Temperamentally Machen was not at all similar to Lovecraft: an unwavering Anglo-Catholic, violently hostile to science and materialism, seeking always for some mystical sense of “ecstasy” that might liberate him from what he fancied to be the prosiness of contemporary life, Machen would have found Lovecraft’s mechanistic materialism and atheism repugnant in the extreme. They may have shared a general hostility to the modern age, but they were coming at it from very different directions.
