Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications.
The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light.
By Arthur Machen.
Keynotes Series.
16mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00.
A couple of tales by Arthur Machen, presumably an Englishman, published aesthetically in this country by Roberts Brothers. They are horror stories, the horror being of the vague psychologic kind and dependent, in each case, upon a man of science who tries to effect a change in individual personality by an operation upon the brain cells. The implied lesson is that it is dangerous and unwise to seek to probe the mystery separating mind and matter. These sketches are extremely strong and we guarantee the "shivers" to anyone who reads them.—Hartford Courant.
For two stories of the most marvelous and improbable character, yet told with wonderful realism and naturalness, the palm for this time will have to be awarded to Arthur Machen, for "The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light," two stories just published in one book. They are fitting companions to the famous stories by Edgar Allan Poe both in matter and style. "The Great God Pan" is founded upon an experiment made upon a girl by which she was enabled for a moment to see the god Pan, but with most disastrous results, the most wonderful of which is revealed at the end of the story, and which solution the reader will eagerly seek to reach. From the first mystery or tragedy follow in rapid succession. "The Inmost Light" is equally as remarkable for its imaginative power and perfect air of probability. Anything in the legitimate line of psychology utterly pales before these stories of such plausibility. Boston Home Journal.
Precisely who the great god Pan of Mr. Machen's first tale is, we did not quite discover when we read it, or, discovering, we have forgotten; but our impression is that under the idea of that primitive great deity he impersonated, or meant to impersonate, the evil influences that attach to woman, the fatality of feminine beauty, which, like the countenance of the great god Pan, is deadly to all who behold it. His heroine is a beautiful woman, who ruins the souls and bodies of those over whom she casts her spells, being as good as a Suicide Club, if we may say so, to those who lover her; and to whom she is Death. Something like this, if not this exactly, is, we take it, the interpretation of Mr. Machen's uncanny parable, which is too obscure to justify itself as an imaginative creation and too morbid to be the production of a healthy mind. The kind of writing which it illustrates is a bad one, and this is one of the worst of the kind. It is not terrible, but horrible.—R. H. S. in Mail and Express.
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Roberts Brothers, Boston, Mass.
