Reynold and Charlton say that Machen's rage, stemming from his Rabelaisian influence, was too novel to be decadent. Yet in Dorian Gray, Dorian dies with figurative justice served through a transfer of the representation of old age to his character whom we are left to believe is Wilde's personification of evil. Earlier in the story, a friend of Gray named Campbell dissolves the body of Basil Howard, the portraitist whom Gray has murdered, with nitric acid, or that is implied. Without a description by Wilde of the actual dissolution of Howard's body we at least read with more suspense than not. Machen's biographers have said that his tales of horror worked the best when he spared using facts, that he knew horror needed to create fear through the unknown. Ultimately then, what they point out is that his macabre scenes do not occur according to some poetic justice, their raison d tre is completely due to supernatural forces84, and these take the place of any superficial quality of evil of Romanticism. They are the first matter, the bisexual slime or the vertebrate which changes sex before turning into a jelly-like substance, at death, in Great God Pan.
In tracing the historical ideas of Great God, one is forced into formulating a few questions. An instructive first glance to the chapter in Robin George Collingwood's autobiography, "Question and Answer," suggests every historical idea stems from a question and every question may lead to an historical idea. But, according to Collingwood, "Later on,... the question has been forgotten; especially if the answer he gave was generally acknowledged to be the right answer; for in that case people stopped asking the questions and began asking the question that next arose," and "the question asked by the original writer can only be reconstructed historically, often not without the exercise of considerable historical skill." The historical idea underlying Machen's Great God Pan necessitates an enquiry into the nature of its Platonic element, for the dissolutions, and a proposes the original enquiry of "What strange teleology is necessary for a 'theory' of evil?"85
The human activity surrounding the origins of first matter as Machen brings us is dynamic, as is that surrounding the origin of first questions, thinking like Collingwood. Text and story being somewhat preservable, nothing requires that in interpretation, slime be cold and motionless for long, and nothing requires that a question and answer relationship in which one part seems negligible, should require extra time for finding something worthy of anecdote, for writing about. Machen commodifies evil through horror, and his morphing figures of the primordial create a liminal state of matter where the unconscious presentation of history is cathected through enquiry: rediscovering, in the manner of Collingwood, the questions to answers.
22. Charlton, William and Aidan Reynolds. Arthur Machen: A Short account of His
Life and Work. London: John Baker, 1963. p. 18. He himself used
to fashion his life and conversation to his pipe so far as was
possible, though since his pipes were black, smelly and disreputable,,
the analogy is not to be pressed beyond the spirit.
23.Collingwood, Robin George. An Autobiography. Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1978, 1939. pp. 40-41. 'Suppose... the metaphysician were talking about the contents of a small mahogany box with a sliding top; There were two questions: (a) Are the contents of this box one set of chessmen or many sets? (b) Are the contents of this box one chessman or many chessmen?
84. p. 73. It was a time when secret societies abounded, and interest in Black Magic ran high. The influence of Huysmans was leading many people with literary ambitions to collect supernatural data at first hand
85. Charlton, William and Aidan Reynolds. Arthur Machen: A Short account of His Life and Work. London: John Baker, 1963. p. 52. 'There are no ghosts in Machen; there is no ordinary vice, or pessimism which amounts to a generalization about the world; the machinery of romanticism, of crumbling castles in Eastern Europe, vampires, corpses and palpable witches, is never pressed into service: yet the effect of more obvious writers are attained and more successfully because they are more abstract and pure.
23.Collingwood, Robin George. An Autobiography. Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1978, 1939. pp. 40-41. 'Suppose... the metaphysician were talking about the contents of a small mahogany box with a sliding top; There were two questions: (a) Are the contents of this box one set of chessmen or many sets? (b) Are the contents of this box one chessman or many chessmen?
84. p. 73. It was a time when secret societies abounded, and interest in Black Magic ran high. The influence of Huysmans was leading many people with literary ambitions to collect supernatural data at first hand
85. Charlton, William and Aidan Reynolds. Arthur Machen: A Short account of His Life and Work. London: John Baker, 1963. p. 52. 'There are no ghosts in Machen; there is no ordinary vice, or pessimism which amounts to a generalization about the world; the machinery of romanticism, of crumbling castles in Eastern Europe, vampires, corpses and palpable witches, is never pressed into service: yet the effect of more obvious writers are attained and more successfully because they are more abstract and pure.
