The White People E-Book

ARTHUR MACHEN

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 99

Beschreibung

A discussion between two men on the nature of evil leads one of them to reveal a mysterious diary in his possession. Written by a young girl in the care of a nurse, its pages detail a horrifying initiation into a world of witchcraft, folklore and ritual magic which may have culminated in tragedy.Originally published in 1904 and considered by E. F. Bleiler to be "probably the finest single supernatural story of the century, perhaps in the literature", this is one of Machen's most celebrated stories, with its influence being seen in the works of genre greats such as H. P. Lovecraft (who called it "a triumph of skilful selectiveness and restraint") and T. E. D. Klein.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title PageAbout Arthur MachenTHE WHITE PEOPLEPrologueThe Green BookEpilogueNotes on the textAcknowledgementsThe Friends of Arthur MachenCopyright

THE WHITE PEOPLE

Arthur Machen

Arthur Machen wasborn in 1863 in Caerleon, Gwent. His father, vicar of the small parish of Llanddewi Fach, was unable to fund Machen’s full education and withdrew his son from Hereford Cathedral School, effectively ending his chances of university and ordination. Instead, Machen moved to London with hopes of a literary career, sparked by his private publication of 100 copies of the long poem ‘Eleusinia’. He took up a variety of writing commissions including translatingThe Memoirs of Jacques Casanova, as well as cataloguing an enormous body of works on the occult. His first authored book,The Anatomy of Tobacco, was published in 1884, but it was in the 1890s that Machen achieved literary success and a reputation as a leading author of gothic texts. In this decade he publishedThe Great God Pan,‘The Shining Pyramid’ andThe Three Impostors, but also wrote several of his most famous works, includingThe Hill of Dreams, ‘The White People’ and ‘The Secret Glory’. Machen gained widespread notoriety in 1914 with the publication of his story ‘The Bowmen’, describing the spectral appearance of the bowmen of Agincourt in the trenches of the First World War.

Machen’s work bears the imprint of the Welsh border country of his upbringing, and his native Caerleon, with its links to both Roman history and the myth of King Arthur’s Round Table; the occult and gothic works of thefin de siècle; his self-avowed ‘Celtic’ identity; and literary London. He published three volumes of autobiography:Far Off Things(1922),Things Near and Far(1923) andThe London Adventure(1924). Arthur Machen died in 1947 aged 84; and maintains a loyal and international following to this day.

THEWHITE PEOPLE

Prologue

‘Sorcery and sanctity,’ said Ambrose, ‘these are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life1.’

Cotgrave listened, interested. He had been brought by a friend to this mouldering house in a northern suburb, through an old garden to the room where Ambrose the recluse dozed and dreamed over his books.

‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘magic is justified of her children. There are many, I think, who eat dry crusts and drink water, with a joy infinitely sharper than anything within the experience of the “practical” epicure.’

‘You are speaking of the saints?’

‘Yes, and of the sinners, too. I think you are falling into the very general error of confining the spiritual world to the supremely good; but the supremely wicked, necessarily, have their portion in it. The merely carnal, sensual man can no more be a great sinner than he can be a great saint. Most of us are just indifferent, mixed-up creatures; we muddle through the world without realising the meaning and the inner sense of things, and, consequently, our wickedness and our goodness are alike second-rate, unimportant.’

‘And you think the great sinner, then, will be an ascetic, as well as the great saint?’

‘Great people of all kinds forsake the imperfect copies and go to the perfect originals. I have no doubt but that many of the very highest among the saints have never done a “good action” (using the words in their ordinary sense). And, on the other hand, there have been those who have sounded the very depths of sin, who all their lives have never done an “ill deed”.’

He went out of the room for a moment, and Cotgrave, in high delight, turned to his friend and thanked him for the introduction.

‘He’s grand,’ he said. ‘I never saw that kind of lunatic before.’

Ambrose returned with more whisky and helped the two men in a liberal manner. He abused the teetotal sect with ferocity, as he handed the seltzer, and pouring out a glass of water for himself, was about to resume his monologue, when Cotgrave broke in…

‘I can’t stand it, you know,’ he said, ‘your paradoxes are too monstrous. A man may be a great sinner and yet never do anything sinful! Come!’

‘You’re quite wrong,’ said Ambrose. ‘I never make paradoxes; I wish I could. I merely said that a man may have an exquisite taste in Romanée Conti2, and yet never have even smelt four ale. That’s all, and it’s more like a truism than a paradox, isn’t it? Your surprise at my remark is due to the fact that you haven’t realised what sin is. Oh, yes, there is a sort of connection between Sin with the capital letter, and actions which are commonly called sinful: with murder, theft, adultery, and so forth. Much the same connection that there is between the A, B, C and fine literature. But I believe that the misconception – it is all but universal – arises in great measure from our looking at the matter through social spectacles. We think that a man who does evil tousand to his neighbours must be very evil. So he is, from a social standpoint; but can’t you realise that Evil in its essence is a lonely thing, a passion of the solitary, individual soul? Really, the average murderer,quâmurderer, is not by any means a sinner in the true sense of the word. He is simply a wild beast that we have to get rid of to save our own necks from his knife. I should class him rather with tigers than with sinners3.’

‘It seems a little strange.’

‘I think not. The murderer murders not from positive qualities, but from negative ones; he lacks something which non-murderers possess. Evil, of course, is wholly positive – only it is on the wrong side. You may believe me that sin in its proper sense is very rare; it is probable that there have been far fewer sinners than saints. Yes, your standpoint is all very well for practical, social purposes; we are naturally inclined to think that a person who is very disagreeable to us must be a very great sinner! It is very disagreeable to have one’s pocket picked, and we pronounce the thief to be a very great sinner. In truth, he is merely an undeveloped man. He cannot be a saint, of course; but he may be, and often is, an infinitely better creature than thousands who have never broken a single commandment. He is a great nuisance tous, I admit, and we very properly lock him up if we catch him; but between his troublesome and unsocial action and evil… oh, the connection is of the weakest.’

It was getting very late. The man who had brought Cotgrave had probably heard all this before, since he assisted with a bland and judicious smile, but Cotgrave began to think that his ‘lunatic’ was turning into a sage.

‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘you interest me immensely? You think, then, that we do not understand the real nature of evil?’

‘No, I don’t think we do. We overestimate it and we underestimate it. We take the very numerous infractions of our social “bye-laws” – the very necessary and very proper regulations which keep the human company together – and we get frightened at the prevalence of “sin” and “evil”. But this is really nonsense. Take theft, for example. Have you anyhorrorat the thought of Robin Hood, of the Highland caterans of the seventeenth century, of the moss-troopers4, of the company promoters of our day?

‘Then, on the other hand, we underrate evil. We attach such an enormous importance to the “sin” of meddling with our pockets (and our wives) that we have quite forgotten the awfulness of real sin.’

‘And what is sin?’ said Cotgrave.

‘I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?

‘Well, these examples may give you some notion of what sin really is.’

‘Look here,’ said the third man, hitherto placid, ‘you two seem pretty well wound up. But I’m going home. I’ve missed my tram, and I shall have to walk.’

Ambrose and Cotgrave seemed to settle down more profoundly when the other had gone out into the early misty morning and the pale light of the lamps.

‘You astonish me,’ said Cotgrave. ‘I had never thought of that. If that is really so, one must turn everything upside down. Then the essence of sin really is…’

‘In the taking of heaven by storm, it seems to me,’ said Ambrose. ‘It appears to me that it is simply an attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden manner. You can understand why it is so rare. There are few, indeed, who wish to penetrate into other spheres, higher or lower, in ways allowed or forbidden. Men, in the mass, are amply content with life as they find it. Therefore there are few saints, and sinners (in the proper sense) are fewer still, and men of genius, who partake sometimes of each character, are rare also. Yes; on the whole, it is, perhaps, harder to be a great sinner than a great saint.’

‘There is something profoundly unnatural about sin? Is that what you mean?’

‘Exactly. Holiness requires as great, or almost as great, an effort; but holiness works on lines thatwerenatural once; it is an effort to recover the ecstasy that was before the Fall. But sin is an effort to gain the ecstasy and the knowledge that pertain alone to angels, and in making this effort man becomes a demon. I told you that the mere murderer is notthereforea sinner; that is true, but the sinner is sometimes a murderer. Gilles de Raiz5 is an instance. So you see that while the good and the evil are unnatural to man as he now is – to man the social, civilised being – evil is unnatural in a much deeper sense than good. The saint endeavours to recover a gift which he has lost; the sinner tries to obtain something which was never his. In brief, he repeats the Fall.’

‘But are you a Catholic?’ said Cotgrave.

‘Yes; I am a member of the persecuted Anglican Church.’ ‘Then, how about those texts which seem to reckon as sin that which you would set down as a mere trivial dereliction?’

‘Yes; but in one place the word “sorcerers” comes in the same sentence, doesn’t it? That seems to me to give the keynote. Consider: can you imagine for a moment that a false statement which saves an innocent man’s life is a sin? No; very good, then, it is not the mere liar who is excluded by those words; it is, above all, the “sorcerers” who use the material life, who use the failings incidental to material life as instruments to obtain their infinitely wicked ends. And let me tell you this: our higher senses are so blunted, we are so drenched with materialism, that we should probably fail to recognise real wickedness if we encountered it.’

‘But shouldn’t we experience a certain horror – a terror such as you hinted we would experience if a rose tree sang – in the mere presence of an evil man?’

‘We should if we were natural: children and women feel this horror you speak of, even animals experience it. But with most of us convention and civilisation and education have blinded and deafened and obscured the natural reason. No, sometimes we may recognise evil by its hatred of the good – one doesn’t need much penetration to guess at the influence which dictated, quite unconsciously, the “Blackwood” review of Keats6 – but this is purely incidental; and, as a rule, I suspect that the Hierarchs of Tophet7