SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE (1927, 1933 - 1935) By H.P. Lovecraft

SUPERNATURAL HORROR
IN LITERATURE (1927, 1933 - 1935)
By H.P. Lovecraft





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 naï vely insipid idealism which deprecates the æsthetic
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 everyday life. Relatively few
are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to tappings 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 innermost 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,
marvelous 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 infinite reservoir of mystery still engulfs most of the outer cosmos, whilst
a vast residuum of powerful inherited associations clings round all the objects and processes that
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were once mysterious; however well they may now be explained. And more than this, there is an
actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous tissue, which would make them
obscurely operative even were the conscious mind to be purged of all sources of wonder.
Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because
our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and
formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more
maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore. This
tendency, too, is naturally enhanced by the fact that uncertainty and danger are always closely
allied; thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities. When
to this sense of fear and evil the inevitable fascination of wonder and curiosity is superadded,
there is born a composite body of keen emotion and imaginative provocation whose vitality must
of necessity endure as long as the human race itself. Children will always be afraid of the dark,
and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the
hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or
press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the
moonstruck can glimpse.
With this foundation, no one need wonder at the existence of a literature of cosmic fear. It has
always existed, and always will exist; and no better evidence of its tenacious vigour can be cited
than the impulse which now and then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands
at it in isolated tales, as if to discharge from their minds certain phantasmal shapes which would
otherwise haunt them. Thus Dickens wrote several eerie narratives; Browning, the hideous poem
Childe Roland; Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; Dr. Holmes, the subtle novel Elsie Venner;
F. Marion Crawford, The Upper Berth and a number of other examples; Mrs. Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, social worker, The Yellow Wall Paper; whilst the humorist, W. W. Jacobs, produced
that able melodramatic bit called The Monkey's Paw.
This type of fear-literature must not be confounded with a type externally similar but
psychologically widely different; the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely
gruesome. Such writing, to be sure, has its place, as has the conventional or even whimsical or
humorous ghost story where formalism or the author's knowing wink removes the true sense of
the morbidly unnatural; but these things are not the literature of cosmic fear in its purest sense.
The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form
clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of
outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness
and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain -- a
malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only
safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the dæmons of unplumbed space.
Naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model.
Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots. Moreover, much of the
choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through
material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast. Atmosphere is the all-important
thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a
given sensation. We may say, as a general thing, that a weird story whose intent is to teach or
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produce a social effect, or one in which the horrors are finally explained away by natural means,
is not a genuine tale of cosmic fear; but it remains a fact that such narratives often possess, in
isolated sections, atmospheric touches which fulfill every condition of true supernatural horrorliterature.
Therefore we must judge a weird tale not by the author's intent, or by the mere
mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point. If
the proper sensations are excited, such a "high spot" must be admitted on its own merits as weird
literature, no matter how prosaically it is later dragged down. The one test of the really weird is
simply this -- whether of not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of
contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the
beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's
utmost rim. And of course, the more completely and unifiedly a story conveys this atmosphere
the better it is as a work of art in the given medium.
II. THE DAWN OF THE HORROR TALE
AS may naturally be expected of a form so closely connected with primal emotion, the horrortale
is as old as human thought and speech themselves.
Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races, and is crystallised in
the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and sacred writings. It was, indeed, a prominent feature of
the elaborate ceremonial magic, with its rituals for the evocation of dæmons and spectres, which
flourished from prehistoric times, and which reached its highest development in Egypt and the
Semitic nations. Fragments like the Book of Enoch and the Claviculae of Solomon well illustrate
the power of the weird over the ancient Eastern mind, and upon such things were based enduring
systems and traditions whose echoes extend obscurely even to the present time. Touches of this
transcendental fear are seen in classic literature, and there is evidence of its still greater emphasis
in a ballad literature which paralleled the classic stream but vanished for lack of a written
medium. The Middle Ages, steeped in fanciful darkness, gave it an enormous impulse toward
expression; and East and West alike were busy preserving and amplifying the dark heritage, both
of random folklore and of academically formulated magic and cabalism, which had descended to
them. Witch, werewolf, vampire, and ghoul brooded ominously on the lips of bard and grandam,
and needed but little encouragement to take the final step across the boundary that divides the
chanted tale or song from the formal literary composition. In the Orient, the weird tale tended to
assume a gorgeous colouring and sprightliness which almost transmuted it into sheer phantasy.
In the West, where the mystical Teuton had come down from his black boreal forests and the
Celt remembered strange sacrifices in Druidic groves, it assumed a terrible intensity and
convincing seriousness of atmosphere which doubled the force of its half-told, half-hinted
horrors.
Much of the power of Western horror-lore was undoubtedly due to the hidden but often
suspected presence of a hideous cult of nocturnal worshippers whose strange customs --
descended from pre-Aryan and pre-agricultural times when a squat race of Mongoloids roved
over Europe with their flocks and herds -- were rooted in the most revolting fertility-rites of
immemorial antiquity. Ibis secret religion, stealthily handed down amongst peasants for
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thousands of years despite the outward reign of the Druidic, Graeco-Roman, and Christian faiths
in the regions involved, was marked by wild "Witches' Sabbaths" in lonely woods and atop
distant hills on Walpurgis-Night and Hallowe'en, the traditional breeding-seasons of the goats
and sheep and cattle; and became the source of vast riches of sorcery-legend, besides provoking
extensive witchcraft -- prosecutions of which the Salem affair forms the chief American
example. Akin to it in essence, and perhaps connected with it in fact, was the frightful secret
system of inverted theology or Satan-worship which produced such horrors as the famous "Black
Mass"; whilst operating toward the same end we may note the activities of those whose aims
were somewhat more scientific or philosophical -- the astrologers, cabalists, and alchemists of
the Albertus Magnus or Ramond Lully type, with whom such rude ages invariably abound. The
prevalence and depth of the mediæval horror-spirit in Europe, intensified by the dark despair
which waves of pestilence brought, may be fairly gauged by the grotesque carvings slyly
introduced into much of the finest later Gothic ecclesiastical work of the time; the dæmoniac
gargoyles of Notre Dame and Mont St. Michel being among the most famous specimens. And
throughout the period, it must be remembered, there existed amongst educated and uneducated
alike a most unquestioning faith in every form of the supernatural; from the gentlest doctrines of
Christianity to the most monstrous morbidities of witchcraft and black magic. It was from no
empty background that the Renaissance magicians and alchemists -- Nostradamus, Trithemius,
Dr. John Dee, Robert Fludd, and the like -- were born.
In this fertile soil were nourished types and characters of sombre myth and legend which persist
in weird literature to this day, more or less disguised or altered by modern technique. Many of
them were taken from the earliest oral sources, and form part of mankind's permanent heritage.
The shade which appears and demands the burial of its bones, the dæmon lover who comes to
bear away his still living bride, the death-fiend or psychopomp riding the night-wind, the manwolf,
the sealed chamber, the deathless sorcerer -- all these may be found in that curious body of
mediæval lore which the late Mr. Baring-Gould so effectively assembled in book form.
Wherever the mystic Northern blood was strongest, the atmosphere of the popular tales became
most intense; for in the Latin races there is a touch of basic rationality which denies to even their
strangest superstitions many of the overtones of glamour so characteristic of our own forest-born
and ice-fostered whisperings.
Just as all fiction first found extensive embodiment in poetry, so is it in poetry that we first
encounter the permanent entry of the weird into standard literature. Most of the ancient instances,
curiously enough, are in prose; as the werewolf incident in Petronius, the gruesome passages in
Apuleius, the brief but celebrated letter of Pliny the Younger to Sura, and the odd compilation
On Wonderful Events by the Emperor Hadrian's Greek freedman, Phlegon. It is in Phlegon that
we first find that hideous tale of the corpse-bride, Philinnion and Machates, later related by
Proclus and in modem times forming the inspiration of Goethe's Bride of Corinth and
Washington Irving's German Student. But by the time the old Northern myths take literary form,
and in that later time when the weird appears as a steady element in the literature of the day, we
find it mostly in metrical dress; as indeed we find the greater part of the strictly imaginative
writing of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Scandinavian Eddas and Sagas thunder with
cosmic horror, and shake with the stark fear of Ymir and his shapeless spawn; whilst our own
Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and the later Continental Nibelung tales are full of eldritcli weirdness.
Dante is a pioneer in the classic capture of macabre atmosphere, and in Spenser's stately stanzas
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will be seen more than a few touches of fantastic terror in landscape, incident, and character.
Prose literature gives us Malory's Morte d'Arthur, in which are presented many ghastly situations
taken from early ballad sources -- the theft of the sword and silk from the corpse in Chapel
Perilous by Sir Galahad -- whilst other and cruder specimens were doubtless set forth in the
cheap and sensational "chapbooks" vulgarly hawked about and devoured by the ignorant. In
Elizabethan drama, with its Dr. Faustus, the witches in Macbeth, the ghost in Hamlet, and the
horrible gruesomeness of Webster we may easily discern the strong hold of the dæmoniac: on the
public mind; a hold intensified by the very real fear of living witchcraft, whose terrors, wildest at
first on the Continent, begin to echo loudly in English ears as the witch-hunting crusades of
James the First gain headway. To the lurking mystical prose of the ages is added a long line of
treatises on witchcraft and dæmonology which aid in exciting the imagination of the reading
world.
Through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century we behold a growing mass of fugitive
legendry and balladry of darksome cast; still, however, held down beneath the surface of polite
and accepted literature. Chapbooks of horror and weirdness multiplied, and we glimpse the eager
interest of the people through fragments like Defoe's Apparition of Mrs. Veal, a homely tale of a
dead woman's spectral visit to a distant friend, written to advertise covertly a badly selling
theological disquisition on death. The upper orders of society were now losing faith in the
supernatural, and indulging in a period of classic rationalism. Then, beginning with the
translations of Eastern tales in Queen Anne's reign and taking definite form toward the middle of
the century, comes the revival of romantic feeling -- the era of new joy in nature, and in the
radiance of past times, strange scenes, bold deeds, and incredible marvels. We feel it first in the
poets, whose utterances take on new qualities of wonder, strangeness, and shuddering. And
finally, after the timid appearance of a few weird scenes in the novels of the day -- such as
Smollett's Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom -- the release instinct precipitates itself in the
birth of a new school of writing; the "Gothic" school of horrible and fantastic prose fiction, long
and short, whose literary posterity is destined to become so numerous, and in many cases so
resplendent in artistic merit. It is, when one reflects upon it, genuinely remarkable that weird
narration as a fixed and academically recognized literary form should have been so late of final
birth. The impulse and atmosphere are as old as man, but the typical weird tale of standard
literature is a child of the eighteenth century.
III. THE EARLY GOTHIC NOVEL
THE shadow-haunted landscapes of Ossian, the chaotic visions of William Blake, the grotesque
witch dances in Burns's Tam O'Shanter, the sinister dæmonism of Coleridge's Christobel and
Ancient Mariner, the ghostly charm of James Hogg's Kilmeny, and the more restrained
approaches to cosmic horror in Lamia and many of Keats's other poems, are typical British
illustrations of the advent of the weird to formal literature. Our Teutonic cousins of the Continent
were equally receptive to the rising flood, and Burger's Wild Huntsman and the even more
famous dæmon-bridegroom ballad of Lenore -- both imitated in English by Scott, whose respect
for the supernatural was always great -- are only a taste of the eerie wealth which German song
had commenced to provide. Thomas Moore adapted from such sources the legend of the
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ghoulish statue-bride (later used by Prosper Merimée in The Venus of Ille, and traceable back to
great antiquity) which echoes so shiveringly in his ballad of The Ring; whilst Goethe's deathless
masterpiece Faust, crossing from mere balladry into the classic, cosmic tragedy of the ages, may
be held as the ultimate height to which this German poetic impulse arose.
But it remained for a very sprightly and worldly Englishman -- none other than Horace Walpole
himself -- to give the growing impulse definite shape and become the actual founder of the
literary horror-story as a permanent form. Fond of mediæval romance and mystery as a
dilettante's diversion, and with a quaintly imitated Gothic castle as his abode at Strawberry Hill,
Walpole in 1764 published The Castle of Otranto; a tale of the supernatural which, though
thoroughly unconvincing and mediocre in itself, was destined to exert an almost unparalleled
influence on the literature of the weird. First venturing it only as a "translation" by one "William
Marshal, Gent." from the Italian of a mythical "Onuphrio Muralto," the author later
acknowledged his connection with the book and took pleasure in its wide and instantaneous
popularity -- a popularity which extended to many editions, early dramatization, and wholesale
imitation both in England and in Germany.
The story -- tedious, artificial, and melodramatic -- is further impaired by a brisk and prosaic
style whose urbane sprightliness nowhere permits the creation of a truly weird atmosphere. It
tells of Manfred, an unscrupulous and usurping prince determined to found a line, who after the
mysterious sudden death of his only son Conrad on the latter's bridal morn, attempts to put away
his wife Hippolita and wed the lady destined for the unfortunate youth -- the lad, by the way,
having been crushed by the preternatural fall of a gigantic helmet in the castle courtyard.
Isabella, the widowed bride, flees from his design; and encounters in subterranean crypts beneath
the castle a noble young preserver, Theodore, who seems to be a peasant yet strangely resembles
the old lord Alfonso who ruled the domain before Manfred's time. Shortly thereafter supernatural
phenomena assail the castle in diverse ways; fragments of gigantic armour being discovered here
and therd, a portrait walking out of its frame, a thunderclap destroying the edifice, and a colossal
armoured spectre of Alfonso rising out of the rains to ascend through parting clouds to the bosom
of St. Nicholas. Theodore, having wooed Manfred's daughter Matilda and lost her through death
-- for she is slain by her father by mistake -- is discovered to be the son of Alfonso and rightful
heir to the estate. He concludes the tale by wedding Isabella and preparing to live happily ever
after, whilst Manfred -- whose usurpation was the cause of his son's supernatural death and his
own supernatural harassings -- retires to a monastery for penitence; his saddened wife seeking
asylum in a neighbouring convent.
Such is the tale; flat stilted, and altogther devoid of the true cosmic horror which makes weird
literature. Yet such was the thirst of the age for those touches of strangeness and spectral
antiquity which it reflects, that it was seriously received by the soundest readers and raised in
spite of its intrinsic ineptness to a pedestal of lofty importance in literary history. What it did
above all else was to create a novel type of scene, puppet-characters, and incidents; which,
handled to better advantage by writers more naturally adapted to weird creation, stimulated the
growth of an imitative Gothic school which in turn inspired the real weavers of cosmic terror --
the line of actual artists beginning with Poe. This novel dramatic paraphernalia consisted first of
all of the Gothic castle, with its awesome antiquity, vast distances and famblings, deserted or
ruined wings, damp corridors, unwholesome hidden catacombs, and galaxy of ghosts and
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appalling legends, as a nucleus of suspense and dæmoniac fright. In addition, it included the
tyrannical and malevolent nobleman as villain; the saintly, long-persecuted, and generally insipid
heroine who undergoes the major terrors and serves as a point of view and focus for the reader's
sympathies; the valorous and immaculate hero, always of high birth but often in humble
disguise; the convention of high-sounding foreign names, moistly Italian, for the characters; and
the infinite array of stage properties which includes strange lights, damp trap-doors, extinguished
lamps, mouldy hidden manuscripts, creaking hinges, shaking arras, and the like. All this
paraphernalia reappears with amusing sameness, yet sometimes with tremendous effect,
throughout the history of the Gothic novel; and is by no means extinct even today, though subtler
technique now forces it to assume a less naive and obvious form. An harmonious milieu for a
new school had been found, and the writing world was not slow to grasp the opportunity.
German romance at once responded to the Walpole influence, and soon became a byword for
the weird and ghastly. In England one of the first imitators was the celebrated Mrs. Barbauld,
then Miss Aikin, who in 1773 published an unfinished fragment called Sir Bertrand, in which the
strings of genuine terror were truly touched with no clumsy hand. A nobleman on a dark and
lonely moor, attracted by a tolling bell and distant light, enters a strange and ancient turreted
castle whose doors open and close and whose bluish will-o'-the-wisps lead up mysterious
staircases toward dead hands and animated black statues. A coffin with a dead lady, whom Sir
Bertrand kisses, is finally reached; and upon the kiss the scene dissolves to give place to a
splendid apartment where the lady, restored to life, holds a banquet in honor of her rescuer.
Walpole admired this tale, though he accorded less respect to an even more prominent offspring
of his Otranto -- The Old English Baron, by Clara Reeve, published in 1777. Truly enough, this
tale lacks the real vibration to the note of outer darkness and mystery which distinguishes Mrs.
Barbauld's fragment; and though less crude than Walpole's novel, and more artistically
economical of horror in its possession of only one spectral figure, it is nevertheless too definitely
insipid for greatness. Here again we have the virtuous heir to the castle disguised as a peasant
and restored to his heritage through the ghost of his father; and here again we have a case of
wide popularity leading to many editions, dramatization, and ultimate translation into French.
Miss Reeve wrote another weird novel, unfortunately unpublished and lost.
The Gothic novel was now settled as a literary form, and instances multiply bewilderingly as
the eighteenth century draws toward its close. The Recess, written in 1785 by Mrs. Sophia Lee,
has the historic element, revolving round the twin daughters of Mary, Queen of Scots; and
though devoid of the supernatural, employs the Walpole scenery and mechanism with great
dexterity. Five years later, and all existing lamps are paled by the rising of a fresh luminary order
-- Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), whose famous novels made terror and suspense a fashion,
and who set new and higher standards in the domain of macabre and fear-inspiring atmosphere
despite a provoking custom of destroying her own phantoms at the last through labored
mechanical explanations. To the familiar Gothic trappings of her predecessors Mrs. Radcliffe
added a genuine sense of the unearthly in scene and incident which closely approached genius;
every touch of setting and action contributing artistically to the impression of illimitable
frightfulness which she wished to convey. A few sinister details like a track of blood on castle
stairs, a groan from a distant vault, or a weird song in a nocturnal forest can with her conjure up
the most powerful images of imminent horror; surpassing by far the extravagant and toilsome
elaborations of others. Nor are these images in themselves any the less potent because they are
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explained away before the end of the novel. Mrs. Radcliffe's visual imagination was very strong,
and appears as much in her delightful landscape touches -- always in broad, glamorously
pictorial outline, and never in close detail -- as in her weird phantasies. Her prime weaknesses,
aside from the habit of prosaic disillusionment, are a tendency toward erroneous geography and
history and a fatal predilection for bestrewing her novels with insipid little poems, attributed to
one or another of the characters.
Mrs. Radcliffe wrote six novels; The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian
Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1792), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The
Italian (1797), and Gaston de Blondeville, composed in 1802 but first published posthumously in
1826. Of these Udolpho is by far the most famous, and may be taken as a type of the early
Gothic tale at its best. It is the chronicle of Emily, a young Frenchwoman transplanted to an
ancient and portentous castle in the Apennines through the death of her parents and the marriage
of her aunt to the lord of the castle -- the scheming nobleman, Montoni. Mysterious sounds,
opened doors, frightful legends, and a nameless horror in a niche behind a black veil all operate
in quick succession to unnerve the heroine and her faithful attendant, Annette; but finally, after
the death of her aunt, she escapes with the aid of a fellow-prisoner whom she has discovered. On
the way home she stops at a chateau filled with fresh horrors -- the abandoned wing where the
departed chatelaine dwelt, and the bed of death with the black pall -- but is finally restored to
security and happiness with her lover Valancourt, after the clearing-up of a secret which seemed
for a time to involve her birth in mystery. Clearly, this is only familiar material re-worked; but it
is so well re-worked that Udolpho will always be a classic. Mrs. Radcliffe's characters are
puppets, but they are less markedly so than those of her forerunners. And in atmospheric creation
she stands preëminent among those of her time.
Of Mrs. Radcliffe's countless imitators, the American novelist Charles Brockden Brown stands
the closest in spirit and method. Like her, he injured his creations by natural explanations; but
also like her, he had in uncanny atmospheric power which gives his horrors a frightful vitality as
long as they remain unexplained. He differed from her in contemptuously discarding the external
Gothic paraphernalia and properties and choosing modern American scenes for his Mysteries;
but this repudiation did not extend to the Gothic spirit and type of incident. Brown's novels
involve some memorably frightful scenes, and excel even Mrs. Radcliffe's in describing the
operations of the perturbed mind. Edgar Hunily starts with a sleep-walker digging a grave, but is
later impaired by touches of Godwinian didacticism. Ormond involves a member of a sinister
secret brotherhood. That and Arthur Mervyn both describe the plague of yellow fever, which the
author had witnessed in Philadelphia and New York. But Brown's most famous book is Wieland;
or, the Transformation (1798), in which a Pennsylvania German, engulfed by a wave of religious
fanaticism, hears "voices" and slays his wife and children as a sacrifice. His sister Clara, who
tells the story, narrowly escapes. The scene, laid at the woodland estate of Mittingen on the
Schuylkill's remote reaches, is drawn with extreme vividness; and the terrors of Clara, beset by
spectral tones, gathering fears, and the sound of strange footsteps in the lonely house, are all
shaped with truly artistic force. In the end a lame ventriloquial explanation is offered, but the
atmosphere is genuine while it lasts. Carwin, the malign ventriloquist, is a typical villain of the
Manfred or Montoni type.
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IV. THE APEX OF GOTHIC ROMANCE
HORROR in literature attains a new malignity in the work of Matthew Gregory Lewis (1773-1818),
whose novel The Monk (1796) achieved marvelous popularity and earned him the nickname
"Monk" Lewis. This young author, educated in Germany and saturated with a body of wild
Teuton lore unknown to Mrs. Radcliffe, turned to terror in forms more violent than his gentle
predecessor had ever dared to think of; and produced as a result a masterpiece of active
nightmare whose general Gothic cast is spiced with added stores of ghoulishness. The story is
one of a Spanish monk, Ambrosio, who from a state of over-proud virtue is tempted to the very
nadir of evil by a fiend in the guise of the maiden Matilda; and who is finally, when awaiting
death at the Inquisition's hands, induced to purchase escape at the price of his soul from the
Devil, because he deems both body and soul already lost. Forthwith the mocking Fiend snatches
him to a lonely place, tells him he has sold his soul in vain since both pardon and a chance for
salvation were approaching at the moment of his hideous bargain, and completes the sardonic
betrayal by rebuking him for his unnatural crimes, and casting his body down a precipice whilst
his soul is borne off for ever to perdition. The novel contains some appalling descriptions such as
the incantation in the vaults beneath the convent cemetery, the burning of the convent, and the
final end of the wretched abbot. In the sub-plot where the Marquis de las Cisternas meets the
spectre of his erring ancestress, The Bleeding Nun, there are many enormously potent strokes;
notably the visit of the animated corpse to the Marquis's bedside, and the cabalistic ritual
whereby the Wandering Jew helps him to fathom and banish his dead tormentor. Nevertheless
The Monk drags sadly when read as a whole. It is too long and too diffuse, and much of its
potency is marred by flippancy and by an awkwardly excessive reaction against those canons of
decorum which Lewis at first despised as prudish. One great thing may be said of the author; that
he never ruined his ghostly visions with a natural explanation. He succeeded in breaking up the
Radcliffian tradition and expanding the field of the Gothic novel. Lewis wrote much more than
The Monk. His drama, The Castle Spectre, was produced in 1798, and he later found time to pen
other fictions in ballad form -- Tales of Terror (1799), The Tales of Wonder (1801), and a
succession of translations from the German. Gothic romances, both English and German, now
appeared in multitudinous and mediocre profusion. Most of them were merely ridiculous in the
light of mature taste, and Miss Austen's famous satire Northanger Abbey was by no means an
unmerited rebuke to a school which had sunk far toward absurdity. This particular school was
petering out, but before its final subordination there arose its last and greatest figure in the person
of Charles Robert Maturin (1782-1824), an obscure and eccentric Irish clergyman. Out of an
ample body of miscellaneous writing which includes one confused Radcliffian imitation called
The Fatal Revenge; or, the Family of Montorio (1807), Maturin at length envolved the vivid
horror-masterpiece of Melmoth, the Wanderer (1820), in which the Gothic tale climbed to
altitudes of sheer spiritual fright which it had never known before.
Melmoth is the tale of an Irish Gentleman who, in the seventeenth century, obtained a
preternaturally extended life from the Devil at the price of his soul. If he can persuade another to
take the bargain off his hands, and assume his existing state, he can be saved; but this he can
never manage to effect, no matter how assiduously he haunts those whom despair has made
reckless and frantic. The framework of the story is very clumsy; involving tedious length,
digressive episodes, narratives within narratives, and labored dovetailing and coincidence; but at
various points in the endless rambling there is felt a pulse of power undiscoverable in any
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previous work of this kind -- a kinship to the essential truth of human nature, an understanding of
the profoundest sources of actual cosmic fear, and a white heat of sympathetic passion on the
writer's part which makes the book a true document of æsthetic self-expression rather than a
mere clever compound of artifice. No unbiased reader can doubt that with Melmoth an enormous
stride in the evolution of the horror-tale is represented. Fear is taken out of the realm of the
conventional and exalted into a hideous cloud over mankind's very destiny. Maturin's shudders,
the work of one capable of shuddering himself, are of the sort that convince, Mrs. Radcliffe and
Lewis are fair game for the parodist, but it would be difficult to find a false note in the feverishly
intensified action and high atmospheric tension of the Irishman whose less sophisticated
emotions and strain of Celtic mysticism gave him the finest possible natural equipment for his
task. Without a doubt Maturin is a man of authentic genius, and he was so recognized by Balzac,
who grouped Melmoth with Molière's Don Juan, Goethe's Faust, and Byron's Manfred as the
supreme allegorical figures of modern European literature, and wrote a whimsical piece called
Melmoth Reconciled, in which the Wanderer succeeds in passing his infernal bargain on to a
Parisian bank defaulter, who in turn hands it along a chain of victims until a reveling gambler
dies with it in his possession, and by his damnation ends the curse. Scott, Rossetti, Thackeray
and Baudelaire are the other titans who gave Maturin their unqualified admiration, and there is
much significance in the fact that Oscar Wilde, after his disgrace and exile, chose for his last
days in Paris the assumed name of "Sebastian Melmoth."
Melmoth contains scenes which even now have not lost their power to evoke dread. It begins
with a deathbed -- an old miser is dying of sheer fright because of something he has seen,
coupled with a manuscript he has read and a family portrait which hangs in an obscure closet of
his centuried home in County Wicklow. He sends to Trinity College, Dublin, for his nephew
John; and the latter upon arriving notes many uncanny things. The eyes of the portrait in the
closet glow horribly, and twice a figure strangely resembling the portrait appears momentarily at
the door. Dread hangs over that house of the Melmoths, one of whose ancestors, "J. Melmoth,
1646," the portrait represents. The dying miser declares that this man -- at a date slightly before
1800 -- is alive. Finally the miser dies, and the nephew is told in the will to destroy both the
portrait and a manuscript to be found in a certain drawer. Reading the manuscript, which was
written late in the seventeenth century by an Englishman named Stanton, young John learns of a
terrible incident in Spain in 1677, when the writer met a horrible fellow-countryman and was
told of how he had stared to death a priest who tried to denounce him as one filled with fearsome
evil. Later, after meeting the man again in London, Stanton is cast into a madhouse and visited
by the stranger, whose approach is heralded by spectral music and whose eyes have a more than
mortal glare. Melmoth the Wanderer -- for such is the malign visitor -- offers the captive
freedom if he will take over his bargain with the Devil; but like all others whom Melmoth has
approached, Stanton is proof against temptation. Melmoth's description of the horrors of a life in
a madhouse, used to tempt Stanton, is one of the most potent passages of the book. Stanton is at
length liberated, and spends the rest of his life tracking down Melmoth, whose family and
ancestral abode he discovers. With the family he leaves the manuscript, which by young John's
time is badly ruinous and fragmentary. John destroys both portrait and manuscript, but in sleep is
visited by his horrible ancestor, who leaves a black and blue mark on his wrist.
Young John soon afterward receives as a visitor a shipwrecked Spaniard, Alonzo de Moncada,
who has escaped from compulsory monasticism and from the perils of the Inquisition. He has
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suffered horribly -- and the descriptions of his experiences under torment and in the vaults
through which he once essays escape are classic -- but had the strength to resist Melmoth the
Wanderer when approached at his darkest hour in prison. At the house of a Jew who sheltered
him after his escape he discovers a wealth of manuscript relating other exploits of Melmoth,
including his wooing of an Indian island maiden, Immalee, who later comes into her birthright in
Spain and is known as Donna Isidora; and of his horrible marriage to her by the corpse of a dead
anchorite at midnight in the ruined chapel of a shunned and abhorred monastery. Moncada's
narrative to young John takes up the bulk of Maturin's four-volume book; this disproportion
being considered one of the chief technical faults of the composition.
At last the colloquies of John and Moncada are interrupted by the entrance of Melmoth the
Wanderer himself, his piercing eyes now fading, and decrepitude swiftly overtaking him. The
term of his bargain has approached its end, and he has come home after a century and a half to
meet his fate. Warning all others from the room, no matter what sounds they may hear in the
night, he awaits the end alone. Young John and Moncada hear frightful ululations, but do not
intrude till silence comes toward morning. They then find the room empty. Clayey footprints
lead out a rear door to a cliff overlooking the sea, and near the edge of the precipice is a track
indicating the forcible dragging of some heavy body. The Wanderer's scarf is found on a crag
some distance below the brink, but nothing further is ever seen or heard of him.
Such is the story, and none can fail to notice the difference between this modulated, suggestive,
and artistically moulded horror and -- to use the words of Professor George Saintsbury -- "the
artful but rather jejune rationalism of Mrs. Radcliffe, and the too often puerile extravagance, the
bad taste, and the sometimes slipshod style of Lewis." Maturin's style in itself deserves particular
praise, for its forcible directness and vitality lift it altogether above the pompous artificialities of
which his predecessors are guilty. Professor Edith Birkhead, in her history of the Gothic novel,
justly observes that "with all his faults Maturin was the greatest as well as the last of the Goths."
Melmoth was widely read and eventually dramatized, but its late date in the evolution of the
Gothic tale deprived it of the tumultuous popularity of Udolpho and The Monk.
V. THE AFTERMATH OF GOTHIC FICTION
MEANWHILE other hands had not been idle, so that above the dreary plethora of trash like Marquis
von Grosse's Horrid Mysteries (1796), Mrs. Roche's Children of the Abbey (1798), Mrs. Dacre's
Zofloya; or, the Moor (1806), and the poet Shelley's schoolboy effusions Zastro (1810) and St.
Irvine (1811) (both imitations of Zofloya) there arose many memorable weird works both in
English and German. Classic in merit, and markedly different from its fellows because of its
foundation in the Oriental tale rather than the Walpolesque Gothic novel, is the celebrated
History of the Caliph Vathek by the wealthy dilettante William Beckford, first written in the
French language but published in an English translation before the appearance of the original.
Eastern tales, introduced to European literature early in the eighteenth century through Galland's
French translation of the inexhaustibly opulent Arabian Nights, had become a reigning fashion;
being used both for allegory and for amusement. The sly humour which only the Eastern mind
knows how to mix with weirdness had captivated a sophisticated generation, till Bagdad and
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Damascus names became as freely strewn through popular literature as dashing Italian and
Spanish ones were soon to be. Beckford, well read in Eastern romance, caught the atmosphere
with unusual receptivity; and in his fantastic volume reflected very potently the haughty luxury,
sly disillusion, bland cruelty, urbane treachery, and shadowy spectral horror of the Saracen spirit.
His seasoning of the ridiculous seldom mars the force of his sinister theme, and the tale marches
onward with a phantasmagoric pomp in which the laughter is that of skeletons feasting under
arabesque domes. Vathek is a tale of the grandson of the Caliph Haroun, who, tormented by that
ambition for super-terrestrial power, pleasure and learning which animates the average Gothic
villain or Byronic hero (essentially cognate types), is lured by an evil genius to seek the
subterranean throne of the mighty and fabulous pre-Adamite sultans in the fiery halls of Eblis,
the Mahometan Devil. The descriptions of Vathek's palaces and diversions, of his scheming
soweress-mother Carathis and her witch-tower with the fifty one-eyed negresses, of his
pilgrimage to the haunted ruins of Istakhar (Persepolis) and of the impish bride Nouronihar
whom he treacherously acquired on the way, of Istakhar's primordial towers and terraces in the
burning moonlight of the waste, and of the terrible Cyclopean halls of Eblis, where, lured by
glittering promises, each victim is compelled to wander in anguish for ever, his right hand upon
his blazingly ignited and eternally burning heart, are triumphs of weird colouring which raise the
book to a permaneat place in English letters. No less notable are the three Episodes of Vathek,
intended for insertion in the tale as narratives of Vathek's fellow-victims in Eblis' infernal halls,
which remained unpublished throughout the author's lifetime and were discovered as recently as
1909 by the scholar Lewis Melville whilst collecting material for his Life and Letters of William
Beckford. Beckford, however, lacks the essential mysticism which marks the acutest form of the
weird; so that his tales have a certain knowing Latin hardness and clearness preclusive of sheer
panic fright.
But Beckford remained alone in his devotion to the Orient. Other writers, closer to the Gothic
tradition and to European life in general, were content to follow more faithfully in the lead of
Walpole. Among the countless producers of terror-literature in these times may be mentioned the
Utopian economic theorist William Godwin, who followed his famous but non-supernatural
Caleb Williams (1794) with the intendedly weird St. Leon (1799), in which the theme of the
elixir of life, as developed by the imaginary secret order of "Rosicrucians," is handled with
ingeniousness if not with atmospheric convincingness. This element of Rosicrucianism, fostesed
by a wave of popular magical interest exemplified in the vogue of the charlatan Cagliostro and
the publication of Francis Barrett's The Magus (1801), a curious and compendious treatise on
occult principles and ceremonies, of which a reprint was made as lately as 1896, figures in
Bulwer-Lytton and in many late Gothic novels, especially that remote and enfeebled posterity
which straggled far down into the nineteenth century and was represented by George W.M.
Reynold's Faust and the Demon and Wagner the Wehr-Wolf. Caleb Williams, though nonsupernatural,
has many authentic touches of terror. It is the tale of a servant persecuted by a
master whom he has found guilty of murder, and displays an invention and skill which have kept
it alive in a fashion to this day. It was dramatized as The Iron Chest, and in that form was almost
equally celebrated. Godwin, however, was too much the conscious teacher and prosaic man of
thought to create a genuine weird masterpiece.
His daughter, the wife of Shelley, was much more successful; and her inimitable Frankenstein;
or, the Modern Prometheus (1817) is one of the horror-classics of all time. Composed in
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competition with her husband, Lord Byron, and Dr. John William Polidori in an effort to prove
supremacy in horror-making, Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein was the only one of the rival narratives
to be brought to an elaborate completion; and criticism has failed to prove that the best parts are
due to Shelley rather than to her. The novel, somewhat tinged but scarcely marred by moral
didacticism, tells of the artificial human being moulded from charnel fragments by Victor
Frankenstein, a young Swiss medical student. Created by its designer "in the mad pride of
intellectuality," the monster possesses full intelligence but owns a hideously loathsome form. It
is rejected by mankind, becomes embittered, and at length begins the successive murder of all
whom Frankenstein loves best, friends and family. It demands that Frankenstein create a wife for
it; and when the student finally refuses in horror lest the world be populated with such monsters,
it departs with a hideous threat "to be with him on his wedding night." Upon that night the bride
is strangled, and from that time on Frankenstein hunts down the monster, even into the wastes of
the Arctic. In the end, whilst seeking shelter on the ship of the man who tells the story,
Frankenstein himself is killed by the shocking object of his search and creation of his
presumptuous pride. Some of the scenes in Frankenstein are unforgettable, as when the newly
animated monster enters its creator's room, parts the curtains of his bed, and gazes at him in the
yellow moonlight with watery eyes -- "if eyes they may be called." Mrs. Shelley wrote other
novels, including the fairly notable Last Man; but never duplicated the success of her first effort.
It has the true touch of cosmic fear, no matter how much the movement may lag in places. Dr.
Polidori developed his competing idea as a long short story, The Vampyre; in which we behold a
suave villain of the true Gothic or Byronic type, and encounter some excellent passages of stark
fright, including a terrible nocturnal experience in a shunned Grecian wood.
In this same period Sir Walter Scott frequently concerned himself with the weird, weaving it
into many of his novels and poems, and sometimes producing such independent bits of narration
as The Tapestried Chamber or Wandering Willie's Tale in Redgauntlet, in the latter of which the
force of the spectral and the diabolic is enhanced by a grotesque homeliness of speech and
atmosphere. In 1830 Scott published his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, which still
forms one of our best compendia of European witch-lore. Washington Irving is another famous
figure not unconnected with the weird; for though most of his ghosts are too whimsical and
humorous to form genuinely spectral literature, a distinct inclination in this direction is to be
noted in many of his productions. The German Student in Tales of a Traveler (1824) is a slyly
concise and effective presentation of the old legend of the dead bride, whilst woven into the
cosmic tissue of The Money Diggers in the same volume is more than one hint of piratical
apparitions in the realms which Captain Kidd once roamed. Thomas Moore also joined the ranks
of the macabre artists in the poem Alciphron, which he later elaborated into the prose novel of
The Epicurean (1827). Though merely relating the adventures of a young Athenian duped by the
artifice of cunning Egyptian priests, Moore manages to infuse much genuine horror into his
account of subterranean frights and wonders beneath the primordial temples of Memphis. De
Quincey more than once revels in grotesque and arabesque terrors, though with a desultoriness
and learned pomp which deny him the rank of specialist.
This era likewise saw the rise of William Harrison Ainsworth, whose romantic novels teem
with the eerie and the gruesome. Capt. Marryat, besides writing such short tales as The
Werewolf, made a memorable contribution in The Phantom Ship (1839), founded on the legend
of the Flying Dutchman, whose spectral and accursed vessel sails for ever near the Cape of Good
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Hope. Dickens now rises with occasional weird bits like The Signalman, a tale of ghastly
warning conforming to a very common pattern and touched with a verisimilitude which allied it
as much with the coming psychological school as with the dying Gothic school. At this time a
wave of interest in spiritualistic charlatanry, mediumism, Hindoo theosophy, and such matters,
much like that of the present day, was flourishing; so that the number of weird tales with a
"Psychic" or pseudo-scientific basis became very considerable. For a number of these the prolific
and popular Edward Bulwer-Lytton was responsible; and despite the large doses of turgid
rhetoric and empty romanticism in his products, his success in the weaving of a certain kind of
bizarre charm cannot be denied.
The House and the Brain, which hints of Rosicrucianism and at a malign and deathless figure
perhaps suggested by Louis XV's mysterious courtier St. Germain, yet survives as one of the best
short haunted-house tales ever written. The novel Zanoni (1842) contains similar elements more
elaborately handled, and introduces a vast unknown sphere of being pressing on our own world
and guarded by a horrible "Dweller of the Threshold" who haunts those who try to enter and fail.
Here we have a benign brotherhood kept alive from age to age till finally reduced to a single
member, and as a hero an ancient Chaldaean sorcerer surviving in the pristine bloom of youth to
perish on the guillotine of the French Revolution. Though full of the conventional spirit of
romance, marred by a ponderous network of symbolic and didactic meanings, and left
unconvincing through lack of perfect atmospheric realization of the situations hinging on the
spectral world, Zanoni is really an excellent performance as a romantic novel; and can be read
with genuine interest by the not too sophisticated reader. It is amusing to note that in describing
an attempted initiation into the ancient brotherhood the author cannot escape using the stock
Gothic castle of Walpolian lineage.
In A Strange Story (1862) Bulwer-Lytton shows a marked improvement in the creation of weird
images and moods. The novel, despite enormous length, a highly artificial plot bolstered up by
opportune coincidences, and an atmosphere of homiletic pseudo-science designed to please the
matter-of-fact and purposeful Victorian reader, is exceedingly effective as a narrative; evoking
instantaneous and unflagging interest, and furnishing many potent -- if somewhat melodramatic -
- tableaux and climaxes. Again we have the mysterious user of life's elixir in the person of the
soulless magician Margrave, whose dark exploits stand out with dramatic vividness against the
modern background of a quiet English town and of the Australian bush; and again we have
shadowy intimations of a vast spectral world of the unknown in the very air about us -- this time
handled with much greater power and vitality than in Zanoni. One of the two great incantation
passages, where the hero is driven by a luminous evil spirit to rise at night in his sleep, take a
strange Egyptian wand, and evoke nameless presences in the haunted and mausoleum-facing
pavilion of a famous Renaissance alchemist, truly stands among the major terror scenes of
literature. Just enough is suggested, and just little enough is told. Unknown words are twice
dictated to the sleep-walker, and as he repeats them the ground trembles, and all the dogs of the
countryside begin to bay at half-seen amorphous shadows that stalk athwart the moonlight. When
a third set of unknown words is prompted, the sleep-walker's spirit suddenly rebels at uttering
them, as if the soul could recognize ultimate abysmal horrors concealed from the mind; and at
last an apparition of an absent sweetheart and good angel breaks the malign spell. This fragment
well illustrates how far Lord Lytton was capable of progressing beyond his usual pomp and stock
romance toward that crystalline essence of artistic fear which belongs to the domain of poetry. In
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describing certain details of incantations, Lytton was greatly indebted to his amusingly serious
occult studies, in the course of which he came in touch with that odd French scholar and cabalist
Alphonse Louis Constant ("Eliphas Levy"), who claimed to possess the secrets of ancient magic,
and to have evoked the spectre of the old Grecian wizard Apollonius of Tyana, who lived in
Nero's times.
The romantic, semi-Gothic, quasi-moral tradition here represented was carried far down the
nineteenth century by such authors as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H.
Rider Haggard (whose She is really remarkably good), Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and
Robert Louis Stevenson -- the latter of whom, despite an atrocious tendency toward jaunty
mannerisms, created permanent classics in Markheim, The Body Snatcher, and Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde. Indeed, we may say that this school still survives; for to it clearly belong such of our
contemporary horror-tales as specialise in events rather than atmospheric details, address the
intellect rather than a malign tensity or psychological verisimilitude, and take a definite stand in
sympathy with mankind and its welfare. It has its undeniable strength, and because of its "human
element" commands a wider audience than does the sheer artistic nightmare. If not quite so
potent as the latter, it is because a diluted product can never achieve the intensity of a
concentrated essence.
Quite alone both as a novel and as a piece of terror-literature stands the famous Wuthering
Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë, with its mad vistas of bleak, windswept Yorkshire moors and
the violent, distorted lives they foster. Though primarily a tale of life, and of human passions in
agony and conflict, its epically cosmic setting affords room for horror of the most spiritual sort.
Heathcliff, the modified Byronic villain-hero, is a strange dark waif found in the streets as a
small child and speaking only a strange gibberish till adopted by the family he ultimately ruins.
That he is in truth a diabolic spirit rather than a human being is more than once suggested, and
the unreal is further approached in the experience of the visitor who encounters a plaintive childghost
at a bough-brushed upper window. Between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is a tie
deeper and more terrible than human love. After her death he twice disturbs her grave, and is
haunted by an impalpable presence which can be nothing less thin her spirit. The spirit enters his
life more and more, and at last he becomes confident of some imminent mystical reunion. He
says he feels a strange change approaching, and ceases to take nourishment. At night he either
walks abroad or opens the casement by his bed. When he dies the casement is still swinging open
to the pouring rain, and a queer smile pervades the stiffened face. They bury him in a grave
beside the mound he has haunted for eighteen years, and small shepherd boys say that he yet
walks with his Catherine in the churchyard and on the moor when it rains. Their faces, too, are
sometimes seen on rainy nights behind that upper casement at Wuthering Heights. Miss
Bront&eeuml;'s eerie terror is no mere Gothic echoe, but a tense expression of man's shuddering
reaction to the unknown. In this respect, Wuthering Heights becomes the symbol of a literary
transition, and marks the growth of a new and sounder school.
VI. SPECTRAL LITERATURE ON THE CONTINENT
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ON the continent literary horror fared well. The celebrated short tales and novels of Ernst
Theodor Wihelm Hoffmann (1776-1822) are a by-word for mellowness of background and
maturity of form, though they incline to levity and extravagance, and lack the exalted moments
of stark, breathless terror which a less sophisticated writer might have achieved. Generally they
convey the grotesque rather than the terrible. Most artistic of all the continental weird tales is the
German classic Undine (1814), by Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Baron de la Motte Fouqu&eeacute;.
In this story of a water-spirit who married a mortal and gained a human soul there is a delicate
fineness of craftsmanship which makes it notable in any department of literature, and an easy
naturalness which places it close to the genuine folk-myth. It is, in fact, derived from a tale told
by the Renaissance physician and alchemist Paracelsus in his Treatise on Elemental Sprites.
Undine, daughter of a powerful water-prince, was exchanged by her father as a small child for a
fisherman's daughter, in order that she might acquire a soul by wedding a human being. Meeting
the noble youth Huldbrand at the cottage of her fosterfather by the sea at the edge of a haunted
wood, she soon marries him, and accompanies him to his ancestral castle of Ringstetten.
Huldbrand, however, eventually wearies of his wife's supernatural affiliations, and especially of
the appearances of her uncle, the malicious woodland waterfall-spirit Kuhleborn; a weariness
increased by his growing affection for Bertalda, who turns out to be the fisherman's child for
whom Undine was changed. At length, on a voyage down the Danube, he is provoked by some
innocent act of his devoted wife to utter the angry words which consign her back to her
supernatural element; from which she can, by the laws of her species, return only once -- to kill
him, whether she will of no, if ever he prove unfaithful to her memory. Later, when Huldbrand is
about to be married to Bertalda, Undine returns for her sad duty, and bears his life away in tears.
When he is buried among his fathers in the village churchyard a veiled, snow-white female
figure appears among the mourners, but after the prayer is seen no more. In her place is seen a
little silver spring, which murmurs its way almost completely around the new grave, and empties
into a neighboring lake. The villagers show it to this day, and say that Undine and her Huldbrand
are thus united in death. Many passages and atmospheric touches in this tale reveal Fouqué as an
accomplished artist in the field of the macabre; especially the descriptions of the haunted wood
with its gigantic snow-white man and various unnamed terrors, which occur early in the
narrative.
Not so well known as Undine, but remarkable for its convincing realism and freedom from
Gothic stock devices, is the Amber Witch of Wilhelm Meinhold, another product of the German
fantastic genius of the earlier nineteenth century. This tale, which is laid in the time of the Thirty
Years' War, purports to be a clergyman's manuscript found in an old church at Coserow, and
centres round the writer's daughter, Maria Schweidler, who is wrongly accused of witchcraft.
She has found a deposit of amber which she keeps secret for various reasons, and the
unexplained wealth obtained from this lends colour to the accusation; an accusation instigated by
the malice of the wolf-hunting nobleman Wittich Appelmann, who has vainly pursued her with
ignoble designs. The deeds of a real witch, who afterward comes to a horrible supernatural end in
prison, are glibly imputed to the hapless Maria; and after a typical witchcraft trial with forced
confessions under torture she is about to be burned at the stake when saved just in time by her
lover, a noble youth from a neighboring district. Meinho1d's great strength is in his air of casual
and realistic verisimilitude, which intensifies our suspense and sense of the unseen by half
persuading us that the menacing events must somehow be either the truth or very dose to the
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truth. Indeed, so thorough is this realism that a popular magazine once published the main points
of The Amber Witch as an actual occurrence of the seventeenth century!
In the present generation German horror-fiction is most notably represented by Hanns Heinz
Ewers, who brings to bear on his dark conceptions an effective knowledge of modem
psychology. Novels like The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Alrune, and short stories like The Spider,
contain distinctive qualities which raise them to a classic level.
But France as well as Germany has been active in the realm of weirdness. Victor Hugo, in such
tales as Hans of Iceland, and Balzac, in The Wild Ass's Skin, Seraphita, and Louis Lambert, both
employ supernaturalism to a greater or less extent; though generally only as a means to some
more human end, and without the sincere and dæmonic intensity which characterizes the born
artist in shadows. It is in Theophile Gautier that we first seem to find an authentic French sense
of the unreal world, and here there appears a spectral mystery which, though not continuously
used, is recognizable at once as something alike genuine and profound. Short tales like Avatar,
The Foot of the Mummy, and Clarimonde display glimpses of forbidden vistas that allure,
tantalize, and sometime horrify; whilst the Egyptian visions evoked in One of Cleopatra's Nights
are of the keenest and most expressive potency. Gautier captured the inmost soul of æonweighted
Egypt, with its cryptic life and Cyclopean architecture, and uttered once and for all the
eternal horror of its nether world of catacombs, where to the end of time millions of stiff, spiced
corpses will stare up in the blackness with glassy eyes, awaiting some awesome and unrelatable
summons. Gustave Flaubert ably continued the tradition of Gautier in orgies of poetic phantasy
like The Temptation of St. Anthony, and but for a strong realistic bias might have been an archweaver
of tapestried terrors. Later on we see the stream divide, producing strange poets and
fantaisistes of the symbolic and decadent schools whose dark interests really centre more in
abnormalities of human thought and instinct than in the actual supernatural, and subtle storytellers
whose thrills are quite directly derived from the night-black wells of cosmic unreality. Of
the former class of "artists in sin" the illustrious poet Baudelaire, influenced vastly by Poe, is the
supreme type; whilst the psychological novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, a true child of the
eighteen-nineties, is at once the summation and finale. The latter and purely narrative class is
continued by Prosper Merimée, whose Venus of Ille presents in terse and convincing prose the
same ancient statue-bride theme which Thomas Moore cast in ballad form in The Ring.
The horror-tales of the powerful and cynical Guy de Maupassant, written as his final madness
gradually overtook him, present individualities of their own; being rather the morbid outpourings
of a realistic mind in a pathological state than the healthy imaginative products of a vision
naturally disposed toward phantasy and sensitive to the normal illusions of the unseen.
Nevertheless they are of the keenest interest and poignancy; suggesting with marvelous force the
imminence of nameless terrors, and the relentless dogging of an ill-starred individual by hideous
and menacing representatives of the outer blackness. Of these stories The Horla is generally
regarded as the masterpiece. Relating the advent to France of an invisible being who lives on
water and milk, sways the minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extraterrestrial
organisms arrived on earth to subjugate an4 overwhelm mankind, this tense narrative
is perhaps without a peer in its particular department; notwithstanding its indebtedness to a tale
by the American Fitz-James O'Brien for details in describing the actual presence of the unseen
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monster. Other potently dark creations of de Maupassant are Who Knows?, The Spectre, He, The
Diary of a Madman, The White Wolf, On the River, and the grisly verses entitled Horror.
The collaborators Erckmann-Chatrian enriched French literature with many spectral fancies like
The Man-Wolf, in which a transmitted curse works toward its end in a traditional Gothic-castle
setting. Their power of creating a shuddering midnight atmosphere was tremendous despite a
tendency toward natural explanations and scientific wonders; and few short tales contain greater
horror than The Invisible Eye, where a malignant old hag weaves nocturnal hypnotic spells which
induce the successive occupants of a certain inn chamber to hang themselves on a cross-beam.
The Owl's Ear and The Waters of Death are full of engulfing darkness and mystery, the latter
embodying the familiar over-grown-spider theme so frequently employed by weird fictionists.
Villiers de l'Isle Adam likewise followed the macabre school; his Torture by Hope, the tale of a
stake-condemned prisoner permitted to escape in order to feel the pangs of recapture, being held
by some to constitute the most harrowing short story in literature. This type, however, is less a
part of the weird tradition than a class peculiar to itself -- the so-called conte cruel, in which the
wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalizations, frustrations, and
gruesome physical horrors. Almost wholly devoted to this form is the living writer Maurice
Level, whose very brief episodes have lent themselves so readily to theatrical adaptation in the
"thrillers" of the Grand Guignol. As a matter of fact, the French genius is more naturally suited
to this dark realism than to the suggestion of the unseen; since the latter process requires, for its
best and most sympathetic development on a large scale, the inherent mysticism of the Northern
mind.
A very flourishing, though till recently quite hidden, branch of weird literature is that of the
Jews, kept alive and nourished in obscurity by the sombre heritage of early Eastern magic,
apocalyptic literature, and cabbalism. The Semitic mind, like the Celtic and Teutonic, seems to
possess marked mystical inclinations; and the wealth of underground horror-lore surviving in
ghettoes and synagogues must be much more considerable than is generally imagined.
Cabbalism itself, so prominent during the Middle Ages, is a system of philosophy explaining the
universe as emanations of the Deity, and involving the existence of strange spiritual realms and
beings apart from the visible world of which dark glimpses may be obtained through certain
secret incantations. Its ritual is bound up with mystical interpretations of the Old Testament, and
attributes an esoteric significance to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet -- a circumstance which
has imparted to Hebrew letters a sort of spectral glamour and potency in the popular literature of
magic. Jewish folklore has preserved much of the terror and mystery of the past, and when more
thoroughly studied is likely to exert considerable influence on weird fiction. The best examples
of its literary use so far are the German novel The Golem, by Gustave Meyrink, and the drama
The Dyhhuk, by the Jewish writer using the pseudonym "Ansky." The former, with its haunting
shadowy suggestions of marvels and horrors just beyond reach, is laid in Prague, and describes
with singular mastery that city's ancient ghetto with its spectral, peaked gables. The name is
derived from a fabulous artificial giant supposed to be made and animated by mediæval rabbis
according to a certain cryptic formula. The Dyhbuk, translated and produced in America in 1925,
and more recently produced as an opera, describes with singular power the possession of a living
body by the evil soul of a dead man. Both golems and dybbuks are fixed types, and serve as
frequent ingredients of later Jewish tradition.
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VII. EDGAR ALLAN POE
IN the eighteen-thirties occurred a literary dawn directly affecting not only the history of the
weird tale, but that of short fiction as a whole; and indirectly moulding the trends and fortunes of
a great European æsthetic school. It is our good fortune as Americans to be able to claim that
dawn as our own, for it came in the person of our most illustrious and unfortunate fellowcountryman
Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's fame has been subject to curious undulations, and it is now a
fashion amongst the "advanced intelligentsia" to minimize his importance both as an artist and as
an influence; but it would be hard for any mature and reflective critic to deny the tremendous
value of his work and the persuasive potency of his mind as an opener of artistic vistas. True, his
type of outlook may have been anticipated; but it was he who first realized its possibilities and
gave it supreme form and systematic expression. True also, that subsequent writers may have
produced greater single tales than his; but again we must comprehend that it was only he who
taught them by example and precept the art which they, having the way cleared for them and
given an explicit guide, were perhaps able to carry to greater lengths. Whatever his limitations,
Poe did that which no one else ever did or could have done; and to him we owe the modern
horror-story in its final and perfected state.
Before Poe the bulk of weird writers had worked largely in the dark; without an understanding
of the psychological basis of the horror appeal, and hampered by more or legs of conformity to
certain empty literary conventions such as the happy ending, virtue rewarded, and in general a
hollow moral didacticism, acceptance of popular standards and values, and striving of the author
to obtrude his own emotions into the story and take sides with the partisans of the majority's
artificial ideas. Poe, on the other hand, perceived the essential impersonality of the real artist; and
knew that the function of creative fiction is merely to express and interpret events and sensations
as they are, regardless of how they tend or what they prove -- good or evil, attractive or
repulsive, stimulating or depressing, with the author always acting as a vivid and detached
chronicler rather than as a teacher, sympathizer, or vendor of opinion. He saw clearly that all
phases of life and thought are equally eligible as a subject matter for the artist, and being inclined
by temperament to strangeness and gloom, decided to be the interpreter of those powerful
feelings and frequent happenings which attend pain rather than pleasure, decay rather than
growth, terror rather than tranquility, and which are fundamentally either adverse or indifferent
to the tastes and traditional outward sentiments of mankind, and to the health, sanity, and normal
expansive welfare of the species.
Poe's spectres thus acquired a convincing malignity possessed by none of their predecessors,
and established a new standard of realism in the annals of literary horror. The impersonal and
artistic intent, moreover, was aided by a scientific attitude not often found before; whereby Poe
studied the human mind rather than the usages of Gothic fiction, and worked with an analytical
knowledge of terror's true sources which doubled the force of his narratives and emancipated him
from all the absurdities inherent in merely conventional shudder-coining. This example having
been set, later authors were naturally forced to conform to it in order to compete at all; so that in
this way a definite change begin to affect the main stream of macabre writing. Poe, too, set a
fashion in consummate craftsmanship; and although today some of his own work seems slightly
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melodramatic and unsophisticated, we can constantly trace his influence in such things as the
maintenance of a single mood and achievement of a single impression in a tale, and the rigorous
paring down of incidents to such as have a direct bearing on the plot and will figure prominently
in the climax. Truly may it be said that Poe invented the short story in its present form. His
elevation of disease, perversity, and decay to the level of artistically expressible themes was
likewise infinitely far-reaching in effect; for avidly seized, sponsored, and intensified by his
eminent French admirer Charles Pierre Baudelaire, it became the nucleus of the principal
æsthetic movements in France, thus making Poe in a sense the father of the Decadents and the
Symbolists.
Poet and critic by nature and supreme attainment, logician and philosopher by taste and
mannerism, Poe was by no means immune from defects and affectations. His pretence to
profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humor,
and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice must all be recognized and forgiven. Beyond
and above them, and dwarfing them to insignificance, was a master's vision of the terror that
stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss.
Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in the
solemn masquerade called human thought and feeling, that vision had power to project itself in
blackly magical crystallisations and transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile America of
the thirties and forties such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi as not even the
nether slopes of Saturn might boast. Verses and tales alike sustain the burthen of cosmic panic.
The raven whose noisome beak pierces the heart, the ghouls that toll iron bells in pestilential
steeples, the vault of Ulalume in the black October night, the shocking spires and domes under
the sea, the "wild, weird clime that lieth, sublime, out of Space -- out of Time" -- all these things
and more leer at us amidst maniacal rattlings in the seething nightmare of the poetry. And in the
prose there yawn open for us the very jaws of the pit -- inconceivable abnormalities slyly hinted
into a horrible half-knowledge by words whose innocence we scarcely doubt till the cracked
tension of the speaker's hollow voice bids us fear their nameless implications; dæmoniac patterns
and presences slumbering noxiously till waked for one phobic instant into a shrieking revelation
that cackles itself to sudden madness or explodes in memorable and cataclysmic echoes. A
Witches' Sabbath of horror flinging off decorous robes is flashed before us -- a sight the more
monstrous because of the scientific skill with which every particular is marshaled and brought
into an easy apparent relation to the known gruesomeness of material life.
Poe's tales, of course, fall into several classes; some of which contain a purer essence of
spiritual horror than others. The tales of logic and ratiocination, forerunners of the modern
detective story, are not to be included at all in weird literature; whilst certain others, probably
influenced considerably by Hoffmann, possess an extravagance which relegates them to the
borderline of the grotesque. Still a third group deal with abnormal psychology and monomania in
such a way as to express terror but not weirdness. A substantial residuum, however, represent the
literature of supernatural horror in its acutest form; and give their author a permanent and
unassailable place as deity and fountainhead of all modern diabolic fiction. Who can forget the
terrible swollen ship poised on the billow-chasm's edge in MS. Found in a Bottle -- the dark
intimations of her unhallowed age and monstrous growth, her sinister crew of unseeing
greybeards, and her frightful southward rush under full sail through the ice of the Antarctic night,
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sucked onward by some resistless devil-current toward a vortex of eldritch enlightenment which
must end in destruction?
Then there is the unutterable M. Valdemar, kept together by hypnotism for seven months after
his death, and uttering frantic sounds but a moment before the breaking of the spell leaves him "a
nearly liquid mass of loathsome, of detestable putrescence." In the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym
the voyagers reach first a strange south polar land of murderous savages where nothing is white
and where vast rocky ravines have the form of titanic Egyptian letters spelling terrible primal
arcana of earth; and thereafter a still more mysterious realm where everything is white, and
where shrouded giants and snowy-plumed birds guard a cryptic cataract of mist which empties
from immeasurable celestial heights into a torrid milky sea. Metzengerstein horrifies with its
malign hints of a monstrous metempsychosis -- the mad nobleman who burns the stable of his
hereditary foe; the colossal unknown horse that issues from the blazing building after the owner
has perished therein; the vanishing bit of ancient tapestry where was shown the giant horse of the
victim's ancestor in the Crusades; the madman's wild and constant riding on the great horse, and
his fear and hatred of the steed; the meaningless prophecies that brood obscurely over the
warring houses; and finally, the burning of the madman's palace and the death therein of the
owner, borne helpless into the flames and up the vast staircase astride the beast he had ridden so
strangely. Afterward the rising smoke of the ruins take the form of a gigantic horse. The Man of
the Crowd, telling of one who roams day and night to mingle with streams of people as if afraid
to be alone, has quieter effects, but implies nothing less of cosmic fear. Poe's mind was never far
from terror and decay, and we see in every tale, poem, and philosophical dialogue a tense
eagerness to fathom unplumbed wells of night, to pierce the veil of death, and to reign in fancy
as lord of the frightful mysteries of time and space.
Certain of Poe's tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form which makes them
veritable beacon-lights in the province of the short story. Poe could, when he wished, give to his
prose a richly poetic cast; employing that archaic and Orientalised style with jeweled phrase,
quasi-Biblical repetition, and recurrent burthen so successfully used by later writers like Oscar
Wilde and Lord Dunsany; and in the cases where he has done this we have an effect of lyrical
phantasy almost narcotic in essence -- an opium pageant of dream in the language of dream, with
every unnatural colour and grotesque image bodied forth in a symphony of corresponding sound.
The Masque of the Red Death, Silence, a Fable, and Shadow, a Parable, are assuredly poems in
every sense of the word save the metrical one, and owe as much of their power to aural cadence
as to visual imagery. But it is in two of the less openly poetic tales, Ligeia and The Fall of the
House of Usher -- especially the latter -- that one finds those very summits of artistry whereby
Poe takes his place at the head of fictional miniaturists. Simple and straightforward in plot, both
of these tales owe their supreme magic to the cunning development which appears in the
selection and collocation of every least incident. Ligeia tells of a first wife of lofty and
mysterious origin, who after death returns through a preternatural force of will to take possession
of the body of a second wife; imposing even her physical appearance on the temporary
reanimated corpse of her victim at the last moment. Despite a suspicion of prolixity and
topheaviness, the narrative reaches its terrific climax with relentless power. Usher, whose
superiority in detail and proportion is very marked, hints shudderingly of obscure life in
inorganic things, and displays an abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a long and
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isolated family history -- a brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly ancient house all sharing a
single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the same moment.
These bizarre conceptions, so awkward in unskillful hands, become under Poe's spell living and
convincing terrors to haunt our nights; and all because the author understood so perfectly the
very mechanics and physiology of fear and strangeness -- the essential details to emphasise, the
precise incongruities and conceits to select as preliminaries or concomitants to horror, the exact
incidents and allusions to throw out innocently in advance as symbols or prefigurings of each
major step toward the hideous dénouement to come, the nice adjustments of cumulative force
and the unerring accuracy in linkage of parts which make for faultless unity throughout and
thunderous effectiveness at the climactic moment, the delicate nuances of scenic and landscape
value to select in establishing and sustaining the desired mood and vitalising the desired illusion
-- principles of this kind, and dozens of obscurer ones too elusive to be described or even fully
comprehended by any ordinary commentator. Melodrama and unsophistication there may be --
we are told of one fastidious Frenchman who could not bear to read Poe except in Baudelaire's
urbane and Gallically modulated translation -- but all traces of such things are wholly
overshadowed by a potent and inborn sense of the spectral, the morbid, and the horrible which
gushed forth from every cell of the artist's creative mentality and stamped his macabre work with
the ineffaceable mark of supreme genius. Poe's weird tales are alive in a manner that few others
can ever hope to be.
Like most fantaisistes, Poe excels in incidents and broad narrative effects rather than in
character drawing. His typical protagonist is generally a dark, handsome, proud, melancholy,
intellectual, highly sensitive, capricious, introspective, isolated, and sometimes slightly mad
gentleman of ancient family and opulent circumstances; usually deeply learned in strange lore,
and darkly ambitious of penetrating to forbidden secrets of the universe. Aside from a highsounding
name, this character obviously derives little from the early Gothic novel; for he is
clearly neither the wooden hero nor the diabolical villain of Radcliffian or Ludovician romance.
Indirectly, however, he does possess a sort of genealogical connection; since his gloomy,
ambitious and anti-social qualities savour strongly of the typical Byronic hero, who in turn is
definitely an offspring,of the Gothic Manfreds, Montonis, and Ambrosios. More particular
qualities appear to be derived from the psychology of Poe himself, who certainly possessed
much of the depression, sensitiveness, mad aspiration, loneliness, and extravagant freakishness
which he attributes to his haughty and solitary victims of Fate.
VIII. THE WEIRD TRADITION IN AMERICA
THE public for whom Poe wrote, though grossly unappreciative of his art, was by no means
accustomed to the horrors with which he dealt. America, besides inheriting the usual dark folklore
of Europe, had an additional fund of weird associations to draw upon; so that spectral
legends had already been recognised as fruitful subject-matter for literature. Charles Brockden
Brown had achieved phenomenal fame with his Radcliffian romances, and Washington Irving's
lighter treatment of eerie themes had quickly become classic. This additional fund proceeded, as
Paul Elmer More has pointed out, from the keen spiritual and theological interests of the first
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colonists, plus the strange and forbidding nature of the scene into which they were plunged. The
vast and gloomy virgin forests in whose perpetual twilight all terrors might well lurk; the hordes
of coppery Indians whose strange, saturnine visages and violent customs hinted strongly at traces
of infernal origin; the free rein given tinder the influence of Puritan theocracy to all manner of
notions respecting man's relation to the stern and vengeful God of the Calvinists, and to the
sulphureous Adversary of that God, about whom so much was thundered in the pulpits each
Sunday; and the morbid introspection developed by an isolated backwoods life devoid of normal
amusements and of the recreational mood, harassed by commands for theological selfexamination,
keyed to unnatural emotional repression, and forming above all a mere grim
struggle for survival -- all these things conspired to produce an environment in which the black
whisperings of sinister grandams were heard far beyond the chimney corner, and in which tales
of witchcraft and unbelievable secret monstrosities lingered long after the dread days of the
Salem nightmare.
Poe represents the newer, more disillusioned, and more technically finished of the weird
schools that rose out of this propitious milieu. Another school -- the tradition of moral values,
gentle restraint, and mild, leisurely phantasy tinged more or less with the whimsical -- was
represented by another famous, misunderstood, and lonely figure in American letters -- the shy
and sensitive Nathaniel Hawthorne, scion of antique Salem and great-grandson of one of the
bloodiest of the old witchcraft judges. In Hawthorne we have none of the violence, the daring,
the high colouring, the intense dramatic sense, the cosmic malignity, and the undivided and
impersonal artistry of Poe. Here, instead, is a gentle soul cramped by the Puritanism of early
New England; shadowed and wistful, and grieved at an unmoral universe which everywhere
transcends the conventional patterns thought by our forefathers to represent divine and
immutable law. Evil, a very real force to Hawthorne, appears on every hand as a lurking and
conquering adversary; and the visible world becomes in his fancy a theatre of infinite tragedy
and woe, with unseen half-existent influences hovering over it and through it, battling for
supremacy and moulding the destinies of the hapless mortals who form its vain and self-deluded
population. The heritage of American weirdness was his to a most intense degree, and he saw a
dismal throng of vague specters behind the common phenomena of life; but he was not
disinterested enough to value impressions, sensations, and beauties of narration for their own
sake. He must needs weave his phantasy into some quietly melancholy fabric of didactic or
allegorical cast, in which his meekly resigned cynicism may display with naive moral appraisal
the perfidy of a human race which he cannot cease to cherish and mourn despite his insight into
its hypocrisy. Supernatural horror, then, is never a primarily object with Hawthorne; though its
impulses were so deeply woven into his personality that he cannot help suggesting it with the
force of genius when he calls upon the unreal world to illustrate the pensive sermon he wishes to
preach.
Hawthorne's intimations of the weird, always gentle, elusive, and restrained, may be traced
throughout his work. The mood that produced them found one delightful vent in the Teutonised
retelling of classic myths for children contained in A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, and at
other times exercised itself in casting a certain strangeness and intangible witchery or
malevolence over events not meant to be actually supernatural; as in the macabre posthumous
novel Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, which invests with a peculiar sort of repulsion a house existing to
this day in Salem, and abutting on the ancient Charter Street Burying Ground. In The Marble
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Faun, whose design was sketched out in an Italian villa reputed to be haunted, a tremendous
background of genuine phantasy and mystery palpitates just beyond the common reader's sight;
and glimpses of fabulous blood in mortal veins are hinted at during the course of a romance
which cannot help being interesting despite the persistent incubus of moral allegory, anti-Popery
propaganda, and a Puritan prudery which has caused the modern writer D. H. Lawrence to
express a longing to treat the author in a highly undignified manner. Septimius Felton, a
posthumous novel whose, idea was to have been elaborated and incorporated into the unfinished
Dolliver Romance, touches on the Elixir of Life in a more or less capable fashion whilst the notes
for a never-written tale to be called The Ancestral Footstep show what Hawthorne would have
done with an intensive treatment of an old English superstition -- that of an ancient and accursed
line whose members left footprints of blood as they walked-which appears incidentally in both
Septimius Felton and Dr. Grimshawe's Secret.
Many of Hawthorne's shorter tales exhibit weirdness, either of atmosphere or of incident, to a
remarkable degree. Edward Randolph's Portrait, in Legends of the Province House, has its
diabolic moments. The Minister's Black Veil (founded on an actual incident) and The Ambitious
Guest imply much more than they state, whilst Ethan Grand -- a fragment of a longer work never
completed -- rises to genuine heights of cosmic fear with its vignette of the wild hill country and
the blazing, desolate lime-kilns, and its delineation of the Byronic "unpardonable sinner," whose
troubled life ends with a peal of fearful laughter in the night as he seeks rest amidst the flames of
the furnace. Some of Hawthorne's notes tell of weird tales he would have written had he lived
longer -- an especially vivid plot being that concerning a baffling stranger who appeared now
and then in public assemblies, and who was at last followed and found to come and go from a
very ancient grave.
But foremost as a finished, artistic unit among all our author's weird material is the famous and
exquisitely wrought novel, The House of the Seven Gables, in which the relentless working out
of an ancestral curse is developed with astonishing power against the sinister background of a
very ancient Salem house -- one of those peaked Gothic affairs which formed the first regular
building-up of our New England coast towns but which gave way after the seventeenth century
to the more familiar gambrel-roofed or classic Georgian types now known as "Colonial." Of
these old gabled Gothic houses scarcely a dozen are to be seen today in their original condition
throughout the United States, but one well known to Hawthorne still stands in Turner Street,
Salem, and is pointed out with doubtful authority as the scene and inspiration of the romance.
Such an edifice, with its spectral peaks, its clustered chimneys, its overhanging second story, its
grotesque corner-brackets, and its diamond-paned lattice windows, is indeed an object well
calculated to evoke sombre reflections; typifying as it does the dark Puritan age of concealed
horror and witch-whispers which preceded the beauty, rationality, and spaciousness of the
eighteenth century. Hawthorne saw many in his youth, and knew the black tales connected with
some of them. He heard, too, many rumours of a curse upon his own line as the result of his
great-grandfather's severity as a witchcraft judge in 1692.
From this setting came the immortal tale -- New England's greatest contribution to weird
literature -- and we can feel in an instant the authenticity of the atomosphere presented to us.
Stealthy horror and disease lurk within the weather-blackened, moss-crusted, and elm-shadowed
walls of the archaic dwelling so vividly displayed, and we grasp the brooding malignity of the
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place when we read that its builder -- old Colonel Pyncheon -- snatched the land with peculiar
ruthlessness from its original settler, Matthew Maule, whom he condemned to the gallows as a
wizard in the year of the panic. Maule died cursing old Pyncheon -- "God will give him blood to
drink" -- and the waters of the old well on the seized land turned bitter. Maule's carpenter son
consented to build the great gabled house for his fathet's triumphant enemy, but the old Colonel
died strangely on the day of its dedication. Then followed generations of odd vicissitudes, with
queer whispers about the dark powers of the Maules, and sometimes terrible ends befalling the
Pyncheons.
The overshadowing malevolence of the ancient house -- almost as alive as Poe's House of
Usher, though in a subtler way -- pervades the tale as a recurrent motif pervades in operatic
tragedy; and when the main story is reached, we behold the modern Pyncheons in a pitiable state
of decay. Poor old Hepzibah, the eccentric reduced gentlewoman; childlike, unfortunate Clifford,
just released from undeserved imprisonment; sly and treacherous judge Pyncheon, who is the old
Colonel an over again -- all these figures are tremendous symbols, and are well matched by the
stunted vegetation and anæmic fowls in the garden. It was almost a pity to supply a fairly happy
ending, with a union of sprightly Phoebe, cousin and last scion of the Pyncheons, to the
prepossessing young man who turns out to be the last of the Maules. This union, presumably,
ends the curse. Hawthorne avoids all violence of diction or movement, and keeps his
implications of terror well in the background; but occasional glimpses amply serve to sustain the
mood and redeem the work from pure allegorical aridity. Incidents like the bewitching of Alice
Pyncheon in the early eighteenth century, and the spectral music of her harpsichord which
precedes a death in the family -- the latter a variant of an immemorial type of Aryan myth -- link
the action directly with the supernatural; whilst the dead nocturnal vigil of old judge Pyncheon in
the ancient parlour, with his frightfully ticking watch, is stark horror of the most poignant and
genuine sort. The way in which the judge's death is first adumbrated by the motions and sniffing
of a strange cat outside the window, long before the fact is suspected by the reader or by any of
the characters, is a stroke of genius which Poe could not have surpassed. Later the strange cat
watches intently outside that same window in the night and on the next day, for -- something. It
is clearly the psychopomp of primeval myth, fitted and adapted with infinite deftness to its latterday
setting.
But Hawthorne left no well-defined literary posterity. His mood and attitude belonged to the
age which closed with him, and it is the spirit of Poe -- who so clearly and realistically
understood the natural basis of the horror-appeal and the correct mechanics of its achievement --
which survived and blossomed. Among the earliest of Poe's disciples may be reckoned the
brilliant young Irishman Fitz James O'Brien (1828-1862), who became naturalised as an
American and perished honourably in the Civil War. It is he who gave us What Was It?, the first
well-shaped short story of a tangible but invisible being, and the prototype of de Maupassant's
Horla; he also who created the inimitable Diamond Lens, in which a young microscopist falls in
love with a maiden of in infinitesimal world which he has discovered in a drop of water.
O'Brien's early death undoubtedly deprived us of some masterful tales of strangeness and terror,
though his genius was not, properly speaking, of the same titan quality which characterised Poe
and Hawthorne.
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Closer to real greatness was the eccentric and saturnine journalist Ambrose Bierce, born in
1842; who likewise entered the Civil War, but survived to write some immortal tales and to
disappear in 1913 in as great a cloud of mystery as any he ever evoked from his nightmare fancy.
Bierce was a satirist and pamphleteer of note, but the bulk of his artistic reputation must rest
upon his grim and savage short stories; a large number of which deal with the Civil War and
form the most vivid and realistic expression which that conflict has yet received in fiction.
Virtually all of Bierce's tales are tales of horror; and whilst many of them treat only of the
physical and psychological horrors within Nature, a substantial proportion admit the malignly
supernatural and form a leading element in America's fund of weird literature. Mr. Samuel
Loveman, a living poet and critic who was personally acquainted with Bierce, thus sums up the
genius of the great "shadow-maker" in the preface to some of his letters:
In Bierce the evocation of horror becomes for the first time not so much the
prescription or perversion of Poe and Maupassant, but an atmosphere definite
and uncannily precise. Words, so simple that one would be prone to ascribe
them to the limitations of a literary hwk, take on an unholy horror, a new and
unguessed transformation. In Poe one finds it a tour de force, in Maupassant a
nervous engagement of the flagellated climax. To Bierce, simply and sincerely,
diabolism held in its tormented death a legitimate and reliant means to the end.
Yet a tacit confirmation with Nature is in every instance insisted upon.
In The Death of Halpin Frayser flowers, verdure, and the boughs and leaves of
trees are magnificently placed as an opposing foil to unnatural malignity. Not
the accustomed golden world, but a world pervaded with the mystery of blue
and the breathless recalcitrance of dreams is Bierces. Yet, curiously, inhumanity
is not altogether absent.
The "inhumanity" mentioned by Mr. Loveman finds vent in a rare strain of sardonic comedy
and graveyard humour, and a kind of delight in images of cruelty and tantalising disappointment.
The former quality is well illustrated by some of the subtitles in the darker narratives; such as
"One does not always eat what is on the table", describing a body laid out for a coroner's inquest,
and "A man though naked may be in rags," referring to a frightfully mangled corpse.
Bierce's work is in general somewhat uneven. Many of the stories are obviously mechanical,
and marred by a jaunty and commonplacely artificial style derived from journalistic models; but
the grim malevolence stalking through all of them is unmistakable, and several stand out as
permanent mountain-peaks of American weird writing. The Death of Halpin Frayser, called by
Frederic Taber Cooper the most fiendishly ghastly tale in the literature of the Anglo-Saxon race,
tells of a body skulking by night without a soul in a weird and horribly ensanguined wood, and
of a man beset by ancestral memories who met death at the claws of that which had been his
fervently loved mother. The Damned Thing, frequently copied in popular anthologies, chronicles
the hideous devastations of an invisible entity that waddles and flounders on the hills and in the
wheatfields by night and day. The Suitable Surroundings evoke's with singular subtlety yet
apparent simplicity a piercing sense of the terror which may reside in the written word. In the
story the weird author Colston says to his friend Marsh, "You are brave enough to read me in a
street-car, but -- in a deserted house -- alone -- in the forest -- at night! Bah! I have a manuscript
in my pocket that would kill you!" Marsh reads the manuscript in "the suitable surroundings --
and it does kill him. The Middle Toe of the Right Foot is clumsily developed, but has a powerful
climax. A man named Manton has horribly killed his two children and his wife, the latter of
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whom lacked the middle toe of the right foot. Ten years later he returns much altered to the
neighbourhood; and, being secretly recognised, is provoked into a bowie-knife duel in the dark,
to be held in the now abandond house where his crime was committed. When the moment of the
duel arrives a trick is played upon him; and he is left without an antagonist, shut in a night-black
ground floor room of the reputedly haunted edifice, with the thick dust of a decade on every
hand. No, knife is drawn against him, for only a thorough scare is intended; but on the next day
he is found crouched in a corner with distorted face, dead of sheer fright at something he has
seen. The only clue visible to the discoverers is one having terrible implications: "In the dust of
years that lay thick upon the floor -- leading from the door by which they had entered, straight
across the room to within a yard of Manton's crouching corpse -- were three parallel lines of
footprints -- light but definite impressions of bare feet, the outer ones those of small children, the
inner a woman's. From the point at which they ended they did not return; they pointed all one
way." And, of course, the woman's prints showed a lack of the middle toe of the right foot. The
Spook House, told with a severely homely air of journalistic verisimilitude, conveys terrible hints
of shocking mystery. In 1858 an entire family of seven persons disappears suddenly and
unaccountably from a plantation house in eastern Kentucky, leaving all its possessions
untouched -- furniture, clothing, food supplies, horses, cattle, and slaves. About a year later two
men of high standing are forced by a storm to take shelter in the deserted dwelling, and in so
doing stumble into a strange subterranean room lit by an unaccountable greenish light and having
an iron door which cannot be opened from within. In this room lie the decayed corpses of all the
missing family; and as one of the discoverers rushes forward to embrace a body he seems to
recognise, the other is so overpowered by a strange foetor that he accidentally shuts his
companion in the vault and loses consciousness. Recovering his senses six weeks later, the
survivor is unable to find the hidden room; and the house is burned during the Civil War. The
imprisoned discoverer is never seen or heard of again.
Bierce seldom realises the atmospheric possibilities of his themes as vividly as Poe; and much
of his work contains a certain touch of naiveté, prosaic angularity, or early-American
provincialism which contrasts somewhat with the efforts of later horror-masters. Nevertheless
the genuineness and artistry of his dark intimations are always unmistakable, so that his
greatness is in no danger of eclipse. As arranged in his definitively collected works, Bierce's
weird tales occur mainly in two volumes, Can Such Things Be? and In the Midst of Life. The
former, indeed, is almost wholly given over to, the supernatural.
Much of the best in American horror-literature has come from pens not mainly devoted to that
medium. Oliver Wendell Holmes's historic Elsie Venner suggests with admirable restraint an
unnatural ophidian element in a young woman prenatally influenced, and sustains the
atmosphere with finely discriminating landscape touches. In The Turn of the Screw Henry James
triumphs over his inevitable pomposity and prolixity sufficiently well to create a truly potent air
of sinister menace; depicting the hideous influence of two dead and evil servants, Peter Quint
and the governess, Miss Jessel, over a small boy and girl who had been under their care. James is
perhaps too diffuse, too unctuously urbane, and too much addicted to subtleties of speech to
realise fully all the wild and devastating horror in his situations; but for all that there is a rare and
mounting tide of fright, culminating in the death of the little boy, which gives the novelette a
permanent place in its special class.
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F. Marion Crawford produced several weird tales of varying quality, now collected in a volume
entitled Wandering Ghosts. For the Blood Is the Life touches powerfully on a case of mooncursed
vampirism near an ancient tower on the rocks of the lonely South Italian seacoast. The
Dead Smile treats of family horrors in an old house and an ancestral vault in Ireland, and
introduces the banshee with considerable force. The Upper Berth, however, is Crawford's weird
masterpiece; and is one of the most tremendous horror-stories in all literature. In this tale of a
suicide-haunted stateroom such things as the spectral saltwater dampness, the strangely open
porthole, and the nightmare struggle with the nameless object are handled with incomparable
dexterity.
Very genuine, though not without the typical mannered extravagance of the eighteen-nineties, is
the strain of horror in the early work of Robert W. Chambers, since renowned for products of a
very different quality. The King in Yellow, a series of vaguely connected short stories having as a
background a monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings fright, madness, and spectral
tragedy, really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear in spite of uneven interest and a
somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere made popular by Du
Maurier's Trilby. The most powerful of its tales, perhaps, is The Yellow Sign, in which is
introduced a silent and terrible churchyard watchman with a face like a puffy grave-worm's. A
boy, describing a tussle he has had with this creature, shivers and sickens as he relates a certain
detail. "Well, it's Gawd's truth that 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 with another a strange dream of a nocturnal hearse, is shocked by the voice with which
the watchman accosts him. The fellow emits a muttering sound that fills the head "like thick oily
smoke from a fat-rendering vat or an odour of noisome decay." What he mumbles is merely this:
"Have you found the Yellow Sign?"
A weirdly hieroglyphed onyx talisman, picked up on the street by the sharer of his dream, is
shortly given the artist; and after stumbling queerly upon the hellish and forbidden book of
horrors the two learn, among other hideous things which no sane mortal should know, that this
talisman is indeed the nameless Yellow Sign handed down from the accursed cult of Hastur --
from primordial Carcosa, whereof the volume treats, and some nightmare memory of which
seeks to lurk latent and ominous at the back of all men's minds. Soon they hear the rumbling of
the black-plumed hearse driven by the flabby and corpse-faced watchman. He enters the nightshrouded
house in quest of the Yellow Sign, all bolts and bars rotting at his touch. And when the
people rush in, drawn by a scream that no human throat could utter, they find three forms 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 been dead for months." It is worth
observing that the author derives most of the names and allusions connected with his eldritch
land of primal memory from the tales of Ambrose Bierce. Other early works of Mr. Chambers
displaying the outré and macabre element are The Maker of Moons and In Search of the
Unknown. One cannot help regretting that he did not further develop a vein in which he could so
easily have become a recognised master.
Horror material of authentic force may be found in the work of the New England realist Mary
E. Wilkins, whose volume of short tales, The Wind in the Rosebush, contains a number of
noteworthy achievements. In The Shadows on the Wall we are shown with consummate skill the
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response of a staid New England household to uncanny tragedy; and the sourceless shadow of
the poisoned brother well prepares us for the climactic moment when the shadow of the secret
murderer, who has killed himself in a neighbouring city, suddenly appears beside it. Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, in The Yellow Wall Paper, rises to a classic level in subtly delineating the
madness which crawls over a woman dwelling in the hideously papered room where a
madwoman was once confined.
In The Dead Valley the eminent architect and mediævalist Ralph Adams Cram achieves a
memorably potent degree of vague regional horror through subtleties of atmosphere and
description.
Still further carrying on our spectral tradition is the gifted and versatile humourist Irvin S.
Cobb, whose work both early and recent contains some finely weird specimens. Fishhead, an
early achievement, is banefully effective in its portrayal of unnatural affinities between a hybrid
idiot and the strange fish of an isolated lake, which at the last avenge their biped kinsman's
murder. Later work of Mr. Cobb introduces an element of possible science, as in the tale of
hereditary memory where a modern man with a negroid strain utters words in African jungle
speech when run down by a train under visual and aural circumstances recalling the maiming of
his black ancestor by a rhinoceros a century before.
Extremely high in artistic stature is the novel The Dark Chamber (1927) by the late Leonard
Cline. This is the tale of a man who -- with the characteristic ambition of the Gothic or Byronic
hero-villain -- seeks to defy nature and recapture every moment of his past life through the
abnormal stimulation of memory. To this end he employs endless notes, records, mnemonic
objects, and pictures -- and finally odours, music, and exotic drugs. At last his ambition goes
beyond his personal life and readies toward the black abysses of hereditary memory -- even back
to pre-human days amidst the steaming swamps of the carboniferous age, and to still more
unimaginable deeps of primal time and entity. He calls for madder music and takes stranger
drugs, and finally his great dog grows oddly afraid of him. A noxious animal stench
encompasses him, and he grows vacant-faced and subhuman. In the end he takes to the woods,
howling at night beneath windows. He is finally found in a thicket, mangled to death. Beside him
is the mangled corpse of his dog. They have killed each other. The atmosphere of this novel is
malevolently potent, much attention being paid to the central figure's sinister home and
household.
A less subtle and well-balanced but nevertheless highly effective creation is Herbert S.
Gorman's novel, The Place Called Dagon, which relates the dark history of a western
Massachusetts back-water where the descendants of refugees from the Salem witchcraft still
keep alive the morbid and degenerate horrors of the Black Sabbat.
Sinister House, by Leland Hall, has touches of magnificent atmosphere but is marred by a
somewhat mediocre romanticism.
Very notable in their way are some of the weird conceptions of the novelist and short-story
writer Edward Lucas White, most of whose themes arise from actual dreams. The Song of The
Siren has a very persuasive strangeness, while such things as Lukundoo and The Snout arouse
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darker apprehensions. Mr. White imparts a very peculiar quality to his tales -- an oblique sort of
glamour which has its own distinctive type of convincingness.
Of younger Americans, none strikes the note of cosmic horror so well as the California poet,
artist and fictionist Clark Ashton Smith, whose bizarre writing, drawings, paintings and stories
are the delight of a sensitive few. Mr. Smith has for his background a universe of remote and
paralysing fright-jungles of poisonous and iridescent blossoms on the moons of Saturn, evil and
grotesque temples in Atlantis, Lemuria, and forgotten elder worlds, and dank morasses of spotted
death-fungi in spectral countries beyond earth's rim. His longest and most ambitious poem, The
Hashish-Eater, is in pentameter blank verse; and opens up chaotic and incredible vistas of
kaleidoscopic nightmare in the spaces between the stars. In sheet dæmonic strangeness and
fertility of conception, Mr. Smith is perhaps unexcelled by, any, other writer dead or living. Who
else has seen such gorgeous, luxuriant, and feverishly distorted visions of infinite spheres and
multiple dimensions and lived to tell the tale? His short stories deal powerfully with other
galaxies, worlds, and dimensions, as well as with strange regions and æons on the earth. He tells
of primal Hyperborea and its black amorphous god Tsathoggua; of the lost continent Zothique,
and of the fabulous, Vampire-curst land of Averoigne in mediæval France. Some of Mr. Smith's
best work can be found in the brochure entitled The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies (1933).
IX. THE WEIRD TRADITION IN THE BRITISH ISLES
RECENT British literature, besides including the three or four greatest fantaisistes of the present
age, has been gratifyingly fertile in the element of the weird. Rudyard Kipling has often
approached it, and has, despite the omnipresent mannerisms, handled it with indubitable mastery
in such tales as The Phantom Rickshaw, The Finest Story in the World, The Recrudescence of
Imray, and The Mark of the Beast. This latter is of particular poignancy; the pictures of the naked
leper-priest who mewed like an otter, of the spots which appeared on the chest of the man that
priest cursed, of the growing carnivorousness of the victim and of the fear which horses began to
display toward him, and of the eventually half-accomplished transformation of that victim into a
leopard, being things which no reader is ever likely to forget. The final defeat of the malignant
sorcery does not impair the force of the tale or the validity of its mystery.
Lafcadio Hearn, strange, wandering, and exotic, departs still farther from the realm of the real;
and with the supreme artistry of a sensitive poet weaves phantasies impossible to an author of the
solid roast beef type. His Fantastics, written in America, contains some of the most impressive
ghoulishness in all literature; whilst his Kwaidan, written in Japan, crystallises with matchless
skill and delicacy the eerie lore and whispered legends of that richly colourful nation. Still more
of Helm's wizardry of language is shown in some of his translations from the French, especially
from Gautier and Flaubert. His version of the latter's Temptation of St. Anthony is a classic of
fevered and riotous imagery clad in the magic of singing words.
Oscar Wilde may likewise be given a place amongst weird writers, both for certain of his
exquisite fairy tales, and for his vivid Picture of Dorian Gray, in which a marvellous portrait for
years assumes the duty of aging and coarsening instead of its original, who meanwhile plunges
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into every excess of vice and crime without the outward loss of youth, beauty, and freshness.
There is a sudden and potent climax when Dorian Gray, at last become a murderer, seeks to
destroy the painting whose changes testify to his moral degeneracy. He stabs it with a knife, and
a hideous cry and crash are heard; but when the servants enter they find it in all its pristine
loveliness. "Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He
was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not until they had examined the rings
that they recognised who he was."
Matthew Phipps Shiel, author of many weird, grotesque, and adventurous novels and tales,
occasionally attains a high level of horrific magic. Xelucha is a noxiously hideous fragment, but
is excelled by Mr. Shiel's undoubted masterpiece, The House of Sounds, floridly written in the
"yellow nineties," and recast with more artistic restraint in the early twentieth century. Ibis story,
in final form, deserves a place among the foremost things of its kind. It tells of a creeping horror
and menace trickling down the centuries on a sub-arctic island off the coast of Norway; where,
amidst the sweep of daemon winds and the ceaseless din of hellish waves and cataracts, a
vengeful dead man built a brazen tower of terror. It is vaguely like, yet infinitely unlike, Poe's
Fall of the House of Usher. In the novel The Purple Cloud Mr. Shiel describes with tremendous
power a curse which came out of the arctic to destroy mankind, and which for a time appears to
have left but a single inhabitant on our planet. The sensations of this lone survivor as he realises
his position, and roams through the corpse-littered and treasure-strewn cities of the world as their
absolute master, are delivered with a skill and artistry falling little short of actual majesty.
Unfortunately the second half of the book, with its conventionally romantic element, involves a
distinct letdown.
Better known than Shiel is the ingenious Bram Stoker, who created many starkly horrific
conceptions in a series of novels whose poor technique sadly impairs their net effect. The Lair of
the White Worm, dealing with a gigantic primitive entity that lurks in a vault beneath an ancient
castle, utterly ruins a magnificent idea by a development almost infantile. The Jewel of Seven
Stars, touching on a strange Egyptian resurrection, is less crudely written. But best of all is the
famous Dracula, which has become almost the standard modern exploitation of the frightful
vampire myth. Count Dracula, a vampire, dwells in a horrible castle in the Carpathians, but
finally migrates to England with the design of populating the country with fellow vampires. How
an Englishman fares within Dracula's stronghold of terrors, and how the dead fiend's plot for
domination is at last defeated, are elements which unite to form a tale now justly assigned a
permanent place in English letters. Dracula evoked many similar novels of supernatural horror,
among which the best are perhaps The Beetle, by Richard Marsh, Brood of the Witch-Queen, by
"Sax Rohmer" (Arthur Sarsfield Ward), and The Door of the Unreal, by Gerald Bliss. The latter
handles quite dexterously the standard werewolf superstition. Much subtler and more artistic, and
told with singular skill through the juxtaposed narratives of the several characters, is the novel
Cold Harbour, by Francis Brett Young, in which an ancient house of strange malignancy is
powerfully delineated. The mocking and well-nigh omnipotent fiend Humphrey Furnival holds
echoes of the Manfred-Montoni type of early Gothic "villain," but is redeemed from triteness by
many clever individualities. Only the slight diffuseness of explanation at the close, and the
somewhat too free use of divination as a plot factor, keep this tale from approaching absolute
perfection.
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In the novel Witch Wood John Buchan depicts with tremendous force a survival of the evil
Sabbat in a lonely district of Scotland. The description of the black forest with the evil stone, and
of the terrible cosmic adumbrations when the horror is finally extirpated, will repay one for
wading through the very gradual action and plethora of Scottish dialect. Some of Mr. Buchan's
short stories are also extremely vivid in their spectral intimations; The Green Wildebeest, a tale
of African witchcraft, The Wind in the Portico, with its awakening of dead Britanno-Roman
horrors, and Skule Skerry, with its touches of sub-arctic fright, being especially remarkable.
Clemence Housman, in the brief novelette The Werewolf, attains a high degree of gruesome
tension and achieves to some extent the atmosphere of authentic folklore. In The Elixir of Life
Arthur Ransome attains some darkly excellent effects despite a general naiveté of plot, while H.
B. Drake's The Shadowy Thing summons up strange and terrible vistas. George Macdonald's
Lilith has a compelling bizarrerie all its own, the first and simpler of the two versions being
perhaps the more effective.
Deserving of distinguished notice as a forceful craftsman to whom an unseen mystic world is,
ever a dose and vital reality is the poet Walter de la Mare, whose haunting verse and exquisite
prose alike bear consistent traces of a strange vision reaching deeply into veiled spheres of
beauty and terrible and forbidden dimensions of being. In the novel The Return we see the soul
of a dead man reach out of its grave of two centuries and fasten itself upon the flesh of the living,
so that even the face of the victim becomes that which had long ago returned to dust. Of the
shorter tales, of which several volumes exist, many are unforgettable for their command of fear's
and sorcery's darkest ramifications; notably Seaton's Aunt, in which there lowers a noxious
background of malignant vampirism; The Tree, which tells of a frightful vegetable growth in the
yard of a starving artist; Out of the Deep, wherein we are given leave to imagine what thing
answered the summons of a dying wastrel in a dark lonely house when he pulled a long-feared
bell-cord in the attic of his dread-haunted boyhood; A Recluse, which hints at what sent a chance
guest flying from a house in the night; Mr. Kempe, which shows us a mad clerical hermit in quest
of the human soul, dwelling in a frightful sea-cliff region beside an archaic abandoned chapel;
and All-Hallows, a glimpse of dæmoniac forces besieging a lonely mediaeval church and
miraculously restoring the rotting masonry. De la Mare does not make fear the sole or even the
dominant element of most of his tales, being apparently more interested in the subtleties of
character involved. Occasionally he sinks to sheer whimisical phantasy of the Barrie order. Still
he is among the very few to whom unreality is a vivid, living presence; and as such he is able to
put into his occasional fear-studies a keen potency which only a rare master can achieve. His
poem The Listeners restores the Gothic shudder to modern verse.
The weird short story has fared well of late, an important contributor being the versatile E. F.
Benson, whose The Man Who Went Too Far breathes whisperingly of a house at the edge of a
dark wood, and of Pan's hoof-mark on the breast of a dead man. Mr. Benson's volume, Visible
and Invisible, contains several stories of singular power; notably Negotiam Perambulans, whose
unfolding reveals an abnormal monster from an ancient ecclesiastical panel which performs an
act of miraculous vengeance in a lonely village on the Cornish coast, and The Horror-Horn,
through which lopes a terrible half-human survival dwelling on unvisited Alpine peaks. The
Face, in another collection, is lethally potent, in its relentless aura of doom. H. R. Wakefield, in
his collections, They Return at Evening and Others Who Return, manages now and then to
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achieve great heights of horror despite a vitiating air of sophistication. The most notable stories
are The Red Lodge with its slimy acqueous evil, He Cometh and He Passeth By, And He Shall
Sing, The Cairn, Look Up There, Blind Man's Buff, and that bit of lurking millennial horror, The
Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster. Mention has been made of the weird work of H.G. Wells and A.
Conan Doyle. The former, in The Ghost of Fear, reaches a very high level while all the items in
Thirty Strange Stories have strong fantastic implications. Doyle now and then struck a
powerfully spectral note, as in The Captain of the Pole-Star, a tale of arctic ghostliness, and Lot
No. 249, wherein the reanimated mummy theme is used with more than ordinary skill. Hugh
Walpole, of the same family as the founder of Gothic fiction, has sometimes approached the
bizarre with much success, his short story Mrs. Lunt carrying a very poignant shudder. John
Metcalfe, in the collection published as The Smoking Leg, attains now and then a rare pitch of
potency, the tale entitled The Bad Lands, containing graduations of horror that strongly savour of
genius. More whimiscial and inclined toward the amiable and innocuous phantasy of Sir J. M.
Barrie are the short tales of E.M. Forster, grouped under the title of The Celestial Omnibus. Of
these only one, dealing with a glimpse of Pan and his aura of fright, may be said to hold the true
element of cosmic horror. Mrs. H.D. Everett, though adhering to very old and conventional
models, occasionally reaches singular heights of spiritual terror in her collection of short stories,
The Death Mask. L. P. Hartley is notable for his incisive and extremely ghastly tale, A Visitor
from Down Under, May Sinclair's Uncanny Stories contain more of traditional "occultism" than
of that creative treatment of fear which marks mastery in this field, and are inclined to lay more
stress on human emotions and psychological delving than upon the stark phenomena of a cosmos
utterly unreal. It may be well to remark here that occult believers are probably less effective than
materialists in delineating the spectral and the fantastic, since to them the phantom world is so
commonplace a reality that they tend to refer to it with less awe, remoteness, and impressiveness
thin do those who see in it an absolute and stupendous violation of the natural order.
Of rather uneven stylistic quality, but vast occasional power in its suggestion of lurking worlds
and beings behind the ordinary surface of life, is the work of William Hope Hodgson, known
today far less than it deserves to be. Despite a tendency toward conventionally sentimental
conceptions of the universe, and of man's relation to it and to his fellows, Mr. Hodgson is
perhaps second only to Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality. Few can equal
him in adumbrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities through
casual hints and insignificant details, or in conveying feelings of the spectral and the abnormal in
connection with regions or buildings.
In The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907) we are shown a variety of malign marvels and accursed
unknown lands as encountered by the survivors of a sunken ship. The brooding menace in the
earlier parts of the book is impossible to surpass, though a letdown in the direction of ordinary
romance and adventure occurs toward the end. An inaccurate and pseudo-romantic attempt to
reproduce eighteenth-century prose detracts from the general effect, but the really profound
nautical erudition everywhere displayed is a compensating factor.
The House on the Borderland (1908) -- perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hodgson's works -- tells
of a lonely and evilly regarded house in Ireland which forms a focus for hideous otherworld
forces and sustains a siege by blasphemous hybrid anomalies from a hidden abyss below. The
wanderings of the Narrator's spirit through limitless light-years of cosmic space and Kalpas of
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eternity, and its witnessing of the solar system's final destruction, constitute something almost
unique in standard literature. And everywhere there is manifest the author's power to suggest
vague, ambushed horrors in natural scenery. But for a few touches of commonplace
sentimentality this book would be a classic of the first water.
The Ghost Pirates (1909), regarded by Mr. Hodgson as rounding out a trilogy with the two
previously mentioned works, is a powerful account of a doomed and haunted ship on its last
voyage, and of the terrible sea-devils (of quasi-human aspect, and perhaps the spirits of bygone
buccaneers) that besiege it and finally drag it down to an unknown fate. With its command of
maritime knowledge, and its clever selection of hints and incidents suggestive of latent horrors in
nature, this book at times reaches enviable peaks of power.
The Night Land (1912) is a long-extended (538 pp.) tale of the earth's infinitely remote futurebillions
of billions of years ahead, after the death of the sun. It is told in a rather clumsy fashion,
as the dreams of a man in the seventeenth century, whose mind merges with its own future
incarnation; and is seriously marred by painful verboseness, repetitiousness, artificial and
nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality, and an attempt at archaic language even more
grotesque and absurd than that in Glen Carrig.
Allowing for all its faults, it is yet one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever
written. The picture of a night-black, dead planet, with the remains of the human race
concentrated in a stupendously vast mental pyramid and besieged by monstrous, hybrid, and
altogether unknown forces of the darkness, is something that no reader can ever forget: Shapes
and entities of an altogether non-human and inconceivable sort -- the prowlers of the black, manforsaken,
and unexplored world outside the pyramid -- are suggested and partly described with
ineffable potency; while the night-land landscape with its chasms and slopes and dying
volcanism takes on an almost sentient terror beneath the author's touch.
Midway in the book the central figure ventures outside the pyramid on a quest through deathhaunted
realms untrod by man for millions of years -- and in his slow, minutely described, dayby-
day progress over unthinkable leagues of immemorial blackness there is a sense of cosmic
alienage, breathless mystery, and terrified expectancy unrivalled 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, the Ghost-Finder, consists of several longish short stories
published many years before in magazines. In quality it falls conspicuously below the level of
the other books. We here find a more or less conventional stock figure of the "infallible
detective" type -- the progeny of M. Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, and the close kin of Algernon
Blackwood's John Silence -- moving through scenes and events badly marred by an atmosphere
of professional "occultism." A few of the episodes, however, are of undeniable power, and afford
glimpses of the peculiar genius characteristic of the author.
Naturally it is impossible in brief sketch to trace out all the classic modern uses of the terror
element. The ingredient must of necessity enter into all work, both prose and verse, treating
broadly of life; and we are therefore not surprised to find a share in such writers as the poet
Browning, whose Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came is instinct with hideous menace, or the
novelist Joseph Conrad, who often wrote of the dark secrets within the sea, and of the dæmoniac
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driving power of Fate as influencing the lives of lonely and maniacally resolute men. Its trail is
one of infinite ramifications; but we must here confine ourselves to its appearance in a relatively
unmixed state, where it determines and dominates the work of art containing it.
Somewhat separate from the main British stream is that current of weirdness in Irish literature
which came to the fore in the Celtic Renaissance of the later nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Ghost and fairy lore have always been of great prominence in Ireland, and for over a
hundred years have been recorded by a line of such faithful transcribers and translators as
William Carleton, T. Crofton Croker, Lady Wilde -- mother of Oscar Wilde -- Douglas Hyde,
and W.B. Yeats. Brought to notice by the modern movement, this body of myth has been
carefully collected and studied; and its salient features reproduced in the work of later figures
like Yeats, J. M. Synge, "A. E.," Lady Gregory, Padraic Colum, James Stephens and their
colleagues.
Whilst on the whole more whimsically fantastic than terrible, such folklore and its consciously
artistic counterparts contain much that falls truly within the domain of cosmic horror. Tales of
burials in sunken churches beneath haunted lakes, accounts of death-heralding banshees and
sinister changelings, ballads of spectres and "the unholy creatures of the Raths" -- all these have
their poignant and definite shivers, and mark a strong and distinctive element in weird literature.
Despite homely grotesqueness and absolute naiveté, there is genuine nightmare in the class of
narrative represented by the yarn of Teig O'Kane, who in punishment for his wild life was ridden
all night by a hideous corpse that demanded burial and drove him from churchyard to churchyard
as the dead rose up loathsomely in each one and refused to accommodate the newcomer with a
berth. Yeats, undoubtedly the greatest figure of the Irish revival if not the greatest of all living
poets, has accomplished notable things both in original work and in the codification of old
legends.
X. THE MODERN MASTERS
THE best horror-tales of today, profiting by the long evolution of the type, possess a naturalness,
convincingness, artistic smoothness, and skilful intensity of appeal quite beyond comparison
with anything in the Gothic work of a century or more ago. Technique, craftsmanship,
experience, and psychological knowledge have advanced tremendously with the passing years,
so that much of the older work seems naive and artificial; redeemed, when redeemed at all, only
by a genius which conquers heavy limitations. The tone of jaunty and inflated romance, full of
false motivation and investing every conceivable event with a counterfeit significance and
carelessly inclusive glamour, is now confined to lighter and more whimiscal phases of
supernatural writing. Serious weird stories are either made realistically intense by dose
consistency and perfect fidelity to Nature except in the one supernatural direction which the
author allows himself, or else cast altogether in the realm of phantasy, with atmosphere
cunningly adapted to the visualisation of a delicately exotic world of unreality beyond space and
time, in which almost anything may happen if it but happen in true accord with certain types of
imagination and illusion normal to the sensitive human brain. This, at least, is the dominant
tendency; though of course many great contemporary writers slip occasionally into some of the
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flashy postures of immature romanticism or into bits of the equally empty and absurd jargon of
pseudo-scientific "occultism," now at one of its periodic high tides.
Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal
the versatile Arthur Machen, author of some dozen tales long and short, in which the elements of
hidden horror and brooding fright attain an almost incomparable substance and realistic
acuteness. Mr. Machen, a general man of letters and master of an exquisitely lyrical and
expressive prose style, has perhaps put more conscious effort into his picaresque Chronicles of
Clemendy, his refreshing essays, his vivid autobiographical volumes, his fresh and spirited
translations, and above all his memorable epic of the sensitive æsthetic mind, The Hill of
Dreams, in which the youthful hero responds to the magic of that ancient Welsh environment
which is the author's own, and lives a dream-life in the Roman city of Isca Silurum, now shrunk
to the relic-strown village of Caerleon-on-Usk. But the fact remains that his powerful horrormaterial
of the nineties and earlier nineteen-hundreds stands alone in its class, and marks a
distinct epoch in the history of this literary form.
Mr. Machen, with an impressionable Celtic heritage linked to keen youthful memories of the
wild domed hills, archaic forests, and cryptical Roman ruins of the Gwent countryside, has
developed an imaginative life of rare beauty, intensity, and historic background. He has absorbed
the mediaeval mystery of dark woods and ancient customs, and is a champion of the Middle
Ages in all things -- including the Catholic faith. He has yielded, likewise, to the spell of the
Britanno-Roman life which once surged over his native region; and finds strange magic in the
fortified camps, tessellated pavements, fragments of statues, and kindred things which tell of the
day when classicism reigned and Latin was the language of the country. A young American poet,
Frank Belknap Long, has well summarised this dreamer's rich endowments and wizardry of
expression in the sonnet On Reading Arthur Machen:
There is a glory in the autumn wood,
The ancient lanes of England wind and climb
Past wizard oaks and gorse and tangled thyme
To where a fort of mighty empire stood:
There is a glamour in the autumn sky;
The reddened clouds are writhing in the glow
Of some great fire, and there are glints below
Of tawny yellow where the embers die.
I wait, for he will show me, clear and cold,
High-rais'd in splendour, sharp against the North,
The Roman eagles, and through mists of gold
The marching legions as they issue forth:
I wait, for I would share with him again
The ancient wisdom, and the ancient pain.
Of Mr. Machen's horror-tales the most famous is perhaps The Great God Pan (1894) which
tells of a singular and terrible experiment and its consequences. A young woman, through
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surgery of the brain-cells, is made to see the vast and monstrous deity of Nature, and becomes an
idiot in consequence, dying less than a year later. Years afterward a strange, ominous, and
foreign-looking child named Helen Vaughan is placed to board with a family in rural Wales, and
haunts the woods in unaccountable fashion. A little boy is thrown out of his mind at sight of
someone or something he spies with her, and a young girl comes to a terrible end in similar
fashion. All this mystery is strangely interwoven with the Roman rural deities of the place, as
sculptured in antique fragments. After another lapse of years, a woman of strangely exotic beauty
appears in society, drives her husband to horror and death, causes an artist to paint unthinkable
paintings of Witches' Sabbaths, creates an epidemic of suicide among the men of her
acquaintance, and is finally discovered to be a frequenter of the lowest dens of vice in London,
where even the most callous degenerates are shocked at her enormities. Through the clever
comparing of notes on the part of those who have had word of her at various stages of her career,
this woman is discovered to be the girl Helen Vaughan, who is the child -- by no mortal father --
of the young woman on whom the brain experiment was made. She is a daughter of hideous Pan
himself, and at the last is put to death amidst horrible transmutations of form involving changes
of sex and a descent to the most primal manifestations of the life-principle.
But the charm of the tale is in the telling. No one could begin to describe the cumulative
suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds without following fully the
precise order in which Mr. Machen unfolds his gradual hints and revelations. Melodrama is
undeniably present, and coincidence is stretched to a length which appears absurd upon analysis;
but in the malign witchery of the tale as a whole these trifles are forgotten, and the sensitive
reader reaches the end with only an appreciative shudder and a tendency to repeat the words of
one of the characters: "It is too incredible, too monstrous; such things can never be in this quiet
world.... Why, man, if such a case were possible, our earth would be a nightmare."
Less famous and less complex in plot than The Great God Pan, but definitely finer in
atmosphere and general artistic value, is the curious and dimly disquieting chronicle called The
White People, whose central portion purports to be the diary or notes of a little girl whose nurse
has introduced her to some of the forbidden magic and soul-blasting traditions of the noxious
witch-cult -- the cult whose whispered lore was handed down long lines of peasantry throughout
Western Europe, and whose members sometimes stole forth at night, one by one, to meet in
black woods and lonely places for the revolting orgies of the Witches' Sabbath. Mr. Machen's
narrative, a triumph of skilful selectiveness and restraint, accumulates enormous power as it
flows on in a stream of innocent childish prattle, introducing allusions to strange "nymphs,"
"Dols," "voolas," "white, green, and scarlet ceremonies," "Aklo letters," "Chian language," "Mao
games," and the like. The rites learned by the nurse from her witch grandmother are taught to the
child by the time she is three years old, and her artless accounts of the dangerous secret
revelations possess a lurking terror generously mixed with pathos. Evil charms well known to
anthropologists are described with juvenile naiveté, and finally there comes a winter afternoon
journey into the old Welsh hills, performed under an imaginative spell which lends to the wild
scenery an added weirdness, strangeness, and suggestion of grotesque sentience. The details of
this journey are given with marvellous vividness, and form to the keen critic a masterpiece of
fantastic writing, with almost unlimited power in the intimation of potent hideousness and
cosmic aberration. At length the child -- whose age is then thirteen -- comes upon a cryptic and
banefully beautiful thing in the midst of a dark and inaccessible wood. In the end horror
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overtakes her in a manner deftly prefigured by an anecdote in the prologue, but she poisons
herself in time. Like the mother of Helen Vaughan in The Great God Pan, she has seen that
frightful deity. She is discovered dead in the dark wood beside the cryptic thing she found; and
that thing -- a whitely luminous statue of Roman workmanship about which dire mediæval
rumours had clustered -- is affrightedly hammered into dust by the searchers.
In the episodic novel of The Three Impostors, a work whose, merit as a whole is somewhat
marred by an imitation of the jaunty Stevenson manner, occur certain tales which perhaps
represent the highwater mark of Machen's skill as a terror-weaver. Here we find in its most
artistic form a favourite weird conception of the author's; the notion that beneath the mounds and
rocks of the wild Welsh hills dwell subterraneously that squat primitive race whose vestiges gave
rise to our common folk legends of fairies, elves, and the "little people," and whose acts are even
now responsible for certain unexplained disappearances, and occasional substitutions of strange
dark "changelings" for normal infants. This theme receives its finest treatment in the episode
entitled The Novel Of The Black Seal; where a professor, having discovered a singular identity
between certain characters scrawled on Welsh limestone rocks and those existing in a prehistoric
black seal from Babylon, sets out on a course of discovery which leads him to unknown and
terrible things. A queer passage in the ancient geographer Solinus, a series of mysterious
disappearances in the lonely reaches of Wales, a strange idiot son born to a rural mother after a
fright in which her inmost faculties were shaken; all these things suggest to the professor a
hideous connection and a condition revolting to any friend and respecter of the human race. He
hires the idiot boy, who jabbers strangely at times in a repulsive hissing voice, and is subject to
odd epileptic seizures. Once, after such a seizure in the professor's study by night, disquieting
odours and evidences of unnatural presences are found; and soon after that the professor leaves a
bulky document and goes into the weird hills with feverish expectancy and strange terror in his
heart. He never returns, but beside a fantastic stone in the wild country are found his watch,
money, and ring, done up with catgut in a parchment bearing the same terrible characters as
those on the black Babylonish seal and the rock in the Welsh mountains.
The bulky document explains enough to bring up the most hideous vistas. Professor Gregg,
from the massed evidence presented by the Welsh disappearances, the rock inscription, the
accounts of ancient geographers, and the black seal, has decided that a frightful race of dark
primal beings of immemorial antiquity and wide former diffusion still dwell beneath the hills of
unfrequented Wales. Further research has unriddled the message of the black seal, and proved
that the idiot boy, a son of some father more terrible than mankind, is the heir of monstrous
memories and possibilities. That strange night in the study the professor invoked "the awful
transmutation of the hills" by the aid of the black seal, and aroused in the hybrid idiot the horrors
of his shocking paternity. He "saw his body swell and become distended as a bladder, while the
face blackened. . . ." And then the supreme effects of the invocation appeared, and Professor
Gregg knew the stark frenzy of cosmic panic in its darkest form. He knew the abysmal gulfs of
abnormality that he had opened, and went forth into the wild hills prepared and resigned. He
would meet the unthinkable "Little People" -- and his document ends with a rational observation:
"If unhappily I do not return from my journey, there is no need to conjure up here a picture of the
awfulness of my fate."
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Also in The Three Imposters is the Novel of the White Powder, which approaches the absolute
culmination of loathsome fright. Francis Leicester, a young law student nervously worn out by
seclusion and overwork, has a prescription filled by an old apothecary none too careful about the
state of his drugs. The substance, it later turns out, is an unusual salt which time and varying
temperature have accidentally changed to something very strange and terrible; nothing less, in
short, than the mediæval vinum sabbati, whose consumption at the horrible orgies of the
Witches' Sabbath gave rise to shocking transformations and -- if injudiciously used -- to
unutterable consequences. Innocently enough, the youth regularly imbibes the powder in a glass
of water after meals; and at first seems substantially benefited. Gradually, however, his improved
spirits take the form of dissipation; he is absent from home a great deal, and appears to have
undergone a repellent psychological change. One day an odd livid spot appears on his right hand,
and he afterward returns to his seclusion; finally keeping himself shut within his room and
admitting none of the household. The doctor calls for an interview, and departs in a palsy of
horror, saying that he can do no more in that house. Two weeks later the patient's sister, walking
outside, sees a monstrous thing at the sickroom window; and servants report that food left at the
locked door is no longer touched. Summons at the door bring only a sound of shuffling and a
demand in a thick gurgling voice to be let alone. At last an awful happening is reported by a
shuddering housemaid. The ceiling of the room below Leicester's is stained with a hideous black
fluid, and a pool of viscid abomination has dripped to the bed beneath. Dr. Haberden, now
persuaded to return to the house, breaks down the young man's door and strikes again and again
with an iron bar at the blasphemous semiliving thing he finds there. It is "a dark and putrid mass,
seething with corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting and
changing." Burning points like eyes shine out of its midst, and before it is dispatched it tries to
lift what might have been an arm. Soon afterward the physician, unable to endure the memory of
what he has beheld, dies at sea while bound for a new life in America. Mr. Machen returns to the
dæmoniac "Little People" in The Red Hand and The Shining Pyramid; and in The Terror, a
wartime story, he treats with very potent mystery the effect of man's modern repudiation of
spirituality on the beasts of the world, which are thus led to question his supremacy and to unite
for his extermination. Of utmost delicacy, and passing from mere horror into true mysticism, is
The Great Return, a story of the Graal, also a product of the war period. Too well known to need
description here is the tale of The Bowmen; which, taken for authentic narration, gave rise to the
widespread legend of the "Angels of Mons" -- ghosts of the old English archers of Crecy and
Agincourt who fought in 1914 beside the hard-pressed ranks of England's glorious "Old
Contemptibles."
Less intense than Mr. Machen in delineating the extremes of stark fear, yet infinitely more
closely wedded to the idea of an unreal world constantly pressing upon ours is the inspired and
prolific Algernon Blackwood, amidst whose voluminous and uneven work may be found some
of the finest spectral literature of this or any age. Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood's genius there
can be no dispute; for no one has even approached the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with
which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences, or the
preternatural insight with which he builds up detail by detail the complete sensations and
perceptions leading from reality into supernormal life or vision. Without notable command of the
poetic witchery of mere words, he is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird
atmosphere; and can evoke what amounts almost to a story from a simple fragment of
humourless psychological description. Above all others he understands how fully some sensitive
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minds dwell forever on the borderland of dream, and how relatively slight is the distinction
betwixt those images formed from actual objects and those excited by the play of the
imagination.
Mr. Blackwood's lesser work is marred by several defects such as ethical didacticism,
occasional insipid whimsicality, the flatness of benignant supernaturalism, and a too free use of
the trade jargon of modem "occultism." A fault of his more serious efforts is that diffuseness and
long-windedness which results from an excessively elaborate attempt, under the handicap of a
somewhat bald and journalistic style devoid of intrinsic magic, colour, and vitality, to visualise
precise sensations and nuances of uncanny suggestion. But in spite of all this, the major products
of Mr. Blackwood attain a genuinely classic level, and evoke as does nothing else in literature in
awed convinced sense of the imminence of strange spiritual spheres of entities.
The well-nigh endless array of Mr. Blackwood's fiction includes both novels and shorter tales,
the latter sometimes independent and sometimes arrayed in series. Foremost of all must be
reckoned The Willows, in which the nameless presences on a desolate Danube island are horribly
felt and recognised by a pair of idle voyagers. Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very
highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a, single
strained passage or a single false note. Another amazingly potent though less artistically finished
tale is The Wendigo, where we are confronted by horrible evidences of a vast forest dæmon
about which North Woods lumbermen whisper at evening. The manner in which certain
footprints tell certain unbelievable things is really a marked triumph in craftsmanship. In An
Episode in a Lodging House we behold frightful presences summoned out of black space by a
sorcerer, and The Listener tells of the awful psychic residuum creeping about an old house where
a leper died. In the volume titled Incredible Adventures occur some of the finest tales which the
author has yet produced, leading the fancy to wild rites on nocturnal hills, to secret and terrible
aspects lurking behind stolid scenes, and to unimaginable vaults of mystery below the sands and
pyramids of Egypt; all with a serious finesse and delicacy that convince where a cruder or lighter
treatment would merely amuse. Some of these accounts are hardly stories at all, but rather
studies in elusive impressions and half-remembered snatches of dream. Plot is everywhere
negligible, and atmosphere reigns untrammelled.
John Silence -- Physician Extraordinary is a book of five related tales, through which a single
character runs his triumphant course. Marred only by traces of the popular and conventional
detective-story atmosphere -- for Dr. Silence is one of those benevolent geniuses who employ
their remarkable powers to aid worthy fellow-men in difficulty -- these narratives contain some
of the author's best work, and produce an illusion at once emphatic and lasting. The opening tale,
A Psychical Invasion, relates what befell a sensitive author in a house once the scene of dark
deeds, and how a legion of fiends was exorcised. Ancient Sorceries, perhaps the finest tale in the
book, gives an almost hypnotically vivid account of an old French town where once the unholy
Sabbath was kept by all the people in the form of cats. In The Nemesis of Fire a hideous
elemental is evoked by new-spilt blood, whilst Secret Worship tells of a German school where
Satanism held sway, and where long afterward an evil aura remained. The Camp of the Dog is a
werewolf tale, but is weakened by moralisation and professional "occultism."
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Too subtle, perhaps, for definite classification as horror-tales, yet possibly more truly artistic in
an absolute sense, are such delicate phantasies as Jimbo or The Centaur. Mr. Blackwood
achieves in these novels a close and palpitant approach to the inmost substance of dream, and
works enormous havoc with the conventional barriers between reality and imagination.
Unexcelled in the sorcery of crystalline singing prose, and supreme in the creation of a
gorgeous and languorous world of iridescently exotic vision, is Edward John Moreton Drax
Plunkett, Eighteenth Baron Dunsany, whose tales and short plays form an almost unique element
in our literature. Inventor of a new mythology and weaver of surprising folklore, Lord Dunsany
stands dedicated to a strange world of fantastic beauty, and pledged to eternal warfare against the
coarseness and ugliness of diurnal reality. His point of view is the most truly cosmic of any held
in the literature of any period. As sensitive as Poe to dramatic values and the significance of
isolated words and details, and far better equipped rhetorically through a simple lyric style based
on the prose of the King James Bible, this author draws with tremendous effectiveness on nearly
every body of myth and legend within the circle of European culture; producing a composite or
eclectic cycle of phantasy in which Eastern colour, Hellenic form, Teutonic sombreness and
Celtic wistfulness are so superbly blended that each sustains and supplements the rest without
sacrifice or perfect congruity and homogeneity. In most cases Dunsany's lands are fabulous --
"beyond the East," or "at the edge of the world." His system of original personal and place
names, with roots drawn from classical, Oriental, and other sources, is a marvel of versatile
inventiveness and poetic discrimination; as one may see from such specimens as "Argimenes,"
"Bethmoora," "Poltarnees," "Camorak," "Iluriel," or "Sardathrion."
Beauty rather than terror is the keynote of Dunsany's work. He loves the vivid green of jade and
of copper domes, and the delicate flush of sunset on the ivory minarets of impossible dreamcities.
Humour and irony, too, are often present to impart a gentle cynicism and modify what
might otherwise possess a naï ve intensity. Nevertheless, as is inevitable in a master of triumphant
unreality, there are occasional touches of cosmic fright which come well within the authentic
tradition. Dunsany loves to hint slyly and adroitly of monstrous things and incredible dooms, as
one hints in a fairy tale. In The Book of Wonder we read of Hlo-Hlo, the gigantic spider-idol
which does not always stay at home; of what the Sphinx feared in the forest; of Slith, the thief
who jumps over the edge of the world after seeing a certain light lit and knowing who lit it; of
the anthropophagous; Gibbelins, who inhabit an evil tower and guard a treasure; of the Gnoles,
who live in the forest and from whom it is not well to steal; of the City of Never, and the eyes
that watch in the Under Pits; and of kindred things of darkness. A Dreamer's Tales tells of the
mystery that sent forth all men from Bethmoora in the desert; of the vast gate of Perdondaris, that
was carved from a single piece of ivory; and of the voyage of poor old Bill, whose captain cursed
the crew and paid calls on nasty-looking isles new-risen from the sea, with low thatched cottages
having evil, obscure windows.
Many of Dunsany's short plays are replete with spectral fear. In The Gods of the Mountain
seven beggars impersonate the seven green idols on a distant hill, and enjoy ease and honour in a
city of worshippers until they hear that the real idols are missing from their wonted seats. A very
ungainly sight in the dusk is reported to them -- "rock should not wall in the evening" -- and at
last, as they sit awaiting the arrival of a troop of dancers, they note that the approaching footsteps
are heavier than those of good dancers ought to be. Then things ensue, and in the end the
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presumptuous blasphemers are turned to green jade statues by the very walking statues whose
sanctity they outraged. But mere plot is the very least merit of this marvellously effective play.
The incidents and developments are those of a supreme master, so that the whole forms one of
the most important contributions of the present age not only to drama, but to literature in general.
A Night at an Inn tells of four thieves who have stolen the emerald eye of Klesh, a monstrous
Hindoo god. They lure to their room and succeed in slaying the three priestly avengers who are
on their track, but in the night Mesh comes gropingly for his eye; and having gained it and
departed, calls each of the despoilers out into the darkness for an unnamed punishment. In The
Laughter of the Gods there is a doomed city at the jungle's edge, and a ghostly lutanist heard
only by those about to die (cf. Alice's spectral harpsichord in Hawthorne's House of the Seven
Gables); whilst The Queen's Enemies retells the anecdote of Herodotus in which a vengeful
princess invites her foes to a subterranean banquet and lets in the Nile to drown them. But no
amount of mere description can convey more than a fraction of Lord Dunsany's pervasive charm.
His prismatic cities and unheard of rites are touched with a sureness which only mastery can
engender, and we thrill with a sense of actual participation in his secret mysteries. To the truly
imaginative he is a talisman and a key unlocking rich storehouses of dream and fragmentary
memory; so that we may think of him not only as a poet, but as one who makes each reader a
poet as well.
At the opposite pole of genius from Lord Dunsany, and gifted with an almost diabolic power of
calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily life, is the scholarly Montague
Rhodes James, Provost of Eton College, antiquary of note, and recognized authority on mediæval
manuscripts and cathedral history. Dr. James, long fond of telling spectral tales at Christmastide,
has become by slow degrees a literary weird fictionist of the very first rank; and has developed a
distinctive style and method likely to serve as models for an enduring line of disciples.
The art of Dr. James is by no means haphazard, and in the preface to one of his collections he
has formulated three very sound rules for macabre composition. A ghost story, he believes,
should have a familiar setting in the modem period, in order to approach closely the reader's
sphere of experience. Its spectral phenomena, moreover, should be malevolent rather than
beneficent; since fear is the emotion primarily to be excited. And finally, the technical patois of
"occultism" or pseudo-science ought carefully to be avoided; lest the charm of casual
verisimilitude be smothered in unconvincing pedantry.
Dr. James, practicing what he preaches, approaches his themes in a light and often
conversational way. Creating the illusion of every-day events, he introduces his abnormal
phenomena cautiously and gradually; relieved at every turn by touches of homely and prosaic
detail, and sometimes spiced with a snatch or two of antiquarian scholarship. Conscious of the
dose relation between present weirdness and accumulated tradition, he generally provides remote
historical antecedents for his incidents; thus being able to utilise very aptly his exhaustive
knowledge of the past, and his ready and convincing command of archaic diction and colouring.
A favourite scene for a James tale is some centuried cathedral, which the author can describe
with all the familiar minuteness of a specialist in that field.
Sly humourous vignettes and bits of lifelike genre portraiture and characterisation are often to
be found in Dr. James's narratives, and serve in his skilled hands to augment the general effect
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rather than to spoil it, as the same qualities would tend to do with a lesser craftsman. In inventing
a new type of ghost, he has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition; for
where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of
sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairy -- a sluggish, hellish night --
abomination midway betwixt beast and man -- and usually touched before it is seen. Sometimes
the spectre is of still more eccentric composition; a roll of flannel with spidery eyes, or an
invisible entity which moulds itself in bedding and shows a face of crumpled linen. Dr. James
has, it is clear, an intelligent and scientific knowledge of human nerves and feelings; and knows
just how to apportion statement, imagery, and subtle suggestions in order to secure the best
results with his readers. He is an artist in incident and arrangement rather than in atmosphere,
and reaches the emotions more often through the intellect than directly. This method, of course,
with its occasional absences of sharp climax, has its drawbacks as well as its advantages; and
many will miss the thorough atmospheric tension which writers like Machen are careful to build
up with words and scenes. But only a few of the tales are open to the charge of tameness.
Generally the laconic unfolding of abnormal events in adroit order is amply sufficient to produce
the desired effect of cumulative horror.
The short stories of Dr. James are contained in four small collections, entitled respectively
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, A Thin Ghost and Others,
and A Warning to the Curious. There is also a delightful juvenile phantasy, The Five Jars, which
has its spectral adumbrations. Amidst this wealth of material it is hard to select a favourite or
especially typical tale, though each reader will no doubt have such preferences as his
temperament may determine.
Count Magnus is assuredly one of the best, forming as it does a veritable Golconda of suspense
and suggestion. Mr. Wraxall is an English traveller of the middle nineteenth century, sojourning
in Sweden to secure material for a book. Becoming interested in the ancient family of De La
Gardie, near the village of Raback, he studies its records; and finds particular fascination in the
builder of the existing Manor-house, one Count Magnus, of whom strange and terrible things are
whispered. The Count, who flourished early in the seventeenth century, was a stern landlord, and
famous for his severity toward poachers and delinquent tenants. His cruel punishments were
bywords, and there were dark rumours of influences which even survived his interment in the
great mausoleum he built near the church -- as in the case of the two peasants who hunted on his
preserves one night a century after his death. There were hideous screams in the woods, and near
the tomb of Count Magnus an unnatural laugh and the clang of a great door. Next morning the
priest found the two men; one a maniac, and the other dead, with the flesh of his face sucked
from the bones.
Mr. Wraxall hears all these tales, and stumbles on more guarded references to a Black
Pilgrimage once taken by the Count, a pilgrimage to Chorazin in Palestine, one of the cities
denounced by Our Lord in the Scriptures, and in which old priests say that Antichrist is to be
born. No one dares to hint just what that Black Pilgrimage was, or what strange being or thing
the Count brought back as a companion. Meanwhile Mr. Wraxall is increasingly anxious to
explore the mausoleum of Count Magnus, and finally secures permission to do so, in the
company of a deacon. He finds several monuments and three copper sarcophagi, one of which is
the Count's. Round the edge of this latter are several bands of engraved scenes, including a
SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE
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singular and hideous delineation of a pursuit -- the pursuit of a frantic man through a forest by a
squat muffled figure with a devil-fish's tentacle, directed by a tall cloaked man on a neighbouring
hillock. The sarcophagus has three massive steel padlocks, one of which is lying open on the
floor, reminding the traveller of a metallic clash he heard the day before when passing the
mausoleum and wishing idly that he might see Count Magnus.
His fascination augmented, and the key being accessible, Mr. Wraxall pays the mausoleum a
second and solitary visit and finds another padlock unfastened. The next day, his last in Raback,
he again goes alone to bid the long-dead Count farewell. Once more queerly impelled to utter a
whimsical wish for a meeting with the buried nobleman, he now sees to his disquiet that only one
of the padlocks remains on the great sarcophagus. Even as he looks, that last lock drops noisily
to the floor, and there comes a sound as of creaking hinges. Then the monstrous lid appears very
slowly to rise, and Mr. Wraxall flees in panic fear without refastening the door of the
mausoleum.
During his return to England the traveller feels a curious uneasiness about his fellow-passengers
on the canal-boat which he employs for the earlier stages. Cloaked figures make him nervous,
and he has a sense of being watched and followed. Of twenty-eight persons whom he counts,
only twenty-six appear at meals; and the missing two are always a tall cloaked man and a shorter
muffled figure. Completing his water travel at Harwich, Mr. Wraxall takes frankly to flight in a
closed carriage, but sees two cloaked figures at a crossroad. Finally he lodges at a small house in
a village and spends the time making frantic notes. On the second morning he is found dead, and
during the inquest seven jurors faint at sight of the body. The house where he stayed is never
again inhabited, and upon its demolition half a century later his manuscript is discovered in a
forgotten cupboard.
In The Treasure of Abbot Thomas a British antiquary unriddles a cipher on some Renaissance
painted windows, and thereby discovers a centuried hoard of gold in a niche halfway down a
well in the courtyard of a German abbey. But the crafty depositor had set a guardian over that
treasure, and something in the black well twines its arms around the searcher's neck in such a
manner that the quest is abandoned, and a clergyman sent for. Each night after that the discoverer
feels a stealthy presence and detects a horrible odour of mould outside the door of his hotel
room, till finally the clergyman makes a daylight replacement of the stone at the mouth of the
treasure-vault in the well -- out of which something had come in the dark to avenge the
disturbing of old Abbot Thomas's gold. As he completes his work the cleric observes a curious
toad-like carving on the ancient well-head, with the Latin motto "Depositum custodi -- keep that
which is committed to thee."
Other notable James tales are The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, in which a grotesque carving
comes curiously to life to avenge the secret and subtle murder of an old Dean by his ambitious
successor: Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, which tells of the horror summoned by a strange
metal whistle found in a mediævel church ruin; and An Episode of Cathedral History, where the
dismantling of a pulpit uncovers an archaic tomb whose lurking daemon spreads panic and
pestilence. Dr. James, for all his light touch, evokes fright and hideousness in their most
shocking form, and will certainly stand as one of the few really creative masters in his darksome
province.
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For those who relish speculation regarding the future, the tale of supernatural horror provides
an interesting field. Combated by a mounting wave of plodding realism, cynical flippancy, and
sophisticated disillusionment, it is yet encouraged by a parallel tide of growing mysticism, as
developed both through the fatigued reaction of "occultists" and religious fundamentalists
against materialistic discovery and through the stimulation of wonder and fancy by such enlarged
vistas and broken barriers as modern science has given us with its intra-atomic chemistry,
advancing astrophysics, doctrines of relativity, and probings into biology and human thought. At
the present moment the favouring forces would appear to have somewhat of an advantage; since
there is unquestionably more cordiality shown toward weird writings than when, thirty years ago,
the best of Arthur Machen's work fell on the stony ground of the smart and cocksure 'nineties.
Ambrose Bierce, almost unknown in his own time, has now reached something like general
recognition.
Startling mutations, however, are not to be looked for in either direction. In any case an
approximate balance of tendencies will continue to exist; and while we may justly expect a
further subtilisation of technique, we have no reason to think that the general position of the
spectral in literature will be altered. It is a narrow though essential branch of human expression,
and will chiefly appeal as always to a limited audience with keen special sensibilities. Whatever
universal masterpiece of tomorrow may be wrought from phantasm or terror will owe its
acceptance rather to a supreme workmanship than to a sympathetic theme. Yet who shall declare
the dark theme a positive handicap? Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of
onyx.
(End.)