The British Library’s 2024 PB of The Human Chord

Published in 1910, The Human Chord is perhaps Blackwood’s most weird-fiction-friendly novel, which makes it fitting it has been republished by the British Library as part of their Tales of the Weird series.

The story centres on 28-year-old Robert Spinrobin, a somewhat ineffectual fellow, wandering through life via a series of secretarial posts (much as Blackwood himself did for a while), but with an ultimate aim of somehow, somewhere, finding his very own “authoritative adventure of the soul”. He responds to an unusual ad:

“WANTED, by Retired Clergyman, Secretarial Assistant with courage and imagination. Tenor voice and some knowledge of Hebrew essential; single; unworldly. Apply Philip Skale.”

Applying, Spinny (as he’s mostly known) finds himself in an isolated house in Wales. Skale is an impressive figure, tall, deep-voiced, and intent on pursuing a certain “philosophical speculation” “wheresoever it may lead”. This speculation is that “Everything in nature has its name, and he who has the power to call a thing by its proper name can make it obedient to his will.” Some names, though, are more complex to speak than others, particularly when it comes to “the so-called ‘Angels’; for these are in reality Forces of immense potency, vast spiritual Powers, Qualities, and the like”, who are “all evocable by correct utterance of their names.” Skale wants to utter “a certain complex and stupendous name”, for which he needs four voices: himself (bass), his housekeeper (alto), her niece Miriam (soprano), and a tenor. So far, twelve young men have applied for the latter role, but all have failed to harmonise, in various subtle ways, with the others. Spinny, though, fits perfectly — not only providing the tenor, but instantly clicking in other ways with young Miriam. (Though is there a significance in his being the thirteenth applicant?)

There are, though, risks. Housekeeper Mrs Mawle is deaf and has a withered arm thanks to Skale’s fumbled attempt to speak her true name. To mispronounce the angelic names is “to attract upon yourself the destructive qualities of these Powers”, and unleash far greater levels of mayhem. Skale, however, is utterly confident that with his new assistant’s E-flat, they can proceed.

1972 HB from Tom Stacey

Spinny, of course, wonders what that “complex and stupendous name” is — and in this, it has to be said, he’s alone, because it’s obvious there can only be one name Skale is aiming for, and that’s the top one, a name so complex that even four human voices will be inadequate. Skale has, it turns out, already succeeded in somehow trapping the four sounds that make up but the first syllable of that name, which are confined (thanks to a combination of coloured drapes, wax forms, and other esoteric devices) in four of the rooms of his large house. Each of the four members of his “human chord” will utter the sound that unleashes these sounds, which will lead to the formation of a greater sound — itself but the first of the four syllables of the Great Name he’s ultimately intending to speak.

And the aim of sounding that name? To both become part of the named entity and to command it — to become, Skale says, “as gods”. Spinny — little, comical Spinny — is bowled over by Skale and agrees to do whatever he says. But doubts creep in, particularly as his relationship with Miriam deepens — if “deepens” is the word, for the pair are as shallow as puddles. Both are innocents, described as “two bewildered children” before Skale’s awesome endeavour, though this is not the childlike nature-mystic type of innocence that really works in Blackwood’s fiction; these two are more comically innocent, wide-eyed and somewhat blank-minded in the face of everything that’s going on. When Spinny agrees with Skale that, yes, they will become “as gods”, I can’t help wondering what Spinny would do if he actually became “as a god”. And anyway, you can’t have an “adventure of the soul” if you are “as a god”, because a god can’t have peril, mystery, or wonder, nor can its already-ultimate soul grow or change as a result.

Like Blackwood’s 1911 novel The Centaur, this is a story whose main character is presented with two worlds, and has to choose between them. In The Centaur, O’Malley was caught between cosmic nature-mysticism and the modern world of “Humanity and Civilisation”, and, like Blackwood, opted for the former. Here, Spinny is presented with a choice between the world of magic, power, knowledge and being “as gods”, and the more human world of love for Miriam. Skale is a magician who never seems to question that anyone would want anything but power, knowledge and godhood. But when, at the end, he sings his note and the world starts to transform, the vision Blackwood presents is far more of the sort found in The Centaur — where nature is one, already-perfect thing, with no need for a magician-figure to take charge of it — so Skale might not have been satisfied with the results even if he had succeeded:

“The outer semblance of the old earth appeared to melt away and reveal that heart of clean and dazzling wonder which burns ever at its inmost core—the naked spirit divined by poets and mystics since the beginning of time. It was a new heaven and a new earth that pulsed below them… All nature knew, from the birds that started out of sleep into passionate singing, to the fish that stirred in the depths of the sea, and the wild deer that sprang alert in their wintry coverts, scenting an eternal spring. For the earth rolled up as a scroll, shaking the outworn skin of centuries from her face, and suffering all her rocky structure to drop away and disclose the soft and glowing loveliness of an actual being—a being most tenderly and exquisitely alive.”

This is a world of “poets and mystics”, not power-seeking magicians, and in the end, Spinney realises that “the great adventure he sought was only the supreme adventure of a very wonderful love”.

Algernon Blackwood, photo by Douglas

Mike Ashley has called The Human Chord Blackwood’s “one complete hermetic novel” arising out of his time in the Order of the Golden Dawn, which Blackwood joined in 1900. But such magickal occultism was only ever a step on the way to the nature mysticism that was Blackwood’s true “note”, and I can’t help feeling The Human Chord is Blackwood’s dismissal of the quest for magical power as opposed to seeking oneness with a mystical Nature. (Meanwhile, Aleister Crowley’s somewhat snide review of The Human Chord, in his own journal The Equinox in March 1911 — signed “Georgos” — called it the result of “indigestion brought on by a surfeit of ill-cooked Theosophy”.)

This is probably Blackwood’s most accessible novel, if you’re looking for something like the sort of weird fiction he’s known for, but The Centaur is far more characteristic of what he was really aiming at. Spinny is perhaps just a little too shallow to make The Human Chord rise above a parable about the overweening quest for power in a world where simply being human might, in the end, be much more satisfying.