By H. P. Lovecraft Supernatural Horror in Literature I. Introduction The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naively insipid idealism which deprecates the aesthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to uplift the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness. The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every- day life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our inmost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species. Man’s first instincts and emotions formed his response to the environment in which he found himself. Definite feelings based on pleasure and pain grew up around the phenomena whose causes and effects he understood, whilst around those which he did not understand—and the universe teemed with them in the early days—were naturally woven such personifications, marvellous interpretations, and sensations of awe and fear as would be hit upon by a race having few and simple ideas and limited experience. The unknown, being likewise the unpredictable, became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly extra- terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part. The phenomenon of dreaming likewise helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world; and in general, all the conditions of savage dawn-life so strongly conduced toward a feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man’s very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition. That saturation must, as a matter of plain scientific fact, be regarded as virtually permanent so far as the subconscious mind and inner instincts are concerned; for though the area of the unknown has been steadily contracting for thousands of years, an 1
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By H. P. Lovecraft
Supernatural Horror in Literature
I. Introduction
The oldest and strongest emotion ofmankind is fear, and the oldest and strongestkind of fear is fear of the unknown. Thesefacts few psychologists will dispute, andtheir admitted truth must establish for alltime the genuineness and dignity of theweirdly horrible tale as a literary form.Against it are discharged all the shafts of amaterialistic sophistication which clings tofrequently felt emotions and external events,and of a naively insipid idealism whichdeprecates the aesthetic motive and calls fora didactic literature to uplift the readertoward a suitable degree of smirkingoptimism. But in spite of all this oppositionthe weird tale has survived, developed, andattained remarkable heights of perfection;founded as it is on a profound andelementary principle whose appeal, if notalways universal, must necessarily bepoignant and permanent to minds of therequisite sensitiveness.
The appeal of the spectrally macabre isgenerally narrow because it demands fromthe reader a certain degree of imaginationand a capacity for detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough fromthe spell of the daily routine to respond torappings from outside, and tales of ordinaryfeelings and events, or of commonsentimental distortions of such feelings andevents, will always take first place in thetaste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, sinceof course these ordinary matters make upthe greater part of human experience. Butthe sensitive are always with us, andsometimes a curious streak of fancy invadesan obscure corner of the very hardest head;so that no amount of rationalisation, reform,or Freudian analysis can quite annul the
thrill of the chimneycorner whisper or thelonely wood. There is here involved apsychological pattern or tradition as real andas deeply grounded in mental experience asany other pattern or tradition of mankind;coeval with the religious feeling and closelyrelated to many aspects of it, and too much apart of our inmost biological heritage to losekeen potency over a very important, thoughnot numerically great, minority of ourspecies.
Man’s first instincts and emotions formed hisresponse to the environment in which hefound himself. Definite feelings based onpleasure and pain grew up around thephenomena whose causes and effects heunderstood, whilst around those which hedid not understand—and the universeteemed with them in the early days—werenaturally woven such personifications,marvellous interpretations, and sensations ofawe and fear as would be hit upon by a racehaving few and simple ideas and limitedexperience. The unknown, being likewise theunpredictable, became for our primitiveforefathers a terrible and omnipotent sourceof boons and calamities visited uponmankind for cryptic and wholly extraterrestrial reasons, and thus clearlybelonging to spheres of existence whereofwe know nothing and wherein we have nopart. The phenomenon of dreaming likewisehelped to build up the notion of an unreal orspiritual world; and in general, all theconditions of savage dawnlife so stronglyconduced toward a feeling of thesupernatural, that we need not wonder atthe thoroughness with which man’s veryhereditary essence has become saturatedwith religion and superstition. Thatsaturation must, as a matter of plainscientific fact, be regarded as virtuallypermanent so far as the subconscious mindand inner instincts are concerned; for thoughthe area of the unknown has been steadilycontracting for thousands of years, an
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infinite reservoir of mystery still engulfs mostof the outer cosmos, whilst a vast residuumof powerful inherited associations clingsaround all the objects and processes thatwere once mysterious, however well theymay now be explained. And more than this,there is an actual physiological fixation ofthe old instincts in our nervous tissue, whichwould make them obscurely operative evenwere the conscious mind to be purged of allsources of wonder.
Because we remember pain and the menaceof death more vividly than pleasure, andbecause our feelings toward the beneficentaspects of the unknown have from the firstbeen captured and formalised byconventional religious rituals, it has fallen tothe lot of the darker and more maleficentside of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly inour popular supernatural folklore. Thistendency, too, is naturally enhanced by thefact that uncertainty and danger are alwaysclosely allied; thus making any kind of anunknown world a world of peril and evilpossibilities. When to this sense of fear andevil the inevitable fascination of wonder andcuriosity is superadded, there is born acomposite body of keen emotion andimaginative provocation whose vitality mustof necessity endure as long as the humanrace itself. Children will always be afraid ofthe dark, and men with minds sensitive tohereditary impulse will always tremble at thethought of the hidden and fathomless worldsof strange life which may pulsate in the gulfsbeyond the stars, or press hideously uponour own globe in unholy dimensions whichonly the dead and the moonstruck canglimpse.
With this foundation, no one need wonder atthe existence of a literature of cosmic fear. Ithas always existed, and always will exist;and no better evidence of its tenaciousvigour can be cited than the impulse which
now and then drives writers of totallyopposite leanings to try their hands at it inisolated tales, as if to discharge from theirminds certain phantasmal shapes whichwould otherwise haunt them. Thus Dickenswrote several eerie narratives; Browning, thehideous poem “Childe Roland”; HenryJames, The Turn of the Screw; Dr. Holmes,the subtle novel Elsie Venner; F. MarionCrawford, “The Upper Berth” and a numberof other examples; Mrs. Charlotte PerkinsGilman, social worker, “The Yellow WallPaper”; whilst the humourist W. W. Jacobsproduced that able melodramatic bit called“The Monkey’s Paw”.
This type of fearliterature must not beconfounded with a type externally similarbut psychologically widely different; theliterature of mere physical fear and themundanely gruesome. Such writing, to besure, has its place, as has the conventional oreven whimsical or humorous ghost storywhere formalism or the author’s knowingwink removes the true sense of the morbidlyunnatural; but these things are not theliterature of cosmic fear in its purest sense.The true weird tale has something more thansecret murder, bloody bones, or a sheetedform clanking chains according to rule. Acertain atmosphere of breathless andunexplainable dread of outer, unknownforces must be present; and there must be ahint, expressed with a seriousness andportentousness becoming its subject, of thatmost terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension ordefeat of those fixed laws of Nature whichare our only safeguard against the assaults ofchaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.
Naturally we cannot expect all weird tales toconform absolutely to any theoretical model.Creative minds are uneven, and the best offabrics have their dull spots. Moreover, muchof the choicest weird work is unconscious;
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appearing in memorable fragments scatteredthrough material whose massed effect maybe of a very different cast. Atmosphere is theallimportant thing, for the final criterion ofauthenticity is not the dovetailing of a plotbut the creation of a given sensation. Wemay say, as a general thing, that a weirdstory whose intent is to teach or produce asocial effect, or one in which the horrors arefinally explained away by natural means, isnot a genuine tale of cosmic fear; but itremains a fact that such narratives oftenpossess, in isolated sections, atmospherictouches which fulfil every condition of truesupernatural horrorliterature. Therefore wemust judge a weird tale not by the author’sintent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot;but by the emotional level which it attains atits least mundane point. If the propersensations are excited, such a “high spot”must be admitted on its own merits as weirdliterature, no matter how prosaically it islater dragged down. The one test of thereally weird is simply this—whether or notthere be excited in the reader a profoundsense of dread, and of contact with unknownspheres and powers; a subtle attitude ofawed listening, as if for the beating of blackwings or the scratching of outside shapesand entities on the known universe’s utmostrim. And of course, the more completely andunifiedly a story conveys this atmosphere,the better it is as a work of art in the givenmedium.
II. The Dawn of the HorrorTale
As may naturally be expected of a form soclosely connected with primal emotion, thehorrortale is as old as human thought andspeech themselves.Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of theearliest folklore of all races, and iscrystallised in the most archaic ballads,chronicles, and sacred writings. It was,indeed, a prominent feature of the elaborateceremonial magic, with its rituals for theevocation of daemons and spectres, which
flourished from prehistoric times, and whichreached its highest development in Egyptand the Semitic nations. Fragments like theBook of Enoch and the Claviculae ofSolomon well illustrate the power of theweird over the ancient Eastern mind, andupon such things were based enduringsystems and traditions whose echoes extendobscurely even to the present time. Touchesof this transcendental fear are seen in classicliterature, and there is evidence of its stillgreater emphasis in a ballad literature whichparalleled the classic stream but vanished forlack of a written medium. The Middle Ages,steeped in fanciful darkness, gave it anenormous impulse toward expression; andEast and West alike were busy preservingand amplifying the dark heritage, both ofrandom folklore and of academicallyformulated magic and cabbalism, which haddescended to them. Witch, werewolf,vampire, and ghoul brooded ominously onthe lips of bard and grandam, and neededbut little encouragement to take the finalstep across the boundary that divides thechanted tale or song from the formal literarycomposition. In the Orient, the weird taletended to assume a gorgeous colouring andsprightliness which almost transmuted it intosheer phantasy. In the West, where themystical Teuton had come down from hisblack Boreal forests and the Celtremembered strange sacrifices in Druidicgroves, it assumed a terrible intensity andconvincing seriousness of atmosphere whichdoubled the force of its halftold, halfhintedhorrors.
Much of the power of Western horrorlorewas undoubtedly due to the hidden but oftensuspected presence of a hideous cult ofnocturnal worshippers whose strangecustoms—descended from preAryan andpreagricultural times when a squat race ofMongoloids roved over Europe with theirflocks and herds—were rooted in the mostrevolting fertilityrites of immemorial
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antiquity. This secret religion, stealthilyhanded down amongst peasants forthousands of years despite the outward reignof the Druidic, GraecoRoman, and Christianfaiths in the regions involved, was marked bywild “Witches’ Sabbaths” in lonely woodsand atop distant hills on WalpurgisNightand Hallowe’en, the traditional breedingseasons of the goats and sheep and cattle;and became the source of vast riches ofsorcerylegend, besides provoking extensivewitchcraft prosecutions of which the Salemaffair forms the chief American example.Akin to it in essence, and perhaps connectedwith it in fact, was the frightful secret systemof inverted theology or Satanworship whichproduced such horrors as the famous “BlackMass”; whilst operating toward the same endwe may note the activities of those whoseaims were somewhat more scientific orphilosophical—the astrologers, cabbalists,and alchemists of the Albertus Magnus orRaymond Lully type, with whom such rudeages invariably abound. The prevalence anddepth of the mediaeval horrorspirit inEurope, intensified by the dark despairwhich waves of pestilence brought, may befairly gauged by the grotesque carvings slylyintroduced into much of the finest laterGothic ecclesiastical work of the time; thedaemoniac gargoyles of Notre Dame andMont St. Michel being among the mostfamous specimens. And throughout theperiod, it must be remembered, there existedamongst educated and uneducated alike amost unquestioning faith in every form ofthe supernatural; from the gentlest ofChristian doctrines to the most monstrousmorbidities of witchcraft and black magic. Itwas from no empty background that theRenaissance magicians and alchemists—Nostradamus, Trithemius, Dr. John Dee,Robert Fludd, and the like—were born.
In this fertile soil were nourished types andcharacters of sombre myth and legend whichpersist in weird literature to this day, more
or less disguised or altered by moderntechnique. Many of them were taken fromthe earliest oral sources, and form part ofmankind’s permanent heritage. The shadewhich appears and demands the burial of itsbones, the daemon lover who comes to bearaway his still living bride, the deathfiend orpsychopomp riding the nightwind, the manwolf, the sealed chamber, the deathlesssorcerer—all these may be found in thatcurious body of mediaeval lore which thelate Mr. BaringGould so effectivelyassembled in book form. Wherever themystic Northern blood was strongest, theatmosphere of the popular tales becamemost intense; for in the Latin races there is atouch of basic rationality which denies toeven their strangest superstitions many ofthe overtones of glamour so characteristic ofour own forestborn and icefosteredwhisperings.
Just as all fiction first found extensiveembodiment in poetry, so is it in poetry thatwe first encounter the permanent entry ofthe weird into standard literature. Most ofthe ancient instances, curiously enough, arein prose; as the werewolf incident inPetronius, the gruesome passages inApuleius, the brief but celebrated letter ofPliny the Younger to Sura, and the oddcompilation On Wonderful Events by theEmperor Hadrian’s Greek freedman,Phlegon. It is in Phlegon that we first findthat hideous tale of the corpsebride,“Philinnion and Machates”, later related byProclus and in modern times forming theinspiration of Goethe’s “Bride of Corinth”and Washington Irving’s “German Student”.But by the time the old Northern myths takeliterary form, and in that later time when theweird appears as a steady element in theliterature of the day, we find it mostly inmetrical dress; as indeed we find the greaterpart of the strictly imaginative writing of theMiddle Ages and Renaissance. TheScandinavian Eddas and Sagas thunder with
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cosmic horror, and shake with the stark fearof Ymir and his shapeless spawn; whilst ourown AngloSaxon Beowulf and the laterContinental Nibelung tales are full ofeldritch weirdness. Dante is a pioneer in theclassic capture of macabre atmosphere, andin Spenser’s stately stanzas will be seen morethan a few touches of fantastic terror inlandscape, incident, and character. Proseliterature gives us Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, inwhich are presented many ghastly situationstaken from early ballad sources—the theft ofthe sword and silk from the corpse in ChapelPerilous by Sir Launcelot, the ghost of SirGawaine, and the tombfiend seen by SirGalahad—whilst other and cruder specimenswere doubtless set forth in the cheap andsensational “chapbooks” vulgarly hawkedabout and devoured by the ignorant. InElizabethan drama, with its Dr. Faustus, thewitches in Macbeth, the ghost in Hamlet, andthe horrible gruesomeness of Webster, wemay easily discern the strong hold of thedaemoniac on the public mind; a holdintensified by the very real fear of livingwitchcraft, whose terrors, first wildest on theContinent, begin to echo loudly in Englishears as the witchhunting crusades of Jamesthe First gain headway. To the lurkingmystical prose of the ages is added a longline of treatises on witchcraft anddaemonology which aid in exciting theimagination of the reading world.
Through the seventeenth and into theeighteenth century we behold a growingmass of fugitive legendry and balladry ofdarksome cast; still, however, held downbeneath the surface of polite and acceptedliterature. Chapbooks of horror andweirdness multiplied, and we glimpse theeager interest of the people throughfragments like Defoe’s “Apparition of Mrs.Veal”, a homely tale of a dead woman’sspectral visit to a distant friend, written toadvertise covertly a badly selling theologicaldisquisition on death. The upper orders of
society were now losing faith in thesupernatural, and indulging in a period ofclassic rationalism. Then, beginning with thetranslations of Eastern tales in Queen Anne’sreign and taking definite form toward themiddle of the century, comes the revival ofromantic feeling—the era of new joy inNature, and in the radiance of past times,strange scenes, bold deeds, and incrediblemarvels. We feel it first in the poets, whoseutterances take on new qualities of wonder,strangeness, and shuddering. And finally,after the timid appearance of a few weirdscenes in the novels of the day—such asSmollett’s Adventures of Ferdinand, CountFathom—the released instinct precipitatesitself in the birth of a new school of writing;the “Gothic” school of horrible and fantasticprose fiction, long and short, whose literaryposterity is destined to become so numerous,and in many cases so resplendent in artisticmerit. It is, when one reflects upon it,genuinely remarkable that weird narrationas a fixed and academically recognisedliterary form should have been so late offinal birth. The impulse and atmosphere areas old as man, but the typical weird tale ofstandard literature is a child of theeighteenth century.
III. The Early Gothic Novel
The shadowhaunted landscapes of “Ossian”,the chaotic visions of William Blake, thegrotesque witchdances in Burns’s “TamO’Shanter”, the sinister daemonism ofColeridge’s Christabel and Ancient Mariner,the ghostly charm of James Hogg’s“Kilmeny”, and the more restrainedapproaches to cosmic horror in Lamia andmany of Keats’s other poems, are typicalBritish illustrations of the advent of theweird to formal literature. Our Teutoniccousins of the Continent were equallyreceptive to the rising flood, and Bürger’s“Wild Huntsman” and the even more famousdaemonbridegroom ballad of “Lenore”—both imitated in English by Scott, whose
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respect for the supernatural was alwaysgreat—are only a taste of the eerie wealthwhich German song had commenced toprovide. Thomas Moore adapted from suchsources the legend of the ghoulish statuebride (later used by Prosper Mérimée in “TheVenus of Ille”, and traceable back to greatantiquity) which echoes so shiveringly in hisballad of “The Ring”; whilst Goethe’sdeathless masterpiece Faust, crossing frommere balladry into the classic, cosmictragedy of the ages, may be held as theultimate height to which this German poeticimpulse arose.
But it remained for a very sprightly andworldly Englishman—none other thanHorace Walpole himself—to give thegrowing impulse definite shape and becomethe actual founder of the literary horrorstory as a permanent form. Fond ofmediaeval romance and mystery as adilettante’s diversion, and with a quaintlyimitated Gothic castle as his abode atStrawberry Hill, Walpole in 1764 publishedThe Castle of Otranto; a tale of thesupernatural which, though thoroughlyunconvincing and mediocre in itself, wasdestined to exert an almost unparalleledinfluence on the literature of the weird. Firstventuring it only as a translation by one“William Marshal, Gent.” from the Italian ofa mythical “Onuphrio Muralto”, the authorlater acknowledged his connexion with thebook and took pleasure in its wide andinstantaneous popularity—a popularitywhich extended to many editions, earlydramatisation, and wholesale imitation bothin England and in Germany.
The story—tedious, artificial, andmelodramatic—is further impaired by a briskand prosaic style whose urbane sprightlinessnowhere permits the creation of a trulyweird atmosphere. It tells of Manfred, anunscrupulous and usurping prince
determined to found a line, who after themysterious sudden death of his only sonConrad on the latter’s bridal morn, attemptsto put away his wife Hippolita and wed thelady destined for the unfortunate youth—thelad, by the way, having been crushed by thepreternatural fall of a gigantic helmet in thecastle courtyard. Isabella, the widowedbride, flees from this design; and encountersin subterranean crypts beneath the castle anoble young preserver, Theodore, whoseems to be a peasant yet strangelyresembles the old lord Alfonso who ruled thedomain before Manfred’s time. Shortlythereafter supernatural phenomena assailthe castle in divers ways; fragments ofgigantic armour being discovered here andthere, a portrait walking out of its frame, athunderclap destroying the edifice, and acolossal armoured spectre of Alfonso risingout of the ruins to ascend through partingclouds to the bosom of St. Nicholas.Theodore, having wooed Manfred’s daughterMatilda and lost her through death—for sheis slain by her father by mistake—isdiscovered to be the son of Alfonso andrightful heir to the estate. He concludes thetale by wedding Isabella and preparing tolive happily ever after, whilst Manfred—whose usurpation was the cause of his son’ssupernatural death and his own supernaturalharassings—retires to a monastery forpenitence; his saddened wife seeking asylumin a neighbouring convent.
Such is the tale; flat, stilted, and altogetherdevoid of the true cosmic horror whichmakes weird literature. Yet such was thethirst of the age for those touches ofstrangeness and spectral antiquity which itreflects, that it was seriously received by thesoundest readers and raised in spite of itsintrinsic ineptness to a pedestal of loftyimportance in literary history. What it didabove all else was to create a novel type ofscene, puppetcharacters, and incidents;which, handled to better advantage by
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writers more naturally adapted to weirdcreation, stimulated the growth of animitative Gothic school which in turninspired the real weavers of cosmic terror—the line of actual artists beginning with Poe.This novel dramatic paraphernalia consistedfirst of all of the Gothic castle, with itsawesome antiquity, vast distances andramblings, deserted or ruined wings, dampcorridors, unwholesome hidden catacombs,and galaxy of ghosts and appalling legends,as a nucleus of suspense and daemoniacfright. In addition, it included the tyrannicaland malevolent nobleman as villain; thesaintly, longpersecuted, and generally insipidheroine who undergoes the major terrorsand serves as a point of view and focus forthe reader’s sympathies; the valorous andimmaculate hero, always of high birth butoften in humble disguise; the convention ofhighsounding foreign names, mostly Italian,for the characters; and the infinite array ofstage properties which includes strangelights, damp trapdoors, extinguished lamps,mouldy hidden manuscripts, creakinghinges, shaking arras, and the like. All thisparaphernalia reappears with amusingsameness, yet sometimes with tremendouseffect, throughout the history of the Gothicnovel; and is by no means extinct eventoday, though subtler technique now forcesit to assume a less naive and obvious form.An harmonious milieu for a new school hadbeen found, and the writing world was notslow to grasp the opportunity.
German romance at once responded to theWalpole influence, and soon became abyword for the weird and ghastly. InEngland one of the first imitators was thecelebrated Mrs. Barbauld, then Miss Aikin,who in 1773 published an unfinishedfragment called “Sir Bertrand”, in which thestrings of genuine terror were truly touchedwith no clumsy hand. A nobleman on a darkand lonely moor, attracted by a tolling belland distant light, enters a strange and
ancient turreted castle whose doors openand close and whose bluish willo’thewispslead up mysterious staircases toward deadhands and animated black statues. A coffinwith a dead lady, whom Sir Bertrand kisses,is finally reached; and upon the kiss thescene dissolves to give place to a splendidapartment where the lady, restored to life,holds a banquet in honour of her rescuer.Walpole admired this tale, though heaccorded less respect to an even moreprominent offspring of his Otranto—The OldEnglish Baron, by Clara Reeve, published in1777. Truly enough, this tale lacks the realvibration to the note of outer darkness andmystery which distinguishes Mrs. Barbauld’sfragment; and though less crude thanWalpole’s novel, and more artisticallyeconomical of horror in its possession of onlyone spectral figure, it is nevertheless toodefinitely insipid for greatness. Here againwe have the virtuous heir to the castledisguised as a peasant and restored to hisheritage through the ghost of his father; andhere again we have a case of wide popularityleading to many editions, dramatisation, andultimate translation into French. Miss Reevewrote another weird novel, unfortunatelyunpublished and lost.
The Gothic novel was now settled as aliterary form, and instances multiplybewilderingly as the eighteenth centurydraws toward its close. The Recess, written in1785 by Mrs. Sophia Lee, has the historicelement, revolving round the twin daughtersof Mary, Queen of Scots; and though devoidof the supernatural, employs the Walpolescenery and mechanism with great dexterity.Five years later, and all existing lamps arepaled by the rising of a fresh luminary ofwholly superior order—Mrs. Ann Radcliffe(1764–1823), whose famous novels madeterror and suspense a fashion, and who setnew and higher standards in the domain ofmacabre and fearinspiring atmospheredespite a provoking custom of destroying her
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own phantoms at the last through labouredmechanical explanations. To the familiarGothic trappings of her predecessors Mrs.Radcliffe added a genuine sense of theunearthly in scene and incident whichclosely approached genius; every touch ofsetting and action contributing artistically tothe impression of illimitable frightfulnesswhich she wished to convey. A few sinisterdetails like a track of blood on castle stairs, agroan from a distant vault, or a weird songin a nocturnal forest can with her conjure upthe most powerful images of imminenthorror; surpassing by far the extravagant andtoilsome elaborations of others. Nor arethese images in themselves any the lesspotent because they are explained awaybefore the end of the novel. Mrs. Radcliffe’svisual imagination was very strong, andappears as much in her delightful landscapetouches—always in broad, glamorouslypictorial outline, and never in close detail—as in her weird phantasies. Her primeweaknesses, aside from the habit of prosaicdisillusionment, are a tendency towarderroneous geography and history and a fatalpredilection for bestrewing her novels withinsipid little poems, attributed to one oranother of the characters.
Mrs. Radcliffe wrote six novels; The Castlesof Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A SicilianRomance (1790), The Romance of the Forest(1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), TheItalian (1797), and Gaston de Blondeville,composed in 1802 but first publishedposthumously in 1826. Of these Udolpho isby far the most famous, and may be taken asa type of the early Gothic tale at its best. It isthe chronicle of Emily, a youngFrenchwoman transplanted to an ancientand portentous castle in the Apenninesthrough the death of her parents and themarriage of her aunt to the lord of the castle—the scheming nobleman Montoni.Mysterious sounds, opened doors, frightfullegends, and a nameless horror in a niche
behind a black veil all operate in quicksuccession to unnerve the heroine and herfaithful attendant Annette; but finally, afterthe death of her aunt, she escapes with theaid of a fellowprisoner whom she hasdiscovered. On the way home she stops at achateau filled with fresh horrors—theabandoned wing where the departedchatelaine dwelt, and the bed of death withthe black pall—but is finally restored tosecurity and happiness with her loverValancourt, after the clearingup of a secretwhich seemed for a time to involve her birthin mystery. Clearly, this is only the familiarmaterial reworked; but it is so well reworked that Udolpho will always be a classic.Mrs. Radcliffe’s characters are puppets, butthey are less markedly so than those of herforerunners. And in atmospheric creation shestands preëminent among those of her time.
Of Mrs. Radcliffe’s countless imitators, theAmerican novelist Charles Brockden Brownstands the closest in spirit and method. Likeher, he injured his creations by naturalexplanations; but also like her, he had anuncanny atmospheric power which gives hishorrors a frightful vitality as long as theyremain unexplained. He differed from her incontemptuously discarding the externalGothic paraphernalia and properties andchoosing modern American scenes for hismysteries; but this repudiation did notextend to the Gothic spirit and type ofincident. Brown’s novels involve somememorably frightful scenes, and excel evenMrs. Radcliffe’s in describing the operationsof the perturbed mind. Edgar Huntly startswith a sleepwalker digging a grave, but islater impaired by touches of Godwiniandidacticism. Ormond involves a member of asinister secret brotherhood. That and ArthurMervyn both describe the plague of yellowfever, which the author had witnessed inPhiladelphia and New York. But Brown’smost famous book is Wieland; or, TheTransformation (1798), in which a
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Pennsylvania German, engulfed by a wave ofreligious fanaticism, hears voices and slayshis wife and children as a sacrifice. His sisterClara, who tells the story, narrowly escapes.The scene, laid at the woodland estate ofMittingen on the Schuylkill’s remote reaches,is drawn with extreme vividness; and theterrors of Clara, beset by spectral tones,gathering fears, and the sound of strangefootsteps in the lonely house, are all shapedwith truly artistic force. In the end a lameventriloquial explanation is offered, but theatmosphere is genuine while it lasts. Carwin,the malign ventriloquist, is a typical villain ofthe Manfred or Montoni type.
IV. The Apex of Gothic Romance
Horror in literature attains a new malignityin the work of Matthew Gregory Lewis(1775–1818), whose novel The Monk (1796)achieved marvellous popularity and earnedhim the nickname of “Monk” Lewis. Thisyoung author, educated in Germany andsaturated with a body of wild Teuton loreunknown to Mrs. Radcliffe, turned to terrorin forms more violent than his gentlepredecessor had ever dared to think of; andproduced as a result a masterpiece of activenightmare whose general Gothic cast isspiced with added stores of ghoulishness.The story is one of a Spanish monk,Ambrosio, who from a state of overproudvirtue is tempted to the very nadir of evil bya fiend in the guise of the maiden Matilda;and who is finally, when awaiting death atthe Inquisition’s hands, induced to purchaseescape at the price of his soul from the Devil,because he deems both body and soulalready lost. Forthwith the mocking Fiendsnatches him to a lonely place, tells him hehas sold his soul in vain since both pardonand a chance for salvation were approachingat the moment of his hideous bargain, andcompletes the sardonic betrayal by rebukinghim for his unnatural crimes, and casting hisbody down a precipice whilst his soul isborne off for ever to perdition. The novel
contains some appalling descriptions such asthe incantation in the vaults beneath theconvent cemetery, the burning of theconvent, and the final end of the wretchedabbot. In the subplot where the Marquis delas Cisternas meets the spectre of his erringancestress, The Bleeding Nun, there aremany enormously potent strokes; notably thevisit of the animated corpse to the Marquis’sbedside, and the cabbalistic ritual wherebythe Wandering Jew helps him to fathom andbanish his dead tormentor. Nevertheless TheMonk drags sadly when read as a whole. It istoo long and too diffuse, and much of itspotency is marred by flippancy and by anawkwardly excessive reaction against thosecanons of decorum which Lewis at firstdespised as prudish. One great thing may besaid of the author; that he never ruined hisghostly visions with a natural explanation.He succeeded in breaking up the Radcliffiantradition and expanding the field of theGothic novel. Lewis wrote much more thanThe Monk. His drama, The Castle Spectre, wasproduced in 1798, and he later found time topen other fictions in ballad form—Tales ofTerror (1799), Tales of Wonder (1801), and asuccession of translations from the German.
Gothic romances, both English and German,now appeared in multitudinous andmediocre profusion. Most of them weremerely ridiculous in the light of maturetaste, and Miss Austen’s famous satireNorthanger Abbey was by no means anunmerited rebuke to a school which hadsunk far toward absurdity. This particularschool was petering out, but before its finalsubordination there arose its last andgreatest figure in the person of CharlesRobert Maturin (1782–1824), an obscureand eccentric Irish clergyman. Out of anample body of miscellaneous writing whichincludes one confused Radcliffian imitationcalled Fatal Revenge; or, The Family ofMontorio (1807), Maturin at length evolvedthe vivid horrormasterpiece of Melmoth the
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Wanderer (1820), in which the Gothic taleclimbed to altitudes of sheer spiritual frightwhich it had never known before.
Melmoth is the tale of an Irish gentlemanwho, in the seventeenth century, obtained apreternaturally extended life from the Devilat the price of his soul. If he can persuadeanother to take the bargain off his hands,and assume his existing state, he can besaved; but this he can never manage toeffect, no matter how assiduously he hauntsthose whom despair has made reckless andfrantic. The framework of the story is veryclumsy; involving tedious length, digressiveepisodes, narratives within narratives, andlaboured dovetailing and coincidences; butat various points in the endless ramblingthere is felt a pulse of power undiscoverablein any previous work of this kind—a kinshipto the essential truth of human nature, anunderstanding of the profoundest sources ofactual cosmic fear, and a white heat ofsympathetic passion on the writer’s partwhich makes the book a true document ofaesthetic selfexpression rather than a mereclever compound of artifice. No unbiassedreader can doubt that with Melmoth anenormous stride in the evolution of thehorrortale is represented. Fear is taken outof the realm of the conventional and exaltedinto a hideous cloud over mankind’s verydestiny. Maturin’s shudders, the work of onecapable of shuddering himself, are of the sortthat convince. Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis arefair game for the parodist, but it would bedifficult to find a false note in the feverishlyintensified action and high atmospherictension of the Irishman whose lesssophisticated emotions and strain of Celticmysticism gave him the finest possiblenatural equipment for his task. Without adoubt Maturin is a man of authentic genius,and he was so recognised by Balzac, whogrouped Melmoth with Molière’s Don Juan,Goethe’s Faust, and Byron’s Manfred as thesupreme allegorical figures of modern
European literature, and wrote a whimsicalpiece called “Melmoth Reconciled”, in whichthe Wanderer succeeds in passing hisinfernal bargain on to a Parisian bankdefaulter, who in turn hands it along a chainof victims until a revelling gambler dies withit in his possession, and by his damnationends the curse. Scott, Rossetti, Thackeray,and Baudelaire are the other titans who gaveMaturin their unqualified admiration, andthere is much significance in the fact thatOscar Wilde, after his disgrace and exile,chose for his last days in Paris the assumedname of “Sebastian Melmoth”.
Melmoth contains scenes which even nowhave not lost their power to evoke dread. Itbegins with a deathbed—an old miser isdying of sheer fright because of somethinghe has seen, coupled with a manuscript hehas read and a family portrait which hangsin an obscure closet of his centuried home inCounty Wicklow. He sends to TrinityCollege, Dublin, for his nephew John; andthe latter upon arriving notes many uncannythings. The eyes of the portrait in the closetglow horribly, and twice a figure strangelyresembling the portrait appears momentarilyat the door. Dread hangs over that house ofthe Melmoths, one of whose ancestors, “J.Melmoth, 1646”, the portrait represents. Thedying miser declares that this man—at adate slightly before 1800—is alive. Finallythe miser dies, and the nephew is told in thewill to destroy both the portrait and amanuscript to be found in a certain drawer.Reading the manuscript, which was writtenlate in the seventeenth century by anEnglishman named Stanton, young Johnlearns of a terrible incident in Spain in 1677,when the writer met a horrible fellowcountryman and was told of how he hadstared to death a priest who tried todenounce him as one filled with fearsomeevil. Later, after meeting the man again inLondon, Stanton is cast into a madhouse andvisited by the stranger, whose approach is
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heralded by spectral music and whose eyeshave a more than mortal glare. Melmoth theWanderer—for such is the malign visitor—offers the captive freedom if he will takeover his bargain with the Devil; but like allothers whom Melmoth has approached,Stanton is proof against temptation.Melmoth’s description of the horrors of a lifein a madhouse, used to tempt Stanton, is oneof the most potent passages of the book.Stanton is at length liberated, and spendsthe rest of his life tracking down Melmoth,whose family and ancestral abode hediscovers. With the family he leaves themanuscript, which by young John’s time issadly ruinous and fragmentary. Johndestroys both portrait and manuscript, but insleep is visited by his horrible ancestor, wholeaves a black and blue mark on his wrist.
Young John soon afterward receives as avisitor a shipwrecked Spaniard, Alonzo deMonçada, who has escaped from compulsorymonasticism and from the perils of theInquisition. He has suffered horribly—andthe descriptions of his experiences undertorment and in the vaults through which heonce essays escape are classic—but had thestrength to resist Melmoth the Wandererwhen approached at his darkest hour inprison. At the house of a Jew who shelteredhim after his escape he discovers a wealth ofmanuscript relating other exploits ofMelmoth including his wooing of an Indianisland maiden, Immalee, who later comes toher birthright in Spain and is known asDonna Isidora; and of his horrible marriageto her by the corpse of a dead anchorite atmidnight in the ruined chapel of a shunnedand abhorred monastery. Monçada’snarrative to young John takes up the bulk ofMaturin’s fourvolume book; thisdisproportion being considered one of thechief technical faults of the composition.
At last the colloquies of John and Monçada
are interrupted by the entrance of Melmoththe Wanderer himself, his piercing eyes nowfading, and decrepitude swiftly overtakinghim. The term of his bargain has approachedits end, and he has come home after acentury and a half to meet his fate. Warningall others from the room, no matter whatsounds they may hear in the night, he awaitsthe end alone. Young John and Monçadahear frightful ululations, but do not intrudetill silence comes toward morning. They thenfind the room empty. Clayey footprints leadout a rear door to a cliff overlooking the sea,and near the edge of the precipice is a trackindicating the forcible dragging of someheavy body. The Wanderer’s scarf is foundon a crag some distance below the brink, butnothing further is ever seen or heard of him.
Such is the story, and none can fail to noticethe difference between this modulated,suggestive, and artistically moulded horrorand—to use the words of Professor GeorgeSaintsbury—“the artful but rather jejunerationalism of Mrs. Radcliffe, and the toooften puerile extravagance, the bad taste,and the sometimes slipshod style of Lewis.”Maturin’s style in itself deserves particularpraise, for its forcible directness and vitalitylift it altogether above the pompousartificialities of which his predecessors areguilty. Professor Edith Birkhead, in herhistory of the Gothic novel, justly observesthat with all his faults Maturin was thegreatest as well as the last of the Goths.Melmoth was widely read and eventuallydramatised, but its late date in the evolutionof the Gothic tale deprived it of thetumultuous popularity of Udolpho and TheMonk.
V. The Aftermath of Gothic Fiction
Meanwhile other hands had not been idle, sothat above the dreary plethora of trash likeMarquis von Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries(1796), Mrs. Roche’s Children of the Abbey
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(1796), Miss Dacre’s Zofloya; or, The Moor(1806), and the poet Shelley’s schoolboyeffusions Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne(1811) (both imitations of Zofloya ) therearose many memorable weird works both inEnglish and German. Classic in merit, andmarkedly different from its fellows becauseof its foundation in the Oriental tale ratherthan the Walpolesque Gothic novel, is thecelebrated History of the Caliph Vathek by thewealthy dilettante William Beckford, firstwritten in the French language but publishedin an English translation before theappearance of the original. Eastern tales,introduced to European literature early inthe eighteenth century through Galland’sFrench translation of the inexhaustiblyopulent Arabian Nights, had become areigning fashion; being used both forallegory and for amusement. The sly humourwhich only the Eastern mind knows how tomix with weirdness had captivated asophisticated generation, till Bagdad andDamascus names became as freely strownthrough popular literature as dashing Italianand Spanish ones were soon to be. Beckford,well read in Eastern romance, caught theatmosphere with unusual receptivity; and inhis fantastic volume reflected very potentlythe haughty luxury, sly disillusion, blandcruelty, urbane treachery, and shadowyspectral horror of the Saracen spirit. Hisseasoning of the ridiculous seldom mars theforce of his sinister theme, and the talemarches onward with a phantasmagoricpomp in which the laughter is that ofskeletons feasting under Arabesque domes.Vathek is a tale of the grandson of the CaliphHaroun, who, tormented by that ambitionfor superterrestrial power, pleasure, andlearning which animates the average Gothicvillain or Byronic hero (essentially cognatetypes), is lured by an evil genius to seek thesubterranean throne of the mighty andfabulous preAdamite sultans in the fieryhalls of Eblis, the Mahometan Devil. Thedescriptions of Vathek’s palaces anddiversions, of his scheming sorceressmother
Carathis and her witchtower with the fiftyoneeyed negresses, of his pilgrimage to thehaunted ruins of Istakhar (Persepolis) and ofthe impish bride Nouronihar whom hetreacherously acquired on the way, ofIstakhar’s primordial towers and terraces inthe burning moonlight of the waste, and ofthe terrible Cyclopean halls of Eblis, where,lured by glittering promises, each victim iscompelled to wander in anguish for ever, hisright hand upon his blazingly ignited andeternally burning heart, are triumphs ofweird colouring which raise the book to apermanent place in English letters. No lessnotable are the three Episodes of Vathek,intended for insertion in the tale asnarratives of Vathek’s fellowvictims in Eblis’infernal halls, which remained unpublishedthroughout the author’s lifetime and werediscovered as recently as 1909 by the scholarLewis Melville whilst collecting material forhis Life and Letters of William Beckford.Beckford, however, lacks the essentialmysticism which marks the acutest form ofthe weird; so that his tales have a certainknowing Latin hardness and clearnesspreclusive of sheer panic fright.
But Beckford remained alone in his devotionto the Orient. Other writers, closer to theGothic tradition and to European life ingeneral, were content to follow morefaithfully in the lead of Walpole. Among thecountless producers of terrorliterature inthese times may be mentioned the Utopianeconomic theorist William Godwin, whofollowed his famous but nonsupernaturalCaleb Williams (1794) with the intendedlyweird St. Leon (1799), in which the theme ofthe elixir of life, as developed by theimaginary secret order of “Rosicrucians”, ishandled with ingeniousness if not withatmospheric convincingness. This element ofRosicrucianism, fostered by a wave ofpopular magical interest exemplified in thevogue of the charlatan Cagliostro and thepublication of Francis Barrett’s The Magus
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(1801), a curious and compendious treatiseon occult principles and ceremonies, ofwhich a reprint was made as lately as 1896,figures in BulwerLytton and in many lateGothic novels, especially that remote andenfeebled posterity which straggled far downinto the nineteenth century and wasrepresented by George W. M. Reynolds’Faust and the Demon and Wagner, the Wehrwolf. Caleb Williams, though nonsupernatural, has many authentic touches ofterror. It is the tale of a servant persecutedby a master whom he has found guilty ofmurder, and displays an invention and skillwhich have kept it alive in a fashion to thisday. It was dramatised as The Iron Chest, andin that form was almost equally celebrated.Godwin, however, was too much theconscious teacher and prosaic man ofthought to create a genuine weirdmasterpiece.
His daughter, the wife of Shelley, was muchmore successful; and her inimitableFrankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus(1818) is one of the horrorclassics of alltime. Composed in competition with herhusband, Lord Byron, and Dr. John WilliamPolidori in an effort to prove supremacy inhorrormaking, Mrs. Shelley’s Frankensteinwas the only one of the rival narratives to bebrought to an elaborate completion; andcriticism has failed to prove that the bestparts are due to Shelley rather than to her.The novel, somewhat tinged but scarcelymarred by moral didacticism, tells of theartificial human being moulded from charnelfragments by Victor Frankenstein, a youngSwiss medical student. Created by itsdesigner “in the mad pride of intellectuality”,the monster possesses full intelligence butowns a hideously loathsome form. It isrejected by mankind, becomes embittered,and at length begins the successive murderof all whom young Frankenstein loves best,friends and family. It demands thatFrankenstein create a wife for it; and when
the student finally refuses in horror lest theworld be populated with such monsters, itdeparts with a hideous threat ‘to be with himon his wedding night’. Upon that night thebride is strangled, and from that time onFrankenstein hunts down the monster, eveninto the wastes of the Arctic. In the end,whilst seeking shelter on the ship of the manwho tells the story, Frankenstein himself iskilled by the shocking object of his searchand creation of his presumptuous pride.Some of the scenes in Frankenstein areunforgettable, as when the newly animatedmonster enters its creator’s room, parts thecurtains of his bed, and gazes at him in theyellow moonlight with watery eyes—“if eyesthey may be called”. Mrs. Shelley wroteother novels, including the fairly notableLast Man; but never duplicated the success ofher first effort. It has the true touch ofcosmic fear, no matter how much themovement may lag in places. Dr. Polidorideveloped his competing idea as a long shortstory, “The Vampyre”; in which we behold asuave villain of the true Gothic or Byronictype, and encounter some excellent passagesof stark fright, including a terrible nocturnalexperience in a shunned Grecian wood.
In this same period Sir Walter Scottfrequently concerned himself with the weird,weaving it into many of his novels andpoems, and sometimes producing suchindependent bits of narration as “TheTapestried Chamber” or “Wandering Willie’sTale” in Redgauntlet, in the latter of whichthe force of the spectral and the diabolic isenhanced by a grotesque homeliness ofspeech and atmosphere. In 1830 Scottpublished his Letters on Demonology andWitchcraft, which still forms one of our bestcompendia of European witchlore.Washington Irving is another famous figurenot unconnected with the weird; for thoughmost of his ghosts are too whimsical andhumorous to form genuinely spectralliterature, a distinct inclination in this
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direction is to be noted in many of hisproductions. “The German Student” in Talesof a Traveller (1824) is a slyly concise andeffective presentation of the old legend ofthe dead bride, whilst woven into the comictissue of “The MoneyDiggers” in the samevolume is more than one hint of piraticalapparitions in the realms which Captain Kiddonce roamed. Thomas Moore also joined theranks of the macabre artists in the poemAlciphron, which he later elaborated into theprose novel of The Epicurean (1827). Thoughmerely relating the adventures of a youngAthenian duped by the artifice of cunningEgyptian priests, Moore manages to infusemuch genuine horror into his account ofsubterranean frights and wonders beneaththe primordial temples of Memphis. DeQuincey more than once revels in grotesqueand arabesque terrors, though with adesultoriness and learned pomp which denyhim the rank of specialist.
This era likewise saw the rise of WilliamHarrison Ainsworth, whose romantic novelsteem with the eerie and the gruesome. Capt.Marryat, besides writing such short tales as“The Werewolf”, made a memorablecontribution in The Phantom Ship (1839),founded on the legend of the FlyingDutchman, whose spectral and accursedvessel sails for ever near the Cape of GoodHope. Dickens now rises with occasionalweird bits like “The Signalman”, a tale ofghostly warning conforming to a verycommon pattern and touched with averisimilitude which allies it as much withthe coming psychological school as with thedying Gothic school. At this time a wave ofinterest in spiritualistic charlatanry,mediumism, Hindoo theosophy, and suchmatters, much like that of the present day,was flourishing; so that the number of weirdtales with a “psychic” or pseudoscientificbasis became very considerable. For anumber of these the prolific and popularLord Edward BulwerLytton was responsible;
and despite the large doses of turgid rhetoricand empty romanticism in his products, hissuccess in the weaving of a certain kind ofbizarre charm cannot be denied.
“The House and the Brain”, which hints ofRosicrucianism and at a malign anddeathless figure perhaps suggested by LouisXV’s mysterious courtier St. Germain, yetsurvives as one of the best short hauntedhouse tales ever written. The novel Zanoni(1842) contains similar elements moreelaborately handled, and introduces a vastunknown sphere of being pressing on ourown world and guarded by a horrible“Dweller of the Threshold” who haunts thosewho try to enter and fail. Here we have abenign brotherhood kept alive from age toage till finally reduced to a single member,and as a hero an ancient Chaldaean sorcerersurviving in the pristine bloom of youth toperish on the guillotine of the FrenchRevolution. Though full of the conventionalspirit of romance, marred by a ponderousnetwork of symbolic and didactic meanings,and left unconvincing through lack of perfectatmospheric realisation of the situationshinging on the spectral world, Zanoni isreally an excellent performance as aromantic novel; and can be read withgenuine interest today by the not toosophisticated reader. It is amusing to notethat in describing an attempted initiationinto the ancient brotherhood the authorcannot escape using the stock Gothic castleof Walpolian lineage.
In A Strange Story (1862) BulwerLyttonshews a marked improvement in the creationof weird images and moods. The novel,despite enormous length, a highly artificialplot bolstered up by opportune coincidences,and an atmosphere of homiletic pseudoscience designed to please the matteroffactand purposeful Victorian reader, isexceedingly effective as a narrative; evoking
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instantaneous and unflagging interest, andfurnishing many potent—if somewhatmelodramatic—tableaux and climaxes. Againwe have the mysterious user of life’s elixir inthe person of the soulless magicianMargrave, whose dark exploits stand outwith dramatic vividness against the modernbackground of a quiet English town and ofthe Australian bush; and again we haveshadowy intimations of a vast spectral worldof the unknown in the very air about us—this time handled with much greater powerand vitality than in Zanoni. One of the twogreat incantation passages, where the hero isdriven by a luminous evil spirit to rise atnight in his sleep, take a strange Egyptianwand, and evoke nameless presences in thehaunted and mausoleumfacing pavilion of afamous Renaissance alchemist, truly standsamong the major terror scenes of literature.Just enough is suggested, and just littleenough is told. Unknown words are twicedictated to the sleepwalker, and as herepeats them the ground trembles, and allthe dogs of the countryside begin to bay athalfseen amorphous shadows that stalkathwart the moonlight. When a third set ofunknown words is prompted, the sleepwalker’s spirit suddenly rebels at utteringthem, as if the soul could recognise ultimateabysmal horrors concealed from the mind;and at last an apparition of an absentsweetheart and good angel breaks themalign spell. This fragment well illustrateshow far Lord Lytton was capable ofprogressing beyond his usual pomp andstock romance toward that crystallineessence of artistic fear which belongs to thedomain of poetry. In describing certaindetails of incantations, Lytton was greatlyindebted to his amusingly serious occultstudies, in the course of which he came intouch with that odd French scholar andcabbalist AlphonseLouis Constant (“EliphasLévi”), who claimed to possess the secrets ofancient magic, and to have evoked thespectre of the old Grecian wizard Apolloniusof Tyana, who lived in Nero’s time.
The romantic, semiGothic, quasimoraltradition here represented was carried fardown the nineteenth century by such authorsas Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Thomas PreskettPrest with his famous Varney, the Vampyre(1847), Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H. RiderHaggard (whose She is really remarkablygood), Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, andRobert Louis Stevenson—the latter of whom,despite an atrocious tendency toward jauntymannerisms, created permanent classics in“Markheim”, “The BodySnatcher”, and Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Indeed, we may say thatthis school still survives; for to it clearlybelong such of our contemporary horrortales as specialise in events rather thanatmospheric details, address the intellectrather than the impressionistic imagination,cultivate a luminous glamour rather than amalign tensity or psychologicalverisimilitude, and take a definite stand insympathy with mankind and its welfare. Ithas its undeniable strength, and because ofits “human element” commands a wideraudience than does the sheer artisticnightmare. If not quite so potent as thelatter, it is because a diluted product cannever achieve the intensity of a concentratedessence.
Quite alone both as a novel and as a piece ofterrorliterature stands the famousWuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë,with its mad vista of bleak, windsweptYorkshire moors and the violent, distortedlives they foster. Though primarily a tale oflife, and of human passions in agony andconflict, its epically cosmic setting affordsroom for horror of the most spiritual sort.Heathcliff, the modified Byronic villainhero,is a strange dark waif found in the streets asa small child and speaking only a strangegibberish till adopted by the family heultimately ruins. That he is in truth adiabolic spirit rather than a human being ismore than once suggested, and the unreal isfurther approached in the experience of the
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visitor who encounters a plaintive childghost at a boughbrushed upper window.Between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshawis a tie deeper and more terrible than humanlove. After her death he twice disturbs hergrave, and is haunted by an impalpablepresence which can be nothing less than herspirit. The spirit enters his life more andmore, and at last he becomes confident ofsome imminent mystical reunion. He says hefeels a strange change approaching, andceases to take nourishment. At night heeither walks abroad or opens the casementby his bed. When he dies the casement is stillswinging open to the pouring rain, and aqueer smile pervades the stiffened face. Theybury him in a grave beside the mound he hashaunted for eighteen years, and smallshepherd boys say that he yet walks with hisCatherine in the churchyard and on themoor when it rains. Their faces, too, aresometimes seen on rainy nights behind thatupper casement at Wuthering Heights. MissBrontë’s eerie terror is no mere Gothic echo,but a tense expression of man’s shudderingreaction to the unknown. In this respect,Wuthering Heights becomes the symbol of aliterary transition, and marks the growth of anew and sounder school.
VI. Spectral Literature on the Continent
On the Continent literary horror fared well.The celebrated short tales and novels ofErnst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (1776–1822) are a byword for mellowness ofbackground and maturity of form, thoughthey incline to levity and extravagance, andlack the exalted moments of stark, breathlessterror which a less sophisticated writer mighthave achieved. Generally they convey thegrotesque rather than the terrible. Mostartistic of all the Continental weird tales isthe German classic Undine (1811), byFriedrich Heinrich Karl, Baron de la MotteFouqué. In this story of a waterspirit whomarried a mortal and gained a human soulthere is a delicate fineness of craftsmanship
which makes it notable in any department ofliterature, and an easy naturalness whichplaces it close to the genuine folkmyth. It is,in fact, derived from a tale told by theRenaissance physician and alchemistParacelsus in his Treatise on ElementalSprites.
Undine, daughter of a powerful waterprince, was exchanged by her father as asmall child for a fisherman’s daughter, inorder that she might acquire a soul bywedding a human being. Meeting the nobleyouth Huldbrand at the cottage of her fosterfather by the sea at the edge of a hauntedwood, she soon marries him, andaccompanies him to his ancestral castle ofRingstetten. Huldbrand, however, eventuallywearies of his wife’s supernatural affiliations,and especially of the appearances of heruncle, the malicious woodland waterfallspirit Kühleborn; a weariness increased byhis growing affection for Bertalda, who turnsout to be the fisherman’s child for whomUndine was exchanged. At length, on avoyage down the Danube, he is provoked bysome innocent act of his devoted wife toutter the angry words which consign herback to her supernatural element; fromwhich she can, by the laws of her species,return only once—to kill him, whether shewill or no, if ever he prove unfaithful to hermemory. Later, when Huldbrand is about tobe married to Bertalda, Undine returns forher sad duty, and bears his life away in tears.When he is buried among his fathers in thevillage churchyard a veiled, snowwhitefemale figure appears among the mourners,but after the prayer is seen no more. In herplace is seen a little silver spring, whichmurmurs its way almost completely aroundthe new grave, and empties into aneighbouring lake. The villagers shew it tothis day, and say that Undine and herHuldbrand are thus united in death. Manypassages and atmospheric touches in thistale reveal Fouqué as an accomplished artist
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in the field of the macabre; especially thedescriptions of the haunted wood with itsgigantic snowwhite man and variousunnamed terrors, which occur early in thenarrative.
Not so well known as Undine, butremarkable for its convincing realism andfreedom from Gothic stock devices, is theAmber Witch of Wilhelm Meinhold, anotherproduct of the German fantastic genius ofthe earlier nineteenth century. This tale,which is laid in the time of the Thirty Years’War, purports to be a clergyman’smanuscript found in an old church atCoserow, and centres round the writer’sdaughter, Maria Schweidler, who is wronglyaccused of witchcraft. She has found adeposit of amber which she keeps secret forvarious reasons, and the unexplained wealthobtained from this lends colour to theaccusation; an accusation instigated by themalice of the wolfhunting nobleman WittichAppelmann, who has vainly pursued herwith ignoble designs. The deeds of a realwitch, who afterward comes to a horriblesupernatural end in prison, are gliblyimputed to the hapless Maria; and after atypical witchcraft trial with forcedconfessions under torture she is about to beburned at the stake when saved just in timeby her lover, a noble youth from aneighbouring district. Meinhold’s greatstrength is in his air of casual and realisticverisimilitude, which intensifies our suspenseand sense of the unseen by half persuadingus that the menacing events must somehowbe either the truth or very close to the truth.Indeed, so thorough is this realism that apopular magazine once published the mainpoints of The Amber Witch as an actualoccurrence of the seventeenth century!
[In the present generation German horrorfiction is most notably represented by HannsHeinz Ewers, who brings to bear on his dark
conceptions an effective knowledge ofmodern psychology. Novels like TheSorcerer’s Apprentice and Alraune, and shortstories like “The Spider”, contain distinctivequalities which raise them to a classic level.]
But France as well as Germany has beenactive in the realm of weirdness. VictorHugo, in such tales as Hans of Iceland, andBalzac, in The Wild Ass’s Skin, Séraphîta, andLouis Lambert, both employ supernaturalismto a greater or less extent; though generallyonly as a means to some more human end,and without the sincere and daemonicintensity which characterises the born artistin shadows. It is in Théophile Gautier thatwe first seem to find an authentic Frenchsense of the unreal world, and here thereappears a spectral mastery which, thoughnot continuously used, is recognisable atonce as something alike genuine andprofound. Short tales like “Avatar”, “TheFoot of the Mummy”, and “Clarimonde”display glimpses of forbidden visits thatallure, tantalise, and sometimes horrify;whilst the Egyptian visions evoked in “One ofCleopatra’s Nights” are of the keenest andmost expressive potency. Gautier capturedthe inmost soul of aeonweighted Egypt,with its cryptic life and Cyclopeanarchitecture, and uttered once and for all theeternal horror of its nether world ofcatacombs, where to the end of time millionsof stiff, spiced corpses will stare up in theblackness with glassy eyes, awaiting someawesome and unrelatable summons. GustaveFlaubert ably continued the tradition ofGautier in orgies of poetic phantasy like TheTemptation of St. Anthony, and but for astrong realistic bias might have been anarchweaver of tapestried terrors. Later onwe see the stream divide, producing strangepoets and fantaisistes of the Symbolist andDecadent schools whose dark interests reallycentre more in abnormalities of humanthought and instinct than in the actualsupernatural, and subtle storytellers whose
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thrills are quite directly derived from thenightblack wells of cosmic unreality. Of theformer class of “artists in sin” the illustriouspoet Baudelaire, influenced vastly by Poe, isthe supreme type; whilst the psychologicalnovelist JorisKarl Huysmans, a true child ofthe eighteennineties, is at once thesummation and finale. The latter and purelynarrative class is continued by ProsperMérimée, whose “Venus of Ille” presents interse and convincing prose the same ancientstatuebride theme which Thomas Moorecast in ballad form in “The Ring”.
The horrortales of the powerful and cynicalGuy de Maupassant, written as his finalmadness gradually overtook him, presentindividualities of their own; being rather themorbid outpourings of a realistic mind in apathological state than the healthyimaginative products of a vision naturallydisposed toward phantasy and sensitive tothe normal illusions of the unseen.Nevertheless they are of the keenest interestand poignancy; suggesting with marvellousforce the imminence of nameless terrors, andthe relentless dogging of an illstarredindividual by hideous and menacingrepresentatives of the outer blackness. Ofthese stories “The Horla” is generallyregarded as the masterpiece. Relating theadvent to France of an invisible being wholives on water and milk, sways the minds ofothers, and seems to be the vanguard of ahorde of extraterrestrial organisms arrivedon earth to subjugate and overwhelmmankind, this tense narrative is perhapswithout a peer in its particular department;notwithstanding its indebtedness to a tale bythe American FitzJames O’Brien for detailsin describing the actual presence of theunseen monster. Other potently darkcreations of de Maupassant are “WhoKnows?”, “The Spectre”, “He?”, “The Diary ofa Madman”, “The White Wolf”, “On theRiver”, and the grisly verses entitled“Horror”.
The collaborators ErckmannChatrianenriched French literature with manyspectral fancies like The ManWolf, in whicha transmitted curse works toward its end in atraditional Gothiccastle setting. Their powerof creating a shuddering midnightatmosphere was tremendous despite atendency toward natural explanations andscientific wonders; and few short talescontain greater horror than “The InvisibleEye”, where a malignant old hag weavesnocturnal hypnotic spells which induce thesuccessive occupants of a certain innchamber to hang themselves on a crossbeam. “The Owl’s Ear” and “The Waters ofDeath” are full of engulfing darkness andmystery, the latter embodying the familiarovergrownspider theme so frequentlyemployed by weird fictionists. Villiers del’IsleAdam likewise followed the macabreschool; his “Torture by Hope”, the tale of astakecondemned prisoner permitted toescape in order to feel the pangs ofrecapture, being held by some to constitutethe most harrowing short story in literature.This type, however, is less a part of the weirdtradition than a class peculiar to itself—thesocalled conte cruel, in which the wrenchingof the emotions is accomplished throughdramatic tantalisations, frustrations, andgruesome physical horrors. Almost whollydevoted to this form is the living writerMaurice Level, whose very brief episodeshave lent themselves so readily to theatricaladaptation in the “thrillers” of the GrandGuignol. As a matter of fact, the Frenchgenius is more naturally suited to this darkrealism than to the suggestion of the unseen;since the latter process requires, for its bestand most sympathetic development on alarge scale, the inherent mysticism of theNorthern mind.
A very flourishing, though till recently quitehidden, branch of weird literature is that of
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the Jews, kept alive and nourished inobscurity by the sombre heritage of earlyEastern magic, apocalyptic literature, andcabbalism. The Semitic mind, like the Celticand Teutonic, seems to possess markedmystical inclinations; and the wealth ofunderground horrorlore surviving inghettoes and synagogues must be muchmore considerable than is generallyimagined. Cabbalism itself, so prominentduring the Middle Ages, is a system ofphilosophy explaining the universe asemanations of the Deity, and involving theexistence of strange spiritual realms andbeings apart from the visible world, of whichdark glimpses may be obtained throughcertain secret incantations. Its ritual is boundup with mystical interpretations of the OldTestament, and attributes an esotericsignificance to each letter of the Hebrewalphabet—a circumstance which hasimparted to Hebrew letters a sort of spectralglamour and potency in the popularliterature of magic. Jewish folklore haspreserved much of the terror and mystery ofthe past, and when more thoroughly studiedis likely to exert considerable influence onweird fiction. The best examples of itsliterary use so far are the German novel TheGolem, by Gustav Meyrink, and the dramaThe Dybbuk, by the Jewish writer using thepseudonym “Ansky”. [The former, with itshaunting shadowy suggestions of marvelsand horrors just beyond reach, is laid inPrague, and describes with singular masterythat city’s ancient ghetto with its spectral,peaked gables. The name is derived from afabulous artificial giant supposed to be madeand animated by mediaeval rabbis accordingto a certain cryptic formula.] The Dybbuk,translated and produced in America in 1925,[and more recently produced as an opera,]describes with singular power the possessionof a living body by the evil soul of a deadman. Both golems and dybbuks are fixedtypes, and serve as frequent ingredients oflater Jewish tradition.
VII. Edgar Allan Poe
In the eighteenthirties occurred a literarydawn directly affecting not only the historyof the weird tale, but that of short fiction asa whole; and indirectly moulding the trendsand fortunes of a great European aestheticschool. It is our good fortune as Americansto be able to claim that dawn as our own, forit came in the person of our illustrious andunfortunate fellowcountryman Edgar AllanPoe. Poe’s fame has been subject to curiousundulations, and it is now a fashion amongstthe “advanced intelligentsia” to minimise hisimportance both as an artist and as aninfluence; but it would be hard for anymature and reflective critic to deny thetremendous value of his work and thepervasive potency of his mind as an openerof artistic vistas. True, his type of outlookmay have been anticipated; but it was hewho first realised its possibilities and gave itsupreme form and systematic expression.True also, that subsequent writers may haveproduced greater single tales than his; butagain we must comprehend that it was onlyhe who taught them by example and preceptthe art which they, having the way clearedfor them and given an explicit guide, wereperhaps able to carry to greater lengths.Whatever his limitations, Poe did that whichno one else ever did or could have done; andto him we owe the modern horrorstory in itsfinal and perfected state.
Before Poe the bulk of weird writers hadworked largely in the dark; without anunderstanding of the psychological basis ofthe horror appeal, and hampered by more orless of conformity to certain empty literaryconventions such as the happy ending, virtuerewarded, and in general a hollow moraldidacticism, acceptance of popular standardsand values, and striving of the author toobtrude his own emotions into the story andtake sides with the partisans of the majority’sartificial ideas. Poe, on the other hand,perceived the essential impersonality of the
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real artist; and knew that the function ofcreative fiction is merely to express andinterpret events and sensations as they are,regardless of how they tend or what theyprove—good or evil, attractive or repulsive,stimulating or depressing—with the authoralways acting as a vivid and detachedchronicler rather than as a teacher,sympathiser, or vendor of opinion. He sawclearly that all phases of life and thought areequally eligible as subjectmatter for theartist, and being inclined by temperament tostrangeness and gloom, decided to be theinterpreter of those powerful feeling, andfrequent happenings which attend painrather than pleasure, decay rather thangrowth, terror rather than tranquillity, andwhich are fundamentally either adverse orindifferent to the tastes and traditionaloutward sentiments of mankind, and to thehealth, sanity, and normal expansive welfareof the species.
Poe’s spectres thus acquired a convincingmalignity possessed by none of theirpredecessors, and established a newstandard of realism in the annals of literaryhorror. The impersonal and artistic intent,moreover, was aided by a scientific attitudenot often found before; whereby Poe studiedthe human mind rather than the usages ofGothic fiction, and worked with an analyticalknowledge of terror’s true sources whichdoubled the force of his narratives andemancipated him from all the absurditiesinherent in merely conventional shuddercoining. This example having been set, laterauthors were naturally forced to conform toit in order to compete at all; so that in thisway a definite change began to affect themain stream of macabre writing. Poe, too,set a fashion in consummate craftsmanship;and although today some of his own workseems slightly melodramatic andunsophisticated, we can constantly trace hisinfluence in such things as the maintenanceof a single mood and achievement of a single
impression in a tale, and the rigorous paringdown of incidents to such as have a directbearing on the plot and will figureprominently in the climax. Truly may it besaid that Poe invented the short story in itspresent form. His elevation of disease,perversity, and decay to the level ofartistically expressible themes was likewiseinfinitely farreaching in effect; for avidlyseized, sponsored, and intensified by hiseminent French admirer Charles PierreBaudelaire, it became the nucleus of theprincipal aesthetic movements in France,thus making Poe in a sense the father of theDecadents and the Symbolists.
Poet and critic by nature and supremeattainment, logician and philosopher by tasteand mannerism, Poe was by no meansimmune from defects and affectations. Hispretence to profound and obscurescholarship, his blundering ventures instilted and laboured pseudohumour, and hisoften vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudicemust all be recognised and forgiven. Beyondand above them, and dwarfing them toinsignificance, was a master’s vision of theterror that stalks about and within us, andthe worm that writhes and slavers in thehideously close abyss. Penetrating to everyfestering horror in the gaily painted mockerycalled existence, and in the solemnmasquerade called human thought andfeelings that vision had power to projectitself in blackly magical crystallisations andtransmutations; till there bloomed in thesterile America of the ’thirties and ’fortiessuch a moonnourished garden of gorgeouspoison fungi as not even the nether slope ofSaturn might boast. Verses and tales alikesustain the burthen of cosmic panic. Theraven whose noisome beak pierces the heart,the ghouls that toll iron bells in pestilentialsteeples, the vault of Ulalume in the blackOctober night, the shocking spires anddomes under the sea, the “wild, weird climethat lieth, sublime, out of Space—out of
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Time”—all these things and more leer at usamidst maniacal rattlings in the seethingnightmare of the poetry. And in the prosethere yawn open for us the very jaws of thepit—inconceivable abnormalities slyly hintedinto a horrible halfknowledge by wordswhose innocence we scarcely doubt till thecracked tension of the speaker’s hollow voicebids us fear their nameless implications;daemoniac patterns and presencesslumbering noxiously till waked for onephobic instant into a shrieking revelationthat cackles itself to sudden madness orexplodes in memorable and cataclysmicechoes. A Witches’ Sabbath of horror flingingoff decorous robes is flashed before us—asight the more monstrous because of thescientific skill with which every particular ismarshalled and brought into an easyapparent relation to the knowngruesomeness of material life.
Poe’s tales, of course, fall into severalclasses; some of which contain a pureressence of spiritual horror than others. Thetales of logic and ratiocination, forerunnersof the modern detective story, are not to beincluded at all in weird literature; whilstcertain others, probably influencedconsiderably by Hoffmann, possess anextravagance which relegates them to theborderline of the grotesque. Still a thirdgroup deal with abnormal psychology andmonomania in such a way as to expressterror but not weirdness. A substantialresiduum, however, represent the literatureof supernatural horror in its acutest form;and give their author a permanent andunassailable place as deity and fountainhead of all modern diabolic fiction. Who canforget the terrible swollen ship poised on thebillowchasm’s edge in “MS. Found in aBottle”—the dark intimations of herunhallowed age and monstrous growth, hersinister crew of unseeing greybeards, and herfrightful southward rush under full sailthrough the ice of the Antarctic night, sucked
onward by some resistless devilcurrenttoward a vortex of eldritch enlightenmentwhich must end in destruction? Then there isthe unutterable “M. Valdemar”, kepttogether by hypnotism for seven monthsafter his death, and uttering frantic soundsbut a moment before the breaking of thespell leaves him “a nearly liquid mass ofloathsome—of detestable putrescence”. Inthe Narrative of A. Gordon Pym the voyagersreach first a strange south polar land ofmurderous savages where nothing is whiteand where vast rocky ravines have the formof titanic Egyptian letters spelling terribleprimal arcana of earth; and thereafter a stillmore mysterious realm where everything iswhite, and where shrouded giants andsnowyplumed birds guard a cryptic cataractof mist which empties from immeasurablecelestial heights into a torrid milky sea.“Metzengerstein” horrifies with its malignhints of a monstrous metempsychosis—themad nobleman who burns the stable of hishereditary foe; the colossal unknown horsethat issues from the blazing building afterthe owner has perished therein; thevanishing bit of ancient tapestry where wasshewn the giant horse of the victim’sancestor in the Crusades; the madman’s wildand constant riding on the great horse, andhis fear and hatred of the steed; themeaningless prophecies that brood obscurelyover the warring houses; and finally, theburning of the madman’s palace and thedeath therein of the owner, borne helplessinto the flames and up the vast staircasesastride the beast he has ridden so strangely.Afterward the rising smoke of the ruins takesthe form of a gigantic horse. “The Man of theCrowd”, telling of one who roams day andnight to mingle with streams of people as ifafraid to be alone, has quieter effects, butimplies nothing less of cosmic fear. Poe’smind was never far from terror and decay,and we see in every tale, poem, andphilosophical dialogue a tense eagerness tofathom unplumbed wells of night, to piercethe veil of death, and to reign in fancy as
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lord of the frightful mysteries of time andspace.
Certain of Poe’s tales possess an almostabsolute perfection of artistic form whichmakes them veritable beaconlights in theprovince of the short story. Poe could, whenhe wished, give to his prose a richly poeticcast; employing that archaic andOrientalised style with jewelled phrase,quasiBiblical repetition, and recurrentburthen so successfully used by later writerslike Oscar Wilde and Lord Dunsany; and inthe cases where he has done this we have aneffect of lyrical phantasy almost narcotic inessence—an opium pageant of dream in thelanguage of dream, with every unnaturalcolour and grotesque image bodied forth in asymphony of corresponding sound. “TheMasque of the Red Death”, “Silence—AFable”, and “Shadow—A Parable” areassuredly poems in every sense of the wordsave the metrical one, and owe as much oftheir power to aural cadence as to visualimagery. But it is in two of the less openlypoetic tales, “Ligeia” and “The Fall of theHouse of Usher”—especially the latter—thatone finds those very summits of artistrywhereby Poe takes his place at the head offictional miniaturists. Simple andstraightforward in plot, both of these talesowe their supreme magic to the cunningdevelopment which appears in the selectionand collocation of every least incident.“Ligeia” tells of a first wife of lofty andmysterious origin, who after death returnsthrough a preternatural force of will to takepossession of the body of a second wife;imposing even her physical appearance onthe temporary reanimated corpse of hervictim at the last moment. Despite asuspicion of prolixity and topheaviness, thenarrative reaches its terrific climax withrelentless power. “Usher”, whose superiorityin detail and proportion is very marked,hints shudderingly of obscure life ininorganic things, and displays an abnormallylinked trinity of entities at the end of a longand isolated family history—a brother, his
twin sister, and their incredibly ancienthouse all sharing a single soul and meetingone common dissolution at the samemoment.
These bizarre conceptions, so awkward inunskilful hands, become under Poe’s spellliving and convincing terrors to haunt ournights; and all because the authorunderstood so perfectly the very mechanicsand physiology of fear and strangeness—theessential details to emphasise, the preciseincongruities and conceits to select aspreliminaries or concomitants to horror, theexact incidents and allusions to throw outinnocently in advance as symbols orprefigurings of each major step toward thehideous denouement to come, the niceadjustments of cumulative force and theunerring accuracy in linkage of parts whichmake for faultless unity throughout andthunderous effectiveness at the climacticmoment, the delicate nuances of scenic andlandscape value to select in establishing andsustaining the desired mood and vitalisingthe desired illusion—principles of this kind,and dozens of obscurer ones too elusive tobe described or even fully comprehended byany ordinary commentator. Melodrama andunsophistication there may be—we are toldof one fastidious Frenchman who could notbear to read Poe except in Baudelaire’surbane and Gallically modulated translation—but all traces of such things are whollyovershadowed by a potent and inborn senseof the spectral, the morbid, and the horriblewhich gushed forth from every cell of theartist’s creative mentality and stamped hismacabre work with the ineffaceable mark ofsupreme genius. Poe’s weird tales are alive ina manner that few others can ever hope tobe.
Like most fantaisistes, Poe excels in incidentsand broad narrative effects rather than incharacter drawing. His typical protagonist is
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generally a dark, handsome, proud,melancholy, intellectual, highly sensitive,capricious, introspective, isolated, andsometimes slightly mad gentleman of ancientfamily and opulent circumstances; usuallydeeply learned in strange lore, and darklyambitious of penetrating to forbidden secretsof the universe. Aside from a highsoundingname, this character obviously derives littlefrom the early Gothic novel; for he is clearlyneither the wooden hero nor the diabolicalvillain of Radcliffian or Ludovician romance.Indirectly, however, he does possess a sort ofgenealogical connexion; since his gloomy,ambitious, and antisocial qualities savourstrongly of the typical Byronic hero, who inturn is definitely an offspring of the GothicManfreds, Montonis, and Ambrosios. Moreparticular qualities appear to be derivedfrom the psychology of Poe himself, whocertainly possessed much of the depression,sensitiveness, mad aspiration, loneliness, andextravagant freakishness which he attributesto his haughty and solitary victims of Fate.
VIII. The Weird Tradition in America
The public for whom Poe wrote, thoughgrossly unappreciative of his art, was by nomeans unaccustomed to the horrors withwhich he dealt. America, besides inheritingthe usual dark folklore of Europe, had anadditional fund of weird associations to drawupon; so that spectral legends had alreadybeen recognised as fruitful subjectmatter forliterature. Charles Brockden Brown hadachieved phenomenal fame with hisRadcliffian romances, and WashingtonIrving’s lighter treatment of eerie themes hadquickly become classic. This additional fundproceeded, as Paul Elmer More has pointedout, from the keen spiritual and theologicalinterests of the first colonists, plus thestrange and forbidding nature of the sceneinto which they were plunged. The vast andgloomy virgin forests in whose perpetualtwilight all terrors might well lurk; thehordes of coppery Indians whose strange,
saturnine visages and violent customs hintedstrongly at traces of infernal origin; the freerein given under the influence of Puritantheocracy to all manner of notions respectingman’s relation to the stern and vengeful Godof the Calvinists, and to the sulphureousAdversary of that God, about whom so muchwas thundered in the pulpits each Sunday;and the morbid introspection developed byan isolated backwoods life devoid of normalamusements and of the recreational mood,harassed by commands for theological selfexamination, keyed to unnatural emotionalrepression, and forming above all a meregrim struggle for survival—all these thingsconspired to produce an environment inwhich the black whisperings of sinistergrandams were heard far beyond thechimney corner, and in which tales ofwitchcraft and unbelievable secretmonstrosities lingered long after the dreaddays of the Salem nightmare.
Poe represents the newer, moredisillusioned, and more technically finishedof the weird schools that rose out of thispropitious milieu. Another school—thetradition of moral values, gentle restraint,and mild, leisurely phantasy tinged more orless with the whimsical—was represented byanother famous, misunderstood, and lonelyfigure in American letters—the shy andsensitive Nathaniel Hawthorne, scion ofantique Salem and greatgrandson of one ofthe bloodiest of the old witchcraft judges. InHawthorne we have none of the violence,the daring, the high colouring, the intensedramatic sense, the cosmic malignity, andthe undivided and impersonal artistry of Poe.Here, instead, is a gentle soul cramped bythe Puritanism of early New England;shadowed and wistful, and grieved at anunmoral universe which everywheretranscends the conventional patterns thoughtby our forefathers to represent divine andimmutable law. Evil, a very real force toHawthorne, appears on every hand as a
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lurking and conquering adversary; and thevisible world becomes in his fancy a theatreof infinite tragedy and woe, with unseenhalfexistent influences hovering over it andthrough it, battling for supremacy andmoulding the destinies of the hapless mortalswho form its vain and selfdeludedpopulation. The heritage of Americanweirdness was his to a most intense degree,and he saw a dismal throng of vaguespectres behind the common phenomena oflife; but he was not disinterested enough tovalue impressions, sensations, and beautiesof narration for their own sake. He mustneeds weave his phantasy into some quietlymelancholy fabric of didactic or allegoricalcast, in which his meekly resigned cynicismmay display with naive moral appraisal theperfidy of a human race which he cannotcease to cherish and mourn despite hisinsight into its hypocrisy. Supernaturalhorror, then, is never a primary object withHawthorne; though its impulses were sodeeply woven into his personality that hecannot help suggesting it with the force ofgenius when he calls upon the unreal worldto illustrate the pensive sermon he wishes topreach.
Hawthorne’s intimations of the weird,always gentle, elusive, and restrained, maybe traced throughout his work. The moodthat produced them found one delightfulvent in the Teutonised retelling of classicmyths for children contained in A WonderBook and Tanglewood Tales, and at othertimes exercised itself in casting a certainstrangeness and intangible witchery ormalevolence over events not meant to beactually supernatural; as in the macabreposthumous novel Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret,which invests with a peculiar sort ofrepulsion a house existing to this day inSalem, and abutting on the ancient CharterStreet Burying Ground. In The Marble Faun,whose design was sketched out in an Italianvilla reputed to be haunted, a tremendous
background of genuine phantasy andmystery palpitates just beyond the commonreader’s sight; and glimpses of fabulousblood in mortal veins are hinted at duringthe course of a romance which cannot helpbeing interesting despite the persistentincubus of moral allegory, antiPoperypropaganda, and a Puritan prudery whichhas caused the late D. H. Lawrence toexpress a longing to treat the author in ahighly undignified manner. Septimius Felton,a posthumous novel whose idea was to havebeen elaborated and incorporated into theunfinished Dolliver Romance, touches on theElixir of Life in a more or less capablefashion; whilst the notes for a neverwrittentale to be called “The Ancestral Footstep”shew what Hawthorne would have donewith an intensive treatment of an old Englishsuperstition—that of an ancient andaccursed line whose members left footprintsof blood as they walked—which appearsincidentally in both Septimius Felton and Dr.Grimshawe’s Secret.
Many of Hawthorne’s shorter tales exhibitweirdness, either of atmosphere or ofincident, to a remarkable degree. “EdwardRandolph’s Portrait”, in Legends of theProvince House, has its diabolic moments.“The Minister’s Black Veil” (founded on anactual incident) and “The Ambitious Guest”imply much more than they state, whilst“Ethan Brand”—a fragment of a longer worknever completed—rises to genuine heights ofcosmic fear with its vignette of the wild hillcountry and the blazing, desolate limekilns,and its delineation of the Byronic“unpardonable sinner”, whose troubled lifeends with a peal of fearful laughter in thenight as he seeks rest amidst the flames ofthe furnace. Some of Hawthorne’s notes tellof weird tales he would have written had helived longer—an especially vivid plot beingthat concerning a baffling stranger whoappeared now and then in public assemblies,and who was at last followed and found to
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come and go from a very ancient grave.
But foremost as a finished, artistic unitamong all our author’s weird material is thefamous and exquisitely wrought novel, TheHouse of the Seven Gables, in which therelentless working out of an ancestral curseis developed with astonishing power againstthe sinister background of a very ancientSalem house—one of those peaked Gothicaffairs which formed the first regularbuildingup of our New England coast towns,but which gave way after the seventeenthcentury to the more familiar gambrelroofedor classic Georgian types now known as“Colonial”. Of these old gabled Gothichouses scarcely a dozen are to be seen todayin their original condition throughout theUnited States, but one well known toHawthorne still stands in Turner Street,Salem, and is pointed out with doubtfulauthority as the scene and inspiration of theromance. Such an edifice, with its spectralpeaks, its clustered chimneys, itsoverhanging second story, its grotesquecornerbrackets, and its diamondpanedlattice windows, is indeed an object wellcalculated to evoke sombre reflections;typifying as it does the dark Puritan age ofconcealed horror and witchwhispers whichpreceded the beauty, rationality, andspaciousness of the eighteenth century.Hawthorne saw many in his youth, andknew the black tales connected with some ofthem. He heard, too, many rumours of acurse upon his own line as the result of hisgreatgrandfather’s severity as a witchcraftjudge in 1692.
From this setting came the immortal tale—New England’s greatest contribution to weirdliterature—and we can feel in an instant theauthenticity of the atmosphere presented tous. Stealthy horror and disease lurk withinthe weatherblackened, mosscrusted, andelmshadowed walls of the archaic dwelling
so vividly displayed, and we grasp thebrooding malignity of the place when weread that its builder—old Colonel Pyncheon—snatched the land with peculiarruthlessness from its original settler,Matthew Maule, whom he condemned to thegallows as a wizard in the year of the panic.Maule died cursing old Pyncheon—“God willgive him blood to drink”—and the waters ofthe old well on the seized land turned bitter.Maule’s carpenter son consented to build thegreat gabled house for his father’striumphant enemy, but the old Colonel diedstrangely on the day of its dedication. Thenfollowed generations of odd vicissitudes,with queer whispers about the dark powersof the Maules, and peculiar and sometimesterrible ends befalling the Pyncheons.
The overshadowing malevolence of theancient house—almost as alive as Poe’sHouse of Usher, though in a subtler way—pervades the tale as a recurrent motifpervades an operatic tragedy; and when themain story is reached, we behold the modernPyncheons in a pitiable state of decay. Poorold Hepzibah, the eccentric reducedgentlewoman; childlike, unfortunateClifford, just released from undeservedimprisonment; sly and treacherous JudgePyncheon, who is the old Colonel all overagain—all these figures are tremendoussymbols, and are well matched by thestunted vegetation and anaemic fowls in thegarden. It was almost a pity to supply a fairlyhappy ending, with a union of sprightlyPhoebe, cousin and last scion of thePyncheons, to the prepossessing young manwho turns out to be the last of the Maules.This union, presumably, ends the curse.Hawthorne avoids all violence of diction ormovement, and keeps his implications ofterror well in the background; but occasionalglimpses amply serve to sustain the moodand redeem the work from pure allegoricalaridity. Incidents like the bewitching of AlicePyncheon in the early eighteenth century,
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and the spectral music of her harpsichordwhich precedes a death in the family—thelatter a variant of an immemorial type ofAryan myth—link the action directly withthe supernatural; whilst the dead nocturnalvigil of old Judge Pyncheon in the ancientparlour, with his frightfully ticking watch, isstark horror of the most poignant andgenuine sort. The way in which the Judge’sdeath is first adumbrated by the motions andsniffing of a strange cat outside the window,long before the fact is suspected either bythe reader or by any of the characters, is astroke of genius which Poe could not havesurpassed. Later the strange cat watchesintently outside that same window in thenight and on the next day, for—something.It is clearly the psychopomp of primevalmyth, fitted and adapted with infinitedeftness to its latterday setting.
But Hawthorne left no welldefined literaryposterity. His mood and attitude belonged tothe age which closed with him, and it is thespirit of Poe—who so clearly and realisticallyunderstood the natural basis of the horrorappeal and the correct mechanics of itsachievement—which survived andblossomed. Among the earliest of Poe’sdisciples may be reckoned the brilliant youngIrishman FitzJames O’Brien (1828–1862),who became naturalised as an American andperished honourably in the Civil War. It is hewho gave us “What Was It?”, the first wellshaped short story of a tangible but invisiblebeing, and the prototype of de Maupassant’s“Horla”; he also who created the inimitable“Diamond Lens”, in which a youngmicroscopist falls in love with a maiden of aninfinitesimal world which he has discoveredin a drop of water. O’Brien’s early deathundoubtedly deprived us of some masterfultales of strangeness and terror, though hisgenius was not, properly speaking, of thesame titan quality which characterised Poeand Hawthorne.
Closer to real greatness was the eccentricand saturnine journalist Ambrose Bierce,born in 1842; who likewise entered the CivilWar, but survived to write some immortaltales and to disappear in 1913 in as great acloud of mystery as any he ever evoked fromhis nightmare fancy. Bierce was a satirist andpamphleteer of note, but the bulk of hisartistic reputation must rest upon his grimand savage short stories; a large number ofwhich deal with the Civil War and form themost vivid and realistic expression whichthat conflict has yet received in fiction.Virtually all of Bierce’s tales are tales ofhorror; and whilst many of them treat onlyof the physical and psychological horrorswithin Nature, a substantial proportionadmit the malignly supernatural and form aleading element in America’s fund of weirdliterature. Mr. Samuel Loveman, a livingpoet and critic who was personallyacquainted with Bierce, thus sums up thegenius of the great shadowmaker in thepreface to some of his letters:
“In Bierce, the evocation of horrorbecomes for the first time, not somuch the prescription orperversion of Poe andMaupassant, but an atmospheredefinite and uncannily precise.Words, so simple that one wouldbe prone to ascribe them to thelimitations of a literary hack, takeon an unholy horror, a new andunguessed transformation. In Poeone finds it a tour de force, inMaupassant a nervousengagement of the flagellatedclimax. To Bierce, simply andsincerely, diabolism held in itstormented depth, a legitimate andreliant means to the end. Yet atacit confirmation with Nature isin every instance insisted upon.
“In ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser’,
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flowers, verdure, and the boughsand leaves of trees aremagnificently placed as anopposing foil to unnaturalmalignity. Not the accustomedgolden world, but a worldpervaded with the mystery of blueand the breathless recalcitrance ofdreams, is Bierce’s. Yet, curiously,inhumanity is not altogetherabsent.”
The “inhumanity” mentioned by Mr.Loveman finds vent in a rare strain ofsardonic comedy and graveyard humour,and a kind of delight in images of crueltyand tantalising disappointment. The formerquality is well illustrated by some of thesubtitles in the darker narratives; such as“One does not always eat what is on thetable”, describing a body laid out for acoroner’s inquest, and “A man though nakedmay be in rags”, referring to a frightfullymangled corpse.
Bierce’s work is in general somewhatuneven. Many of the stories are obviouslymechanical, and marred by a jaunty andcommonplacely artificial style derived fromjournalistic models; but the grimmalevolence stalking through all of them isunmistakable, and several stand out aspermanent mountainpeaks of Americanweird writing. “The Death of HalpinFrayser”, called by Frederic Taber Cooper themost fiendishly ghastly tale in the literatureof the AngloSaxon race, tells of a bodyskulking by night without a soul in a weirdand horribly ensanguined wood, and of aman beset by ancestral memories who metdeath at the claws of that which had beenhis fervently loved mother. “The DamnedThing”, frequently copied in popularanthologies, chronicles the hideousdevastations of an invisible entity thatwaddles and flounders on the hills and in thewheatfields by night and day. “The Suitable
Surroundings” evokes with singular subtletyyet apparent simplicity a piercing sense ofthe terror which may reside in the writtenword. In the story the weird author Colstonsays to his friend Marsh, “You are braveenough to read me in a streetcar, but—in adeserted house—alone—in the forest—atnight! Bah! I have a manuscript in my pocketthat would kill you!” Marsh reads themanuscript in “the suitable surroundings”—and it does kill him. “The Middle Toe of theRight Foot” is clumsily developed, but has apowerful climax. A man named Manton hashorribly killed his two children and his wife,the latter of whom lacked the middle toe ofthe right foot. Ten years later he returnsmuch altered to the neighbourhood; and,being secretly recognised, is provoked into abowieknife duel in the dark, to be held inthe now abandoned house where his crimewas committed. When the moment of theduel arrives a trick is played upon him; andhe is left without an antagonist, shut in anightblack ground floor room of thereputedly haunted edifice, with the thickdust of a decade on every hand. No knife isdrawn against him, for only a thorough scareis intended; but on the next day he is foundcrouched in a corner with distorted face,dead of sheer fright at something he hasseen. The only clue visible to the discoverersis one having terrible implications: “In thedust of years that lay thick upon the floor—leading from the door by which they hadentered, straight across the room to within ayard of Manton’s crouching corpse—werethree parallel lines of footprints—light butdefinite impressions of bare feet, the outerones those of small children, the inner awoman’s. From the point at which theyended they did not return; they pointed allone way.” And, of course, the woman’s printsshewed a lack of the middle toe of the rightfoot. “The Spook House”, told with aseverely homely air of journalisticverisimilitude, conveys terrible hints ofshocking mystery. In 1858 an entire familyof seven persons disappears suddenly and
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unaccountably from a plantation house ineastern Kentucky, leaving all its possessionsuntouched—furniture, clothing, foodsupplies, horses, cattle, and slaves. About ayear later two men of high standing areforced by a storm to take shelter in thedeserted dwelling, and in so doing stumbleinto a strange subterranean room lit by anunaccountable greenish light and having aniron door which cannot be opened fromwithin. In this room lie the decayed corpsesof all the missing family; and as one of thediscoverers rushes forward to embrace abody he seems to recognise, the other is sooverpowered by a strange foetor that heaccidentally shuts his companion in the vaultand loses consciousness. Recovering hissenses six weeks later, the survivor is unableto find the hidden room; and the house isburned during the Civil War. The imprisoneddiscoverer is never seen or heard of again.
Bierce seldom realises the atmosphericpossibilities of his themes as vividly as Poe;and much of his work contains a certaintouch of naiveté, prosaic angularity, or earlyAmerican provincialism which contrastssomewhat with the efforts of later horrormasters. Nevertheless the genuineness andartistry of his dark intimations are alwaysunmistakable, so that his greatness is in nodanger of eclipse. As arranged in hisdefinitively collected works, Bierce’s weirdtales occur mainly in two volumes, Can SuchThings Be? and In the Midst of Life. Theformer, indeed, is almost wholly given overto the supernatural.
Much of the best in American horrorliterature has come from pens not mainlydevoted to that medium. Oliver WendellHolmes’s historic Elsie Venner suggests withadmirable restraint an unnatural ophidianelement in a young woman prenatallyinfluenced, and sustains the atmospherewith finely discriminating landscape touches.
In The Turn of the Screw Henry Jamestriumphs over his inevitable pomposity andprolixity sufficiently well to create a trulypotent air of sinister menace; depicting thehideous influence of two dead and evilservants, Peter Quint and the governess MissJessel, over a small boy and girl who hadbeen under their care. James is perhaps toodiffuse, too unctuously urbane, and toomuch addicted to subtleties of speech torealise fully all the wild and devastatinghorror in his situations; but for all that thereis a rare and mounting tide of fright,culminating in the death of the little boy,which gives the novelette a permanent placein its special class.
F. Marion Crawford produced several weirdtales of varying quality, now collected in avolume entitled Wandering Ghosts. “For theBlood Is the Life” touches powerfully on acase of mooncursed vampirism near anancient tower on the rocks of the lonelySouth Italian seacoast. “The Dead Smile”treats of family horrors in an old house andan ancestral vault in Ireland, and introducesthe banshee with considerable force. “TheUpper Berth”, however, is Crawford’s weirdmasterpiece; and is one of the mosttremendous horrorstories in all literature. Inthis tale of a suicidehaunted stateroom suchthings as the spectral saltwater dampness,the strangely open porthole, and thenightmare struggle with the nameless objectare handled with incomparable dexterity.
Very genuine, though not without the typicalmannered extravagance of the eighteennineties, is the strain of horror in the earlywork of Robert W. Chambers, sincerenowned for products of a very differentquality. The King in Yellow, a series ofvaguely connected short stories having as abackground a monstrous and suppressedbook whose perusal brings fright, madness,and spectral tragedy, really achieves notable
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heights of cosmic fear in spite of uneveninterest and a somewhat trivial and affectedcultivation of the Gallic studio atmospheremade popular by Du Maurier’s Trilby. Themost powerful of its tales, perhaps, is “TheYellow Sign”, in which is introduced a silentand terrible churchyard watchman with aface like a puffy graveworm’s. A boy,describing a tussle he has had with thiscreature, shivers and sickens as he relates acertain detail. “Well, sir, it’s Gawd’s truththat when I ’it ’im ’e grabbed me wrists, sir,and when I twisted ’is soft, mushy fist one of’is fingers come off in me ’and.” An artist,who after seeing him has shared withanother a strange dream of a nocturnalhearse, is shocked by the voice with whichthe watchman accosts him. The fellow emitsa muttering sound that fills the head likethick oily smoke from a fatrendering vat oran odour of noisome decay. What hemumbles is merely this: “Have you found theYellow Sign?”
A weirdly hieroglyphed onyx talisman,picked up in the street by the sharer of hisdream, is shortly given the artist; and afterstumbling queerly upon the hellish andforbidden book of horrors the two learn,among other hideous things which no sanemortal should know, that this talisman isindeed the nameless Yellow Sign handeddown from the accursed cult of Hastur—from primordial Carcosa, whereof thevolume treats, and some nightmare memoryof which seems to lurk latent and ominous atthe back of all men’s minds. Soon they hearthe rumbling of the blackplumed hearsedriven by the flabby and corpsefacedwatchman. He enters the nightshroudedhouse in quest of the Yellow Sign, all boltsand bars rotting at his touch. And when thepeople rush in, drawn by a scream that nohuman throat could utter, they find threeforms on the floor—two dead and one dying.One of the dead shapes is far gone in decay.It is the churchyard watchman, and the
doctor exclaims, “That man must have beendead for months.” It is worth observing thatthe author derives most of the names andallusions connected with his eldritch land ofprimal memory from the tales of AmbroseBierce. Other early works of Mr. Chambersdisplaying the outré and macabre elementare The Maker of Moons and In Search of theUnknown. One cannot help regretting that hedid not further develop a vein in which hecould so easily have become a recognisedmaster.
Horror material of authentic force may befound in the work of the New England realistMary E. Wilkins; whose volume of shorttales, The Wind in the RoseBush, contains anumber of noteworthy achievements. In“The Shadows on the Wall” we are shewnwith consummate skill the response of astaid New England household to uncannytragedy; and the sourceless shadow of thepoisoned brother well prepares us for theclimactic moment when the shadow of thesecret murderer, who has killed himself in aneighbouring city, suddenly appears besideit. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in “The YellowWall Paper”, rises to a classic level in subtlydelineating the madness which crawls over awoman dwelling in the hideously paperedroom where a madwoman was onceconfined.
[In “The Dead Valley” the eminent architectand mediaevalist Ralph Adams Cramachieves a memorably potent degree ofvague regional horror through subtleties ofatmosphere and description.]
Still further carrying on our spectraltradition is the gifted and versatilehumourist Irvin S. Cobb, whose work bothearly and recent contains some finely weirdspecimens. “Fishhead”, an earlyachievement, is banefully effective in its
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portrayal of unnatural affinities between ahybrid idiot and the strange fish of anisolated lake, which at the last avenge theirbiped kinsman’s murder. Later work of Mr.Cobb introduces an element of possiblescience, as in the tale of hereditary memorywhere a modern man with a negroid strainutters words in African jungle speech whenrun down by a train under visual and auralcircumstances recalling the maiming of hisblack ancestor by a rhinoceros a centurybefore.
[Extremely high in artistic stature is thenovel The Dark Chamber (1927), by the lateLeonard Cline. This is the tale of a man who—with the characteristic ambition of theGothic or Byronic herovillain—seeks to defyNature and recapture every moment of hispast life through the abnormal stimulation ofmemory. To this end he employs endlessnotes, records, mnemonic objects, andpictures—and finally odours, music, andexotic drugs. At last his ambition goesbeyond his personal life and reaches towardthe black abysses of hereditary memory—even back to prehuman days amidst thesteaming swamps of the Carboniferous age,and to still more unimaginable deeps ofprimal time and entity. He calls for maddermusic and takes stronger drugs, and finallyhis great dog grows oddly afraid of him. Anoxious animal stench encompasses him,and he grows vacantfaced and subhuman.In the end he takes to the woods, howling atnight beneath windows. He is finally foundin a thicket, mangled to death. Beside him isthe mangled corpse of his dog. They havekilled each other. The atmosphere of thisnovel is malevolently potent, much attentionbeing paid to the central figure’s sinisterhome and household.
A less subtle and wellbalanced butnevertheless highly effective creation isHerbert S. Gorman’s novel, The Place Called
Dagon, which relates the dark history of awestern Massachusetts backwater where thedescendants of refugees from the Salemwitchcraft still keep alive the morbid anddegenerate horrors of the Black Sabbat.
Sinister House, by Leland Hall, has touches ofmagnificent atmosphere but is marred by asomewhat mediocre romanticism.
Very notable in their way are some of theweird conceptions of the novelist and shortstory writer Edward Lucas White, most ofwhose themes arise from actual dreams.“The Song of the Sirens” has a very pervasivestrangeness, while such things as“Lukundoo” and “The Snout” rouse darkerapprehensions. Mr. White imparts a verypeculiar quality to his tales—an oblique sortof glamour which has its own distinctive typeof convincingness.]
Of younger Americans, none strikes the noteof cosmic terror so well as the Californiapoet, artist, and fictionist Clark AshtonSmith, whose bizarre writings, drawings,paintings, and stories are the delight of asensitive few. Mr. Smith has for hisbackground a universe of remote andparalysing fright—jungles of poisonous andiridescent blossoms on the moons of Saturn,evil and grotesque temples in Atlantis,Lemuria, and forgotten elder worlds, anddank morasses of spotted deathfungi inspectral countries beyond earth’s rim. Hislongest and most ambitious poem, TheHashishEater, is in pentameter blank verse;and opens up chaotic and incredible vistas ofkaleidoscopic nightmare in the spacesbetween the stars. In sheer daemonicstrangeness and fertility of conception, Mr.Smith is perhaps unexcelled by any otherwriter dead or living. Who else has seen suchgorgeous, luxuriant, and feverishly distortedvisions of infinite spheres and multiple
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dimensions and lived to tell the tale? [Hisshort stories deal powerfully with othergalaxies, worlds, and dimensions, as well aswith strange regions and aeons on the earth.He tells of primal Hyperborea and its blackamorphous god Tsathoggua; of the lostcontinent Zothique, and of the fabulous,vampirecurst land of Averoigne inmediaeval France. Some of Mr. Smith’s bestwork can be found in the brochure entitledThe Double Shadow and Other Fantasies(1933).]
IX. The Weird Tradition in the British Isles
Recent British literature, besides includingthe three or four greatest fantaisistes of thepresent age, has been gratifyingly fertile inthe element of the weird. Rudyard Kiplinghas often approached it; and has, despite theomnipresent mannerisms, handled it withindubitable mastery in such tales as “ThePhantom ’Rickshaw”, “ ‘The Finest Story inthe World’ ”, “The Recrudescence of Imray”,and “The Mark of the Beast”. This latter is ofparticular poignancy; the pictures of thenaked leperpriest who mewed like an otter,of the spots which appeared on the chest ofthe man that priest cursed, of the growingcarnivorousness of the victim and of the fearwhich horses began to display toward him,and of the eventually halfaccomplishedtransformation of that victim into a leopard,being things which no reader is ever likely toforget. The final defeat of the malignantsorcery does not impair the force of the taleor the validity of its mystery.
Lafcadio Hearn, strange, wandering, andexotic, departs still farther from the realm ofthe real; and with the supreme artistry of asensitive poet weaves phantasies impossibleto an author of the solid roastbeef type. HisFantastics, written in America, contains someof the most impressive ghoulishness in allliterature; whilst his Kwaidan, written inJapan, crystallises with matchless skill and
delicacy the eerie lore and whisperedlegends of that richly colourful nation. Stillmore of Hearn’s weird wizardry of languageis shewn in some of his translations from theFrench, especially from Gautier and Flaubert.His version of the latter’s Temptation of St.Anthony is a classic of fevered and riotousimagery clad in the magic of singing words.
Oscar Wilde may likewise be given a placeamongst weird writers, both for certain ofhis exquisite fairy tales, and for his vividPicture of Dorian Gray, in which a marvellousportrait for years assumes the duty of ageingand coarsening instead of its original, whomeanwhile plunges into every excess of viceand crime without the outward loss of youth,beauty, and freshness. There is a sudden andpotent climax when Dorian Gray, at lastbecome a murderer, seeks to destroy thepainting whose changes testify to his moraldegeneracy. He stabs it with a knife, and ahideous cry and crash are heard; but whenthe servants enter they find it in all itspristine loveliness. “Lying on the floor was adead man, in evening dress, with a knife inhis heart. He was withered, wrinkled, andloathsome of visage. It was not till they hadexamined the rings that they recognised whoit was.”
Matthew Phipps Shiel, author of manyweird, grotesque, and adventurous novelsand tales, occasionally attains a high level ofhorrific magic. “Xélucha” is a noxiouslyhideous fragment, but is excelled by Mr.Shiel’s undoubted masterpiece, “The Houseof Sounds”, floridly written in the “yellow’nineties”, and recast with more artisticrestraint in the early twentieth century. Thisstory, in final form, deserves a place amongthe foremost things of its kind. It tells of acreeping horror and menace trickling downthe centuries on a subarctic island off thecoast of Norway; where, amidst the sweep ofdaemon winds and the ceaseless din of
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hellish waves and cataracts, a vengeful deadman built a brazen tower of terror. It isvaguely like, yet infinitely unlike, Poe’s “Fallof the House of Usher”. [In the novel ThePurple Cloud Mr. Shiel describes withtremendous power a curse which came outof the arctic to destroy mankind, and whichfor a time appears to have left but a singleinhabitant on our planet. The sensations ofthis lone survivor as he realises his position,and roams through the corpselittered andtreasurestrown cities of the world as theirabsolute master, are delivered with a skilland artistry falling little short of actualmajesty. Unfortunately the second half of thebook, with its conventionally romanticelement, involves a distinct “letdown”.]
Better known than Shiel is the ingeniousBram Stoker, who created many starklyhorrific conceptions in a series of novelswhose poor technique sadly impairs their neteffect. The Lair of the White Worm, dealingwith a gigantic primitive entity that lurks ina vault beneath an ancient castle, utterlyruins a magnificent idea by a developmentalmost infantile. The Jewel of Seven Stars,touching on a strange Egyptian resurrection,is less crudely written. But best of all is thefamous Dracula, which has become almostthe standard modern exploitation of thefrightful vampire myth. Count Dracula, avampire, dwells in a horrible castle in theCarpathians; but finally migrates to Englandwith the design of populating the countrywith fellow vampires. How an Englishmanfares within Dracula’s stronghold of terrors,and how the dead fiend’s plot for dominationis at last defeated, are elements which uniteto form a tale now justly assigned apermanent place in English letters. Draculaevoked many similar novels of supernaturalhorror, among which the best are perhapsThe Beetle, by Richard Marsh, Brood of theWitchQueen, by “Sax Rohmer” (ArthurSarsfield Ward), and The Door of the Unreal,by Gerald Biss. The latter handles quitedexterously the standard werewolfsuperstition. Much subtler and more artistic,
and told with singular skill through thejuxtaposed narratives of the severalcharacters, is the novel Cold Harbour, byFrancis Brett Young, in which an ancienthouse of strange malignancy is powerfullydelineated. The mocking and wellnighomnipotent fiend Humphrey Furnival holdsechoes of the Manfred Montoni type of earlyGothic “villain”, but is redeemed fromtriteness by many clever individualities. Onlythe slight diffuseness of explanation at theclose, and the somewhat too free use ofdivination as a plot factor, keep this talefrom approaching absolute perfection.
[In the novel Witch Wood John Buchandepicts with tremendous force a survival ofthe evil Sabbat in a lonely district ofScotland. The description of the black forestwith the evil stone, and of the terrible cosmicadumbrations when the horror is finallyextirpated, will repay one for wadingthrough the very gradual action and plethoraof Scottish dialect. Some of Mr. Buchan’sshort stories are also extremely vivid in theirspectral intimations; “The GreenWildebeest”, a tale of African witchcraft,“The Wind in the Portico”, with itsawakening of dead BritannoRoman horrors,and “Skule Skerry”, with its touches of subarctic fright, being especially remarkable.]
Clemence Housman, in the brief novelette“The Werewolf”, attains a high degree ofgruesome tension and achieves to someextent the atmosphere of authentic folklore.[In The Elixir of Life Arthur Ransome attainssome darkly excellent effects despite ageneral naiveté of plot, while H. B. Drake’sThe Shadowy Thing summons up strange andterrible vistas. George Macdonald’s Lilith hasa compelling bizarrerie all its own; the firstand simpler of the two versions beingperhaps the more effective.]
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Deserving of distinguished notice as aforceful craftsman to whom an unseenmystic world is ever a close and vital realityis the poet Walter de la Mare, whosehaunting verse and exquisite prose alike bearconsistent traces of a strange vision reachingdeeply into veiled spheres of beauty andterrible and forbidden dimensions of being.In the novel The Return we see the soul of adead man reach out of its grave of twocenturies and fasten itself upon the flesh ofthe living, so that even the face of the victimbecomes that which had long ago returnedto dust. Of the shorter tales, of which severalvolumes exist, many are unforgettable fortheir command of fear’s and sorcery’s darkestramifications; notably “Seaton’s Aunt”, inwhich there lowers a noxious background ofmalignant vampirism; “The Tree”, whichtells of a frightful vegetable growth in theyard of a starving artist; “Out of the Deep”,wherein we are given leave to imagine whatthing answered the summons of a dyingwastrel in a dark lonely house when hepulled a longfeared bellcord in the atticchamber of his dreadhaunted boyhood; [“ARecluse”, which hints at what sent a chanceguest flying from a house in the night;] “Mr.Kempe”, which shews us a mad clericalhermit in quest of the human soul, dwellingin a frightful seacliff region beside anarchaic abandoned chapel; and “AllHallows”, a glimpse of daemoniac forcesbesieging a lonely mediaeval church andmiraculously restoring the rotting masonry.De la Mare does not make fear the sole oreven the dominant element of most of histales, being apparently more interested inthe subtleties of character involved.Occasionally he sinks to sheer whimsicalphantasy of the Barrie order. Still, he isamong the very few to whom unreality is avivid, living presence; and as such he is ableto put into his occasional fearstudies a keenpotency which only a rare master canachieve. His poem “The Listeners” restoresthe Gothic shudder to modern verse.
The weird short story has fared well of late,an important contributor being the versatileE. F. Benson, whose “The Man Who WentToo Far” breathes whisperingly of a house atthe edge of a dark wood, and of Pan’s hoofmark on the breast of a dead man. Mr.Benson’s volume, Visible and Invisible,contains several stories of singular power;notably “Negotium Perambulans”, whoseunfolding reveals an abnormal monster froman ancient ecclesiastical panel whichperforms an act of miraculous vengeance ina lonely village on the Cornish coast, and“The HorrorHorn”, through which lopes aterrible halfhuman survival dwelling onunvisited Alpine peaks. [“The Face”, inanother collection, is lethally potent in itsrelentless aura of doom. H. R. Wakefield, inhis collections They Return at Evening andOthers Who Return, manages now and thento achieve great heights of horror despite avitiating air of sophistication. The mostnotable stories are “The Red Lodge” with itsslimy aqueous evil, “‘He Cometh and HePasseth By’”, “‘And He Shall Sing . . .’”, “TheCairn”, “‘Look Up There!’”, “Blind Man’sBuff”, and that bit of lurking millennialhorror, “The Seventeenth Hole atDuncaster”. Mention has been made of theweird work of H. G. Wells and A. ConanDoyle. The former, in “The Ghost of Fear”,reaches a very high level; while all the itemsin Thirty Strange Stories have strong fantasticimplications. Doyle now and then struck apowerfully spectral note, as in “The Captainof the ‘PoleStar’ ”, a tale of arcticghostliness, and “Lot No. 249”, wherein thereanimated mummy theme is used withmore than ordinary skill. Hugh Walpole, ofthe same family as the founder of Gothicfiction, has sometimes approached thebizarre with much success; his short story“Mrs. Lunt” carrying a very poignantshudder.] John Metcalfe, in the collectionpublished as The Smoking Leg, attains nowand then a rare pitch of potency; the taleentitled “The Bad Lands” containinggraduations of horror that strongly savour of
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genius. More whimsical and inclined towardthe amiable and innocuous phantasy of Sir J.M. Barrie are the short tales of E. M. Forster,grouped under the title of The CelestialOmnibus. Of these only one, dealing with aglimpse of Pan and his aura of fright, may besaid to hold the true element of cosmichorror. [Mrs. H. D. Everett, though adheringto very old and conventional models,occasionally reaches singular heights ofspiritual terror in her collection of shortstories. L. P. Hartley is notable for hisincisive and extremely ghastly tale, “A Visitorfrom Down Under”.] May Sinclair’s UncannyStories contain more of traditional occultismthan of that creative treatment of fear whichmarks mastery in this field, and are inclinedto lay more stress on human emotions andpsychological delving than upon the starkphenomena of a cosmos utterly unreal. Itmay be well to remark here that occultbelievers are probably less effective thanmaterialists in delineating the spectral andthe fantastic, since to them the phantomworld is so commonplace a reality that theytend to refer to it with less awe, remoteness,and impressiveness than do those who see init an absolute and stupendous violation ofthe natural order.
[Of rather uneven stylistic quality, but vastoccasional power in its suggestion of lurkingworlds and beings behind the ordinarysurface of life, is the work of William HopeHodgson, known today far less than itdeserves to be. Despite a tendency towardconventionally sentimental conceptions ofthe universe, and of man’s relation to it andto his fellows, Mr. Hodgson is perhapssecond only to Algernon Blackwood in hisserious treatment of unreality. Few can equalhim in adumbrating the nearness ofnameless forces and monstrous besiegingentities through casual hints andinsignificant details, or in conveying feelingsof the spectral and the abnormal inconnexion with regions or buildings.
In The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1907) weare shewn a variety of malign marvels andaccursed unknown lands as encountered bythe survivors of a sunken ship. The broodingmenace in the earlier parts of the book isimpossible to surpass, though a letdown inthe direction of ordinary romance andadventure occurs toward the end. Aninaccurate and pseudoromantic attempt toreproduce eighteenthcentury prose detractsfrom the general effect, but the reallyprofound nautical erudition everywheredisplayed is a compensating factor.
The House on the Borderland (1908)—perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hodgson’sworks—tells of a lonely and evilly regardedhouse in Ireland which forms a focus forhideous otherworld forces and sustains asiege by blasphemous hybrid anomalies froma hidden abyss below. The wanderings of thenarrator’s spirit through limitless lightyearsof cosmic space and kalpas of eternity, andits witnessing of the solar system’s finaldestruction, constitute something almostunique in standard literature. Andeverywhere there is manifest the author’spower to suggest vague, ambushed horrorsin natural scenery. But for a few touches ofcommonplace sentimentality this bookwould be a classic of the first water.
The Ghost Pirates (1909), regarded by Mr.Hodgson as rounding out a trilogy with thetwo previously mentioned works, is apowerful account of a doomed and hauntedship on its last voyage, and of the terribleseadevils (of quasihuman aspect, andperhaps the spirits of bygone buccaneers)that besiege it and finally drag it down to anunknown fate. With its command ofmaritime knowledge, and its clever selectionof hints and incidents suggestive of latenthorrors in Nature, this book at times reaches
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enviable peaks of power.
The Night Land (1912) is a longextended(583 pp.) tale of the earth’s infinitely remotefuture—billions of billions of years ahead,after the death of the sun. It is told in arather clumsy fashion, as the dreams of aman in the seventeenth century, whose mindmerges with its own future incarnation; andis seriously marred by painful verboseness,repetitiousness, artificial and nauseouslysticky romantic sentimentality, and anattempt at archaic language even moregrotesque and absurd than that in “GlenCarrig”.
Allowing for all its faults, it is yet one of themost potent pieces of macabre imaginationever written. The picture of a nightblack,dead planet, with the remains of the humanrace concentrated in a stupendously vastmetal pyramid and besieged by monstrous,hybrid, and altogether unknown forces ofthe darkness, is something that no readercan ever forget. Shapes and entities of analtogether nonhuman and inconceivablesort—the prowlers of the black, manforsaken, and unexplored world outside thepyramid—are suggested and partly describedwith ineffable potency; while the nightbound landscape with its chasms and slopesand dying volcanism takes on an almostsentient terror beneath the author’s touch.
Midway in the book the central figureventures outside the pyramid on a questthrough deathhaunted realms untrod byman for millions of years—and in his slow,minutely described, daybyday progressover unthinkable leagues of immemorialblackness there is a sense of cosmic alienage,breathless mystery, and terrified expectancyunrivalled in the whole range of literature.The last quarter of the book drags woefully,but fails to spoil the tremendous power of
the whole.
Mr. Hodgson’s later volume, Carnacki, theGhostFinder, consists of several longish shortstories published many years before inmagazines. In quality it falls conspicuouslybelow the level of the other books. We herefind a more or less conventional stock figureof the “infallible detective” type—theprogeny of M. Dupin and Sherlock Holmes,and the close kin of Algernon Blackwood’sJohn Silence—moving through scenes andevents badly marred by an atmosphere ofprofessional “occultism”. A few of theepisodes, however, are of undeniable power;and afford glimpses of the peculiar geniuscharacteristic of the author.]
Naturally it is impossible in a brief sketch totrace out all the classic modern uses of theterror element. The ingredient must ofnecessity enter into all work both prose andverse treating broadly of life; and we aretherefore not surprised to find a share insuch writers as the poet Browning, whose“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came ” isinstinct with hideous menace, or the novelistJoseph Conrad, who often wrote of the darksecrets within the sea, and of the daemoniacdriving power of Fate as influencing the livesof lonely and maniacally resolute men. Itstrail is one of infinite ramifications; but wemust here confine ourselves to itsappearance in a relatively unmixed state,where it determines and dominates the workof art containing it.
Somewhat separate from the main Britishstream is that current of weirdness in Irishliterature which came to the fore in theCeltic Renaissance of the later nineteenthand early twentieth centuries. Ghost andfairy lore have always been of greatprominence in Ireland, and for over anhundred years have been recorded by a line
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of such faithful transcribers and translatorsas William Carleton, T. Crofton Croker, LadyWilde—mother of Oscar Wilde—DouglasHyde, and W. B. Yeats. Brought to notice bythe modern movement, this body of mythhas been carefully collected and studied; andits salient features reproduced in the work oflater figures like Yeats, J. M. Synge, “A. E.”,Lady Gregory, Padraic Colum, JamesStephens, and their colleagues.
Whilst on the whole more whimsicallyfantastic than terrible, such folklore and itsconsciously artistic counterparts containmuch that falls truly within the domain ofcosmic horror. Tales of burials in sunkenchurches beneath haunted lakes, accounts ofdeathheralding banshees and sinisterchangelings, ballads of spectres and “theunholy creatures of the raths”—all thesehave their poignant and definite shivers, andmark a strong and distinctive element inweird literature. Despite homelygrotesqueness and absolute naiveté, there isgenuine nightmare in the class of narrativerepresented by the yarn of Teig O’Kane, whoin punishment for his wild life was ridden allnight by a hideous corpse that demandedburial and drove him from churchyard tochurchyard as the dead rose up loathsomelyin each one and refused to accommodate thenewcomer with a berth. Yeats, undoubtedlythe greatest figure of the Irish revival if notthe greatest of all living poets, hasaccomplished notable things both in originalwork and in the codification of old legends.
X. The Modern Masters
The best horrortales of today, profiting bythe long evolution of the type, possess anaturalness, convincingness, artisticsmoothness, and skilful intensity of appealquite beyond comparison with anything inthe Gothic work of a century or more ago.Technique, craftsmanship, experience, andpsychological knowledge have advanced
tremendously with the passing years, so thatmuch of the older work seems naive andartificial; redeemed, when redeemed at all,only by a genius which conquers heavylimitations. The tone of jaunty and inflatedromance, full of false motivation andinvesting every conceivable event with acounterfeit significance and carelesslyinclusive glamour, is now confined to lighterand more whimsical phases of supernaturalwriting. Serious weird stories are eithermade realistically intense by closeconsistency and perfect fidelity to Natureexcept in the one supernatural directionwhich the author allows himself, or else castaltogether in the realm of phantasy, withatmosphere cunningly adapted to thevisualisation of a delicately exotic world ofunreality beyond space and time, in whichalmost anything may happen if it but happenin true accord with certain types ofimagination and illusion normal to thesensitive human brain. This, at least, is thedominant tendency; though of course manygreat contemporary writers slip occasionallyinto some of the flashy postures of immatureromanticism, or into bits of the equallyempty and absurd jargon of pseudoscientific“occultism”, now at one of its periodic hightides.
Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to itsmost artistic pitch, few if any can hope toequal the versatile Arthur Machen; author ofsome dozen tales long and short, in whichthe elements of hidden horror and broodingfright attain an almost incomparablesubstance and realistic acuteness. Mr.Machen, a general man of letters and masterof an exquisitely lyrical and expressive prosestyle, has perhaps put more conscious effortinto his picaresque Chronicle of Clemendy, hisrefreshing essays, his vivid autobiographicalvolumes, his fresh and spirited translations,and above all his memorable epic of thesensitive aesthetic mind, The Hill of Dreams,in which the youthful hero responds to themagic of that ancient Welsh environment
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which is the author’s own, and lives a dreamlife in the Roman city of Isca Silurum, nowshrunk to the relicstrown village ofCaerleononUsk. But the fact remains thathis powerful horrormaterial of the ’ninetiesand earlier nineteenhundreds stands alonein its class, and marks a distinct epoch in thehistory of this literary form.
Mr. Machen, with an impressionable Celticheritage linked to keen youthful memories ofthe wild domed hills, archaic forests, andcryptical Roman ruins of the Gwentcountryside, has developed an imaginativelife of rare beauty, intensity, and historicbackground. He has absorbed the mediaevalmystery of dark woods and ancient customs,and is a champion of the Middle Ages in allthings—including the Catholic faith. He hasyielded, likewise, to the spell of theBritannoRoman life which once surged overhis native region; and finds strange magic inthe fortified camps, tessellated pavements,fragments of statues, and kindred thingswhich tell of the day when classicism reignedand Latin was the language of the country. Ayoung American poet, Frank Belknap Long,Jun., has well summarised this dreamer’srich endowments and wizardry of expressionin the sonnet “On Reading Arthur Machen”:
“There is a glory in the autumnwood;The ancient lanes of Englandwind and climbPast wizard oaks and gorse andtangled thymeTo where a fort of mighty empirestood:There is a glamour in the autumnsky;The reddened clouds are writhingin the glowOf some great fire, and there areglints belowOf tawny yellow where theembers die.
I wait, for he will show me, clearand cold,Highrais’d in splendour, sharpagainst the North,The Roman eagles, and thro’ mistsof goldThe marching legions as theyissue forth:I wait, for I would share with himagainThe ancient wisdom, and theancient pain.”
Of Mr. Machen’s horrortales the mostfamous is perhaps “The Great God Pan”(1894), which tells of a singular and terribleexperiment and its consequences. A youngwoman, through surgery of the braincells, ismade to see the vast and monstrous deity ofNature, and becomes an idiot inconsequence, dying less than a year later.Years afterward a strange, ominous, andforeignlooking child named Helen Vaughanis placed to board with a family in ruralWales, and haunts the woods inunaccountable fashion. A little boy is thrownout of his mind at sight of someone orsomething he spies with her, and a younggirl comes to a terrible end in similarfashion. All this mystery is strangelyinterwoven with the Roman rural deities ofthe place, as sculptured in antiquefragments. After another lapse of years, awoman of strangely exotic beauty appears insociety, drives her husband to horror anddeath, causes an artist to paint unthinkablepaintings of Witches’ Sabbaths, creates anepidemic of suicide among the men of heracquaintance, and is finally discovered to bea frequenter of the lowest dens of vice inLondon, where even the most callousdegenerates are shocked at her enormities.Through the clever comparing of notes onthe part of those who have had word of herat various stages of her career, this woman isdiscovered to be the girl Helen Vaughan;who is the child—by no mortal father—of
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the young woman on whom the brainexperiment was made. She is a daughter ofhideous Pan himself, and at the last is put todeath amidst horrible transmutations of forminvolving changes of sex and a descent to themost primal manifestations of the lifeprinciple.
But the charm of the tale is in the telling. Noone could begin to describe the cumulativesuspense and ultimate horror with whichevery paragraph abounds without followingfully the precise order in which Mr. Machenunfolds his gradual hints and revelations.Melodrama is undeniably present, andcoincidence is stretched to a length whichappears absurd upon analysis; but in themalign witchery of the tale as a whole thesetrifles are forgotten, and the sensitive readerreaches the end with only an appreciativeshudder and a tendency to repeat the wordsof one of the characters: “It is too incredible,too monstrous; such things can never be inthis quiet world. . . . Why, man, if such acase were possible, our earth would be anightmare.”
Less famous and less complex in plot than“The Great God Pan”, but definitely finer inatmosphere and general artistic value, is thecurious and dimly disquieting chroniclecalled “The White People”, whose centralportion purports to be the diary or notes of alittle girl whose nurse has introduced her tosome of the forbidden magic and soulblasting traditions of the noxious witchcult—the cult whose whispered lore was handeddown long lines of peasantry throughoutWestern Europe, and whose memberssometimes stole forth at night, one by one,to meet in black woods and lonely places forthe revolting orgies of the Witches’ Sabbath.Mr. Machen’s narrative, a triumph of skilfulselectiveness and restraint, accumulatesenormous power as it flows on in a stream ofinnocent childish prattle; introducingallusions to strange “nymphs”, “Dôls”,“voolas”, “White, Green, and Scarlet
Ceremonies”, “Aklo letters”, “Chianlanguage”, “Mao games”, and the like. Therites learned by the nurse from her witchgrandmother are taught to the child by thetime she is three years old, and her artlessaccounts of the dangerous secret revelationspossess a lurking terror generously mixedwith pathos. Evil charms well known toanthropologists are described with juvenilenaiveté, and finally there comes a winterafternoon journey into the old Welsh hills,performed under an imaginative spell whichlends to the wild scenery an addedweirdness, strangeness, and suggestion ofgrotesque sentience. The details of thisjourney are given with marvellous vividness,and form to the keen critic a masterpiece offantastic writing, with almost unlimitedpower in the intimation of potenthideousness and cosmic aberration. Atlength the child—whose age is then thirteen—comes upon a cryptic and banefullybeautiful thing in the midst of a dark andinaccessible wood. She flees in awe, but ispermanently altered and repeatedly revisitsthe wood. In the end horror overtakes her ina manner deftly prefigured by an anecdote inthe prologue, but she poisons herself in time.Like the mother of Helen Vaughan in TheGreat God Pan, she has seen that frightfuldeity. She is discovered dead in the darkwood beside the cryptic thing she found; andthat thing—a whitely luminous statue ofRoman workmanship about which diremediaeval rumours had clustered—isaffrightedly hammered into dust by thesearchers.
In the episodic novel of The Three Impostors,a work whose merit as a whole is somewhatmarred by an imitation of the jauntyStevenson manner, occur certain tales whichperhaps represent the highwater mark ofMachen’s skill as a terrorweaver. Here wefind in its most artistic form a favouriteweird conception of the author’s; the notionthat beneath the mounds and rocks of thewild Welsh hills dwell subterraneously that
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squat primitive race whose vestiges gave riseto our common folk legends of fairies, elves,and the “little people”, and whose acts areeven now responsible for certainunexplained disappearances, and occasionalsubstitutions of strange dark “changelings”for normal infants. This theme receives itsfinest treatment in the episode entitled “TheNovel of the Black Seal”; where a professor,having discovered a singular identitybetween certain characters scrawled onWelsh limestone rocks and those existing ina prehistoric black seal from Babylon, setsout on a course of discovery which leads himto unknown and terrible things. A queerpassage in the ancient geographer Solinus, aseries of mysterious disappearances in thelonely reaches of Wales, a strange idiot sonborn to a rural mother after a fright in whichher inmost faculties were shaken; all thesethings suggest to the professor a hideousconnexion and a condition revolting to anyfriend and respecter of the human race. Hehires the idiot boy, who jabbers strangely attimes in a repulsive hissing voice, and issubject to odd epileptic seizures. Once, aftersuch a seizure in the professor’s study bynight, disquieting odours and evidences ofunnatural presences are found; and soonafter that the professor leaves a bulkydocument and goes into the weird hills withfeverish expectancy and strange terror in hisheart. He never returns, but beside afantastic stone in the wild country are foundhis watch, money, and ring, done up withcatgut in a parchment bearing the sameterrible characters as those on the blackBabylonish seal and the rock in the Welshmountains.
The bulky document explains enough tobring up the most hideous vistas. ProfessorGregg, from the massed evidence presentedby the Welsh disappearances, the rockinscription, the accounts of ancientgeographers, and the black seal, has decidedthat a frightful race of dark primal beings ofimmemorial antiquity and wide former
diffusion still dwells beneath the hills ofunfrequented Wales. Further research hasunriddled the message of the black seal, andproved that the idiot boy, a son of somefather more terrible than mankind, is theheir of monstrous memories andpossibilities. That strange night in the studythe professor invoked ‘the awfultransmutation of the hills’ by the aid of theblack seal, and aroused in the hybrid idiotthe horrors of his shocking paternity. He“saw his body swell and become distendedas a bladder, while the face blackened. . . .”And then the supreme effects of theinvocation appeared, and Professor Greggknew the stark frenzy of cosmic panic in itsdarkest form. He knew the abysmal gulfs ofabnormality that he had opened, and wentforth into the wild hills prepared andresigned. He would meet the unthinkable‘Little People’—and his document ends witha rational observation: “If I unhappily do notreturn from my journey, there is no need toconjure up here a picture of the awfulness ofmy fate.”
Also in The Three Impostors is the “Novel ofthe White Powder”, which approaches theabsolute culmination of loathsome fright.Francis Leicester, a young law studentnervously worn out by seclusion andoverwork, has a prescription filled by an oldapothecary none too careful about the stateof his drugs. The substance, it later turnsout, is an unusual salt which time andvarying temperature have accidentallychanged to something very strange andterrible; nothing less, in short, than themediaeval Vinum Sabbati, whoseconsumption at the horrible orgies of theWitches’ Sabbath gave rise to shockingtransformations and—if injudiciously used—to unutterable consequences. Innocentlyenough, the youth regularly imbibes thepowder in a glass of water after meals; andat first seems substantially benefited.Gradually, however, his improved spiritstake the form of dissipation; he is absent
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from home a great deal, and appears to haveundergone a repellent psychological change.One day an odd livid spot appears on hisright hand, and he afterward returns to hisseclusion; finally keeping himself shut withinhis room and admitting none of thehousehold. The doctor calls for an interview,and departs in a palsy of horror, saying thathe can do no more in that house. Two weekslater the patient’s sister, walking outside,sees a monstrous thing at the sickroomwindow; and servants report that food left atthe locked door is no longer touched.Summons at the door bring only a sound ofshuffling and a demand in a thick gurglingvoice to be let alone. At last an awfulhappening is reported by a shudderinghousemaid. The ceiling of the room belowLeicester’s is stained with a hideous blackfluid, and a pool of viscid abomination hasdripped to the bed beneath. Dr. Haberden,now persuaded to return to the house,breaks down the young man’s door andstrikes again and again with an iron bar atthe blasphemous semiliving thing he findsthere. It is “a dark and putrid mass, seethingwith corruption and hideous rottenness,neither liquid nor solid, but melting andchanging”. Burning points like eyes shine outof its midst, and before it is despatched ittries to lift what might have been an arm.Soon afterward the physician, unable toendure the memory of what he has beheld,dies at sea while bound for a new life inAmerica.
Mr. Machen returns to the daemoniac “LittlePeople” in “The Red Hand” and “The ShiningPyramid”; and in The Terror, a wartimestory, he treats with very potent mystery theeffect of man’s modern repudiation ofspirituality on the beasts of the world, whichare thus led to question his supremacy andto unite for his extermination. Of utmostdelicacy, and passing from mere horror intotrue mysticism, is The Great Return, a storyof the Graal, also a product of the warperiod. Too well known to need description
here is the tale of “The Bowmen”; which,taken for authentic narration, gave rise tothe widespread legend of the “Angels ofMons”—ghosts of the old English archers ofCrécy and Agincourt who fought in 1914beside the hardpressed ranks of England’sglorious “Old Contemptibles”.
Less intense than Mr. Machen in delineatingthe extremes of stark fear, yet infinitely moreclosely wedded to the idea of an unrealworld constantly pressing upon ours, is theinspired and prolific Algernon Blackwood,amidst whose voluminous and uneven workmay be found some of the finest spectralliterature of this or any age. Of the quality ofMr. Blackwood’s genius there can be nodispute; for no one has even approached theskill, seriousness, and minute fidelity withwhich he records the overtones ofstrangeness in ordinary things andexperiences, or the preternatural insight withwhich he builds up detail by detail thecomplete sensations and perceptions leadingfrom reality into supernormal life or vision.Without notable command of the poeticwitchery of mere words, he is the oneabsolute and unquestioned master of weirdatmosphere; and can evoke what amountsalmost to a story from a simple fragment ofhumourless psychological description. Aboveall others he understands how fully somesensitive minds dwell forever on theborderland of dream, and how relativelyslight is the distinction betwixt those imagesformed from actual objects and those excitedby the play of the imagination.
Mr. Blackwood’s lesser work is marred byseveral defects such as ethical didacticism,occasional insipid whimsicality, the flatnessof benignant supernaturalism, and a too freeuse of the trade jargon of modern“occultism”. A fault of his more seriousefforts is that diffuseness and longwindedness which results from anexcessively elaborate attempt, under the
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handicap of a somewhat bald andjournalistic style devoid of intrinsic magic,colour, and vitality, to visualise precisesensations and nuances of uncannysuggestion. But in spite of all this, the majorproducts of Mr. Blackwood attain agenuinely classic level, and evoke as doesnothing else in literature an awed andconvinced sense of the immanence of strangespiritual spheres or entities.
The wellnigh endless array of Mr.Blackwood’s fiction includes both novels andshorter tales, the latter sometimesindependent and sometimes arrayed inseries. Foremost of all must be reckoned“The Willows”, in which the namelesspresences on a desolate Danube island arehorribly felt and recognised by a pair of idlevoyagers. Here art and restraint in narrativereach their very highest development, and animpression of lasting poignancy is producedwithout a single strained passage or a singlefalse note. Another amazingly potent thoughless artistically finished tale is “TheWendigo”, where we are confronted byhorrible evidences of a vast forest daemonabout which North Woods lumbermenwhisper at evening. The manner in whichcertain footprints tell certain unbelievablethings is really a marked triumph incraftsmanship. In “An Episode in a LodgingHouse” we behold frightful presencessummoned out of black space by a sorcerer,and “The Listener” tells of the awful psychicresiduum creeping about an old house wherea leper died. In the volume titled IncredibleAdventures occur some of the finest taleswhich the author has yet produced, leadingthe fancy to wild rites on nocturnal hills, tosecret and terrible aspects lurking behindstolid scenes, and to unimaginable vaults ofmystery below the sands and pyramids ofEgypt; all with a serious finesse and delicacythat convince where a cruder or lightertreatment would merely amuse. Some ofthese accounts are hardly stories at all, butrather studies in elusive impressions and
halfremembered snatches of dream. Plot iseverywhere negligible, and atmospherereigns untrammelled.
John Silence—Physician Extraordinary is abook of five related tales, through which asingle character runs his triumphant course.Marred only by traces of the popular andconventional detectivestory atmosphere—for Dr. Silence is one of those benevolentgeniuses who employ their remarkablepowers to aid worthy fellowmen in difficulty—these narratives contain some of theauthor’s best work, and produce an illusionat once emphatic and lasting. The openingtale, “A Psychical Invasion”, relates whatbefell a sensitive author in a house once thescene of dark deeds, and how a legion offiends was exorcised. “Ancient Sorceries”,perhaps the finest tale in the book, gives analmost hypnotically vivid account of an oldFrench town where once the unholy Sabbathwas kept by all the people in the form ofcats. In “The Nemesis of Fire” a hideouselemental is evoked by newspilt blood,whilst “Secret Worship” tells of a Germanschool where Satanism held sway, andwhere long afterward an evil aura remained.“The Camp of the Dog” is a werewolf tale,but is weakened by moralisation andprofessional “occultism”.
Too subtle, perhaps, for definiteclassification as horrortales, yet possiblymore truly artistic in an absolute sense, aresuch delicate phantasies as Jimbo or TheCentaur. Mr. Blackwood achieves in thesenovels a close and palpitant approach to theinmost substance of dream, and worksenormous havock with the conventionalbarriers between reality and imagination.
Unexcelled in the sorcery of crystallinesinging prose, and supreme in the creation ofa gorgeous and languorous world ofiridescently exotic vision, is Edward JohnMoreton Drax Plunkett, Eighteenth Baron
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Dunsany, whose tales and short plays forman almost unique element in our literature.Inventor of a new mythology and weaver ofsurprising folklore, Lord Dunsany standsdedicated to a strange world of fantasticbeauty, and pledged to eternal warfareagainst the coarseness and ugliness ofdiurnal reality. His point of view is the mosttruly cosmic of any held in the literature ofany period. As sensitive as Poe to dramaticvalues and the significance of isolated wordsand details, and far better equippedrhetorically through a simple lyric stylebased on the prose of the King James Bible,this author draws with tremendouseffectiveness on nearly every body of mythand legend within the circle of Europeanculture; producing a composite or eclecticcycle of phantasy in which Eastern colour,Hellenic form, Teutonic sombreness, andCeltic wistfulness are so superbly blendedthat each sustains and supplements the restwithout sacrifice of perfect congruity andhomogeneity. In most cases Dunsany’s landsare fabulous—“beyond the East”, or “at theedge of the world”. His system of originalpersonal and place names, with roots drawnfrom classical, Oriental, and other sources, isa marvel of versatile inventiveness andpoetic discrimination; as one may see fromsuch specimens as “Argim n s”,ē ē“Bethmoora”, “Poltarnees”, “Camorak”,“Illuriel”, or “Sardathrion”.
Beauty rather than terror is the keynote ofDunsany’s work. He loves the vivid green ofjade and of copper domes, and the delicateflush of sunset on the ivory minarets ofimpossible dreamcities. Humour and irony,too, are often present to impart a gentlecynicism and modify what might otherwisepossess a naive intensity. Nevertheless, as isinevitable in a master of triumphantunreality, there are occasional touches ofcosmic fright which come well within theauthentic tradition. Dunsany loves to hintslyly and adroitly of monstrous things andincredible dooms, as one hints in a fairy tale.
In The Book of Wonder we read of Hlohlo,the gigantic spideridol which does notalways stay at home; of what the Sphinxfeared in the forest; of Slith, the thief whojumps over the edge of the world afterseeing a certain light lit and knowing who litit; of the anthropophagous Gibbelins, whoinhabit an evil tower and guard a treasure;of the Gnoles, who live in the forest andfrom whom it is not well to steal; of the Cityof Never, and the eyes that watch in theUnder Pits; and of kindred things ofdarkness. A Dreamer’s Tales tells of themystery that sent forth all men fromBethmoora in the desert; of the vast gate ofPerdóndaris, that was carved from a singlepiece of ivory; and of the voyage of poor oldBill, whose captain cursed the crew and paidcalls on nastylooking isles newrisen fromthe sea, with low thatched cottages havingevil, obscure windows.
Many of Dunsany’s short plays are repletewith spectral fear. In The Gods of theMountain seven beggars impersonate theseven green idols on a distant hill, and enjoyease and honour in a city of worshippersuntil they hear that the real idols are missingfrom their wonted seats. A very ungainly sightin the dusk is reported to them—“rockshould not walk in the evening”—and at last,as they sit awaiting the arrival of a troop ofdancers, they note that the approachingfootsteps are heavier than those of gooddancers ought to be. Then things ensue, andin the end the presumptuous blasphemersare turned to green jade statues by the verywalking statues whose sanctity theyoutraged. But mere plot is the very leastmerit of this marvellously effective play. Theincidents and developments are those of asupreme master, so that the whole forms oneof the most important contributions of thepresent age not only to drama, but toliterature in general. A Night at an Inn tellsof four thieves who have stolen the emeraldeye of Klesh, a monstrous Hindoo god. Theylure to their room and succeed in slaying the
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three priestly avengers who are on theirtrack, but in the night Klesh comes gropinglyfor his eye; and having gained it anddeparted, calls each of the despoilers outinto the darkness for an unnamedpunishment. In The Laughter of the Godsthere is a doomed city at the jungle’s edge,and a ghostly lutanist heard only by thoseabout to die (cf. Alice’s spectral harpsichordin Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables);whilst The Queen’s Enemies retells theanecdote of Herodotus in which a vengefulprincess invites her foes to a subterraneanbanquet and lets in the Nile to drown them.
But no amount of mere description canconvey more than a fraction of LordDunsany’s pervasive charm. His prismaticcities and unheardof rites are touched witha sureness which only mastery can engender,and we thrill with a sense of actualparticipation in his secret mysteries. To thetruly imaginative he is a talisman and a keyunlocking rich storehouses of dream andfragmentary memory; so that we may thinkof him not only as a poet, but as one whomakes each reader a poet as well.
At the opposite pole of genius from LordDunsany, and gifted with an almost diabolicpower of calling horror by gentle steps fromthe midst of prosaic daily life, is the scholarlyMontague Rhodes James, Provost of EtonCollege, antiquary of note, and recognisedauthority on mediaeval manuscripts andcathedral history. Dr. James, long fond oftelling spectral tales at Christmastide, hasbecome by slow degrees a literary weirdfictionist of the very first rank; and hasdeveloped a distinctive style and methodlikely to serve as models for an enduring lineof disciples.
The art of Dr. James is by no meanshaphazard, and in the preface to one of hiscollections he has formulated three verysound rules for macabre composition. A
ghost story, he believes, should have afamiliar setting in the modern period, inorder to approach closely the reader’s sphereof experience. Its spectral phenomena,moreover, should be malevolent rather thanbeneficent; since fear is the emotionprimarily to be excited. And finally, thetechnical patois of “occultism” or pseudoscience ought carefully to be avoided; lestthe charm of casual verisimilitude besmothered in unconvincing pedantry.
Dr. James, practicing what he preaches,approaches his themes in a light and oftenconversational way. Creating the illusion ofeveryday events, he introduces his abnormalphenomena cautiously and gradually;relieved at every turn by touches of homelyand prosaic detail, and sometimes spicedwith a snatch or two of antiquarianscholarship. Conscious of the close relationbetween present weirdness and accumulatedtradition, he generally provides remotehistorical antecedents for his incidents; thusbeing able to utilise very aptly his exhaustiveknowledge of the past, and his ready andconvincing command of archaic diction andcolouring. A favourite scene for a James taleis some centuried cathedral, which theauthor can describe with all the familiarminuteness of a specialist in that field.
Sly humorous vignettes and bits of lifelikegenre portraiture and characterisation areoften to be found in Dr. James’s narratives,and serve in his skilled hands to augment thegeneral effect rather than to spoil it, as thesame qualities would tend to do with a lessercraftsman. In inventing a new type of ghost,he has departed considerably from theconventional Gothic tradition; for where theolder stock ghosts were pale and stately, andapprehended chiefly through the sense ofsight, the average James ghost is lean,dwarfish, and hairy—a sluggish, hellishnightabomination midway betwixt beastand man—and usually touched before it isseen. Sometimes the spectre is of still more
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eccentric composition; a roll of flannel withspidery eyes, or an invisible entity whichmoulds itself in bedding and shews a face ofcrumpled linen. Dr. James has, it is clear, anintelligent and scientific knowledge ofhuman nerves and feelings; and knows justhow to apportion statement, imagery, andsubtle suggestions in order to secure the bestresults with his readers. He is an artist inincident and arrangement rather than inatmosphere, and reaches the emotions moreoften through the intellect than directly. Thismethod, of course, with its occasionalabsences of sharp climax, has its drawbacksas well as its advantages; and many will missthe thorough atmospheric tension whichwriters like Machen are careful to build upwith words and scenes. But only a few of thetales are open to the charge of tameness.Generally the laconic unfolding of abnormalevents in adroit order is amply sufficient toproduce the desired effect of cumulativehorror.
The short stories of Dr. James are containedin four small collections, entitled respectivelyGhostStories of an Antiquary, More GhostStories of an Antiquary, A Thin Ghost andOthers, and A Warning to the Curious. Thereis also a delightful juvenile phantasy, TheFive Jars, which has its spectraladumbrations. Amidst this wealth of materialit is hard to select a favourite or especiallytypical tale, though each reader will nodoubt have such preferences as histemperament may determine.
“Count Magnus” is assuredly one of the best,forming as it does a veritable Golconda ofsuspense and suggestion. Mr. Wraxall is anEnglish traveller of the middle nineteenthcentury, sojourning in Sweden to securematerial for a book. Becoming interested inthe ancient family of De la Gardie, near thevillage of Råbäck, he studies its records; andfinds particular fascination in the builder ofthe existing manorhouse, one CountMagnus, of whom strange and terrible things
are whispered. The Count, who flourishedearly in the seventeenth century, was a sternlandlord, and famous for his severity towardpoachers and delinquent tenants. His cruelpunishments were bywords, and there weredark rumours of influences which evensurvived his interment in the greatmausoleum he built near the church—as inthe case of the two peasants who hunted onhis preserves one night a century after hisdeath. There were hideous screams in thewoods, and near the tomb of Count Magnusan unnatural laugh and the clang of a greatdoor. Next morning the priest found the twomen; one a maniac, and the other dead, withthe flesh of his face sucked from the bones.
Mr. Wraxall hears all these tales, andstumbles on more guarded references to aBlack Pilgrimage once taken by the Count; apilgrimage to Chorazin in Palestine, one ofthe cities denounced by Our Lord in theScriptures, and in which old priests say thatAntichrist is to be born. No one dares to hintjust what that Black Pilgrimage was, or whatstrange being or thing the Count broughtback as a companion. Meanwhile Mr.Wraxall is increasingly anxious to explorethe mausoleum of Count Magnus, and finallysecures permission to do so, in the companyof a deacon. He finds several monumentsand three copper sarcophagi, one of which isthe Count’s. Round the edge of this latter areseveral bands of engraved scenes, includinga singular and hideous delineation of apursuit—the pursuit of a frantic manthrough a forest by a squat muffled figurewith a devilfish’s tentacle, directed by a tallcloaked man on a neighbouring hillock. Thesarcophagus has three massive steelpadlocks, one of which is lying open on thefloor, reminding the traveller of a metallicclash he heard the day before when passingthe mausoleum and wishing idly that hemight see Count Magnus.
His fascination augmented, and the keybeing accessible, Mr. Wraxall pays the
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mausoleum a second and solitary visit andfinds another padlock unfastened. The nextday, his last in Råbäck, he again goes aloneto bid the longdead Count farewell. Oncemore queerly impelled to utter a whimsicalwish for a meeting with the buriednobleman, he now sees to his disquiet thatonly one of the padlocks remains on thegreat sarcophagus. Even as he looks, that lastlock drops noisily to the floor, and therecomes a sound as of creaking hinges. Thenthe monstrous lid appears very slowly to rise,and Mr. Wraxall flees in panic fear withoutrefastening the door of the mausoleum.
During his return to England the travellerfeels a curious uneasiness about his fellowpassengers on the canalboat which heemploys for the earlier stages. Cloakedfigures make him nervous, and he has asense of being watched and followed. Oftwentyeight persons whom he counts, onlytwentysix appear at meals; and the missingtwo are always a tall cloaked man and ashorter muffled figure. Completing his watertravel at Harwich, Mr. Wraxall takes franklyto flight in a closed carriage, but sees twocloaked figures at a crossroad. Finally helodges at a small house in a village andspends the time making frantic notes. On thesecond morning he is found dead, andduring the inquest seven jurors faint at sightof the body. The house where he stayed isnever again inhabited, and upon itsdemolition half a century later hismanuscript is discovered in a forgottencupboard.
In “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” a Britishantiquary unriddles a cipher on someRenaissance painted windows, and therebydiscovers a centuried hoard of gold in aniche half way down a well in the courtyardof a German abbey. But the crafty depositorhad set a guardian over that treasure, andsomething in the black well twines its armsaround the searcher’s neck in such a mannerthat the quest is abandoned, and a
clergyman sent for. Each night after that thediscoverer feels a stealthy presence anddetects a horrible odour of mould outsidethe door of his hotel room, till finally theclergyman makes a daylight replacement ofthe stone at the mouth of the treasurevaultin the well—out of which something hadcome in the dark to avenge the disturbing ofold Abbot Thomas’s gold. As he completeshis work the cleric observes a curious toadlike carving on the ancient wellhead, withthe Latin motto “Depositum custodi—keepthat which is committed to thee.”
Other notable James tales are “The Stalls ofBarchester Cathedral”, in which a grotesquecarving comes curiously to life to avenge thesecret and subtle murder of an old Dean byhis ambitious successor; “‘Oh, Whistle, andI’ll Come to You, My Lad’”, which tells of thehorror summoned by a strange metal whistlefound in a mediaeval church ruin; and “AnEpisode of Cathedral History”, where thedismantling of a pulpit uncovers an archaictomb whose lurking daemon spreads panicand pestilence. Dr. James, for all his lighttouch, evokes fright and hideousness in theirmost shocking forms; and will certainlystand as one of the few really creativemasters in his darksome province.
For those who relish speculation regardingthe future, the tale of supernatural horrorprovides an interesting field. Combated by amounting wave of plodding realism, cynicalflippancy, and sophisticated disillusionment,it is yet encouraged by a parallel tide ofgrowing mysticism, as developed boththrough the fatigued reaction of “occultists”and religious fundamentalists againstmaterialistic discovery and through thestimulation of wonder and fancy by suchenlarged vistas and broken barriers asmodern science has given us with its intraatomic chemistry, advancing astrophysics,doctrines of relativity, and probings intobiology and human thought. At the present
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moment the favouring forces would appearto have somewhat of an advantage; sincethere is unquestionably more cordialityshewn toward weird writings than when,thirty years ago, the best of Arthur Machen’swork fell on the stony ground of the smartand cocksure ’nineties. Ambrose Bierce,almost unknown in his own time, has nowreached something like general recognition.
Startling mutations, however, are not to belooked for in either direction. In any case anapproximate balance of tendencies willcontinue to exist; and while we may justlyexpect a further subtilisation of technique,we have no reason to think that the generalposition of the spectral in literature will bealtered. It is a narrow though essentialbranch of human expression, and will chieflyappeal as always to a limited audience withkeen special sensibilities. Whatever universalmasterpiece of tomorrow may be wroughtfrom phantasm or terror will owe itsacceptance rather to a supremeworkmanship than to a sympathetic theme.Yet who shall declare the dark theme apositive handicap? Radiant with beauty, theCup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx.
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Notes on Writing Weird Fiction
My reason for writing stories is to givemyself the satisfaction of visualising moreclearly and detailedly and stably the vague,elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder,beauty, and adventurous expectancy whichare conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic,architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas,occurrences, and images encountered in artand literature. I choose weird stories becausethey suit my inclination best—one of mystrongest and most persistent wishes beingto achieve, momentarily, the illusion of somestrange suspension or violation of the gallinglimitations of time, space, and natural lawwhich for ever imprison us and frustrate ourcuriosity about the infinite cosmic spacesbeyond the radius of our sight and analysis.These stories frequently emphasise theelement of horror because fear is our deepestand strongest emotion, and the one whichbest lends itself to the creation of naturedefying illusions. Horror and the unknownor the strange are always closely connected,so that it is hard to create a convincingpicture of shattered natural law or cosmicalienage or “outsideness” without layingstress on the emotion of fear. The reasonwhy time plays a great part in so many of mytales is that this element looms up in mymind as the most profoundly dramatic andgrimly terrible thing in the universe. Conflictwith time seems to me the most potent andfruitful theme in all human expression.
While my chosen form of storywriting isobviously a special and perhaps a narrowone, it is none the less a persistent andpermanent type of expression, as old asliterature itself. There will always be a smallpercentage of persons who feel a burningcuriosity about unknown outer space, and aburning desire to escape from the prisonhouse of the known and the real into thoseenchanted lands of incredible adventure andinfinite possibilities which dreams open up
to us, and which things like deep woods,fantastic urban towers, and flaming sunsetsmomentarily suggest. These persons includegreat authors as well as insignificantamateurs like myself—Dunsany, Poe, ArthurMachen, M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood,and Walter de la Mare being typical mastersin this field.
As to how I write a story—there is no oneway. Each one of my tales has a differenthistory. Once or twice I have literally writtenout a dream; but usually I start with a moodor idea or image which I wish to express,and revolve it in my mind until I can think ofa good way of embodying it in some chain ofdramatic occurrences capable of beingrecorded in concrete terms. I tend to runthrough a mental list of the basic conditionsor situations best adapted to such a mood oridea or image, and then begin to speculateon logical and naturally motivatedexplanations of the given mood or idea orimage in terms of the basic condition orsituation chosen.
The actual process of writing is of course asvaried as the choice of theme and initialconception; but if the history of all my taleswere analysed, it is just possible that thefollowing set of rules might be deduced fromthe average procedure:(1) Prepare a synopsis or scenario of eventsin the order of their absolute occurrence —not the order of their narration. Describewith enough fulness to cover all vital pointsand motivate all incidents planned. Details,comments, and estimates of consequencesare sometimes desirable in this temporaryframework.(2) Prepare a second synopsis or scenario ofevents—this one in order of narration (notactual occurrence), with ample fulness anddetail, and with notes as to changingperspective, stresses, and climax. Change theoriginal synopsis to fit if such a change willincrease the dramatic force or generaleffectiveness of the story. Interpolate or
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delete incidents at will—never being boundby the original conception even if theultimate result be a tale wholly differentfrom that first planned. Let additions andalterations be made whenever suggested byanything in the formulating process.(3) Write out the story—rapidly, fluently,and not too critically—following the secondor narrativeorder synopsis. Changeincidents and plot whenever the developingprocess seems to suggest such change, neverbeing bound by any previous design. If thedevelopment suddenly reveals newopportunities for dramatic effect or vividstorytelling, add whatever is thoughtadvantageous—going back and reconcilingthe early parts to the new plan. Insert anddelete whole sections if necessary ordesirable, trying different beginnings andendings until the best arrangement is found.But be sure that all references throughoutthe story are thoroughly reconciled with thefinal design. Remove all possiblesuperfluities—words, sentences, paragraphs,or whole episodes or elements—observingthe usual precautions about the reconcilingof all references.(4) Revise the entire text, paying attention tovocabulary, syntax, rhythm of prose,proportioning of parts, niceties of tone, graceand convincingness or transitions (scene toscene, slow and detailed action to rapid andsketchy timecovering action and viceversa. . . . etc., etc., etc.), effectiveness ofbeginning, ending, climaxes, etc., dramaticsuspense and interest, plausibility andatmosphere, and various other elements.(5) Prepare a neatly typed copy—nothesitating to add final revisory toucheswhere they seem in order.
The first of these stages is often purely amental one—a set of conditions andhappenings being worked out in my head,and never set down until I am ready toprepare a detailed synopsis of events inorder of narration. Then, too, I sometimesbegin even the actual writing before I know
how I shall develop the idea—this beginningforming a problem to be motivated andexploited.
There are, I think, four distinct types ofweird story; one expressing a mood orfeeling, another expressing a pictorialconception, a third expressing a generalsituation, condition, legend, or intellectualconception, and a fourth explaining a definitetableau or specific dramatic situation orclimax. In another way, weird tales may begrouped into two rough categories—those inwhich the marvel or horror concerns somecondition or phenomenon, and those in whichit concerns some action of persons inconnexion with a bizarre condition orphenomenon.
Each weird story—to speak more particularlyof the horror type—seems to involve fivedefinite elements: (a) some basic, underlyinghorror or abnormality—condition, entity,etc.—, (b) the general effects or bearings ofthe horror, (c) the mode of manifestation—object embodying the horror andphenomena observed—, (d) the types offearreaction pertaining to the horror, and(e) the specific effects of the horror inrelation to the given set of conditions.
In writing a weird story I always try verycarefully to achieve the right mood andatmosphere, and place the emphasis where itbelongs. One cannot, except in immaturepulp charlatan–fiction, present an account ofimpossible, improbable, or inconceivablephenomena as a commonplace narrative ofobjective acts and conventional emotions.Inconceivable events and conditions have aspecial handicap to overcome, and this canbe accomplished only through themaintenance of a careful realism in everyphase of the story except that touching on theone given marvel. This marvel must betreated very impressively and deliberately—with a careful emotional “buildup”—else itwill seem flat and unconvincing. Being the
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principal thing in the story, its mereexistence should overshadow the charactersand events. But the characters and eventsmust be consistent and natural except wherethey touch the single marvel. In relation tothe central wonder, the characters shouldshew the same overwhelming emotion whichsimilar characters would shew toward such awonder in real life. Never have a wondertaken for granted. Even when the charactersare supposed to be accustomed to thewonder I try to weave an air of awe andimpressiveness corresponding to what thereader should feel. A casual style ruins anyserious fantasy.
Atmosphere, not action, is the greatdesideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all thata wonder story can ever be is a vivid pictureof a certain type of human mood. Themoment it tries to be anything else itbecomes cheap, puerile, and unconvincing.Prime emphasis should be given to subtlesuggestion—imperceptible hints and touchesof selective associative detail which expressshadings of moods and build up a vagueillusion of the strange reality of the unreal.Avoid bald catalogues of incrediblehappenings which can have no substance ormeaning apart from a sustaining cloud ofcolour and symbolism.
These are the rules or standards which Ihave followed—consciously or unconsciously—ever since I first attempted the seriouswriting of fantasy. That my results aresuccessful may well be disputed—but I feelat least sure that, had I ignored theconsiderations mentioned in the last fewparagraphs, they would have been muchworse than they are.