Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: When did Machen publish The Great God Pan?
The Great God Pan is a horror and fantasy novella by Welsh writer Arthur Machen. Machen was inspired to write The Great God Pan by his experiences at the ruins of a pagan temple in Wales. What would become the first chapter of the novella was published in the magazine The Whirlwind in 1890. Machen later extended The Great God Pan and it was published as a book alongside another story, "The Inmost Light", in 1894. The novella begins with an experiment to allow a woman named Mary to see the supernatural world. This is followed by an account of a series of mysterious happenings and deaths over many years surrounding a woman named Helen Vaughan. At the end, the heroes confront Helen and force her to kill herself. She undergoes a series of supernatural transformations before dying and she is revealed to be the child of Mary and the god Pan.
Del Toro has said the film has strong connections in theme to "The Devil's Backbone" and should be seen as an informal sequel dealing with some of the issues raised there. Fernando Tielve and Íñigo Garcés, who played the protagonists of "The Devil's Backbone", make cameo appearances as unnamed guerrilla soldiers in "Pan's Labyrinth". Some of the other works he drew on for inspiration include Lewis Carroll's "Alice" books, Jorge Luis Borges' "Ficciones", Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan" and "The White People", Lord Dunsany's "The Blessing of Pan", Algernon Blackwood's "Pan's Garden" and Francisco Goya's works. In 2004, del Toro said: ""Pan" is an original story. Some of my favourite writers (Borges, Blackwood, Machen, Dunsany) have explored the figure of the god Pan and the symbol of the labyrinth. These are things that I find very compelling and I am trying to mix them and play with them." It was also influenced by the illustrations of Arthur Rackham.
Around 1890 Machen began to publish in literary magazines, writing stories influenced by the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, some of which used gothic or fantastic themes. This led to his first major success, "The Great God Pan". It was published in 1894 by John Lane in the noted Keynotes Series, which was part of the growing aesthetic movement of the time. Machen's story was widely denounced for its sexual and horrific content and consequently sold well, going into a second edition.
On publication, it was widely denounced by the press as degenerate and horrific because of its implied sexual content, and the novella hurt Machen's reputation as an author. Beginning in the 1920s, Machen's work was critically re-evaluated and The Great God Pan has since garnered a reputation as a classic of horror. Literary critics have noted the influence of other nineteenth-century authors on The Great God Pan and offered differing opinions on whether or not it can be considered an example of Gothic fiction or science fiction. The novella has influenced the work of horror writers such as Bram Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King, and has been adapted for the stage twice.
This story had particular resonance with Victorian literary audiences.[15] In 1844, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote her poem "The Dead Pan", an adaption of Plutarch's story which insisted that proper Christian literature should abandon Greek mythology, with each stanza ending in the words "Pan, Pan is dead."[15] As a member of the Decadent movement, Machen sought to subvert traditional themes and transgress literary boundaries,[15] an agenda which made Pan a particularly appealing figure.[15] The title of The Great God Pan appears to have been specifically derived from the Browning's later poem "A Musical Instrument" (1862), in which the first line of every stanza ends with the words "the great god Pan".[17] Machen's use of Pan in the novella may have also been influenced by Robert Louis Stevenson's essay "Pan's Pipes" (1878) and Algernon Charles Swinburne's poem "A Nympholept" (1894),[18] in which Pan is portrayed as the "emblem of the delicious combination of ecstasy and terror."[19]
In writing the novella, he tried to "pass on the vague, indefinable sense of awe and mystery and terror that [he] had received" while visiting those ruins.[1] Machen felt that he had "transliterated [the feeling] clumsily" in The Great God Pan, elaborating: "I translated awe, at worst awfulness, into evil; again, I say, one dreams with fire and works in clay."[5] Dennis Denisoff said that Machen's decision to make Helen Vaughan the child of a Welsh woman and a pagan figure "parallels Machen's own authorial self-identity as one arising from not only his Welsh ancestry but also pagan myth."[6]
Lovecraft's main literary sources for "The Dunwich Horror" are the stories of Welsh horror writer Arthur Machen, particularly "The Great God Pan" (which is mentioned in the text of "The Dunwich Horror") and "The Novel of the Black Seal". Both Machen stories concern individuals whose death throes reveal them to be only half-human in their parentage. According to Robert M. Price, "'The Dunwich Horror' is in every sense an homage to Machen and even a pastiche. There is little in Lovecraft's story that does not come directly out of Machen's fiction."
In a review of the novella for Black Gate, Matthew David Surridge hypothesized that Machen took inspiration from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) in his portrayal of Dr. Raymond as a mad scientist akin to Victor Frankenstein.[2] The works of Robert Louis Stevenson, especially his 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, were among Machen's most significant influences when writing The Great God Pan.[3][19] Critic John Gawsworth also sees Machen's novella as reminiscent of the horror stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Sheridan Le Fanu.[20] Aaron Worth noted similitude between the death of Helen Vaughan and the theories of alchemist Thomas Vaughan, who is the character's namesake[21] and Helen's disintegration recalls the alchemical concept of the prima materia.[22] John C. Tibbetts observes similarities between Helen Vaughan and Ayesha, the sexually liberated demonic priestess from H. Rider Haggard's She: A History of Adventure (1886).[23] Machen wrote that several critics felt that Joris-Karl Huysmans's novels À rebours (1884) and Là-bas (1891) had inspired The Great God Pan, though he did not read either book until after Pan was published. Upon reading the two novels, Machen concluded that "my critics had not read them either."[24]
Machen's literary reputation was re-evaluated in the 1920s[2] and The Great God Pan has since attained the reputation of a horror masterpiece.[8] In "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1926; revised 1933), H. P. Lovecraft praised the story, saying: "No one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds"; he added that "the sensitive reader" reaches the end with "an appreciative shudder". Lovecraft also noted, however, that "melodrama is undeniably present, and coincidence is stretched to a length which appears absurd upon analysis". Bennett Cerf described the story as a "masterpiece".[35] Brian Stableford stated that The Great God Pan is "the archetypal Decadent horror story" and described the story as "highly original".[8] Stephen King referred to it as "one of the best horror stories ever written. Maybe the best in the English language." King also praised Pan for being "more reader-friendly" than Lovecraft's fiction.[36] The Washington Post's Elizabeth Hand deemed it "one of the greatest supernatural tales ever written".[37] Black Gate's Matthew David Surridge said that The Great God Pan is "a fascinating, troubling story, and, for all its influence, not like much else than I can think of. It's not simple, and yet it's effective, more so than can easily be explained."[2]
Perhaps inspired by the Lydney Park excavations, Arthur Machen's novella "The Great God Pan" (1890; revised and expanded 1894) features a Roman pillar dedicated to Nodens. The dedication is made by one Flavius Senilis "on account of the marriage which he saw beneath the shade", and there is a strong hint that Nodens is in fact Pan.
These elements - of Pan as Satanic and neopaganism as a dangerous path - place "The Man Who Went Too Far" in a horror tradition with "The Great God Pan" (1890), a novella by Arthur Machen. Frank's obsession with hearing the music of Pan (who in mythology is depicted as playing a flute) and finally seeing him, which he believes will be a transcendent moment, is similar to the work of the character Dr. Raymond in Machen's novella. Raymond conducts scientific experiments with the aim of "seeing the great god Pan".
In 1897, Toulet received a copy of "The Great God Pan" by Arthur Machen from a friend and he translated it the following year, as "Le Grand Dieu Pan". It was published in "La Plume" in 1901 but went unnoticed except for Maeterlinck's reaction "...combining the traditional and scientific fantastic genres, it hits both our memories and hopes". Toulet engaged a correspondence with Machen and visited him in London.
Arthur Machen's 1894 novella "The Great God Pan" uses the god's name in a simile about the whole world being revealed as it really is: "seeing the Great God Pan". The novella is considered by many (including Stephen King) as being one of the greatest horror stories ever written.
Clark Ashton Smith was inspired by The Great God Pan to write his story "The Nameless Offspring" (1931), which also features a monstrous child born of a human and a supernatural entity.[49] It has been suggested that Michael Arlen's novel Hell! Said the Duchess (1934) is a parody of The Great God Pan, as Arlen was influenced by Machen's work.[50][51] The Great God Pan influenced Peter Straub's novel Ghost Story (1979) in its depiction of a shapeshifting monster who terrifies those it encounters.[52] Straub himself frequently credited The Great God Pan as having been a major influence on his work.[23]
Lovecraft pays tribute to the influence by directly incorporating some of Machen's creations and references, such as Nodens and Aklo, into his Cthulhu Mythos and using similar plotlines, most notably seen by a comparison of "The Dunwich Horror" to "The Great God Pan" and of "The Whisperer in Darkness" to "The Novel of the Black Seal". Other Lovecraft tales with a debt or reference to Machen include "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Festival", "Cool Air", "The Descendant", and "The Colour Out of Space".
Literary critics such as Wesley D. Sweetser and S. T. Joshi see Machen's works as a significant part of the late Victorian revival of the gothic novel and the decadent movement of the 1890s, bearing direct comparison to the themes found in contemporary works like Robert Louis Stevenson's "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde", Bram Stoker's "Dracula", and Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray". At the time authors like Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and Arthur Conan Doyle were all admirers of Machen's works. He is also usually noted in the better studies of Anglo-Welsh literature. The French writer Paul-Jean Toulet translated Machen's "The Great God Pan" into French and visited Machen in London. Charles Williams was also a devotee of Machen's work, which inspired Williams' own fiction.
According to film historians Keith McDonald and Roger Clark, Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro's portrayal of the faun in his 2006 dark fantasy film Pan's Labyrinth was inspired by the "ambivalent and possibly dangerous" portrayals of Pan in late Victorian and early Edwardian novels, including Machen's The Great God Pan and Pan's Garden (1912) by Algernon Blackwood.[53] Del Toro deliberately chose to imitate the darker, more sinister fauns of Machen and Blackwood rather than the "sweetly domesticated figure" of Mr. Tumnus from C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950).[54] The original title of the film in Spanish is El Laberinto del Fauno (The Labyrinth of the Faun),[55] but the English title Pan's Labyrinth emphasizes the connection between del Toro's film and the body of late nineteenth-century writings about Pan, including The Great God Pan.[54]
Some commentary on The Great God Pan has focused on its portrayal of women. Surridge sees the novella as expressing a fear of women even though the ultimate source of horror in the story is a male deity.[2] The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says that Helen's "metamorphosis...remains one of the most dramatically horrible and misogynistic in fiction".[10] Helen never speaks in the book; according to Victoria Margree and Bryony Randall in Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, "The silence of the central female character is part of the text's misogyny, but also part of its narrative effect." Margree and Randall also view Helen's fate as a punishment for her sexual impropriety.[38] Dennis Denisoff connects Machen's tendency to make his empowered female characters "sexually monstrous" to his criticisms of authors who discussed the subject of women's rights.[39] James Machin defends Machen and The Great God Pan from charges from misogyny on the grounds that the male protagonist of Machen's story "The Novel of the White Powder" (1895) disintegrates in a manner reminiscent of Helen Vaughan[22] and on the grounds that Machen married Amy Hogg, a woman who defied the sexual boundaries of her time.[40]
What is now the first chapter of the novella was published in 1890 in a magazine called The Whirlwind, while what is now the third chapter of the book was published in the same magazine the following year as a standalone short story called "The City of Resurrections". Machen only viewed the two works as connected after they were finished. Once he decided the two stories were connected, Machen wrote the rest of The Great God Pan in a single evening save for its final chapter. Machen did not think of an ending for the tale for months, and in that time believed that the novella would remain unfinished forever. The last chapter was completed in June 1891. Machen sent the novella to the publisher Blackwood, who rejected it, deeming it a clever story that "shrink[s]...from the central idea." It was accepted by John Lane and published in 1894.[7] When published as a book, The Great God Pan was accompanied by another Machen tale called "The Inmost Light"[8] which also features a mad scientist and elements of science fiction.[9] The book's cover was illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley.[3]
The Great God Pan was highly influential on the circle of writers around H. P. Lovecraft.[8] The structure of Machen's story influenced the structure of Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928).[47] Pan's depiction of a monstrous half-human hybrid inspired the plot of Lovecraft’s "The Dunwich Horror" (1929), which refers to Machen’s novella by name. According to Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price, "'The Dunwich Horror' is in every sense an homage to Machen and even a pastiche. There is little in Lovecraft's wonderful story that does not come directly out of Machen's fiction."[46] Pan also inspired Lovecraft to create his character Nodens[2] who appears most prominently in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1943).[48]
A pair of parodies of Pan were published in 1895 – Arthur Rickett's "A Yellow Creeper" and Arthur Sykes's "The Great Pan-Demon". Both suggest that Machen is an author of "limited imagination," with the latter depicting him as a mad scientist unleashing degenerate literature on an unsuspecting public.[41] The Great God Pan was brought to the stage in 2008 by the WildClaw Theatre Company in Chicago. It was adapted and directed by WildClaw artistic director Charley Sherman.[42] The novella Helen's Story (2013) by Rosanne Rabinowitz retells the story of The Great God Pan from Helen Vaughan's point of view. Helen's Story was written from a feminist perspective and nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award.[43] The Great God Pan was adapted into a chamber opera by composer Ross Crean. Unusually for a composer, Crean wrote the opera's libretto himself. A recording of the work was released in 2017.[44] The production saw its world premiere by Chicago Fringe Opera in 2018. According to the Chicago Tribune's John von Rhein, Chicago Fringe Opera's staging of The Great God Pan portrays Helen Vaughan as both a symbol of gender equality and an evil femme fatale.[45]
Machen's lifelong fascination with occultism began after he read an article on alchemy in an edition of Charles Dickens's periodical Household Words belonging to his father, a clergyman.[2][3] In his 1922 autobiography, Far Off Things, Machen wrote that The Great God Pan was inspired by the times he visited the Usk, a Welsh river, and the Welsh towns of Caerleon on the Usk and Caerwent as a boy; all of these places had been settled by the Romans.[4] He wrote that "strange relics" were frequently found at Caerwent from the ruined temple of "Nodens, god of the depths".[4] Machen visited the temple, which he described as a "lonely house between the dark forest and the silver river".[4]
The Great God Pan's implied sexuality caused a scandal upon its original release and hurt Machen's reputation as an author.[2] Reviewing the novella for the magazine Literary News, Richard Henry Stoddard criticised the story as "too morbid to be the production of a healthy mind".[29] The art critic Harry Quilter's review of the book, titled "The Gospel of Intensity", and published in The Contemporary Review in June 1895, was even more harsh.[30] Quilter declared: "'The Great God Pan' is, I have no hesitation in saying, a perfectly abominable story, in which the author has spared no endeavor to suggest loathsomeness and horror which he describes as beyond the reach of words."[31][32] Quilter warned that Machen's books were a dangerous threat to the entire British public and that they would destroy readers' sanities and senses of morality.[33][31] Quilter went on to attack the story's publisher, John Lane, as well as Machen himself: "Why should he be allowed, for the sake of a few miserable pounds, to cast into our midst these monstrous creations of his diseased brain?"[31][34] Quilter added that works of fiction like Machen's should be unanimously condemned by literary critics and newspapers: "If the Press was so disposed it could stamp out such art and fiction in a few months: And that disposition must be acquired, must even be enforced."[31] He was particularly harsh in his denunciation of sexual ambiguity and polymorphous androgyny in the book.[34] He expressed revulsion at Machen's description of Helen's sex changing immediately before her death[34] and concluded his review with a comment of distaste regarding the "nasty little naked figure of dubious sex and humanity with which Mr. Aubrey Beardsley has prefaced the story".[34] A positive appraisal of the novella came from Oscar Wilde, who called it "un succès fou."[21]
Lovecraft may have based Nodens on Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan" (1890) because Machen was one of Lovecraft's favorite authors. In the novel, Machen describes a late Roman inscription hinting that Nodens is actually the titular god Pan.
On one side of the pillar was an inscription, of which I took a note. Some of the letters had been defaced, but I do not think there can be any doubt as to those which I supply. The inscription reads as follows:
In Arthur Machen's 1894 novella "The Great God Pan", Helen Vaughan, the satanic villainess and offspring of Pan, lives off Piccadilly in the pseudonymous Ashley Street. Margery Allingham's fictional detective Albert Campion has a flat at 17A Bottle Street, Piccadilly, over a police station, although Bottle Street is equally fictitious.