hurried steps they went down from the grassy bank to the shore covered with stones. I had time to notice the gray

baby frogs leap into the tiny pools among the wet stones. The two men swung me to and fro like a sack, like a corpse, and then pitched me into the water. laughing as though they were drunk.

The water was shallow-the midSeptember rains had not yet come to wash the grapes and to flood the

streams. With bones unbroken, my clothes drenched with the slimy water, I was able to get up and resume my way home from the ford.

The two men were running away in flight; the little girl was far away; and the wind was once more blowing stronger, as though vexed at the sluggishness of the clouds.

Nothing in the world was changed. Smiling to myself. I said, "Tomorrow will be the fourth of September."

IT

T is, primarily, a mystery of letters. He has been at it now some thirty-five long years, producing some of the most admirable tales of fantasy in our language and one novel, "The Hill of Dreams," which is nothing less than an incomparable jewel, a piece of beautifully sustained wellnigh flawless prose, but he is still unread, unfamed, almost unknown. Other men (Algernon Blackwood, the Brothers Young) imitate him discreetly and become celebrated; his curiously precious monograph of criticism, "Hieroglyphics" has evidently been read with profit by our own Mr. Cabell and by Albert Mordell; but Mr. Machen remains on Fleet Street, and one by one, his beautiful books go out of print. There are barely five lines of critical comment that we have been able to discover on this truly exquisite writer and darkly captivating spirit. In Holbrook Jackson's "History of the Nineties," there is, to be sure, one line.

We do not wish to give the impression, however, that Mr. Machen is euphuistic and out-of-date, or that he hovers, with the frustrate ghosts of other Dowsons in "the bare ruined quires" of some spiritual Kew Gardens. Linked as he is by his origins to the deciduous Nineties, he might more profitably be studied in relation to certain of the more conspicuous fads and follies of our own time. It is a period characterized, for instance, by a revival of so

called spiritualistic phenomena, in other words, by a furious credulity. Phantoms themselves become best sellers with enormous circulations, and the poor

dead, less than ever at peace in their tombs, exhibit a perverse inclination to pursue the wearisome occupations which obsessed them when living. Not a month passes that one does not read of some hard-working spook frantically attempting to rival the popularity of "If

Winter Comes" from the other side of Paradise.

Perhaps it was the war, with its plague of attendant evils, which produced this revival of superstition. Everyone will recall those famous Angels of Mons, and the hard-headed doctors, nurses and soldiers who attested the protecting presence at the infernal retreat of shining hosts led by a celestial adolescent in Burne-Jones armor, bearing the immistakable insignia of merry England. At the time, of course, it would have been almost a shooting offence to have doubted the reality of this picturesque phenomenon. The purest motives of patriotism and morale demanded that the Captain of the Heavenly Host evince a special affection for the army of Marshal French and a divine detestation for that of Von Kluck. Even after four years of dulcet Peace, this legend still commands respect. Recently we had occasion to travel from Oberammergau to Munich with three English journalists. Now we all know what a really good, trusting, believing creature is your capable journalist. For

simple faith there is nobody like him unless it be a peasant or a Hottentot; his credo in a word is a profound respect for the Pope and the Public, and a good working belief that there is a power not ourselves that makes for righteousness-not ourselves is important and must always be emphasized. Being journalists, then, and above all, being English, these gentlemen were profoundly shocked that anyone should doubt that there had been real angels at Mons, and that hundreds of people had seen them. After a heated argument, it was finally conceded that it might have been an hallucination; cloud-formations were mentioned, and the proper note was struck by one of the newspaper men, a large Scotchman, who remarked that "God moves in a mysterious way," with other originalia from the Bible (so he said.)

We have mentioned at some length this business of the angels only to add that in 1914, after soldiers had written home, doctors had testified and bishops preached thereon, a Catholic journalist was so far lost to any manly sentiment of God or country as to confess that the whole legion had come, not out of heaven nor out of Flanders, but out of his own head. He had written the story as an imaginative exercise for his newspaper. The name of the paper was the London Evening News; that of the journalist you have already guessed. And people began to ask: "Who is this Mr. Machen anyway?"

We asked that question too a good many years ago, at the moment in fact of reading his volume of short stories, "The House of Souls." When we first encountered this troubling realm of what Rabelais called "sacraments and

horrible mysteries," we mistook the author for a mere mystifier, of consumnate fantasy without doubt, but still a mystifier, that is, a writer of imagination whose conception, however solemnly presented, had absolutely no connection with any scientific discovery or conjecture. This impression is not borne out by rereading the book. There is a tenable idea behind nearly all of Mr. Machen's stories, an idea on which he performs any number of ingenious variations, but a conception all the same scientifically relative. Take the story called "The Great God Pan," the only one of the volumes which has been translated into French. The conception behind the tenebrous involutions of this wild and morbid tale is simply that matter is as awful and unknowable as spirit. A doctor, who for years has devoted himself to what he calls transcendental medicine, becomes convinced of the possible functions of a group of nervecentres in the brain which up till then had been, as it were, "mere land to let, a waste place for fanciful theories," "With a touch I can bring them into play, with a touch I can complete the communication between this world of sense and-we shall be able to finish the sentence later on.

There is a

real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond them all as beyond a veil. You may think this all strange nonsense, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan."

The operation is performed on a ward of the doctor's, a young girl who is pregnant. She dies a little later, a hopeless idiot, in giving birth to daughter. It

is about this daughter that the occult and horrible adventures of the story unfold. When she is barely five years old, the doctor surprises her with a playmate one may guess of what kind. When, at the end of the story, she herself dies, strangling herself with a hempen rope, the medical man who attends gives this appetizing account: "I know that the body may be separated into its elements by separate agencies, but here was some internal force that caused dissolution and change. I saw the form descend to the beasts from which it ascended, and that which was on the heights go down to the depths. Then the ladder was again ascended . . . and for one instant I saw a Form shaped in dimness before me, the symbol of which may be seen in ancient sculptures, and in paintings which survived the lava, too foul to be spoken of . . .”

This story links itself to another, "The White Powder," where the same. process is effected, this time not by an operation, but a drug, which turns out to be nothing less than the Wine of the witches Sabbath-that phenomenon of satanic mania which so frightened the imaginations of our forefathers. And in a third story, the author puts forward an ingenious theory to account for the unknown beings who attended the Sabbath, and whom the mediaeval priests and judges wrote down as demons. Suppose that much of the folklore still current in western Europe be an account under a fanciful form of much that really happened. Suppose that the Fairies, the famous "little people," who have always been saluted in certain parts of England with signs of the Cross rather than smiles, still exist, a secondary race, fallen out of the march

of evolution, but still lurking in remote and savage places. Conceive of the member of such a race stalking about the streets of modern London like a troglodite, and we see that we have here delectable material for a new kind of horror story.

To explain the fascination of Mr. Machen's art by dragging in a vaguely scientific or historical raison d'etre is, however, an impertinence. He has invented a new thrill compounded of the most occult beauty and the sheerest spiritual terror. In comparison the Poes, Bierces, Bram Stokers and their like, sink to the level of a penny dreadful. How coarse is Poe (in his tales of fantasy and horror) compared to this consummate artisan of language! To appreciate his distinction, one has only to put side by side "The Three Imposers" with "New Arabian Nights;" "The Great God Pan" with "The Fall of the House of Usher"; or "The Hill of Dreams" with any novel of similar genre that has ever appeared in our tongue. And with all that, we have said nothing of "The White People", the second story in the volume, the diary of a little girl, which is not only the most remarkable story in this book, but one of the most amazing performances in our literature. Only one man, so far as