‘Strangely mistaking death for life’: Arthur Machen

Abstract

Most efforts at critical scholarship of Arthur Machen’s corpus of fiction are directed at biography, or heavily embedded in it. These show Machen to have been a man whose religious outlook was consistently Anglo-Catholic, and who sought, and later proclaimed, the mystery of human experience within the framework of Christian orthodoxy. Having produced weird tales in the 1890s which stylistically placed him among the Decadent writers of the period, his twentieth-century writing demonstrated an increasingly confident exposition of a sense of the world through Christian mysticism. Such a bibliography leads to a strange dichotomy in the critical scholarship of Machen’s work. His philosophical and religious themes are seen as unchanging, indeed becoming repetitive. (Machen’s most prolific critic S. T. Joshi, claims, not without reason, that Hieroglyphics provides us with all the background we need to understand Machen’s work.1) Machen’s weird tales of the 1890s, however, are nearly always read independently of his later works, seen as the product of a typical fin de siecle writer. Most readings claim that the stories reveal an authorial agnosticism which was only many years later replaced by orthodox belief.2 This chapter examines Machen’s horror fiction with respect to his Anglo-Catholic orthodoxy, claiming that such a reading reveals these stories to be examinations of man’s experience of the world which are theologically consistent with Machen’s later work. Rather than simply bohemian, these stories adopt the tropes of Decadence in order to expose the spiritual nihilism of late-nineteenth-century materialist aesthetics.