a negromancer; the baneful, the baleful, the horrendous are his subjects. With Baudelaire, he might pray, Evil be thou my good! Consider the theme of The Great God Pan, a psychic experiment, operation, if you will, on a pure young girl, and its consequences. Again a theme which another writer, any other writer, would have cheapened, filled in with sordid detail, described to the last black mass. But Machen knows better. He knows so much, indeed, that he is able to say nothing. He keeps the thaumaturgic secrets as the alchemists were bidden to do. Instead of raising the veil, he drops it. Instead of revealing, he conceals. The reader may imagine as much as he likes, or as much as he can, for nothing is said, but he rises from a reading of one of these books with a sense of exaltation, an awareness that he has tasted the waters of the Fountain of Beauty. There is, indeed, sometimes, in relation to this writer, a feeling[1] that he is truly inspired, that he is writing automatically of the eternal mysteries, that the hand which holds the pen is that of a blind genius, and yet. . . .
More straightforward good English prose, limpid narrative, I am not yet acquainted with. What a teller of stories! This gift, tentatively displayed in The Chronicle of Clemendy, which purports to be a translation from an old manuscript—Machen has really been the translator of the Heptamaron,
- ↑ A feeling in which he encourages belief in his preface to a new edition of "The Great God Pan"; 1916.
