“The Terror” (1917) stands out as
Arthur Machen’s longest horror story, but its plot is simple.
During the cataclysm that was the Great War, a series of bizarre
killings besets the “Northern District” and “Meirion” in west
Wales. It turns out that the perpetrators are not human beings,
but animals, even moths, who attack people without warning, leaving
no witnesses alive.
First-person narrator Machen declines
to state definitively why the animals made these dreadful attacks,
but he offers as an “opinion” the hypothesis that they rose up
against their natural lord, man, because he had denied his own
spiritual nature and his sovereignty; for centuries, he has, as it
were, been “wiping the balm of consecration from his breast.”
American readers, and perhaps many
British readers now, too, are likely to miss the significance of this
phrase.
Start with this: when Elizabeth was
crowned queen of Great Britain in 1953, the event was televised –
except for a portion of the ceremony that was deemed especially
sacred, and therefore not fit for broadcast by the mass media.
This was her anointing by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
This ceremony – the prayers and the
anointing – set apart the monarch, not so much for special
privileges vis-à-vis her subjects, but for unique responsibilities
under God.
The archbishop’s application of
chrism to Elizabeth may have stirred the imaginations and memories of
some of the witnesses. They might have recalled the old story
of how the prophet Samuel anointed Saul, Israel’s first king:
“Samuel
took a vial of oil, and poured it upon his head, and kissed him, and
said, Is it not because the Lord
hath anointed thee to be captain over his
inheritance?” (1 Samuel 10:1).
They may have recollected that the
Hebrew priests were also anointed (Leviticus 21). They were set
apart as intermediaries between God and the Israelites.
Many of those present in 1953 would
have known a lot of Shakespeare. The occasion being a happy,
though solemn one, they probably didn’t think of the Bard’s black
magic play. In it, when Macduff learns that King Duncan has
been murdered, he is appalled:
“Confusion now hath made his
masterpiece:
Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope
The Lord’s anointed temple and stole
thence
The life o’ th’ building!”
(Macbeth Act II, Scene 3, lines
65-68)
Like “sacrilege,” that word
“confusion” has come down in the world. In Shakespeare,
“confusion” may be the catastrophe that accompanies, or follows
as the effect of, “ruin”:
"'Tis much when sceptres are in
children’s hands,
But more when envy breed unkind [i.e.
“unnatural”] division:
There comes the ruin, there begins
confusion."
(Henry VI, Part One, Act IV,
Scene 1, lines192-194)
I hope the 1953 coronation wasn’t
spoiled for anyone by the thought of such passages in Shakespeare,
though their gravity might have been salutary if anyone were inclined
to be impatient with, or amused by, the pomp.
But – a reader may object – how is
any of this material relevant to “The Terror”? There you
have nobody killing a king.
The Shakespearean material deals with
anointing and the concept of sacrilege. What Machen’s
narrator proposes is that the violence that happened was the result
of what amounts to being auto-sacrilege.
In his theory, the animals did not rise
up because (as is often sadly the case) man had abused them.
They attacked him because of his offense against himself as the one
consecrated for a unique role in nature. “The king abdicated”
– and he had no right to do that. He became “self-deposed.”
The theory of man as mediator between
God and the brute creation, of man’s viceroyalty, is something that
was once familiar but is now hardly part of the cultural
imagination. Our understanding of Machen’s fiction, and our
imaginative engagement with it, may be compromised.
Machen’s narrator leaves to the
reader whether or not to accept his strange hypothesis about why the
animals attacked people – and, since the story, after all, is
fiction, the stakes are low.
Or rather, the stakes today are high –
if not for us, for the animals. Shall human beings consider
ourselves responsible for the domestic and wild creatures that are,
whether we like it or not, our subjects?
Animals can’t be stewards of us; we
can’t not be stewards of them. We can only be good
stewards or bad stewards.
Notes
I referred to “The Terror” as
Machen’s “longest horror story,” since I see The Three
Impostors as a collection of linked stories rather than as a
novel.
Admirers of The Lord of the Rings
should read Evans and Dickerson’s Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The
Environmental Vision of J. R. R. Tolkien, which is a much better
book than its cheesy main title would lead one to expect.
It’s curious to note, by the way,
that Machen’s story seems to have been written just before the
abdication of the anointed Russian emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, in
early 1917.
