A Theme in the Early Work of Arthur Machen: "Degeneration"

A Theme in the Early Work of Arthur Machen: "Degeneration" ADRIAN ECKERSLEY London University ARTHUR MACHEN ACHIEVED notoriety as a writer through a series of short stories he wrote in the 1890s which, perhaps more than any other literary material, are a bridge between the supernatural tale of the nineteenth-century and the twentieth-century genre of the horror-film. Stories such as The Great GodPan (1894), The Inmost Light (1894) and The Novel of the White Powder (1895) achieved both fame and opprobrium for their author through the powerful sense of evil which is realised in them. Though Machen was by no means the only writer of the 90s to concern himself with evil, it is at first sight a strange concern. Why, in an age and society increasingly agnostic and conscious of its own modernity, should a writer be impelled to create a sense of evil through his work? And how can he do so? In an age when the traditional religious iconography of evil has all but withered, on what common ground can he rely to communicate with his readership? The answer is that the sense of moral evil traditionally associated with religion had only changed its character, not dissolved. From the Enlightenment onwards, the imagery of evil was being translated gradually from a spiritual to a scientific register, just as the function of the priest as society's moral guardian was steadily and imperceptibly being taken over by the medical man; and the priest's sanctions of spiritual damnation were being replaced by the medical man's ideas of biological degeneration. I shall argue that it is the fear of this, degeneration, which underlies and gives immediacy to Machen's tales of horror. Nowadays we do not lightly attempt to explain variations in human behaviour by searching for corresponding biological variations: for example , we are more likely to search for the roots of what is now called deviant behaviour in the environment of the individual, not in his or her body. A century ago, however, when the era of "hard" materialist science 277 ELT : VOLUME 35:3 1992 was at its peak, the material body was often invoked as root cause of variations in behaviour. So, "degenerate" behaviour was seen as the mere outward show of a physiologically degenerate brain, which was the result of indulgence not only of the individual but also of his forebears. Degeneration was moreover seen as a process not affecting brain and behaviour alone; bodily signs of it might include facial asymmetry or irregularity of feature, and the pseudoscience of phrenology provided a further series of signs that could be recognised by an "expert." The label "degenerate" drew its power and fascination from its placing simultaneously within two language registers, the physiological and the moral. The conception of degeneracy came from France, before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. The alienist B. A. Morel described how over four generations a paternal line had moved from first generation "alcoholic excess" through second generation "hereditary drunkenness" and third generation "delusions of persecutions," to a final "transition to complete idiocy."1 The idea arrived in England roughly concurrently with the Origin of Species, and drew strength from it.2 Darwin's publication led in the popular mind not only to the idea of a great chain of being, but to that of a hierarchy of being, in which humanity was uniquely privileged: man was the crowning foliage on the topmost branch of the tree of life.3 But this glory carried an attendant danger in humanity's vertiginous distance from primeval slime: in occupying such a position man had further to fall than other species. Darwin's theories of the species helped to create a framework in which the punishment of wickedness had to be psycho-physical rather than metaphysical, and sin was now punished by a fall not from metaphysical grace but from the highest branches of the tree of evolution. The theorists of degeneracy began to see atavism in the conditions they described. Thus Henry Maudsley, as Gulstonian Lecturer to the Royal College of Physicians, described to his audience a number of cases where in one form or...