He spent his whole career arguing the same thing: there is a lid on the world, and the lid is thin.
Under it — the Great God Pan, whom you may see if a doctor is willing to operate on the right piece of your brain, and who is not worth seeing. Under it, the White People, and a girl who learns the games and the rhymes and the true names from her nurse and writes it all down in a little green book in a cheerful hand, and the awful part, the genuinely awful part, is that she does not know she is describing anything strange. To her it's just what one does in the woods.
And then in 1914 he wrote a short story for the newspaper. Fiction. Bylined, paid, made up entirely at a desk. The ghosts of the Agincourt bowmen turning out over the retreat from Mons to loose one last volley for the British line.
And the country decided it had happened.
Parish magazines reprinted it as testimony. Nurses recalled treating men who had seen them. Machen spent the rest of his life patiently explaining that he had invented the whole business, and nobody believed him, because obviously the poor fellow was just being modest.
He wanted a hidden world beneath the world. He made one by accident, and it would not go back under.
