch of the British Army.
17 The Defence of the Realm Act was passed by Parliament on August 8, 1914 and gave the government wide-ranging powers during war-time, including censorship of war reporting in the press. A second act was passed in 1915.
18 There are two locales named Plas Newydd in Wales. One is the county seat of the Marquess of Anglesey in Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, Anglesey, and the other is the residence of the Ladies of Llangollen, in Llangollen, Denbighshire. Probably the former is meant.
19 Brahma-Dorking is a crossbreed of two different types of poultry, the Brahma (originating probably in India and imported to England in 1853) and the Dorking (developed in Sussex).
20 Middle Temple is one of the four Inns of Court, professional associations to which every English barrister must belong; the others are the Inner Temple, Gray’s Inn, and Lincoln’s Inn.
21 Llantarnam is now a suburb of the new town of Cwmbran, in Torfaen (formerly a part of Monmouthshire), in southeast Wales. Morwen is apparently Machen’s adaptation of morwyn (“maiden”).
22 The reference is to a proverb, “Tenterden steeple is the cause of Goodwin Sands,” meaning that any explanation is better than none.
23 The luminiferous ether (or aether) was a postulation of nineteenth-century science, in which it was assumed that particles could not pass through a void, so that light, radio waves (discovered by Guglielmo Marconi), and other particles had to pass through an infinitely fine medium, which physicists called the ether even though they could not independently demonstrate its existence. The theory collapsed with the emergence of Einstein’s theory of relativity.
24 The paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise was first devised by the Presocratic philosopher Zeno of Elea (490?–430? B.C.E.): In a race, if a slow-moving tortoise was placed ahead of the fleet Achilles, Achilles could never catch it because, no matter how quickly Achilles reaches the tortoise’s original position, the tortoise would have moved a bit ahead, and so on ad infinitum. The paradox can be resolved by pointing to the fallacy of regarding time and distance as made up of discrete units.
25 Machen takes particular aim at some of the leading thinkers of his age—the naturalists Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), and the philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)—because they were, directly or indirectly, largely responsible for the decline of religious belief among the intelligentsia.
26 Mescal button (see n. 23 to “The Great Return”).
27 X-rays were discovered by the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen (1845–1923) in 1895.
28 Midlingham is fictitious.
29 A Lewis gun was a light machine gun invented by Colonel Isaac Newton Lewis of the U.S. Army in 1911 and widely used by the British in World War I.
30 There are several towns or parishes named Belmont in England, but only one (Belmont Rural, in Herefordshire) in the Midlands. Probably Machen intends Belmont to be fictitious.
31 The Wipers Salient is a slang reference to the Ypres Salient, the area around Ypres, in Belgium, that was the site of one of the largest battles in World War I (the Second Battle of Ypres, April 22–May 25, 1915).
32 Holme is a village in Cumbria, in northern Britain.
33 Dunwich is a small town in Suffolk, on the southeast coast of Britain. In the seventh century it was the capital of East Anglia. Much of the town has now been submerged by coastal erosion. Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote a poem about the town, “By the North Sea” (1880). Its mention here probably helped to inspire H. P. Lovecraft’s use of the name in such stories as “The Dunwich Horror” (1928), set in central Massachusetts.
34 The Russian writer Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) was the inventor of the mystical philosophy or religion called theosophy, expounded in such works as Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888). The basic principle of theosophy is the theory of the soul’s passage through seven layers of cosmic awareness to reach the Absolute.
35 Helmuth von Moltke the Younger (1848–1916), nephew of the celebrated Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (1800–1891), was chief of the German General Staff from 1906 to 1914 and was a major figure in the development of German war plans, including a contemplated invasion of Great Britain.
36 Latin for “third [party] in delight.”
37 Latin for On Human Villainy. “Facinore” is Machen’s coinage derived from the noun facinus (villainy).
38 The philosophy of German thinker Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900), especially its conception of the übermensch (superman or overman), was commonly believed to have inspired the Germans to initiate World War I. Both the spelling and the pronunciation of his name were rendered erroneously by Anglophone speakers.
39 Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener (1850–1916), was a leading British military figure of the period. He had fought in the Sudan and in the Boer War, then served as commander-in-chief of the Army in India (1902–09). In 1914 he became Secretary of State for War and did important work in raising recruits for the British Army.
40 Pengareg appears to be Machen’s adaptation of Pen carreg (“head of the rock”). There are locales of this name in Gwent and Carmarthenshire.
41 Bog Bean (Menyanthes trifoliata), or Marsh Trefoil, is a water plant c
ommonly found in bogs or marshes in North America and northern Europe.
42 In this sense, heliography refers to the use of the heliograph, a device (chiefly consisting of a mirror) that flashes signals in Morse code by the use of sunlight.
43 Louvain (the French name for the Dutch town of Leuven), the capital of the province of Flemish Brabant, is a town in Belgium where, in late August 1914, the German Army, in its avowed plan to terrify the populace, killed the mayor and other leading officials and destroyed the university library, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of rare volumes and causing worldwide outrage. The Lusitania was a British ocean liner that was sunk by a German U-boat on May 7, 1915, causing the deaths of 1,200 people, including 128 Americans. For a time it seemed as if the incident might lead to the United States’ entry into World War I on the side of the Allies.
44 Bachgen is Welsh for “boy” (bach, used earlier in the expression “doctor bach,” means “little”).
45 Llandudno is a popular seaside resort in the north of Wales. Colwyn Bay is a town and seaside resort a few miles east of Llandudno.
46 Ynys Sant (“sacred island”) is probably a reference to Caldey Island, off the coast of Pembrokshire in southwestern Wales. As a boy Machen spent his holidays in that area.
47 Cf. the Welsh boy Jervase Cradock in “Novel of the Black Seal” (p. 44).
48 William Burke and William Hare were Irish immigrants in Edinburgh who, in 1827–28, committed at least seventeen murders and sold the bodies to medical students for dissection. In most cases they killed their victims by suffocation. They were hanged on January 28, 1829.
49 Carbonic acid (H2CO3) is a weak acid that is not used as a weapon. Machen may be intending to refer to carbolic acid, an archaic name for phenol (C6H5OH), which was in fact used by the Nazis as an injection to kill victims in the concentration camps in World War II.
50 Apparently a variant spelling of Tredunnock, a village in Monmouthshire.
51 Pentoppin was a real farm near Caerleon-on-Usk known to Machen from boyhood.
52 The reference is to a celebrated passage in James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) in which Johnson claimed to have refuted the idealism of the philosopher George Berkeley, who in Johnson’s view had asserted that the material world does not really exist. “I shall never forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus’” (August 6, 1763).
53 Machen was also an actor for a time, serving as a bit player in Frank Benson’s company (1901–10).
54 Engedi (more properly Ein Gedi) is a region in Israel, west of the Dead Sea. David hid from Samuel in the caves of Engedi (1 Samuel 23:29f.).
55 Zain (or Zayin) is the seventh letter of several Semitic alphabets, including Hebrew.
56 Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), is a work by the British writer Edwin A. Abbott (1838–1926), in which a sphere of three dimensions visits a world of two dimensions whose inhabitants fail to grasp the true nature of the sphere’s existence.
57 Peterborough Cathedral (properly the Cathedral Church of St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. Andrew), in the city of Peterborough in Cambridgeshire, is an impressive early Gothic cathedral whose construction began in 1118 and was completed in 1238.
58 Cf. John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667): “With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, / Confusion worse confounded” (2.995–96).
59 A not entirely accurate citation of Coleridge’s remark in his Table Talk: “A religion, that is, a true religion, must consist of ideas and facts both; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere philosophy; nor of facts alone without ideas of which those facts are the symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded, for then it would be mere history” (December 3, 1831).
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