by the gratification of the sensual appetite; faith promises a bliss that will endure for ever. In either case the mind is conscious of the enormous importance of the object to be obtained. Machen achieves the soaring ecstasy of Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn or Shelley's To a Skylark, and yet he seldom writes of cool, clean, beautiful things. Was ever a more malignantly depraved story written than The White People (which it might be profitable to compare with Henry James's The Turn of Screw), the story of a child who stumbles upon the performance of the horrid, supernatural rites of a forgotten race and the consequences of the discovery? Yet, Machen's genius burns so deep, his power is so wondrous, that the angels of Benozzo Gozzoli himself do not shine with more refulgent splendour than the outlines of this erotic tale, a tale which it would have been easy to vulgarize, which Blackwood, nay Poe himself, would have vulgarized, which Laforgue would have made grotesque or fantastic, which Baudelaire would have made poetic but obscene. But Machen's grace, his rare, ecstatic grace, is perpetual and unswerving. He creates his rhythmic circles without a break, the skies open to the reader, and the Lord, Jesus Christ, appears on a cloud, or Buddha sits placidly on his lotus. Even his name is mystic, for, according to the Arbatel of Magic, Machen is the name of the fourth heaven.
Machen does not often write of white magic; he is
