By H. P. Lovecraft thrill of the chimney­corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a Supernatural Horror in Literature psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as I. Introduction any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely The oldest and strongest emotion of related to many aspects of it, and too much a mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest part of our inmost biological heritage to lose kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These keen potency over a very important, though facts few psychologists will dispute, and not numerically great, minority of our their admitted truth must establish for all species. time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a Man’s first instincts and emotions formed his materialistic sophistication which clings to response to the environment in which he frequently felt emotions and external events, found himself. Definite feelings based on and of a naively insipid idealism which pleasure and pain grew up around the deprecates the aesthetic motive and calls for phenomena whose causes and effects he a didactic literature to uplift the reader understood, whilst around those which he toward a suitable degree of smirking did not understand—and the universe optimism. But in spite of all this opposition teemed with them in the early days—were the weird tale has survived, developed, and naturally woven such personifications, attained remarkable heights of perfection; marvellous interpretations, and sensations of founded as it is on a profound and awe and fear as would be hit upon by a race elementary principle whose appeal, if not having few and simple ideas and limited always universal, must necessarily be experience. The unknown, being likewise the poignant and permanent to minds of the unpredictable, became for our primitive requisite sensitiveness. forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly extra­ The appeal of the spectrally macabre is terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly generally narrow because it demands from belonging to spheres of existence whereof the reader a certain degree of imagination we know nothing and wherein we have no and a capacity for detachment from every­ part. The phenomenon of dreaming likewise day life. Relatively few are free enough from helped to build up the notion of an unreal or the spell of the daily routine to respond to spiritual world; and in general, all the rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary conditions of savage dawn­life so strongly feelings and events, or of common conduced toward a feeling of the sentimental distortions of such feelings and supernatural, that we need not wonder at events, will always take first place in the the thoroughness with which man’s very taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since hereditary essence has become saturated of course these ordinary matters make up with religion and superstition. That the greater part of human experience. But saturation must, as a matter of plain the sensitive are always with us, and scientific fact, be regarded as virtually sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades permanent so far as the subconscious mind an obscure corner of the very hardest head; and inner instincts are concerned; for though so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, the area of the unknown has been steadily or Freudian analysis can quite annul the contracting for thousands of years, an

1 infinite reservoir of mystery still engulfs most now and then drives writers of totally of the outer cosmos, whilst a vast residuum opposite leanings to try their hands at it in of powerful inherited associations clings isolated tales, as if to discharge from their around all the objects and processes that minds certain phantasmal shapes which were once mysterious, however well they would otherwise haunt them. Thus Dickens may now be explained. And more than this, wrote several eerie narratives; Browning, the there is an actual physiological fixation of hideous poem “Childe Roland”; Henry the old instincts in our nervous tissue, which James, The Turn of the Screw; Dr. Holmes, would make them obscurely operative even the subtle novel Elsie Venner; F. Marion were the conscious mind to be purged of all Crawford, “The Upper Berth” and a number sources of wonder. of other examples; Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, social worker, “The Yellow Wall Paper”; whilst the humourist W. W. Jacobs Because we remember pain and the menace produced that able melodramatic bit called of death more vividly than pleasure, and “The Monkey’s Paw”. because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by This type of fear­literature must not be conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to confounded with a type externally similar the lot of the darker and more maleficent but psychologically widely different; the side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in literature of mere physical fear and the our popular supernatural folklore. This mundanely gruesome. Such writing, to be tendency, too, is naturally enhanced by the sure, has its place, as has the conventional or fact that uncertainty and danger are always even whimsical or humorous ghost story closely allied; thus making any kind of an where formalism or the author’s knowing unknown world a world of peril and evil wink removes the true sense of the morbidly possibilities. When to this sense of fear and unnatural; but these things are not the evil the inevitable fascination of wonder and literature of cosmic fear in its purest sense. curiosity is superadded, there is born a The true weird tale has something more than composite body of keen emotion and secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted imaginative provocation whose vitality must form clanking chains according to rule. A of necessity endure as long as the human certain atmosphere of breathless and race itself. Children will always be afraid of unexplainable dread of outer, unknown the dark, and men with minds sensitive to forces must be present; and there must be a hereditary impulse will always tremble at the hint, expressed with a seriousness and thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds portentousness becoming its subject, of that of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs most terrible conception of the human brain beyond the stars, or press hideously upon —a malign and particular suspension or our own globe in unholy dimensions which defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which only the dead and the moonstruck can are our only safeguard against the assaults of glimpse. chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

With this foundation, no one need wonder at Naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to the existence of a literature of cosmic fear. It conform absolutely to any theoretical model. has always existed, and always will exist; Creative minds are uneven, and the best of and no better evidence of its tenacious fabrics have their dull spots. Moreover, much vigour can be cited than the impulse which of the choicest weird work is unconscious;

2 appearing in memorable fragments scattered flourished from prehistoric times, and which through material whose massed effect may reached its highest development in Egypt be of a very different cast. Atmosphere is the and the Semitic nations. Fragments like the all­important thing, for the final criterion of Book of Enoch and the Claviculae of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot Solomon well illustrate the power of the but the creation of a given sensation. We weird over the ancient Eastern mind, and may say, as a general thing, that a weird upon such things were based enduring story whose intent is to teach or produce a systems and traditions whose echoes extend social effect, or one in which the horrors are obscurely even to the present time. Touches finally explained away by natural means, is of this transcendental fear are seen in classic not a genuine tale of cosmic fear; but it literature, and there is evidence of its still remains a fact that such narratives often greater emphasis in a ballad literature which possess, in isolated sections, atmospheric paralleled the classic stream but vanished for touches which fulfil every condition of true lack of a written medium. The Middle Ages, supernatural horror­literature. Therefore we steeped in fanciful darkness, gave it an must judge a weird tale not by the author’s enormous impulse toward expression; and intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; East and West alike were busy preserving but by the emotional level which it attains at and amplifying the dark heritage, both of its least mundane point. If the proper random folklore and of academically sensations are excited, such a “high spot” formulated magic and cabbalism, which had must be admitted on its own merits as weird descended to them. Witch, werewolf, literature, no matter how prosaically it is vampire, and ghoul brooded ominously on later dragged down. The one test of the the lips of bard and grandam, and needed really weird is simply this—whether or not but little encouragement to take the final there be excited in the reader a profound step across the boundary that divides the sense of dread, and of contact with unknown chanted tale or song from the formal literary spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of composition. In the Orient, the weird tale awed listening, as if for the beating of black tended to assume a gorgeous colouring and wings or the scratching of outside shapes sprightliness which almost transmuted it into and entities on the known universe’s utmost sheer phantasy. In the West, where the rim. And of course, the more completely and mystical Teuton had come down from his unifiedly a story conveys this atmosphere, black Boreal forests and the Celt the better it is as a work of art in the given remembered strange sacrifices in Druidic medium. groves, it assumed a terrible intensity and convincing seriousness of atmosphere which doubled the force of its half­told, half­hinted II. The Dawn of the Horror­Tale horrors. As may naturally be expected of a form so closely connected with primal emotion, the horror­tale is as old as human thought and Much of the power of Western horror­lore speech themselves. was undoubtedly due to the hidden but often Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the suspected presence of a hideous cult of earliest folklore of all races, and is nocturnal worshippers whose strange crystallised in the most archaic ballads, customs—descended from pre­Aryan and chronicles, and sacred writings. It was, pre­agricultural times when a squat race of indeed, a prominent feature of the elaborate Mongoloids roved over Europe with their ceremonial magic, with its rituals for the flocks and herds—were rooted in the most evocation of daemons and spectres, which revolting fertility­rites of immemorial

3 antiquity. This secret religion, stealthily or less disguised or altered by modern handed down amongst peasants for technique. Many of them were taken from thousands of years despite the outward reign the earliest oral sources, and form part of of the Druidic, Graeco­Roman, and Christian mankind’s permanent heritage. The shade faiths in the regions involved, was marked by which appears and demands the burial of its wild “Witches’ Sabbaths” in lonely woods bones, the daemon lover who comes to bear and atop distant hills on Walpurgis­Night away his still living bride, the death­fiend or and Hallowe’en, the traditional breeding­ psychopomp riding the night­wind, the man­ seasons of the goats and sheep and cattle; wolf, the sealed chamber, the deathless and became the source of vast riches of sorcerer—all these may be found in that sorcery­legend, besides provoking extensive curious body of mediaeval lore which the witchcraft­ prosecutions of which the Salem late Mr. Baring­Gould so effectively affair forms the chief American example. assembled in book form. Wherever the Akin to it in essence, and perhaps connected mystic Northern blood was strongest, the with it in fact, was the frightful secret system atmosphere of the popular tales became of inverted theology or Satan­worship which most intense; for in the Latin races there is a produced such horrors as the famous “Black touch of basic rationality which denies to Mass”; whilst operating toward the same end even their strangest superstitions many of we may note the activities of those whose the overtones of glamour so characteristic of aims were somewhat more scientific or our own forest­born and ice­fostered philosophical—the astrologers, cabbalists, whisperings. and alchemists of the Albertus Magnus or Raymond Lully type, with whom such rude ages invariably abound. The prevalence and Just as all fiction first found extensive depth of the mediaeval horror­spirit in embodiment in poetry, so is it in poetry that Europe, intensified by the dark despair we first encounter the permanent entry of which waves of pestilence brought, may be the weird into standard literature. Most of fairly gauged by the grotesque carvings slyly the ancient instances, curiously enough, are introduced into much of the finest later in prose; as the werewolf incident in Gothic ecclesiastical work of the time; the Petronius, the gruesome passages in daemoniac gargoyles of Notre Dame and Apuleius, the brief but celebrated letter of Mont St. Michel being among the most Pliny the Younger to Sura, and the odd famous specimens. And throughout the compilation On Wonderful Events by the period, it must be remembered, there existed Emperor Hadrian’s Greek freedman, amongst educated and uneducated alike a Phlegon. It is in Phlegon that we first find most unquestioning faith in every form of that hideous tale of the corpse­bride, the supernatural; from the gentlest of “Philinnion and Machates”, later related by Christian doctrines to the most monstrous Proclus and in modern times forming the morbidities of witchcraft and black magic. It inspiration of Goethe’s “Bride of Corinth” was from no empty background that the and Washington Irving’s “German Student”. Renaissance magicians and alchemists— But by the time the old Northern myths take Nostradamus, Trithemius, Dr. John Dee, literary form, and in that later time when the Robert Fludd, and the like—were born. 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 In this fertile soil were nourished types and part of the strictly imaginative writing of the characters of sombre myth and legend which Middle Ages and Renaissance. The persist in weird literature to this day, more Scandinavian Eddas and Sagas thunder with

4 cosmic horror, and shake with the stark fear society were now losing faith in the of Ymir and his shapeless spawn; whilst our supernatural, and indulging in a period of own Anglo­Saxon Beowulf and the later classic rationalism. Then, beginning with the Continental Nibelung tales are full of translations of Eastern tales in Queen Anne’s eldritch weirdness. Dante is a pioneer in the reign and taking definite form toward the classic capture of macabre atmosphere, and middle of the century, comes the revival of in Spenser’s stately stanzas will be seen more romantic feeling—the era of new joy in than a few touches of fantastic terror in Nature, and in the radiance of past times, landscape, incident, and character. Prose strange scenes, bold deeds, and incredible literature gives us Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, in marvels. We feel it first in the poets, whose which are presented many ghastly situations utterances take on new qualities of wonder, taken from early ballad sources—the theft of strangeness, and shuddering. And finally, the sword and silk from the corpse in Chapel after the timid appearance of a few weird Perilous by Sir Launcelot, the ghost of Sir scenes in the novels of the day—such as Gawaine, and the tomb­fiend seen by Sir Smollett’s Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Galahad—whilst other and cruder specimens Fathom—the released instinct precipitates were doubtless set forth in the cheap and itself in the birth of a new school of writing; sensational “chapbooks” vulgarly hawked the “Gothic” school of horrible and fantastic about and devoured by the ignorant. In prose fiction, long and short, whose literary Elizabethan drama, with its Dr. Faustus, the posterity is destined to become so numerous, witches in Macbeth, the ghost in Hamlet, and and in many cases so resplendent in artistic the horrible gruesomeness of Webster, we merit. It is, when one reflects upon it, may easily discern the strong hold of the genuinely remarkable that weird narration daemoniac on the public mind; a hold as a fixed and academically recognised intensified by the very real fear of living literary form should have been so late of witchcraft, whose terrors, first wildest on the final birth. The impulse and atmosphere are Continent, begin to echo loudly in English as old as man, but the typical weird tale of ears as the witch­hunting crusades of James standard literature is a child of the the First gain headway. To the lurking eighteenth century. mystical prose of the ages is added a long line of treatises on witchcraft and daemonology which aid in exciting the III. The Early Gothic Novel imagination of the reading world. The shadow­haunted landscapes of “Ossian”, the chaotic visions of William Blake, the grotesque witch­dances in Burns’s “Tam Through the seventeenth and into the O’Shanter”, the sinister daemonism of eighteenth century we behold a growing Coleridge’s Christabel and Ancient Mariner, mass of fugitive legendry and balladry of the ghostly charm of James Hogg’s darksome cast; still, however, held down “Kilmeny”, and the more restrained beneath the surface of polite and accepted approaches to cosmic horror in Lamia and literature. Chapbooks of horror and many of Keats’s other poems, are typical weirdness multiplied, and we glimpse the British illustrations of the advent of the eager interest of the people through weird to formal literature. Our Teutonic fragments like Defoe’s “Apparition of Mrs. cousins of the Continent were equally Veal”, a homely tale of a dead woman’s receptive to the rising flood, and Bürger’s spectral visit to a distant friend, written to “Wild Huntsman” and the even more famous advertise covertly a badly selling theological daemon­bridegroom ballad of “Lenore”— disquisition on death. The upper orders of both imitated in English by Scott, whose

5 respect for the supernatural was always determined to found a line, who after the great—are only a taste of the eerie wealth mysterious sudden death of his only son which German song had commenced to Conrad on the latter’s bridal morn, attempts provide. Thomas Moore adapted from such to put away his wife Hippolita and wed the sources the legend of the ghoulish statue­ lady destined for the unfortunate youth—the bride (later used by Prosper Mérimée in “The lad, by the way, having been crushed by the Venus of Ille”, and traceable back to great preternatural fall of a gigantic helmet in the antiquity) which echoes so shiveringly in his castle courtyard. Isabella, the widowed ballad of “The Ring”; whilst Goethe’s bride, flees from this design; and encounters deathless masterpiece Faust, crossing from in subterranean crypts beneath the castle a mere balladry into the classic, cosmic noble young preserver, Theodore, who tragedy of the ages, may be held as the seems to be a peasant yet strangely ultimate height to which this German poetic resembles the old lord Alfonso who ruled the impulse arose. domain before Manfred’s time. Shortly thereafter supernatural phenomena assail the castle in divers ways; fragments of But it remained for a very sprightly and gigantic armour being discovered here and worldly Englishman—none other than there, a portrait walking out of its frame, a Horace Walpole himself—to give the thunderclap destroying the edifice, and a growing impulse definite shape and become colossal armoured spectre of Alfonso rising the actual founder of the literary horror­ out of the ruins to ascend through parting story as a permanent form. Fond of clouds to the bosom of St. Nicholas. mediaeval romance and mystery as a Theodore, having wooed Manfred’s daughter dilettante’s diversion, and with a quaintly Matilda and lost her through death—for she imitated Gothic castle as his abode at is slain by her father by mistake—is Strawberry Hill, Walpole in 1764 published discovered to be the son of Alfonso and The Castle of Otranto; a tale of the rightful heir to the estate. He concludes the supernatural which, though thoroughly tale by wedding Isabella and preparing to unconvincing and mediocre in itself, was live happily ever after, whilst Manfred— destined to exert an almost unparalleled whose usurpation was the cause of his son’s influence on the literature of the weird. First supernatural death and his own supernatural venturing it only as a translation by one harassings—retires to a monastery for “William Marshal, Gent.” from the Italian of penitence; his saddened wife seeking asylum a mythical “Onuphrio Muralto”, the author in a neighbouring convent. later acknowledged his connexion with the book and took pleasure in its wide and instantaneous popularity—a popularity Such is the tale; flat, stilted, and altogether which extended to many editions, early devoid of the true cosmic horror which dramatisation, and wholesale imitation both makes weird literature. Yet such was the in England and in Germany. thirst of the age for those touches of strangeness and spectral antiquity which it reflects, that it was seriously received by the The story—tedious, artificial, and soundest readers and raised in spite of its melodramatic—is further impaired by a brisk intrinsic ineptness to a pedestal of lofty and prosaic style whose urbane sprightliness importance in literary history. What it did nowhere permits the creation of a truly above all else was to create a novel type of weird atmosphere. It tells of Manfred, an scene, puppet­characters, and incidents; unscrupulous and usurping prince which, handled to better advantage by

6 writers more naturally adapted to weird ancient turreted castle whose doors open creation, stimulated the growth of an and close and whose bluish will­o’­the­wisps imitative Gothic school which in turn lead up mysterious staircases toward dead inspired the real weavers of cosmic terror— hands and animated black statues. A coffin the line of actual artists beginning with Poe. with a dead lady, whom Sir Bertrand kisses, This novel dramatic paraphernalia consisted is finally reached; and upon the kiss the first of all of the Gothic castle, with its scene dissolves to give place to a splendid awesome antiquity, vast distances and apartment where the lady, restored to life, ramblings, deserted or ruined wings, damp holds a banquet in honour of her rescuer. corridors, unwholesome hidden catacombs, Walpole admired this tale, though he and galaxy of ghosts and appalling legends, accorded less respect to an even more as a nucleus of suspense and daemoniac prominent offspring of his Otranto—The Old fright. In addition, it included the tyrannical English Baron, by Clara Reeve, published in and malevolent nobleman as villain; the 1777. Truly enough, this tale lacks the real saintly, longpersecuted, and generally insipid vibration to the note of outer darkness and heroine who undergoes the major terrors mystery which distinguishes Mrs. Barbauld’s and serves as a point of view and focus for fragment; and though less crude than the reader’s sympathies; the valorous and Walpole’s novel, and more artistically immaculate hero, always of high birth but economical of horror in its possession of only often in humble disguise; the convention of one spectral figure, it is nevertheless too high­sounding foreign names, mostly Italian, definitely insipid for greatness. Here again for the characters; and the infinite array of we have the virtuous heir to the castle stage properties which includes strange disguised as a peasant and restored to his lights, damp trap­doors, extinguished lamps, heritage through the ghost of his father; and mouldy hidden manuscripts, creaking here again we have a case of wide popularity hinges, shaking arras, and the like. All this leading to many editions, dramatisation, and paraphernalia reappears with amusing ultimate translation into French. Miss Reeve sameness, yet sometimes with tremendous wrote another weird novel, unfortunately effect, throughout the history of the Gothic unpublished and lost. novel; and is by no means extinct even today, though subtler technique now forces it to assume a less naive and obvious form. The Gothic novel was now settled as a An harmonious milieu for a new school had literary form, and instances multiply been found, and the writing world was not bewilderingly as the eighteenth century slow to grasp the opportunity. draws toward its close. The Recess, written in 1785 by Mrs. Sophia Lee, has the historic element, revolving round the twin daughters German romance at once responded to the of Mary, Queen of Scots; and though devoid Walpole influence, and soon became a of the supernatural, employs the Walpole byword for the weird and ghastly. In scenery and mechanism with great dexterity. England one of the first imitators was the Five years later, and all existing lamps are celebrated Mrs. Barbauld, then Miss Aikin, paled by the rising of a fresh luminary of who in 1773 published an unfinished wholly superior order—Mrs. Ann Radcliffe fragment called “Sir Bertrand”, in which the (1764–1823), whose famous novels made strings of genuine terror were truly touched terror and suspense a fashion, and who set with no clumsy hand. A nobleman on a dark new and higher standards in the domain of and lonely moor, attracted by a tolling bell macabre and fear­inspiring atmosphere and distant light, enters a strange and despite a provoking custom of destroying her

7 own phantoms at the last through laboured behind a black veil all operate in quick mechanical explanations. To the familiar succession to unnerve the heroine and her Gothic trappings of her predecessors Mrs. faithful attendant Annette; but finally, after Radcliffe added a genuine sense of the the death of her aunt, she escapes with the unearthly in scene and incident which aid of a fellow­prisoner whom she has closely approached genius; every touch of discovered. On the way home she stops at a setting and action contributing artistically to chateau filled with fresh horrors—the the impression of illimitable frightfulness abandoned wing where the departed which she wished to convey. A few sinister chatelaine dwelt, and the bed of death with details like a track of blood on castle stairs, a the black pall—but is finally restored to groan from a distant vault, or a weird song security and happiness with her lover in a nocturnal forest can with her conjure up Valancourt, after the clearing­up of a secret the most powerful images of imminent which seemed for a time to involve her birth horror; surpassing by far the extravagant and in mystery. Clearly, this is only the familiar toilsome elaborations of others. Nor are material re­worked; but it is so well re­ these images in themselves any the less worked that Udolpho will always be a classic. potent because they are explained away Mrs. Radcliffe’s characters are puppets, but before the end of the novel. Mrs. Radcliffe’s they are less markedly so than those of her visual imagination was very strong, and forerunners. And in atmospheric creation she appears as much in her delightful landscape stands preëminent among those of her time. touches—always in broad, glamorously pictorial outline, and never in close detail— as in her weird phantasies. Her prime Of Mrs. Radcliffe’s countless imitators, the weaknesses, aside from the habit of prosaic American novelist Charles Brockden Brown disillusionment, are a tendency toward stands the closest in spirit and method. Like erroneous geography and history and a fatal her, he injured his creations by natural predilection for bestrewing her novels with explanations; but also like her, he had an insipid little poems, attributed to one or uncanny atmospheric power which gives his another of the characters. horrors a frightful vitality as long as they remain unexplained. He differed from her in contemptuously discarding the external Mrs. Radcliffe wrote six novels; The Castles Gothic paraphernalia and properties and of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian choosing modern American scenes for his Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest mysteries; but this repudiation did not (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The extend to the Gothic spirit and type of Italian (1797), and Gaston de Blondeville, incident. Brown’s novels involve some composed in 1802 but first published memorably frightful scenes, and excel even posthumously in 1826. Of these Udolpho is Mrs. Radcliffe’s in describing the operations by far the most famous, and may be taken as of the perturbed mind. Edgar Huntly starts a type of the early Gothic tale at its best. It is with a sleep­walker digging a grave, but is the chronicle of Emily, a young later impaired by touches of Godwinian Frenchwoman transplanted to an ancient didacticism. Ormond involves a member of a and portentous castle in the Apennines sinister secret brotherhood. That and Arthur through the death of her parents and the Mervyn both describe the plague of yellow marriage of her aunt to the lord of the castle fever, which the author had witnessed in —the scheming nobleman Montoni. Philadelphia and New York. But Brown’s Mysterious sounds, opened doors, frightful most famous book is Wieland; or, The legends, and a nameless horror in a niche Transformation (1798), in which a

8 Pennsylvania German, engulfed by a wave of contains some appalling descriptions such as religious fanaticism, hears voices and slays the incantation in the vaults beneath the his wife and children as a sacrifice. His sister convent cemetery, the burning of the Clara, who tells the story, narrowly escapes. convent, and the final end of the wretched The scene, laid at the woodland estate of abbot. In the sub­plot where the Marquis de Mittingen on the Schuylkill’s remote reaches, las Cisternas meets the spectre of his erring is drawn with extreme vividness; and the ancestress, The Bleeding Nun, there are terrors of Clara, beset by spectral tones, many enormously potent strokes; notably the gathering fears, and the sound of strange visit of the animated corpse to the Marquis’s footsteps in the lonely house, are all shaped bedside, and the cabbalistic ritual whereby with truly artistic force. In the end a lame the Wandering Jew helps him to fathom and ventriloquial explanation is offered, but the banish his dead tormentor. Nevertheless The atmosphere is genuine while it lasts. Carwin, Monk drags sadly when read as a whole. It is the malign ventriloquist, is a typical villain of too long and too diffuse, and much of its the Manfred or Montoni type. potency is marred by flippancy and by an awkwardly excessive reaction against those canons of decorum which Lewis at first IV. The Apex of Gothic Romance despised as prudish. One great thing may be Horror in literature attains a new malignity said of the author; that he never ruined his in the work of Matthew Gregory Lewis ghostly visions with a natural explanation. (1775–1818), whose novel The Monk (1796) He succeeded in breaking up the Radcliffian achieved marvellous popularity and earned tradition and expanding the field of the him the nickname of “Monk” Lewis. This Gothic novel. Lewis wrote much more than young author, educated in Germany and The Monk. His drama, The Castle Spectre, was saturated with a body of wild Teuton lore produced in 1798, and he later found time to unknown to Mrs. Radcliffe, turned to terror pen other fictions in ballad form—Tales of in forms more violent than his gentle Terror (1799), Tales of Wonder (1801), and a predecessor had ever dared to think of; and succession of translations from the German. produced as a result a masterpiece of active nightmare whose general Gothic cast is spiced with added stores of ghoulishness. Gothic romances, both English and German, The story is one of a Spanish monk, now appeared in multitudinous and Ambrosio, who from a state of overproud mediocre profusion. Most of them were virtue is tempted to the very nadir of evil by merely ridiculous in the light of mature a fiend in the guise of the maiden Matilda; taste, and Miss Austen’s famous satire and who is finally, when awaiting death at Northanger Abbey was by no means an the Inquisition’s hands, induced to purchase unmerited rebuke to a school which had escape at the price of his soul from the Devil, sunk far toward absurdity. This particular because he deems both body and soul school was petering out, but before its final already lost. Forthwith the mocking Fiend subordination there arose its last and snatches him to a lonely place, tells him he greatest figure in the person of Charles has sold his soul in vain since both pardon Robert Maturin (1782–1824), an obscure and a chance for salvation were approaching and eccentric Irish clergyman. Out of an at the moment of his hideous bargain, and ample body of miscellaneous writing which completes the sardonic betrayal by rebuking includes one confused Radcliffian imitation him for his unnatural crimes, and casting his called Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of body down a precipice whilst his soul is Montorio (1807), Maturin at length evolved borne off for ever to perdition. The novel the vivid horror­masterpiece of Melmoth the

9 Wanderer (1820), in which the Gothic tale European literature, and wrote a whimsical climbed to altitudes of sheer spiritual fright piece called “Melmoth Reconciled”, in which which it had never known before. the Wanderer succeeds in passing his infernal bargain on to a Parisian bank defaulter, who in turn hands it along a chain Melmoth is the tale of an Irish gentleman of victims until a revelling gambler dies with who, in the seventeenth century, obtained a it in his possession, and by his damnation preternaturally extended life from the Devil ends the curse. Scott, Rossetti, Thackeray, at the price of his soul. If he can persuade and Baudelaire are the other titans who gave another to take the bargain off his hands, Maturin their unqualified admiration, and and assume his existing state, he can be there is much significance in the fact that saved; but this he can never manage to Oscar Wilde, after his disgrace and exile, effect, no matter how assiduously he haunts chose for his last days in Paris the assumed those whom despair has made reckless and name of “Sebastian Melmoth”. frantic. The framework of the story is very clumsy; involving tedious length, digressive episodes, narratives within narratives, and Melmoth contains scenes which even now laboured dovetailing and coincidences; but have not lost their power to evoke dread. It at various points in the endless rambling begins with a deathbed—an old miser is there is felt a pulse of power undiscoverable dying of sheer fright because of something in any previous work of this kind—a kinship he has seen, coupled with a manuscript he to the essential truth of human nature, an has read and a family portrait which hangs understanding of the profoundest sources of in an obscure closet of his centuried home in actual cosmic fear, and a white heat of County Wicklow. He sends to Trinity sympathetic passion on the writer’s part College, Dublin, for his nephew John; and which makes the book a true document of the latter upon arriving notes many uncanny aesthetic self­expression rather than a mere things. The eyes of the portrait in the closet clever compound of artifice. No unbiassed glow horribly, and twice a figure strangely reader can doubt that with Melmoth an resembling the portrait appears momentarily enormous stride in the evolution of the at the door. Dread hangs over that house of horror­tale is represented. Fear is taken out the Melmoths, one of whose ancestors, “J. of the realm of the conventional and exalted Melmoth, 1646”, the portrait represents. The into a hideous cloud over mankind’s very dying miser declares that this man—at a destiny. Maturin’s shudders, the work of one date slightly before 1800—is alive. Finally capable of shuddering himself, are of the sort the miser dies, and the nephew is told in the that convince. Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis are will to destroy both the portrait and a fair game for the parodist, but it would be manuscript to be found in a certain drawer. difficult to find a false note in the feverishly Reading the manuscript, which was written intensified action and high atmospheric late in the seventeenth century by an tension of the Irishman whose less Englishman named Stanton, young John sophisticated emotions and strain of Celtic learns of a terrible incident in Spain in 1677, mysticism gave him the finest possible when the writer met a horrible fellow­ natural equipment for his task. Without a countryman and was told of how he had doubt Maturin is a man of authentic genius, stared to death a priest who tried to and he was so recognised by Balzac, who denounce him as one filled with fearsome grouped Melmoth with Molière’s Don Juan, evil. Later, after meeting the man again in Goethe’s Faust, and Byron’s Manfred as the London, Stanton is cast into a madhouse and supreme allegorical figures of modern visited by the stranger, whose approach is

10 heralded by spectral music and whose eyes are interrupted by the entrance of Melmoth have a more than mortal glare. Melmoth the the Wanderer himself, his piercing eyes now Wanderer—for such is the malign visitor— fading, and decrepitude swiftly overtaking offers the captive freedom if he will take him. The term of his bargain has approached over his bargain with the Devil; but like all its end, and he has come home after a others whom Melmoth has approached, century and a half to meet his fate. Warning Stanton is proof against temptation. all others from the room, no matter what Melmoth’s description of the horrors of a life sounds they may hear in the night, he awaits in a madhouse, used to tempt Stanton, is one the end alone. Young John and Monçada of the most potent passages of the book. hear frightful ululations, but do not intrude Stanton is at length liberated, and spends till silence comes toward morning. They then the rest of his life tracking down Melmoth, find the room empty. Clayey footprints lead whose family and ancestral abode he out a rear door to a cliff overlooking the sea, discovers. With the family he leaves the and near the edge of the precipice is a track manuscript, which by young John’s time is indicating the forcible dragging of some sadly ruinous and fragmentary. John heavy body. The Wanderer’s scarf is found destroys both portrait and manuscript, but in on a crag some distance below the brink, but sleep is visited by his horrible ancestor, who nothing further is ever seen or heard of him. leaves a black and blue mark on his wrist.

Such is the story, and none can fail to notice Young John soon afterward receives as a the difference between this modulated, visitor a shipwrecked Spaniard, Alonzo de suggestive, and artistically moulded horror Monçada, who has escaped from compulsory and—to use the words of Professor George monasticism and from the perils of the Saintsbury—“the artful but rather jejune Inquisition. He has suffered horribly—and rationalism of Mrs. Radcliffe, and the too the descriptions of his experiences under often puerile extravagance, the bad taste, torment and in the vaults through which he and the sometimes slipshod style of Lewis.” once essays escape are classic—but had the Maturin’s style in itself deserves particular strength to resist Melmoth the Wanderer praise, for its forcible directness and vitality when approached at his darkest hour in lift it altogether above the pompous prison. At the house of a Jew who sheltered artificialities of which his predecessors are him after his escape he discovers a wealth of guilty. Professor Edith Birkhead, in her manuscript relating other exploits of history of the Gothic novel, justly observes Melmoth including his wooing of an Indian that with all his faults Maturin was the island maiden, Immalee, who later comes to greatest as well as the last of the Goths. her birthright in Spain and is known as Melmoth was widely read and eventually Donna Isidora; and of his horrible marriage dramatised, but its late date in the evolution to her by the corpse of a dead anchorite at of the Gothic tale deprived it of the midnight in the ruined chapel of a shunned tumultuous popularity of Udolpho and The and abhorred monastery. Monçada’s Monk. narrative to young John takes up the bulk of Maturin’s four­volume book; this disproportion being considered one of the V. The Aftermath of Gothic Fiction chief technical faults of the composition. Meanwhile other hands had not been idle, so that above the dreary plethora of trash like Marquis von Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries At last the colloquies of John and Monçada (1796), Mrs. Roche’s Children of the Abbey

11 (1796), Miss Dacre’s Zofloya; or, The Moor Carathis and her witch­tower with the fifty (1806), and the poet Shelley’s schoolboy one­eyed negresses, of his pilgrimage to the effusions Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne haunted ruins of Istakhar (Persepolis) and of (1811) (both imitations of Zofloya ) there the impish bride Nouronihar whom he arose many memorable weird works both in treacherously acquired on the way, of English and German. Classic in merit, and Istakhar’s primordial towers and terraces in markedly different from its fellows because the burning moonlight of the waste, and of of its foundation in the Oriental tale rather the terrible Cyclopean halls of Eblis, where, than the Walpolesque Gothic novel, is the lured by glittering promises, each victim is celebrated History of the Caliph Vathek by the compelled to wander in anguish for ever, his wealthy dilettante William Beckford, first right hand upon his blazingly ignited and written in the French language but published eternally burning heart, are triumphs of in an English translation before the weird colouring which raise the book to a appearance of the original. Eastern tales, permanent place in English letters. No less introduced to European literature early in notable are the three Episodes of Vathek, the eighteenth century through Galland’s intended for insertion in the tale as French translation of the inexhaustibly narratives of Vathek’s fellow­victims in Eblis’ opulent Arabian Nights, had become a infernal halls, which remained unpublished reigning fashion; being used both for throughout the author’s lifetime and were allegory and for amusement. The sly humour discovered as recently as 1909 by the scholar which only the Eastern mind knows how to Lewis Melville whilst collecting material for mix with weirdness had captivated a his Life and Letters of William Beckford. sophisticated generation, till Bagdad and Beckford, however, lacks the essential Damascus names became as freely strown mysticism which marks the acutest form of through popular literature as dashing Italian the weird; so that his tales have a certain and Spanish ones were soon to be. Beckford, knowing Latin hardness and clearness well read in Eastern romance, caught the preclusive of sheer panic fright. atmosphere with unusual receptivity; and in his fantastic volume reflected very potently the haughty luxury, sly disillusion, bland But Beckford remained alone in his devotion cruelty, urbane treachery, and shadowy to the Orient. Other writers, closer to the spectral horror of the Saracen spirit. His Gothic tradition and to European life in seasoning of the ridiculous seldom mars the general, were content to follow more force of his sinister theme, and the tale faithfully in the lead of Walpole. Among the marches onward with a phantasmagoric countless producers of terror­literature in pomp in which the laughter is that of these times may be mentioned the Utopian skeletons feasting under Arabesque domes. economic theorist William Godwin, who Vathek is a tale of the grandson of the Caliph followed his famous but non­supernatural Haroun, who, tormented by that ambition Caleb Williams (1794) with the intendedly for super­terrestrial power, pleasure, and weird St. Leon (1799), in which the theme of learning which animates the average Gothic the elixir of life, as developed by the villain or Byronic hero (essentially cognate imaginary secret order of “Rosicrucians”, is types), is lured by an evil genius to seek the handled with ingeniousness if not with subterranean throne of the mighty and atmospheric convincingness. This element of fabulous pre­Adamite sultans in the fiery Rosicrucianism, fostered by a wave of halls of Eblis, the Mahometan Devil. The popular magical interest exemplified in the descriptions of Vathek’s palaces and vogue of the charlatan Cagliostro and the diversions, of his scheming sorceress­mother publication of Francis Barrett’s The Magus

12 (1801), a curious and compendious treatise the student finally refuses in horror lest the on occult principles and ceremonies, of world be populated with such monsters, it which a reprint was made as lately as 1896, departs with a hideous threat ‘to be with him figures in Bulwer­Lytton and in many late on his wedding night’. Upon that night the Gothic novels, especially that remote and bride is strangled, and from that time on enfeebled posterity which straggled far down Frankenstein hunts down the monster, even into the nineteenth century and was into the wastes of the Arctic. In the end, represented by George W. M. Reynolds’ whilst seeking shelter on the ship of the man Faust and the Demon and Wagner, the Wehr­ who tells the story, Frankenstein himself is wolf. Caleb Williams, though non­ killed by the shocking object of his search supernatural, has many authentic touches of and creation of his presumptuous pride. terror. It is the tale of a servant persecuted Some of the scenes in Frankenstein are by a master whom he has found guilty of unforgettable, as when the newly animated murder, and displays an invention and skill monster enters its creator’s room, parts the which have kept it alive in a fashion to this curtains of his bed, and gazes at him in the day. It was dramatised as The Iron Chest, and yellow moonlight with watery eyes—“if eyes in that form was almost equally celebrated. they may be called”. Mrs. Shelley wrote Godwin, however, was too much the other novels, including the fairly notable conscious teacher and prosaic man of Last Man; but never duplicated the success of thought to create a genuine weird her first effort. It has the true touch of masterpiece. cosmic fear, no matter how much the movement may lag in places. Dr. Polidori developed his competing idea as a long short His daughter, the wife of Shelley, was much story, “The Vampyre”; in which we behold a more successful; and her inimitable suave villain of the true Gothic or Byronic Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus type, and encounter some excellent passages (1818) is one of the horror­classics of all of stark fright, including a terrible nocturnal time. Composed in competition with her experience in a shunned Grecian wood. husband, Lord Byron, and Dr. John William Polidori in an effort to prove supremacy in horror­making, Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein In this same period Sir Walter Scott was the only one of the rival narratives to be frequently concerned himself with the weird, brought to an elaborate completion; and weaving it into many of his novels and criticism has failed to prove that the best poems, and sometimes producing such parts are due to Shelley rather than to her. independent bits of narration as “The The novel, somewhat tinged but scarcely Tapestried Chamber” or “Wandering Willie’s marred by moral didacticism, tells of the Tale” in Redgauntlet, in the latter of which artificial human being moulded from charnel the force of the spectral and the diabolic is fragments by Victor Frankenstein, a young enhanced by a grotesque homeliness of Swiss medical student. Created by its speech and atmosphere. In 1830 Scott designer “in the mad pride of intellectuality”, published his Letters on Demonology and the monster possesses full intelligence but Witchcraft, which still forms one of our best owns a hideously loathsome form. It is compendia of European witch­lore. rejected by mankind, becomes embittered, Washington Irving is another famous figure and at length begins the successive murder not unconnected with the weird; for though of all whom young Frankenstein loves best, most of his ghosts are too whimsical and friends and family. It demands that humorous to form genuinely spectral Frankenstein create a wife for it; and when literature, a distinct inclination in this

13 direction is to be noted in many of his and despite the large doses of turgid rhetoric productions. “The German Student” in Tales and empty romanticism in his products, his of a Traveller (1824) is a slyly concise and success in the weaving of a certain kind of effective presentation of the old legend of bizarre charm cannot be denied. the dead bride, whilst woven into the comic tissue of “The Money­Diggers” in the same volume is more than one hint of piratical “The House and the Brain”, which hints of apparitions in the realms which Captain Kidd Rosicrucianism and at a malign and once roamed. Thomas Moore also joined the deathless figure perhaps suggested by Louis ranks of the macabre artists in the poem XV’s mysterious courtier St. Germain, yet Alciphron, which he later elaborated into the survives as one of the best short haunted­ prose novel of The Epicurean (1827). Though house tales ever written. The novel Zanoni merely relating the adventures of a young (1842) contains similar elements more Athenian duped by the artifice of cunning elaborately handled, and introduces a vast Egyptian priests, Moore manages to infuse unknown sphere of being pressing on our much genuine horror into his account of own world and guarded by a horrible subterranean frights and wonders beneath “Dweller of the Threshold” who haunts those the primordial temples of Memphis. De who try to enter and fail. Here we have a Quincey more than once revels in grotesque benign brotherhood kept alive from age to and arabesque terrors, though with a age till finally reduced to a single member, desultoriness and learned pomp which deny and as a hero an ancient Chaldaean sorcerer him the rank of specialist. surviving in the pristine bloom of youth to perish on the guillotine of the French Revolution. Though full of the conventional This era likewise saw the rise of William spirit of romance, marred by a ponderous Harrison Ainsworth, whose romantic novels network of symbolic and didactic meanings, teem with the eerie and the gruesome. Capt. and left unconvincing through lack of perfect Marryat, besides writing such short tales as atmospheric realisation of the situations “The Werewolf”, made a memorable hinging on the spectral world, Zanoni is contribution in The Phantom Ship (1839), really an excellent performance as a founded on the legend of the Flying romantic novel; and can be read with Dutchman, whose spectral and accursed genuine interest today by the not too vessel sails for ever near the Cape of Good sophisticated reader. It is amusing to note Hope. Dickens now rises with occasional that in describing an attempted initiation weird bits like “The Signalman”, a tale of into the ancient brotherhood the author ghostly warning conforming to a very cannot escape using the stock Gothic castle common pattern and touched with a of Walpolian lineage. verisimilitude which allies it as much with the coming psychological school as with the dying Gothic school. At this time a wave of In A Strange Story (1862) Bulwer­Lytton interest in spiritualistic charlatanry, shews a marked improvement in the creation mediumism, Hindoo theosophy, and such of weird images and moods. The novel, matters, much like that of the present day, despite enormous length, a highly artificial was flourishing; so that the number of weird plot bolstered up by opportune coincidences, tales with a “psychic” or pseudo­scientific and an atmosphere of homiletic pseudo­ basis became very considerable. For a science designed to please the matter­of­fact number of these the prolific and popular and purposeful Victorian reader, is Lord Edward Bulwer­Lytton was responsible; exceedingly effective as a narrative; evoking

14 instantaneous and unflagging interest, and The romantic, semi­Gothic, quasi­moral furnishing many potent—if somewhat tradition here represented was carried far melodramatic—tableaux and climaxes. Again down the nineteenth century by such authors we have the mysterious user of life’s elixir in as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Thomas Preskett the person of the soulless magician Prest with his famous Varney, the Vampyre Margrave, whose dark exploits stand out (1847), Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H. Rider with dramatic vividness against the modern Haggard (whose She is really remarkably background of a quiet English town and of good), Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and the Australian bush; and again we have Robert Louis Stevenson—the latter of whom, shadowy intimations of a vast spectral world despite an atrocious tendency toward jaunty of the unknown in the very air about us— mannerisms, created permanent classics in this time handled with much greater power “Markheim”, “The Body­Snatcher”, and Dr. and vitality than in Zanoni. One of the two Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Indeed, we may say that great incantation passages, where the hero is this school still survives; for to it clearly driven by a luminous evil spirit to rise at belong such of our contemporary horror­ night in his sleep, take a strange Egyptian tales as specialise in events rather than wand, and evoke nameless presences in the atmospheric details, address the intellect haunted and mausoleum­facing pavilion of a rather than the impressionistic imagination, famous Renaissance alchemist, truly stands cultivate a luminous glamour rather than a among the major terror scenes of literature. malign tensity or psychological Just enough is suggested, and just little verisimilitude, and take a definite stand in enough is told. Unknown words are twice sympathy with mankind and its welfare. It dictated to the sleep­walker, and as he has its undeniable strength, and because of repeats them the ground trembles, and all its “human element” commands a wider the dogs of the countryside begin to bay at audience than does the sheer artistic half­seen amorphous shadows that stalk nightmare. If not quite so potent as the athwart the moonlight. When a third set of latter, it is because a diluted product can unknown words is prompted, the sleep­ never achieve the intensity of a concentrated walker’s spirit suddenly rebels at uttering essence. them, as if the soul could recognise ultimate abysmal horrors concealed from the mind; and at last an apparition of an absent Quite alone both as a novel and as a piece of sweetheart and good angel breaks the terror­literature stands the famous malign spell. This fragment well illustrates Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë, how far Lord Lytton was capable of with its mad vista of bleak, windswept progressing beyond his usual pomp and Yorkshire moors and the violent, distorted stock romance toward that crystalline lives they foster. Though primarily a tale of essence of artistic fear which belongs to the life, and of human passions in agony and domain of poetry. In describing certain conflict, its epically cosmic setting affords details of incantations, Lytton was greatly room for horror of the most spiritual sort. indebted to his amusingly serious occult Heathcliff, the modified Byronic villain­hero, studies, in the course of which he came in is a strange dark waif found in the streets as touch with that odd French scholar and a small child and speaking only a strange cabbalist Alphonse­Louis Constant (“Eliphas gibberish till adopted by the family he Lévi”), who claimed to possess the secrets of ultimately ruins. That he is in truth a ancient magic, and to have evoked the diabolic spirit rather than a human being is spectre of the old Grecian wizard Apollonius more than once suggested, and the unreal is of Tyana, who lived in Nero’s time. further approached in the experience of the

15 visitor who encounters a plaintive child­ which makes it notable in any department of ghost at a bough­brushed upper window. literature, and an easy naturalness which Between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw places it close to the genuine folk­myth. It is, is a tie deeper and more terrible than human in fact, derived from a tale told by the love. After her death he twice disturbs her Renaissance physician and alchemist grave, and is haunted by an impalpable Paracelsus in his Treatise on Elemental presence which can be nothing less than her Sprites. spirit. The spirit enters his life more and more, and at last he becomes confident of some imminent mystical reunion. He says he Undine, daughter of a powerful water­ feels a strange change approaching, and prince, was exchanged by her father as a ceases to take nourishment. At night he small child for a fisherman’s daughter, in either walks abroad or opens the casement order that she might acquire a soul by by his bed. When he dies the casement is still wedding a human being. Meeting the noble swinging open to the pouring rain, and a youth Huldbrand at the cottage of her foster­ queer smile pervades the stiffened face. They father by the sea at the edge of a haunted bury him in a grave beside the mound he has wood, she soon marries him, and haunted for eighteen years, and small accompanies him to his ancestral castle of shepherd boys say that he yet walks with his Ringstetten. Huldbrand, however, eventually Catherine in the churchyard and on the wearies of his wife’s supernatural affiliations, moor when it rains. Their faces, too, are and especially of the appearances of her sometimes seen on rainy nights behind that uncle, the malicious woodland waterfall­ upper casement at Wuthering Heights. Miss spirit Kühleborn; a weariness increased by Brontë’s eerie terror is no mere Gothic echo, his growing affection for Bertalda, who turns but a tense expression of man’s shuddering out to be the fisherman’s child for whom reaction to the unknown. In this respect, Undine was exchanged. At length, on a Wuthering Heights becomes the symbol of a voyage down the Danube, he is provoked by literary transition, and marks the growth of a some innocent act of his devoted wife to new and sounder school. utter the angry words which consign her back to her supernatural element; from which she can, by the laws of her species, VI. Spectral Literature on the Continent return only once—to kill him, whether she On the Continent literary horror fared well. will or no, if ever he prove unfaithful to her The celebrated short tales and novels of memory. Later, when Huldbrand is about to Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (1776– be married to Bertalda, Undine returns for 1822) are a byword for mellowness of her sad duty, and bears his life away in tears. background and maturity of form, though When he is buried among his fathers in the they incline to levity and extravagance, and village churchyard a veiled, snow­white lack the exalted moments of stark, breathless female figure appears among the mourners, terror which a less sophisticated writer might but after the prayer is seen no more. In her have achieved. Generally they convey the place is seen a little silver spring, which grotesque rather than the terrible. Most murmurs its way almost completely around artistic of all the Continental weird tales is the new grave, and empties into a the German classic Undine (1811), by neighbouring lake. The villagers shew it to Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Baron de la Motte this day, and say that Undine and her Fouqué. In this story of a water­spirit who Huldbrand are thus united in death. Many married a mortal and gained a human soul passages and atmospheric touches in this there is a delicate fineness of craftsmanship tale reveal Fouqué as an accomplished artist

16 in the field of the macabre; especially the conceptions an effective knowledge of descriptions of the haunted wood with its modern psychology. Novels like The gigantic snow­white man and various Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Alraune, and short unnamed terrors, which occur early in the stories like “The Spider”, contain distinctive narrative. qualities which raise them to a classic level.]

Not so well known as Undine, but But France as well as Germany has been remarkable for its convincing realism and active in the realm of weirdness. Victor freedom from Gothic stock devices, is the Hugo, in such tales as Hans of Iceland, and Amber Witch of Wilhelm Meinhold, another Balzac, in The Wild Ass’s Skin, Séraphîta, and product of the German fantastic genius of Louis Lambert, both employ supernaturalism the earlier nineteenth century. This tale, to a greater or less extent; though generally which is laid in the time of the Thirty Years’ only as a means to some more human end, War, purports to be a clergyman’s and without the sincere and daemonic manuscript found in an old church at intensity which characterises the born artist Coserow, and centres round the writer’s in shadows. It is in Théophile Gautier that daughter, Maria Schweidler, who is wrongly we first seem to find an authentic French accused of witchcraft. She has found a sense of the unreal world, and here there deposit of amber which she keeps secret for appears a spectral mastery which, though various reasons, and the unexplained wealth not continuously used, is recognisable at obtained from this lends colour to the once as something alike genuine and accusation; an accusation instigated by the profound. Short tales like “Avatar”, “The malice of the wolf­hunting nobleman Wittich Foot of the Mummy”, and “Clarimonde” Appelmann, who has vainly pursued her display glimpses of forbidden visits that with ignoble designs. The deeds of a real allure, tantalise, and sometimes horrify; witch, who afterward comes to a horrible whilst the Egyptian visions evoked in “One of supernatural end in prison, are glibly Cleopatra’s Nights” are of the keenest and imputed to the hapless Maria; and after a most expressive potency. Gautier captured typical witchcraft trial with forced the inmost soul of aeon­weighted Egypt, confessions under torture she is about to be with its cryptic life and Cyclopean burned at the stake when saved just in time architecture, and uttered once and for all the by her lover, a noble youth from a eternal horror of its nether world of neighbouring district. Meinhold’s great catacombs, where to the end of time millions strength is in his air of casual and realistic of stiff, spiced corpses will stare up in the verisimilitude, which intensifies our suspense blackness with glassy eyes, awaiting some and sense of the unseen by half persuading awesome and unrelatable summons. Gustave us that the menacing events must somehow Flaubert ably continued the tradition of be either the truth or very close to the truth. Gautier in orgies of poetic phantasy like The Indeed, so thorough is this realism that a Temptation of St. Anthony, and but for a popular magazine once published the main strong realistic bias might have been an points of The Amber Witch as an actual arch­weaver of tapestried terrors. Later on occurrence of the seventeenth century! we see the stream divide, producing strange poets and fantaisistes of the Symbolist and Decadent schools whose dark interests really [In the present generation German horror­ centre more in abnormalities of human fiction is most notably represented by Hanns thought and instinct than in the actual Heinz Ewers, who brings to bear on his dark supernatural, and subtle story­tellers whose

17 thrills are quite directly derived from the night­black wells of cosmic unreality. Of the former class of “artists in sin” the illustrious The collaborators Erckmann­Chatrian poet Baudelaire, influenced vastly by Poe, is enriched French literature with many the supreme type; whilst the psychological spectral fancies like The Man­Wolf, in which novelist Joris­Karl Huysmans, a true child of a transmitted curse works toward its end in a the eighteen­nineties, is at once the traditional Gothic­castle setting. Their power summation and finale. The latter and purely of creating a shuddering midnight narrative class is continued by Prosper atmosphere was tremendous despite a Mérimée, whose “Venus of Ille” presents in tendency toward natural explanations and terse and convincing prose the same ancient scientific wonders; and few short tales statue­bride theme which Thomas Moore contain greater horror than “The Invisible cast in ballad form in “The Ring”. Eye”, where a malignant old hag weaves nocturnal hypnotic spells which induce the successive occupants of a certain inn The horror­tales of the powerful and cynical chamber to hang themselves on a cross­ Guy de Maupassant, written as his final beam. “The Owl’s Ear” and “The Waters of madness gradually overtook him, present Death” are full of engulfing darkness and individualities of their own; being rather the mystery, the latter embodying the familiar morbid outpourings of a realistic mind in a overgrown­spider theme so frequently pathological state than the healthy employed by weird fictionists. Villiers de imaginative products of a vision naturally l’Isle­Adam likewise followed the macabre disposed toward phantasy and sensitive to school; his “Torture by Hope”, the tale of a the normal illusions of the unseen. stake­condemned prisoner permitted to Nevertheless they are of the keenest interest escape in order to feel the pangs of and poignancy; suggesting with marvellous recapture, being held by some to constitute force the imminence of nameless terrors, and the most harrowing short story in literature. the relentless dogging of an ill­starred This type, however, is less a part of the weird individual by hideous and menacing tradition than a class peculiar to itself—the representatives of the outer blackness. Of so­called conte cruel, in which the wrenching these stories “The Horla” is generally of the emotions is accomplished through regarded as the masterpiece. Relating the dramatic tantalisations, frustrations, and advent to France of an invisible being who gruesome physical horrors. Almost wholly lives on water and milk, sways the minds of devoted to this form is the living writer others, and seems to be the vanguard of a Maurice Level, whose very brief episodes horde of extra­terrestrial organisms arrived have lent themselves so readily to theatrical on earth to subjugate and overwhelm adaptation in the “thrillers” of the Grand mankind, this tense narrative is perhaps Guignol. As a matter of fact, the French without a peer in its particular department; genius is more naturally suited to this dark notwithstanding its indebtedness to a tale by realism than to the suggestion of the unseen; the American Fitz­James O’Brien for details since the latter process requires, for its best in describing the actual presence of the and most sympathetic development on a unseen monster. Other potently dark large scale, the inherent mysticism of the creations of de Maupassant are “Who Northern mind. Knows?”, “The Spectre”, “He?”, “The Diary of a Madman”, “The White Wolf”, “On the River”, and the grisly verses entitled A very flourishing, though till recently quite “Horror”. hidden, branch of weird literature is that of

18 the Jews, kept alive and nourished in VII. Edgar Allan Poe obscurity by the sombre heritage of early In the eighteen­thirties occurred a literary Eastern magic, apocalyptic literature, and dawn directly affecting not only the history cabbalism. The Semitic mind, like the Celtic of the weird tale, but that of short fiction as and Teutonic, seems to possess marked a whole; and indirectly moulding the trends mystical inclinations; and the wealth of and fortunes of a great European aesthetic underground horror­lore surviving in school. It is our good fortune as Americans ghettoes and synagogues must be much to be able to claim that dawn as our own, for more considerable than is generally it came in the person of our illustrious and imagined. Cabbalism itself, so prominent unfortunate fellow­countryman Edgar Allan during the Middle Ages, is a system of Poe. Poe’s fame has been subject to curious philosophy explaining the universe as undulations, and it is now a fashion amongst emanations of the Deity, and involving the the “advanced intelligentsia” to minimise his existence of strange spiritual realms and importance both as an artist and as an beings apart from the visible world, of which influence; but it would be hard for any dark glimpses may be obtained through mature and reflective critic to deny the certain secret incantations. Its ritual is bound tremendous value of his work and the up with mystical interpretations of the Old pervasive potency of his mind as an opener Testament, and attributes an esoteric of artistic vistas. True, his type of outlook significance to each letter of the Hebrew may have been anticipated; but it was he alphabet—a circumstance which has who first realised its possibilities and gave it imparted to Hebrew letters a sort of spectral supreme form and systematic expression. glamour and potency in the popular True also, that subsequent writers may have literature of magic. Jewish folklore has produced greater single tales than his; but preserved much of the terror and mystery of again we must comprehend that it was only the past, and when more thoroughly studied he who taught them by example and precept is likely to exert considerable influence on the art which they, having the way cleared weird fiction. The best examples of its for them and given an explicit guide, were literary use so far are the German novel The perhaps able to carry to greater lengths. Golem, by Gustav Meyrink, and the drama Whatever his limitations, Poe did that which The Dybbuk, by the Jewish writer using the no one else ever did or could have done; and pseudonym “Ansky”. [The former, with its to him we owe the modern horror­story in its haunting shadowy suggestions of marvels final and perfected state. and horrors just beyond reach, is laid in Prague, and describes with singular mastery that city’s ancient ghetto with its spectral, Before Poe the bulk of weird writers had peaked gables. The name is derived from a worked largely in the dark; without an fabulous artificial giant supposed to be made understanding of the psychological basis of and animated by mediaeval rabbis according the horror appeal, and hampered by more or to a certain cryptic formula.] The Dybbuk, less of conformity to certain empty literary translated and produced in America in 1925, conventions such as the happy ending, virtue [and more recently produced as an opera,] rewarded, and in general a hollow moral describes with singular power the possession didacticism, acceptance of popular standards of a living body by the evil soul of a dead and values, and striving of the author to man. Both golems and dybbuks are fixed obtrude his own emotions into the story and types, and serve as frequent ingredients of take sides with the partisans of the majority’s later Jewish tradition. artificial ideas. Poe, on the other hand, perceived the essential impersonality of the

19 real artist; and knew that the function of impression in a tale, and the rigorous paring creative fiction is merely to express and down of incidents to such as have a direct interpret events and sensations as they are, bearing on the plot and will figure regardless of how they tend or what they prominently in the climax. Truly may it be prove—good or evil, attractive or repulsive, said that Poe invented the short story in its stimulating or depressing—with the author present form. His elevation of disease, always acting as a vivid and detached perversity, and decay to the level of chronicler rather than as a teacher, artistically expressible themes was likewise sympathiser, or vendor of opinion. He saw infinitely far­reaching in effect; for avidly clearly that all phases of life and thought are seized, sponsored, and intensified by his equally eligible as subject­matter for the eminent French admirer Charles Pierre artist, and being inclined by temperament to Baudelaire, it became the nucleus of the strangeness and gloom, decided to be the principal aesthetic movements in France, interpreter of those powerful feeling, and thus making Poe in a sense the father of the frequent happenings which attend pain Decadents and the Symbolists. rather than pleasure, decay rather than growth, terror rather than tranquillity, and which are fundamentally either adverse or Poet and critic by nature and supreme indifferent to the tastes and traditional attainment, logician and philosopher by taste outward sentiments of mankind, and to the and mannerism, Poe was by no means health, sanity, and normal expansive welfare immune from defects and affectations. His of the species. pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo­humour, and his Poe’s spectres thus acquired a convincing often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice malignity possessed by none of their must all be recognised and forgiven. Beyond predecessors, and established a new and above them, and dwarfing them to standard of realism in the annals of literary insignificance, was a master’s vision of the horror. The impersonal and artistic intent, terror that stalks about and within us, and moreover, was aided by a scientific attitude the worm that writhes and slavers in the not often found before; whereby Poe studied hideously close abyss. Penetrating to every the human mind rather than the usages of festering horror in the gaily painted mockery Gothic fiction, and worked with an analytical called existence, and in the solemn knowledge of terror’s true sources which masquerade called human thought and doubled the force of his narratives and feelings that vision had power to project emancipated him from all the absurdities itself in blackly magical crystallisations and inherent in merely conventional shudder­ transmutations; till there bloomed in the coining. This example having been set, later sterile America of the ’thirties and ’forties authors were naturally forced to conform to such a moon­nourished garden of gorgeous it in order to compete at all; so that in this poison fungi as not even the nether slope of way a definite change began to affect the Saturn might boast. Verses and tales alike main stream of macabre writing. Poe, too, sustain the burthen of cosmic panic. The set a fashion in consummate craftsmanship; raven whose noisome beak pierces the heart, and although today some of his own work the ghouls that toll iron bells in pestilential seems slightly melodramatic and steeples, the vault of Ulalume in the black unsophisticated, we can constantly trace his October night, the shocking spires and influence in such things as the maintenance domes under the sea, the “wild, weird clime of a single mood and achievement of a single that lieth, sublime, out of Space—out of

20 Time”—all these things and more leer at us onward by some resistless devil­current amidst maniacal rattlings in the seething toward a vortex of eldritch enlightenment nightmare of the poetry. And in the prose which must end in destruction? Then there is there yawn open for us the very jaws of the the unutterable “M. Valdemar”, kept pit—inconceivable abnormalities slyly hinted together by hypnotism for seven months into a horrible half­knowledge by words after his death, and uttering frantic sounds whose innocence we scarcely doubt till the but a moment before the breaking of the cracked tension of the speaker’s hollow voice spell leaves him “a nearly liquid mass of bids us fear their nameless implications; loathsome—of detestable putrescence”. In daemoniac patterns and presences the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym the voyagers slumbering noxiously till waked for one reach first a strange south polar land of phobic instant into a shrieking revelation murderous savages where nothing is white that cackles itself to sudden madness or and where vast rocky ravines have the form explodes in memorable and cataclysmic of titanic Egyptian letters spelling terrible echoes. A Witches’ Sabbath of horror flinging primal arcana of earth; and thereafter a still off decorous robes is flashed before us—a more mysterious realm where everything is sight the more monstrous because of the white, and where shrouded giants and scientific skill with which every particular is snowy­plumed birds guard a cryptic cataract marshalled and brought into an easy of mist which empties from immeasurable apparent relation to the known celestial heights into a torrid milky sea. gruesomeness of material life. “Metzengerstein” horrifies with its malign hints of a monstrous metempsychosis—the mad nobleman who burns the stable of his Poe’s tales, of course, fall into several hereditary foe; the colossal unknown horse classes; some of which contain a purer that issues from the blazing building after essence of spiritual horror than others. The the owner has perished therein; the tales of logic and ratiocination, forerunners vanishing bit of ancient tapestry where was of the modern detective story, are not to be shewn the giant horse of the victim’s included at all in weird literature; whilst ancestor in the Crusades; the madman’s wild certain others, probably influenced and constant riding on the great horse, and considerably by Hoffmann, possess an his fear and hatred of the steed; the extravagance which relegates them to the meaningless prophecies that brood obscurely borderline of the grotesque. Still a third over the warring houses; and finally, the group deal with abnormal psychology and burning of the madman’s palace and the monomania in such a way as to express death therein of the owner, borne helpless terror but not weirdness. A substantial into the flames and up the vast staircases residuum, however, represent the literature astride the beast he has ridden so strangely. of supernatural horror in its acutest form; Afterward the rising smoke of the ruins takes and give their author a permanent and the form of a gigantic horse. “The Man of the unassailable place as deity and fountain­ Crowd”, telling of one who roams day and head of all modern diabolic fiction. Who can night to mingle with streams of people as if forget the terrible swollen ship poised on the afraid to be alone, has quieter effects, but billow­chasm’s edge in “MS. Found in a implies nothing less of cosmic fear. Poe’s Bottle”—the dark intimations of her mind was never far from terror and decay, unhallowed age and monstrous growth, her and we see in every tale, poem, and sinister crew of unseeing greybeards, and her philosophical dialogue a tense eagerness to frightful southward rush under full sail fathom unplumbed wells of night, to pierce through the ice of the Antarctic night, sucked the veil of death, and to reign in fancy as

21 lord of the frightful mysteries of time and twin sister, and their incredibly ancient space. house all sharing a single soul and meeting Certain of Poe’s tales possess an almost one common dissolution at the same absolute perfection of artistic form which moment. makes them veritable beacon­lights in the province of the short story. Poe could, when he wished, give to his prose a richly poetic These bizarre conceptions, so awkward in cast; employing that archaic and unskilful hands, become under Poe’s spell Orientalised style with jewelled phrase, living and convincing terrors to haunt our quasi­Biblical repetition, and recurrent nights; and all because the author burthen so successfully used by later writers understood so perfectly the very mechanics like Oscar Wilde and Lord Dunsany; and in and physiology of fear and strangeness—the the cases where he has done this we have an essential details to emphasise, the precise effect of lyrical phantasy almost narcotic in incongruities and conceits to select as essence—an opium pageant of dream in the preliminaries or concomitants to horror, the language of dream, with every unnatural exact incidents and allusions to throw out colour and grotesque image bodied forth in a innocently in advance as symbols or symphony of corresponding sound. “The prefigurings of each major step toward the Masque of the Red Death”, “Silence—A hideous denouement to come, the nice Fable”, and “Shadow—A Parable” are adjustments of cumulative force and the assuredly poems in every sense of the word unerring accuracy in linkage of parts which save the metrical one, and owe as much of make for faultless unity throughout and their power to aural cadence as to visual thunderous effectiveness at the climactic imagery. But it is in two of the less openly moment, the delicate nuances of scenic and poetic tales, “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the landscape value to select in establishing and House of Usher”—especially the latter—that sustaining the desired mood and vitalising one finds those very summits of artistry the desired illusion—principles of this kind, whereby Poe takes his place at the head of and dozens of obscurer ones too elusive to fictional miniaturists. Simple and be described or even fully comprehended by straightforward in plot, both of these tales any ordinary commentator. Melodrama and owe their supreme magic to the cunning unsophistication there may be—we are told development which appears in the selection of one fastidious Frenchman who could not and collocation of every least incident. bear to read Poe except in Baudelaire’s “Ligeia” tells of a first wife of lofty and urbane and Gallically modulated translation mysterious origin, who after death returns —but all traces of such things are wholly through a preternatural force of will to take overshadowed by a potent and inborn sense possession of the body of a second wife; of the spectral, the morbid, and the horrible imposing even her physical appearance on which gushed forth from every cell of the the temporary reanimated corpse of her artist’s creative mentality and stamped his victim at the last moment. Despite a macabre work with the ineffaceable mark of suspicion of prolixity and topheaviness, the supreme genius. Poe’s weird tales are alive in narrative reaches its terrific climax with a manner that few others can ever hope to relentless power. “Usher”, whose superiority be. in detail and proportion is very marked, hints shudderingly of obscure life in inorganic things, and displays an abnormally Like most fantaisistes, Poe excels in incidents linked trinity of entities at the end of a long and broad narrative effects rather than in and isolated family history—a brother, his character drawing. His typical protagonist is

22 generally a dark, handsome, proud, saturnine visages and violent customs hinted melancholy, intellectual, highly sensitive, strongly at traces of infernal origin; the free capricious, introspective, isolated, and rein given under the influence of Puritan sometimes slightly mad gentleman of ancient theocracy to all manner of notions respecting family and opulent circumstances; usually man’s relation to the stern and vengeful God deeply learned in strange lore, and darkly of the Calvinists, and to the sulphureous ambitious of penetrating to forbidden secrets Adversary of that God, about whom so much of the universe. Aside from a high­sounding was thundered in the pulpits each Sunday; name, this character obviously derives little and the morbid introspection developed by from the early Gothic novel; for he is clearly an isolated backwoods life devoid of normal neither the wooden hero nor the diabolical amusements and of the recreational mood, villain of Radcliffian or Ludovician romance. harassed by commands for theological self­ Indirectly, however, he does possess a sort of examination, keyed to unnatural emotional genealogical connexion; since his gloomy, repression, and forming above all a mere ambitious, and anti­social qualities savour grim struggle for survival—all these things strongly of the typical Byronic hero, who in conspired to produce an environment in turn is definitely an offspring of the Gothic which the black whisperings of sinister Manfreds, Montonis, and Ambrosios. More grandams were heard far beyond the particular qualities appear to be derived chimney corner, and in which tales of from the psychology of Poe himself, who witchcraft and unbelievable secret certainly possessed much of the depression, monstrosities lingered long after the dread sensitiveness, mad aspiration, loneliness, and days of the Salem nightmare. extravagant freakishness which he attributes to his haughty and solitary victims of Fate. Poe represents the newer, more disillusioned, and more technically finished VIII. The Weird Tradition in America of the weird schools that rose out of this The public for whom Poe wrote, though propitious milieu. Another school—the grossly unappreciative of his art, was by no tradition of moral values, gentle restraint, means unaccustomed to the horrors with and mild, leisurely phantasy tinged more or which he dealt. America, besides inheriting less with the whimsical—was represented by the usual dark folklore of Europe, had an another famous, misunderstood, and lonely additional fund of weird associations to draw figure in American letters—the shy and upon; so that spectral legends had already sensitive Nathaniel Hawthorne, scion of been recognised as fruitful subject­matter for antique Salem and great­grandson of one of literature. Charles Brockden Brown had the bloodiest of the old witchcraft judges. In achieved phenomenal fame with his Hawthorne we have none of the violence, Radcliffian romances, and Washington the daring, the high colouring, the intense Irving’s lighter treatment of eerie themes had dramatic sense, the cosmic malignity, and quickly become classic. This additional fund the undivided and impersonal artistry of Poe. proceeded, as Paul Elmer More has pointed Here, instead, is a gentle soul cramped by out, from the keen spiritual and theological the Puritanism of early New England; interests of the first colonists, plus the shadowed and wistful, and grieved at an strange and forbidding nature of the scene unmoral universe which everywhere into which they were plunged. The vast and transcends the conventional patterns thought gloomy virgin forests in whose perpetual by our forefathers to represent divine and twilight all terrors might well lurk; the immutable law. Evil, a very real force to hordes of coppery Indians whose strange, Hawthorne, appears on every hand as a

23 lurking and conquering adversary; and the background of genuine phantasy and visible world becomes in his fancy a theatre mystery palpitates just beyond the common of infinite tragedy and woe, with unseen reader’s sight; and glimpses of fabulous half­existent influences hovering over it and blood in mortal veins are hinted at during through it, battling for supremacy and the course of a romance which cannot help moulding the destinies of the hapless mortals being interesting despite the persistent who form its vain and self­deluded incubus of moral allegory, anti­Popery population. The heritage of American propaganda, and a Puritan prudery which weirdness was his to a most intense degree, has caused the late D. H. Lawrence to and he saw a dismal throng of vague express a longing to treat the author in a spectres behind the common phenomena of highly undignified manner. Septimius Felton, life; but he was not disinterested enough to a posthumous novel whose idea was to have value impressions, sensations, and beauties been elaborated and incorporated into the of narration for their own sake. He must unfinished Dolliver Romance, touches on the needs weave his phantasy into some quietly Elixir of Life in a more or less capable melancholy fabric of didactic or allegorical fashion; whilst the notes for a never­written cast, in which his meekly resigned cynicism tale to be called “The Ancestral Footstep” may display with naive moral appraisal the shew what Hawthorne would have done perfidy of a human race which he cannot with an intensive treatment of an old English cease to cherish and mourn despite his superstition—that of an ancient and insight into its hypocrisy. Supernatural accursed line whose members left footprints horror, then, is never a primary object with of blood as they walked—which appears Hawthorne; though its impulses were so incidentally in both Septimius Felton and Dr. deeply woven into his personality that he Grimshawe’s Secret. cannot help suggesting it with the force of genius when he calls upon the unreal world to illustrate the pensive sermon he wishes to Many of Hawthorne’s shorter tales exhibit preach. weirdness, either of atmosphere or of incident, to a remarkable degree. “Edward Randolph’s Portrait”, in Legends of the Hawthorne’s intimations of the weird, Province House, has its diabolic moments. always gentle, elusive, and restrained, may “The Minister’s Black Veil” (founded on an be traced throughout his work. The mood actual incident) and “The Ambitious Guest” that produced them found one delightful imply much more than they state, whilst vent in the Teutonised retelling of classic “Ethan Brand”—a fragment of a longer work myths for children contained in A Wonder never completed—rises to genuine heights of Book and Tanglewood Tales, and at other cosmic fear with its vignette of the wild hill times exercised itself in casting a certain country and the blazing, desolate lime­kilns, strangeness and intangible witchery or and its delineation of the Byronic malevolence over events not meant to be “unpardonable sinner”, whose troubled life actually supernatural; as in the macabre ends with a peal of fearful laughter in the posthumous novel Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret, night as he seeks rest amidst the flames of which invests with a peculiar sort of the furnace. Some of Hawthorne’s notes tell repulsion a house existing to this day in of weird tales he would have written had he Salem, and abutting on the ancient Charter lived longer—an especially vivid plot being Street Burying Ground. In The Marble Faun, that concerning a baffling stranger who whose design was sketched out in an Italian appeared now and then in public assemblies, villa reputed to be haunted, a tremendous and who was at last followed and found to

24 come and go from a very ancient grave. so vividly displayed, and we grasp the brooding malignity of the place when we read that its builder—old Colonel Pyncheon But foremost as a finished, artistic unit —snatched the land with peculiar among all our author’s weird material is the ruthlessness from its original settler, famous and exquisitely wrought novel, The Matthew Maule, whom he condemned to the House of the Seven Gables, in which the gallows as a wizard in the year of the panic. relentless working out of an ancestral curse Maule died cursing old Pyncheon—“God will is developed with astonishing power against give him blood to drink”—and the waters of the sinister background of a very ancient the old well on the seized land turned bitter. Salem house—one of those peaked Gothic Maule’s carpenter son consented to build the affairs which formed the first regular great gabled house for his father’s building­up of our New England coast towns, triumphant enemy, but the old Colonel died but which gave way after the seventeenth strangely on the day of its dedication. Then century to the more familiar gambrel­roofed followed generations of odd vicissitudes, or classic Georgian types now known as with queer whispers about the dark powers “Colonial”. Of these old gabled Gothic of the Maules, and peculiar and sometimes houses scarcely a dozen are to be seen today terrible ends befalling the Pyncheons. in their original condition throughout the United States, but one well known to Hawthorne still stands in Turner Street, The overshadowing malevolence of the Salem, and is pointed out with doubtful ancient house—almost as alive as Poe’s authority as the scene and inspiration of the House of Usher, though in a subtler way— romance. Such an edifice, with its spectral pervades the tale as a recurrent motif peaks, its clustered chimneys, its pervades an operatic tragedy; and when the overhanging second story, its grotesque main story is reached, we behold the modern corner­brackets, and its diamond­paned Pyncheons in a pitiable state of decay. Poor lattice windows, is indeed an object well old Hepzibah, the eccentric reduced calculated to evoke sombre reflections; gentlewoman; child­like, unfortunate typifying as it does the dark Puritan age of Clifford, just released from undeserved concealed horror and witch­whispers which imprisonment; sly and treacherous Judge preceded the beauty, rationality, and Pyncheon, who is the old Colonel all over spaciousness of the eighteenth century. again—all these figures are tremendous Hawthorne saw many in his youth, and symbols, and are well matched by the knew the black tales connected with some of stunted vegetation and anaemic fowls in the them. He heard, too, many rumours of a garden. It was almost a pity to supply a fairly curse upon his own line as the result of his happy ending, with a union of sprightly great­grandfather’s severity as a witchcraft Phoebe, cousin and last scion of the judge in 1692. Pyncheons, to the prepossessing young man who turns out to be the last of the Maules. This union, presumably, ends the curse. From this setting came the immortal tale— Hawthorne avoids all violence of diction or New England’s greatest contribution to weird movement, and keeps his implications of literature—and we can feel in an instant the terror well in the background; but occasional authenticity of the atmosphere presented to glimpses amply serve to sustain the mood us. Stealthy horror and disease lurk within and redeem the work from pure allegorical the weather­blackened, moss­crusted, and aridity. Incidents like the bewitching of Alice elm­shadowed walls of the archaic dwelling Pyncheon in the early eighteenth century,

25 and the spectral music of her harpsichord Closer to real greatness was the eccentric which precedes a death in the family—the and saturnine journalist Ambrose Bierce, latter a variant of an immemorial type of born in 1842; who likewise entered the Civil Aryan myth—link the action directly with War, but survived to write some immortal the supernatural; whilst the dead nocturnal tales and to disappear in 1913 in as great a vigil of old Judge Pyncheon in the ancient cloud of mystery as any he ever evoked from parlour, with his frightfully ticking watch, is his nightmare fancy. Bierce was a satirist and stark horror of the most poignant and pamphleteer of note, but the bulk of his genuine sort. The way in which the Judge’s artistic reputation must rest upon his grim death is first adumbrated by the motions and and savage short stories; a large number of sniffing of a strange cat outside the window, which deal with the Civil War and form the long before the fact is suspected either by most vivid and realistic expression which the reader or by any of the characters, is a that conflict has yet received in fiction. stroke of genius which Poe could not have Virtually all of Bierce’s tales are tales of surpassed. Later the strange cat watches horror; and whilst many of them treat only intently outside that same window in the of the physical and psychological horrors night and on the next day, for—something. within Nature, a substantial proportion It is clearly the psychopomp of primeval admit the malignly supernatural and form a myth, fitted and adapted with infinite leading element in America’s fund of weird deftness to its latter­day setting. literature. Mr. Samuel Loveman, a living poet and critic who was personally acquainted with Bierce, thus sums up the But Hawthorne left no well­defined literary genius of the great shadow­maker in the posterity. His mood and attitude belonged to preface to some of his letters: the age which closed with him, and it is the spirit of Poe—who so clearly and realistically “In Bierce, the evocation of horror understood the natural basis of the horror­ becomes for the first time, not so appeal and the correct mechanics of its much the prescription or achievement—which survived and perversion of Poe and blossomed. Among the earliest of Poe’s Maupassant, but an atmosphere disciples may be reckoned the brilliant young definite and uncannily precise. Irishman Fitz­James O’Brien (1828–1862), Words, so simple that one would who became naturalised as an American and be prone to ascribe them to the perished honourably in the Civil War. It is he limitations of a literary hack, take who gave us “What Was It?”, the first well­ on an unholy horror, a new and shaped short story of a tangible but invisible unguessed transformation. In Poe being, and the prototype of de Maupassant’s one finds it a tour de force, in “Horla”; he also who created the inimitable Maupassant a nervous “Diamond Lens”, in which a young engagement of the flagellated microscopist falls in love with a maiden of an climax. To Bierce, simply and infinitesimal world which he has discovered sincerely, diabolism held in its in a drop of water. O’Brien’s early death tormented depth, a legitimate and undoubtedly deprived us of some masterful reliant means to the end. Yet a tales of strangeness and terror, though his tacit confirmation with Nature is genius was not, properly speaking, of the in every instance insisted upon. same titan quality which characterised Poe and Hawthorne. “In ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser’,

26 flowers, verdure, and the boughs Surroundings” evokes with singular subtlety and leaves of trees are yet apparent simplicity a piercing sense of magnificently placed as an the terror which may reside in the written opposing foil to unnatural word. In the story the weird author Colston malignity. Not the accustomed says to his friend Marsh, “You are brave golden world, but a world enough to read me in a street­car, but—in a pervaded with the mystery of blue deserted house—alone—in the forest—at and the breathless recalcitrance of night! Bah! I have a manuscript in my pocket dreams, is Bierce’s. Yet, curiously, that would kill you!” Marsh reads the inhumanity is not altogether manuscript in “the suitable surroundings”— absent.” and it does kill him. “The Middle Toe of the Right Foot” is clumsily developed, but has a The “inhumanity” mentioned by Mr. powerful climax. A man named Manton has Loveman finds vent in a rare strain of horribly killed his two children and his wife, sardonic comedy and graveyard humour, the latter of whom lacked the middle toe of and a kind of delight in images of cruelty the right foot. Ten years later he returns and tantalising disappointment. The former much altered to the neighbourhood; and, quality is well illustrated by some of the being secretly recognised, is provoked into a subtitles in the darker narratives; such as bowie­knife duel in the dark, to be held in “One does not always eat what is on the the now abandoned house where his crime table”, describing a body laid out for a was committed. When the moment of the coroner’s inquest, and “A man though naked duel arrives a trick is played upon him; and may be in rags”, referring to a frightfully he is left without an antagonist, shut in a mangled corpse. night­black ground floor room of the reputedly haunted edifice, with the thick dust of a decade on every hand. No knife is Bierce’s work is in general somewhat drawn against him, for only a thorough scare uneven. Many of the stories are obviously is intended; but on the next day he is found mechanical, and marred by a jaunty and crouched in a corner with distorted face, commonplacely artificial style derived from dead of sheer fright at something he has journalistic models; but the grim seen. The only clue visible to the discoverers malevolence stalking through all of them is is one having terrible implications: “In the unmistakable, and several stand out as dust of years that lay thick upon the floor— permanent mountain­peaks of American leading from the door by which they had weird writing. “The Death of Halpin entered, straight across the room to within a Frayser”, called by Frederic Taber Cooper the yard of Manton’s crouching corpse—were most fiendishly ghastly tale in the literature three parallel lines of footprints—light but of the Anglo­Saxon race, tells of a body definite impressions of bare feet, the outer skulking by night without a soul in a weird ones those of small children, the inner a and horribly ensanguined wood, and of a woman’s. From the point at which they man beset by ancestral memories who met ended they did not return; they pointed all death at the claws of that which had been one way.” And, of course, the woman’s prints his fervently loved mother. “The Damned shewed a lack of the middle toe of the right Thing”, frequently copied in popular foot. “The Spook House”, told with a anthologies, chronicles the hideous severely homely air of journalistic devastations of an invisible entity that verisimilitude, conveys terrible hints of waddles and flounders on the hills and in the shocking mystery. In 1858 an entire family wheatfields by night and day. “The Suitable of seven persons disappears suddenly and

27 unaccountably from a plantation house in In The Turn of the Screw Henry James eastern Kentucky, leaving all its possessions triumphs over his inevitable pomposity and untouched—furniture, clothing, food prolixity sufficiently well to create a truly supplies, horses, cattle, and slaves. About a potent air of sinister menace; depicting the year later two men of high standing are hideous influence of two dead and evil forced by a storm to take shelter in the servants, Peter Quint and the governess Miss deserted dwelling, and in so doing stumble Jessel, over a small boy and girl who had into a strange subterranean room lit by an been under their care. James is perhaps too unaccountable greenish light and having an diffuse, too unctuously urbane, and too iron door which cannot be opened from much addicted to subtleties of speech to within. In this room lie the decayed corpses realise fully all the wild and devastating of all the missing family; and as one of the horror in his situations; but for all that there discoverers rushes forward to embrace a is a rare and mounting tide of fright, body he seems to recognise, the other is so culminating in the death of the little boy, overpowered by a strange foetor that he which gives the novelette a permanent place accidentally shuts his companion in the vault in its special class. and loses consciousness. Recovering his senses six weeks later, the survivor is unable to find the hidden room; and the house is F. Marion Crawford produced several weird burned during the Civil War. The imprisoned tales of varying quality, now collected in a discoverer is never seen or heard of again. volume entitled Wandering Ghosts. “For the Blood Is the Life” touches powerfully on a case of moon­cursed vampirism near an Bierce seldom realises the atmospheric ancient tower on the rocks of the lonely possibilities of his themes as vividly as Poe; South Italian sea­coast. “The Dead Smile” and much of his work contains a certain treats of family horrors in an old house and touch of naiveté, prosaic angularity, or early­ an ancestral vault in Ireland, and introduces American provincialism which contrasts the banshee with considerable force. “The somewhat with the efforts of later horror­ Upper Berth”, however, is Crawford’s weird masters. Nevertheless the genuineness and masterpiece; and is one of the most artistry of his dark intimations are always tremendous horror­stories in all literature. In unmistakable, so that his greatness is in no this tale of a suicide­haunted stateroom such danger of eclipse. As arranged in his things as the spectral salt­water dampness, definitively collected works, Bierce’s weird the strangely open porthole, and the tales occur mainly in two volumes, Can Such nightmare struggle with the nameless object Things Be? and In the Midst of Life. The are handled with incomparable dexterity. former, indeed, is almost wholly given over to the supernatural. Very genuine, though not without the typical mannered extravagance of the eighteen­ Much of the best in American horror­ nineties, is the strain of horror in the early literature has come from pens not mainly work of Robert W. Chambers, since devoted to that medium. Oliver Wendell renowned for products of a very different Holmes’s historic Elsie Venner suggests with quality. The King in Yellow, a series of admirable restraint an unnatural ophidian vaguely connected short stories having as a element in a young woman pre­natally background a monstrous and suppressed influenced, and sustains the atmosphere book whose perusal brings fright, madness, with finely discriminating landscape touches. and spectral tragedy, really achieves notable

28 heights of cosmic fear in spite of uneven doctor exclaims, “That man must have been interest and a somewhat trivial and affected dead for months.” It is worth observing that cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere the author derives most of the names and made popular by Du Maurier’s Trilby. The allusions connected with his eldritch land of most powerful of its tales, perhaps, is “The primal memory from the tales of Ambrose Yellow Sign”, in which is introduced a silent Bierce. Other early works of Mr. Chambers and terrible churchyard watchman with a displaying the outré and macabre element face like a puffy grave­worm’s. A boy, are The Maker of Moons and In Search of the describing a tussle he has had with this Unknown. One cannot help regretting that he creature, shivers and sickens as he relates a did not further develop a vein in which he certain detail. “Well, sir, it’s Gawd’s truth could so easily have become a recognised that when I ’it ’im ’e grabbed me wrists, sir, master. 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 Horror material of authentic force may be another a strange dream of a nocturnal found in the work of the New England realist hearse, is shocked by the voice with which Mary E. Wilkins; whose volume of short the watchman accosts him. The fellow emits tales, The Wind in the Rose­Bush, contains a a muttering sound that fills the head like number of noteworthy achievements. In thick oily smoke from a fat­rendering vat or “The Shadows on the Wall” we are shewn an odour of noisome decay. What he with consummate skill the response of a mumbles is merely this: “Have you found the staid New England household to uncanny Yellow Sign?” tragedy; and the sourceless shadow of the poisoned brother well prepares us for the climactic moment when the shadow of the A weirdly hieroglyphed onyx talisman, secret murderer, who has killed himself in a picked up in the street by the sharer of his neighbouring city, suddenly appears beside dream, is shortly given the artist; and after it. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in “The Yellow stumbling queerly upon the hellish and Wall Paper”, rises to a classic level in subtly forbidden book of horrors the two learn, delineating the madness which crawls over a among other hideous things which no sane woman dwelling in the hideously papered mortal should know, that this talisman is room where a madwoman was once indeed the nameless Yellow Sign handed confined. down from the accursed cult of Hastur— from primordial Carcosa, whereof the volume treats, and some nightmare memory [In “The Dead Valley” the eminent architect of which seems to lurk latent and ominous at and mediaevalist Ralph Adams Cram the back of all men’s minds. Soon they hear achieves a memorably potent degree of the rumbling of the black­plumed hearse vague regional horror through subtleties of driven by the flabby and corpse­faced atmosphere and description.] watchman. He enters the night­shrouded house in quest of the Yellow Sign, all bolts and bars rotting at his touch. And when the Still further carrying on our spectral people rush in, drawn by a scream that no tradition is the gifted and versatile human throat could utter, they find three humourist Irvin S. Cobb, whose work both forms on the floor—two dead and one dying. early and recent contains some finely weird One of the dead shapes is far gone in decay. specimens. “Fishhead”, an early It is the churchyard watchman, and the achievement, is banefully effective in its

29 portrayal of unnatural affinities between a Dagon, which relates the dark history of a hybrid idiot and the strange fish of an western Massachusetts backwater where the isolated lake, which at the last avenge their descendants of refugees from the Salem biped kinsman’s murder. Later work of Mr. witchcraft still keep alive the morbid and Cobb introduces an element of possible degenerate horrors of the Black Sabbat. science, as in the tale of hereditary memory where a modern man with a negroid strain utters words in African jungle speech when Sinister House, by Leland Hall, has touches of run down by a train under visual and aural magnificent atmosphere but is marred by a circumstances recalling the maiming of his somewhat mediocre romanticism. black ancestor by a rhinoceros a century before. Very notable in their way are some of the weird conceptions of the novelist and short­ [Extremely high in artistic stature is the story writer Edward Lucas White, most of novel The Dark Chamber (1927), by the late whose themes arise from actual dreams. Leonard Cline. This is the tale of a man who “The Song of the Sirens” has a very pervasive —with the characteristic ambition of the strangeness, while such things as Gothic or Byronic hero­villain—seeks to defy “Lukundoo” and “The Snout” rouse darker Nature and recapture every moment of his apprehensions. Mr. White imparts a very past life through the abnormal stimulation of peculiar quality to his tales—an oblique sort memory. To this end he employs endless of glamour which has its own distinctive type notes, records, mnemonic objects, and of convincingness.] pictures—and finally odours, music, and exotic drugs. At last his ambition goes beyond his personal life and reaches toward Of younger Americans, none strikes the note the black abysses of hereditary memory— of cosmic terror so well as the California even back to pre­human days amidst the poet, artist, and fictionist Clark Ashton steaming swamps of the Carboniferous age, Smith, whose bizarre writings, drawings, and to still more unimaginable deeps of paintings, and stories are the delight of a primal time and entity. He calls for madder sensitive few. Mr. Smith has for his music and takes stronger drugs, and finally background a universe of remote and his great dog grows oddly afraid of him. A paralysing fright—jungles of poisonous and noxious animal stench encompasses him, iridescent blossoms on the moons of Saturn, and he grows vacant­faced and sub­human. evil and grotesque temples in Atlantis, In the end he takes to the woods, howling at Lemuria, and forgotten elder worlds, and night beneath windows. He is finally found dank morasses of spotted death­fungi in in a thicket, mangled to death. Beside him is spectral countries beyond earth’s rim. His the mangled corpse of his dog. They have longest and most ambitious poem, The killed each other. The atmosphere of this Hashish­Eater, is in pentameter blank verse; novel is malevolently potent, much attention and opens up chaotic and incredible vistas of being paid to the central figure’s sinister kaleidoscopic nightmare in the spaces home and household. between the stars. In sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Mr. Smith is perhaps unexcelled by any other A less subtle and well­balanced but writer dead or living. Who else has seen such nevertheless highly effective creation is gorgeous, luxuriant, and feverishly distorted Herbert S. Gorman’s novel, The Place Called visions of infinite spheres and multiple

30 dimensions and lived to tell the tale? [His delicacy the eerie lore and whispered short stories deal powerfully with other legends of that richly colourful nation. Still galaxies, worlds, and dimensions, as well as more of Hearn’s weird wizardry of language with strange regions and aeons on the earth. is shewn in some of his translations from the He tells of primal Hyperborea and its black French, especially from Gautier and Flaubert. amorphous god Tsathoggua; of the lost His version of the latter’s Temptation of St. continent Zothique, and of the fabulous, Anthony is a classic of fevered and riotous vampire­curst land of Averoigne in imagery clad in the magic of singing words. mediaeval France. Some of Mr. Smith’s best work can be found in the brochure entitled The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies Oscar Wilde may likewise be given a place (1933).] amongst weird writers, both for certain of his exquisite fairy tales, and for his vivid Picture of Dorian Gray, in which a marvellous IX. The Weird Tradition in the British Isles portrait for years assumes the duty of ageing Recent British literature, besides including and coarsening instead of its original, who the three or four greatest fantaisistes of the meanwhile plunges into every excess of vice present age, has been gratifyingly fertile in and crime without the outward loss of youth, the element of the weird. Rudyard Kipling beauty, and freshness. There is a sudden and has often approached it; and has, despite the potent climax when Dorian Gray, at last omnipresent mannerisms, handled it with become a murderer, seeks to destroy the indubitable mastery in such tales as “The painting whose changes testify to his moral Phantom ’Rickshaw”, “ ‘The Finest Story in degeneracy. He stabs it with a knife, and a the World’ ”, “The Recrudescence of Imray”, hideous cry and crash are heard; but when and “The Mark of the Beast”. This latter is of the servants enter they find it in all its particular poignancy; the pictures of the pristine loveliness. “Lying on the floor was a naked leper­priest who mewed like an otter, dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in of the spots which appeared on the chest of his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and the man that priest cursed, of the growing loathsome of visage. It was not till they had carnivorousness of the victim and of the fear examined the rings that they recognised who which horses began to display toward him, it was.” and of the eventually half­accomplished transformation of that victim into a leopard, being things which no reader is ever likely to Matthew Phipps Shiel, author of many forget. The final defeat of the malignant weird, grotesque, and adventurous novels sorcery does not impair the force of the tale and tales, occasionally attains a high level of or the validity of its mystery. horrific magic. “Xélucha” is a noxiously hideous fragment, but is excelled by Mr. Shiel’s undoubted masterpiece, “The House Lafcadio Hearn, strange, wandering, and of Sounds”, floridly written in the “yellow exotic, departs still farther from the realm of ’nineties”, and re­cast with more artistic the real; and with the supreme artistry of a restraint in the early twentieth century. This sensitive poet weaves phantasies impossible story, in final form, deserves a place among to an author of the solid roast­beef type. His the foremost things of its kind. It tells of a Fantastics, written in America, contains some creeping horror and menace trickling down of the most impressive ghoulishness in all the centuries on a sub­arctic island off the literature; whilst his Kwaidan, written in coast of Norway; where, amidst the sweep of Japan, crystallises with matchless skill and daemon winds and the ceaseless din of

31 hellish waves and cataracts, a vengeful dead and told with singular skill through the man built a brazen tower of terror. It is juxtaposed narratives of the several vaguely like, yet infinitely unlike, Poe’s “Fall characters, is the novel Cold Harbour, by of the House of Usher”. [In the novel The Francis Brett Young, in which an ancient Purple Cloud Mr. Shiel describes with house of strange malignancy is powerfully tremendous power a curse which came out delineated. The mocking and well­nigh of the arctic to destroy mankind, and which omnipotent fiend Humphrey Furnival holds for a time appears to have left but a single echoes of the Manfred­ Montoni type of early inhabitant on our planet. The sensations of Gothic “villain”, but is redeemed from this lone survivor as he realises his position, triteness by many clever individualities. Only and roams through the corpse­littered and the slight diffuseness of explanation at the treasure­strown cities of the world as their close, and the somewhat too free use of absolute master, are delivered with a skill divination as a plot factor, keep this tale and artistry falling little short of actual from approaching absolute perfection. majesty. Unfortunately the second half of the book, with its conventionally romantic element, involves a distinct “letdown”.] [In the novel Witch Wood John Buchan Better known than Shiel is the ingenious depicts with tremendous force a survival of Bram Stoker, who created many starkly the evil Sabbat in a lonely district of horrific conceptions in a series of novels Scotland. The description of the black forest whose poor technique sadly impairs their net with the evil stone, and of the terrible cosmic effect. The Lair of the White Worm, dealing adumbrations when the horror is finally with a gigantic primitive entity that lurks in extirpated, will repay one for wading a vault beneath an ancient castle, utterly through the very gradual action and plethora ruins a magnificent idea by a development of Scottish dialect. Some of Mr. Buchan’s almost infantile. The Jewel of Seven Stars, short stories are also extremely vivid in their touching on a strange Egyptian resurrection, spectral intimations; “The Green is less crudely written. But best of all is the Wildebeest”, a tale of African witchcraft, famous Dracula, which has become almost “The Wind in the Portico”, with its the standard modern exploitation of the awakening of dead Britanno­Roman horrors, frightful vampire myth. Count Dracula, a and “Skule Skerry”, with its touches of sub­ vampire, dwells in a horrible castle in the arctic fright, being especially remarkable.] Carpathians; but finally migrates to England with the design of populating the country with fellow vampires. How an Englishman Clemence Housman, in the brief novelette fares within Dracula’s stronghold of terrors, “The Were­wolf”, attains a high degree of and how the dead fiend’s plot for domination gruesome tension and achieves to some is at last defeated, are elements which unite extent the atmosphere of authentic folklore. to form a tale now justly assigned a [In The Elixir of Life Arthur Ransome attains permanent place in English letters. Dracula some darkly excellent effects despite a evoked many similar novels of supernatural general naiveté of plot, while H. B. Drake’s horror, among which the best are perhaps The Shadowy Thing summons up strange and The Beetle, by Richard Marsh, Brood of the terrible vistas. George Macdonald’s Lilith has Witch­Queen, by “Sax Rohmer” (Arthur a compelling bizarrerie all its own; the first Sarsfield Ward), and The Door of the Unreal, and simpler of the two versions being by Gerald Biss. The latter handles quite perhaps the more effective.] dexterously the standard werewolf superstition. Much subtler and more artistic,

32 Deserving of distinguished notice as a The weird short story has fared well of late, forceful craftsman to whom an unseen an important contributor being the versatile mystic world is ever a close and vital reality E. F. Benson, whose “The Man Who Went is the poet Walter de la Mare, whose Too Far” breathes whisperingly of a house at haunting verse and exquisite prose alike bear the edge of a dark wood, and of Pan’s hoof­ consistent traces of a strange vision reaching mark on the breast of a dead man. Mr. deeply into veiled spheres of beauty and Benson’s volume, Visible and Invisible, terrible and forbidden dimensions of being. contains several stories of singular power; In the novel The Return we see the soul of a notably “Negotium Perambulans”, whose dead man reach out of its grave of two unfolding reveals an abnormal monster from centuries and fasten itself upon the flesh of an ancient ecclesiastical panel which the living, so that even the face of the victim performs an act of miraculous vengeance in becomes that which had long ago returned a lonely village on the Cornish coast, and to dust. Of the shorter tales, of which several “The Horror­Horn”, through which lopes a volumes exist, many are unforgettable for terrible half­human survival dwelling on their command of fear’s and sorcery’s darkest unvisited Alpine peaks. [“The Face”, in ramifications; notably “Seaton’s Aunt”, in another collection, is lethally potent in its which there lowers a noxious background of relentless aura of doom. H. R. Wakefield, in malignant vampirism; “The Tree”, which his collections They Return at Evening and tells of a frightful vegetable growth in the Others Who Return, manages now and then yard of a starving artist; “Out of the Deep”, to achieve great heights of horror despite a wherein we are given leave to imagine what vitiating air of sophistication. The most thing answered the summons of a dying notable stories are “The Red Lodge” with its wastrel in a dark lonely house when he slimy aqueous evil, “‘He Cometh and He pulled a long­feared bell­cord in the attic Passeth By’”, “‘And He Shall Sing . . .’”, “The chamber of his dread­haunted boyhood; [“A Cairn”, “‘Look Up There!’”, “Blind Man’s Recluse”, which hints at what sent a chance Buff”, and that bit of lurking millennial guest flying from a house in the night;] “Mr. horror, “The Seventeenth Hole at Kempe”, which shews us a mad clerical Duncaster”. Mention has been made of the hermit in quest of the human soul, dwelling weird work of H. G. Wells and A. Conan in a frightful sea­cliff region beside an Doyle. The former, in “The Ghost of Fear”, archaic abandoned chapel; and “All­ reaches a very high level; while all the items Hallows”, a glimpse of daemoniac forces in Thirty Strange Stories have strong fantastic besieging a lonely mediaeval church and implications. Doyle now and then struck a miraculously restoring the rotting masonry. powerfully spectral note, as in “The Captain De la Mare does not make fear the sole or of the ‘Pole­Star’ ”, a tale of arctic even the dominant element of most of his ghostliness, and “Lot No. 249”, wherein the tales, being apparently more interested in reanimated mummy theme is used with the subtleties of character involved. more than ordinary skill. Hugh Walpole, of Occasionally he sinks to sheer whimsical the same family as the founder of Gothic phantasy of the Barrie order. Still, he is fiction, has sometimes approached the among the very few to whom unreality is a bizarre with much success; his short story vivid, living presence; and as such he is able “Mrs. Lunt” carrying a very poignant to put into his occasional fear­studies a keen shudder.] John Metcalfe, in the collection potency which only a rare master can published as The Smoking Leg, attains now achieve. His poem “The Listeners” restores and then a rare pitch of potency; the tale the Gothic shudder to modern verse. entitled “The Bad Lands” containing graduations of horror that strongly savour of

33 genius. More whimsical and inclined toward the amiable and innocuous phantasy of Sir J. M. Barrie are the short tales of E. M. Forster, In The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1907) we grouped under the title of The Celestial are shewn a variety of malign marvels and Omnibus. Of these only one, dealing with a accursed unknown lands as encountered by glimpse of Pan and his aura of fright, may be the survivors of a sunken ship. The brooding said to hold the true element of cosmic menace in the earlier parts of the book is horror. [Mrs. H. D. Everett, though adhering impossible to surpass, though a letdown in to very old and conventional models, the direction of ordinary romance and occasionally reaches singular heights of adventure occurs toward the end. An spiritual terror in her collection of short inaccurate and pseudo­romantic attempt to stories. L. P. Hartley is notable for his reproduce eighteenth­century prose detracts incisive and extremely ghastly tale, “A Visitor from the general effect, but the really from Down Under”.] May Sinclair’s Uncanny profound nautical erudition everywhere Stories contain more of traditional occultism displayed is a compensating factor. than of that creative treatment of fear which marks mastery in this field, and are inclined to lay more stress on human emotions and The House on the Borderland (1908)— psychological delving than upon the stark perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hodgson’s phenomena of a cosmos utterly unreal. It works—tells of a lonely and evilly regarded may be well to remark here that occult house in Ireland which forms a focus for believers are probably less effective than hideous other­world forces and sustains a materialists in delineating the spectral and siege by blasphemous hybrid anomalies from the fantastic, since to them the phantom a hidden abyss below. The wanderings of the world is so commonplace a reality that they narrator’s spirit through limitless light­years tend to refer to it with less awe, remoteness, of cosmic space and kalpas of eternity, and and impressiveness than do those who see in its witnessing of the solar system’s final it an absolute and stupendous violation of destruction, constitute something almost the natural order. unique in standard literature. And everywhere there is manifest the author’s power to suggest vague, ambushed horrors [Of rather uneven stylistic quality, but vast in natural scenery. But for a few touches of occasional power in its suggestion of lurking commonplace sentimentality this book worlds and beings behind the ordinary would be a classic of the first water. surface of life, is the work of William Hope Hodgson, known today far less than it deserves to be. Despite a tendency toward The Ghost Pirates (1909), regarded by Mr. conventionally sentimental conceptions of Hodgson as rounding out a trilogy with the the universe, and of man’s relation to it and two previously mentioned works, is a to his fellows, Mr. Hodgson is perhaps powerful account of a doomed and haunted second only to Algernon Blackwood in his ship on its last voyage, and of the terrible serious treatment of unreality. Few can equal sea­devils (of quasi­human aspect, and him in adumbrating the nearness of perhaps the spirits of bygone buccaneers) nameless forces and monstrous besieging that besiege it and finally drag it down to an entities through casual hints and unknown fate. With its command of insignificant details, or in conveying feelings maritime knowledge, and its clever selection of the spectral and the abnormal in of hints and incidents suggestive of latent connexion with regions or buildings. horrors in Nature, this book at times reaches

34 enviable peaks of power. the whole.

The Night Land (1912) is a long­extended Mr. Hodgson’s later volume, Carnacki, the (583 pp.) tale of the earth’s infinitely remote Ghost­Finder, consists of several longish short future—billions of billions of years ahead, stories published many years before in after the death of the sun. It is told in a magazines. In quality it falls conspicuously rather clumsy fashion, as the dreams of a below the level of the other books. We here man in the seventeenth century, whose mind find a more or less conventional stock figure merges with its own future incarnation; and of the “infallible detective” type—the is seriously marred by painful verboseness, progeny of M. Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, repetitiousness, artificial and nauseously and the close kin of Algernon Blackwood’s sticky romantic sentimentality, and an John Silence—moving through scenes and attempt at archaic language even more events badly marred by an atmosphere of grotesque and absurd than that in “Glen professional “occultism”. A few of the Carrig”. episodes, however, are of undeniable power; and afford glimpses of the peculiar genius characteristic of the author.] Allowing for all its faults, it is yet one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written. The picture of a night­black, Naturally it is impossible in a brief sketch to dead planet, with the remains of the human trace out all the classic modern uses of the race concentrated in a stupendously vast terror element. The ingredient must of metal pyramid and besieged by monstrous, necessity enter into all work both prose and hybrid, and altogether unknown forces of verse treating broadly of life; and we are the darkness, is something that no reader therefore not surprised to find a share in can ever forget. Shapes and entities of an such writers as the poet Browning, whose altogether non­human and inconceivable “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came ” is sort—the prowlers of the black, man­ instinct with hideous menace, or the novelist forsaken, and unexplored world outside the Joseph Conrad, who often wrote of the dark pyramid—are suggested and partly described secrets within the sea, and of the daemoniac with ineffable potency; while the night­ driving power of Fate as influencing the lives bound landscape with its chasms and slopes of lonely and maniacally resolute men. Its and dying volcanism takes on an almost trail is one of infinite ramifications; but we sentient terror beneath the author’s touch. must here confine ourselves to its appearance in a relatively unmixed state, where it determines and dominates the work Midway in the book the central figure of art containing it. ventures outside the pyramid on a quest through death­haunted realms untrod by man for millions of years—and in his slow, Somewhat separate from the main British minutely described, day­by­day progress stream is that current of weirdness in Irish over unthinkable leagues of immemorial literature which came to the fore in the blackness there is a sense of cosmic alienage, Celtic Renaissance of the later nineteenth breathless mystery, and terrified expectancy and early twentieth centuries. Ghost and unrivalled in the whole range of literature. fairy lore have always been of great The last quarter of the book drags woefully, prominence in Ireland, and for over an but fails to spoil the tremendous power of hundred years have been recorded by a line

35 of such faithful transcribers and translators tremendously with the passing years, so that as William Carleton, T. Crofton Croker, Lady much of the older work seems naive and Wilde—mother of Oscar Wilde—Douglas artificial; redeemed, when redeemed at all, Hyde, and W. B. Yeats. Brought to notice by only by a genius which conquers heavy the modern movement, this body of myth limitations. The tone of jaunty and inflated has been carefully collected and studied; and romance, full of false motivation and its salient features reproduced in the work of investing every conceivable event with a later figures like Yeats, J. M. Synge, “A. E.”, counterfeit significance and carelessly Lady Gregory, Padraic Colum, James inclusive glamour, is now confined to lighter Stephens, and their colleagues. and more whimsical phases of supernatural writing. Serious weird stories are either made realistically intense by close Whilst on the whole more whimsically consistency and perfect fidelity to Nature fantastic than terrible, such folklore and its except in the one supernatural direction consciously artistic counterparts contain which the author allows himself, or else cast much that falls truly within the domain of altogether in the realm of phantasy, with cosmic horror. Tales of burials in sunken atmosphere cunningly adapted to the churches beneath haunted lakes, accounts of visualisation of a delicately exotic world of death­heralding banshees and sinister unreality beyond space and time, in which changelings, ballads of spectres and “the almost anything may happen if it but happen unholy creatures of the raths”—all these in true accord with certain types of have their poignant and definite shivers, and imagination and illusion normal to the mark a strong and distinctive element in sensitive human brain. This, at least, is the weird literature. Despite homely dominant tendency; though of course many grotesqueness and absolute naiveté, there is great contemporary writers slip occasionally genuine nightmare in the class of narrative into some of the flashy postures of immature represented by the yarn of Teig O’Kane, who romanticism, or into bits of the equally in punishment for his wild life was ridden all empty and absurd jargon of pseudo­scientific night by a hideous corpse that demanded “occultism”, now at one of its periodic high burial and drove him from churchyard to tides. churchyard as the dead rose up loathsomely in each one and refused to accommodate the Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its newcomer with a berth. Yeats, undoubtedly most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to the greatest figure of the Irish revival if not equal the versatile Arthur Machen; author of the greatest of all living poets, has some dozen tales long and short, in which accomplished notable things both in original the elements of hidden horror and brooding work and in the codification of old legends. fright attain an almost incomparable substance and realistic acuteness. Mr. Machen, a general man of letters and master X. The Modern Masters of an exquisitely lyrical and expressive prose The best horror­tales of today, profiting by style, has perhaps put more conscious effort the long evolution of the type, possess a into his picaresque Chronicle of Clemendy, his naturalness, convincingness, artistic refreshing essays, his vivid autobiographical smoothness, and skilful intensity of appeal volumes, his fresh and spirited translations, quite beyond comparison with anything in and above all his memorable epic of the the Gothic work of a century or more ago. sensitive aesthetic mind, The Hill of Dreams, Technique, craftsmanship, experience, and in which the youthful hero responds to the psychological knowledge have advanced magic of that ancient Welsh environment

36 which is the author’s own, and lives a dream­ life in the Roman city of Isca Silurum, now I wait, for he will show me, clear shrunk to the relic­strown village of and cold, Caerleon­on­Usk. But the fact remains that High­rais’d in splendour, sharp his powerful horror­material of the ’nineties against the North, and earlier nineteen­hundreds stands alone The Roman eagles, and thro’ mists in its class, and marks a distinct epoch in the of gold history of this literary form. The marching legions as they issue forth: I wait, for I would share with him Mr. Machen, with an impressionable Celtic again heritage linked to keen youthful memories of The ancient wisdom, and the the wild domed hills, archaic forests, and ancient pain.” cryptical Roman ruins of the Gwent countryside, has developed an imaginative Of Mr. Machen’s horror­tales the most life of rare beauty, intensity, and historic famous is perhaps “The Great God Pan” background. He has absorbed the mediaeval (1894), which tells of a singular and terrible mystery of dark woods and ancient customs, experiment and its consequences. A young and is a champion of the Middle Ages in all woman, through surgery of the brain­cells, is things—including the Catholic faith. He has made to see the vast and monstrous deity of yielded, likewise, to the spell of the Nature, and becomes an idiot in Britanno­Roman life which once surged over consequence, dying less than a year later. his native region; and finds strange magic in Years afterward a strange, ominous, and the fortified camps, tessellated pavements, foreign­looking child named Helen Vaughan fragments of statues, and kindred things is placed to board with a family in rural which tell of the day when classicism reigned Wales, and haunts the woods in and Latin was the language of the country. A unaccountable fashion. A little boy is thrown young American poet, Frank Belknap Long, out of his mind at sight of someone or Jun., has well summarised this dreamer’s something he spies with her, and a young rich endowments and wizardry of expression girl comes to a terrible end in similar in the sonnet “On Reading Arthur Machen”: fashion. All this mystery is strangely interwoven with the Roman rural deities of “There is a glory in the autumn the place, as sculptured in antique wood; fragments. After another lapse of years, a The ancient lanes of England woman of strangely exotic beauty appears in wind and climb society, drives her husband to horror and Past wizard oaks and gorse and death, causes an artist to paint unthinkable tangled thyme paintings of Witches’ Sabbaths, creates an To where a fort of mighty empire epidemic of suicide among the men of her stood: acquaintance, and is finally discovered to be There is a glamour in the autumn a frequenter of the lowest dens of vice in sky; London, where even the most callous The reddened clouds are writhing degenerates are shocked at her enormities. in the glow Through the clever comparing of notes on Of some great fire, and there are the part of those who have had word of her glints below at various stages of her career, this woman is Of tawny yellow where the discovered to be the girl Helen Vaughan; embers die. who is the child—by no mortal father—of

37 the young woman on whom the brain Ceremonies”, “Aklo letters”, “Chian experiment was made. She is a daughter of language”, “Mao games”, and the like. The hideous Pan himself, and at the last is put to rites learned by the nurse from her witch death amidst horrible transmutations of form grandmother are taught to the child by the involving changes of sex and a descent to the time she is three years old, and her artless most primal manifestations of the life­ accounts of the dangerous secret revelations principle. possess a lurking terror generously mixed with pathos. Evil charms well known to But the charm of the tale is in the telling. No anthropologists are described with juvenile one could begin to describe the cumulative naiveté, and finally there comes a winter suspense and ultimate horror with which afternoon journey into the old Welsh hills, every paragraph abounds without following performed under an imaginative spell which fully the precise order in which Mr. Machen lends to the wild scenery an added unfolds his gradual hints and revelations. weirdness, strangeness, and suggestion of Melodrama is undeniably present, and grotesque sentience. The details of this coincidence is stretched to a length which journey are given with marvellous vividness, appears absurd upon analysis; but in the and form to the keen critic a masterpiece of malign witchery of the tale as a whole these fantastic writing, with almost unlimited trifles are forgotten, and the sensitive reader power in the intimation of potent reaches the end with only an appreciative hideousness and cosmic aberration. At shudder and a tendency to repeat the words length the child—whose age is then thirteen of one of the characters: “It is too incredible, —comes upon a cryptic and banefully too monstrous; such things can never be in beautiful thing in the midst of a dark and this quiet world. . . . Why, man, if such a inaccessible wood. She flees in awe, but is case were possible, our earth would be a permanently altered and repeatedly revisits nightmare.” the wood. In the end horror overtakes her in a manner deftly prefigured by an anecdote in Less famous and less complex in plot than the prologue, but she poisons herself in time. “The Great God Pan”, but definitely finer in Like the mother of Helen Vaughan in The atmosphere and general artistic value, is the Great God Pan, she has seen that frightful curious and dimly disquieting chronicle deity. She is discovered dead in the dark called “The White People”, whose central wood beside the cryptic thing she found; and portion purports to be the diary or notes of a that thing—a whitely luminous statue of little girl whose nurse has introduced her to Roman workmanship about which dire some of the forbidden magic and soul­ mediaeval rumours had clustered—is blasting traditions of the noxious witch­cult affrightedly hammered into dust by the —the cult whose whispered lore was handed searchers. down long lines of peasantry throughout Western Europe, and whose members In the episodic novel of The Three Impostors, sometimes stole forth at night, one by one, a work whose merit as a whole is somewhat to meet in black woods and lonely places for marred by an imitation of the jaunty the revolting orgies of the Witches’ Sabbath. Stevenson manner, occur certain tales which Mr. Machen’s narrative, a triumph of skilful perhaps represent the high­water mark of selectiveness and restraint, accumulates Machen’s skill as a terror­weaver. Here we enormous power as it flows on in a stream of find in its most artistic form a favourite innocent childish prattle; introducing weird conception of the author’s; the notion allusions to strange “nymphs”, “Dôls”, that beneath the mounds and rocks of the “voolas”, “White, Green, and Scarlet wild Welsh hills dwell subterraneously that

38 squat primitive race whose vestiges gave rise diffusion still dwells beneath the hills of to our common folk legends of fairies, elves, unfrequented Wales. Further research has and the “little people”, and whose acts are unriddled the message of the black seal, and even now responsible for certain proved that the idiot boy, a son of some unexplained disappearances, and occasional father more terrible than mankind, is the substitutions of strange dark “changelings” heir of monstrous memories and for normal infants. This theme receives its possibilities. That strange night in the study finest treatment in the episode entitled “The the professor invoked ‘the awful Novel of the Black Seal”; where a professor, transmutation of the hills’ by the aid of the having discovered a singular identity black seal, and aroused in the hybrid idiot between certain characters scrawled on the horrors of his shocking paternity. He Welsh limestone rocks and those existing in “saw his body swell and become distended a prehistoric black seal from Babylon, sets as a bladder, while the face blackened. . . .” out on a course of discovery which leads him And then the supreme effects of the to unknown and terrible things. A queer invocation appeared, and Professor Gregg passage in the ancient geographer Solinus, a knew the stark frenzy of cosmic panic in its series of mysterious disappearances in the darkest form. He knew the abysmal gulfs of lonely reaches of Wales, a strange idiot son abnormality that he had opened, and went born to a rural mother after a fright in which forth into the wild hills prepared and her inmost faculties were shaken; all these resigned. He would meet the unthinkable things suggest to the professor a hideous ‘Little People’—and his document ends with connexion and a condition revolting to any a rational observation: “If I unhappily do not friend and respecter of the human race. He return from my journey, there is no need to hires the idiot boy, who jabbers strangely at conjure up here a picture of the awfulness of times in a repulsive hissing voice, and is my fate.” subject to odd epileptic seizures. Once, after such a seizure in the professor’s study by Also in The Three Impostors is the “Novel of night, disquieting odours and evidences of the White Powder”, which approaches the unnatural presences are found; and soon absolute culmination of loathsome fright. after that the professor leaves a bulky Francis Leicester, a young law student document and goes into the weird hills with nervously worn out by seclusion and feverish expectancy and strange terror in his overwork, has a prescription filled by an old heart. He never returns, but beside a apothecary none too careful about the state fantastic stone in the wild country are found of his drugs. The substance, it later turns his watch, money, and ring, done up with out, is an unusual salt which time and catgut in a parchment bearing the same varying temperature have accidentally terrible characters as those on the black changed to something very strange and Babylonish seal and the rock in the Welsh terrible; nothing less, in short, than the mountains. mediaeval Vinum Sabbati, whose consumption at the horrible orgies of the The bulky document explains enough to Witches’ Sabbath gave rise to shocking bring up the most hideous vistas. Professor transformations and—if injudiciously used— Gregg, from the massed evidence presented to unutterable consequences. Innocently by the Welsh disappearances, the rock enough, the youth regularly imbibes the inscription, the accounts of ancient powder in a glass of water after meals; and geographers, and the black seal, has decided at first seems substantially benefited. that a frightful race of dark primal beings of Gradually, however, his improved spirits immemorial antiquity and wide former take the form of dissipation; he is absent

39 from home a great deal, and appears to have here is the tale of “The Bowmen”; which, undergone a repellent psychological change. taken for authentic narration, gave rise to One day an odd livid spot appears on his the widespread legend of the “Angels of right hand, and he afterward returns to his Mons”—ghosts of the old English archers of seclusion; finally keeping himself shut within Crécy and Agincourt who fought in 1914 his room and admitting none of the beside the hard­pressed ranks of England’s household. The doctor calls for an interview, glorious “Old Contemptibles”. 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, Less intense than Mr. Machen in delineating sees a monstrous thing at the sickroom the extremes of stark fear, yet infinitely more window; and servants report that food left at closely wedded to the idea of an unreal the locked door is no longer touched. world constantly pressing upon ours, is the Summons at the door bring only a sound of inspired and prolific Algernon Blackwood, shuffling and a demand in a thick gurgling amidst whose voluminous and uneven work voice to be let alone. At last an awful may be found some of the finest spectral happening is reported by a shuddering literature of this or any age. Of the quality of housemaid. The ceiling of the room below Mr. Blackwood’s genius there can be no Leicester’s is stained with a hideous black dispute; for no one has even approached the fluid, and a pool of viscid abomination has skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with dripped to the bed beneath. Dr. Haberden, which he records the overtones of now persuaded to return to the house, strangeness in ordinary things and breaks down the young man’s door and experiences, or the preternatural insight with strikes again and again with an iron bar at which he builds up detail by detail the the blasphemous semi­living thing he finds complete sensations and perceptions leading there. It is “a dark and putrid mass, seething from reality into supernormal life or vision. with corruption and hideous rottenness, Without notable command of the poetic neither liquid nor solid, but melting and witchery of mere words, he is the one changing”. Burning points like eyes shine out absolute and unquestioned master of weird of its midst, and before it is despatched it atmosphere; and can evoke what amounts tries to lift what might have been an arm. almost to a story from a simple fragment of Soon afterward the physician, unable to humourless psychological description. Above endure the memory of what he has beheld, all others he understands how fully some dies at sea while bound for a new life in sensitive minds dwell forever on the America. borderland of dream, and how relatively slight is the distinction betwixt those images Mr. Machen returns to the daemoniac “Little formed from actual objects and those excited People” in “The Red Hand” and “The Shining by the play of the imagination. Pyramid”; and in The Terror, a wartime story, he treats with very potent mystery the Mr. Blackwood’s lesser work is marred by effect of man’s modern repudiation of several defects such as ethical didacticism, spirituality on the beasts of the world, which occasional insipid whimsicality, the flatness are thus led to question his supremacy and of benignant supernaturalism, and a too free to unite for his extermination. Of utmost use of the trade jargon of modern delicacy, and passing from mere horror into “occultism”. A fault of his more serious true mysticism, is The Great Return, a story efforts is that diffuseness and long­ of the Graal, also a product of the war windedness which results from an period. Too well known to need description excessively elaborate attempt, under the

40 handicap of a somewhat bald and half­remembered snatches of dream. Plot is journalistic style devoid of intrinsic magic, everywhere negligible, and atmosphere colour, and vitality, to visualise precise reigns untrammelled. sensations and nuances of uncanny suggestion. But in spite of all this, the major John Silence—Physician Extraordinary is a products of Mr. Blackwood attain a book of five related tales, through which a genuinely classic level, and evoke as does single character runs his triumphant course. nothing else in literature an awed and Marred only by traces of the popular and convinced sense of the immanence of strange conventional detective­story atmosphere— spiritual spheres or entities. for Dr. Silence is one of those benevolent geniuses who employ their remarkable The well­nigh endless array of Mr. powers to aid worthy fellow­men in difficulty Blackwood’s fiction includes both novels and —these narratives contain some of the shorter tales, the latter sometimes author’s best work, and produce an illusion independent and sometimes arrayed in at once emphatic and lasting. The opening series. Foremost of all must be reckoned tale, “A Psychical Invasion”, relates what “The Willows”, in which the nameless befell a sensitive author in a house once the presences on a desolate Danube island are scene of dark deeds, and how a legion of horribly felt and recognised by a pair of idle fiends was exorcised. “Ancient Sorceries”, voyagers. Here art and restraint in narrative perhaps the finest tale in the book, gives an reach their very highest development, and an almost hypnotically vivid account of an old impression of lasting poignancy is produced French town where once the unholy Sabbath without a single strained passage or a single was kept by all the people in the form of false note. Another amazingly potent though cats. In “The Nemesis of Fire” a hideous less artistically finished tale is “The elemental is evoked by new­spilt blood, Wendigo”, where we are confronted by whilst “Secret Worship” tells of a German horrible evidences of a vast forest daemon school where Satanism held sway, and about which North Woods lumbermen where long afterward an evil aura remained. whisper at evening. The manner in which “The Camp of the Dog” is a werewolf tale, certain footprints tell certain unbelievable but is weakened by moralisation and things is really a marked triumph in professional “occultism”. craftsmanship. In “An Episode in a Lodging House” we behold frightful presences Too subtle, perhaps, for definite summoned out of black space by a sorcerer, classification as horror­tales, yet possibly and “The Listener” tells of the awful psychic more truly artistic in an absolute sense, are residuum creeping about an old house where such delicate phantasies as Jimbo or The a leper died. In the volume titled Incredible Centaur. Mr. Blackwood achieves in these Adventures occur some of the finest tales novels a close and palpitant approach to the which the author has yet produced, leading inmost substance of dream, and works the fancy to wild rites on nocturnal hills, to enormous havock with the conventional secret and terrible aspects lurking behind barriers between reality and imagination. stolid scenes, and to unimaginable vaults of mystery below the sands and pyramids of Egypt; all with a serious finesse and delicacy Unexcelled in the sorcery of crystalline that convince where a cruder or lighter singing prose, and supreme in the creation of treatment would merely amuse. Some of a gorgeous and languorous world of these accounts are hardly stories at all, but iridescently exotic vision, is Edward John rather studies in elusive impressions and Moreton Drax Plunkett, Eighteenth Baron

41 Dunsany, whose tales and short plays form In The Book of Wonder we read of Hlo­hlo, an almost unique element in our literature. the gigantic spider­idol which does not Inventor of a new mythology and weaver of always stay at home; of what the Sphinx surprising folklore, Lord Dunsany stands feared in the forest; of Slith, the thief who dedicated to a strange world of fantastic jumps over the edge of the world after beauty, and pledged to eternal warfare seeing a certain light lit and knowing who lit against the coarseness and ugliness of it; of the anthropophagous Gibbelins, who diurnal reality. His point of view is the most inhabit an evil tower and guard a treasure; truly cosmic of any held in the literature of of the Gnoles, who live in the forest and any period. As sensitive as Poe to dramatic from whom it is not well to steal; of the City values and the significance of isolated words of Never, and the eyes that watch in the and details, and far better equipped Under Pits; and of kindred things of rhetorically through a simple lyric style darkness. A Dreamer’s Tales tells of the based on the prose of the King James Bible, mystery that sent forth all men from this author draws with tremendous Bethmoora in the desert; of the vast gate of effectiveness on nearly every body of myth Perdóndaris, that was carved from a single and legend within the circle of European piece of ivory; and of the voyage of poor old culture; producing a composite or eclectic Bill, whose captain cursed the crew and paid cycle of phantasy in which Eastern colour, calls on nasty­looking isles new­risen from Hellenic form, Teutonic sombreness, and the sea, with low thatched cottages having Celtic wistfulness are so superbly blended evil, obscure windows. that each sustains and supplements the rest without sacrifice of perfect congruity and Many of Dunsany’s short plays are replete homogeneity. In most cases Dunsany’s lands with spectral fear. In The Gods of the are fabulous—“beyond the East”, or “at the Mountain seven beggars impersonate the edge of the world”. His system of original seven green idols on a distant hill, and enjoy personal and place names, with roots drawn ease and honour in a city of worshippers from classical, Oriental, and other sources, is until they hear that the real idols are missing a marvel of versatile inventiveness and from their wonted seats. A very ungainly sight poetic discrimination; as one may see from in the dusk is reported to them—“rock such specimens as “Argimē n ē s”, should not walk in the evening”—and at last, “Bethmoora”, “Poltarnees”, “Camorak”, as they sit awaiting the arrival of a troop of “Illuriel”, or “Sardathrion”. dancers, they note that the approaching footsteps are heavier than those of good Beauty rather than terror is the keynote of dancers ought to be. Then things ensue, and Dunsany’s work. He loves the vivid green of in the end the presumptuous blasphemers jade and of copper domes, and the delicate are turned to green jade statues by the very flush of sunset on the ivory minarets of walking statues whose sanctity they impossible dream­cities. Humour and irony, outraged. But mere plot is the very least too, are often present to impart a gentle merit of this marvellously effective play. The cynicism and modify what might otherwise incidents and developments are those of a possess a naive intensity. Nevertheless, as is supreme master, so that the whole forms one inevitable in a master of triumphant of the most important contributions of the unreality, there are occasional touches of present age not only to drama, but to cosmic fright which come well within the literature in general. A Night at an Inn tells authentic tradition. Dunsany loves to hint of four thieves who have stolen the emerald slyly and adroitly of monstrous things and eye of Klesh, a monstrous Hindoo god. They incredible dooms, as one hints in a fairy tale. lure to their room and succeed in slaying the

42 three priestly avengers who are on their ghost story, he believes, should have a track, but in the night Klesh comes gropingly familiar setting in the modern period, in for his eye; and having gained it and order to approach closely the reader’s sphere departed, calls each of the despoilers out of experience. Its spectral phenomena, into the darkness for an unnamed moreover, should be malevolent rather than punishment. In The Laughter of the Gods beneficent; since fear is the emotion there is a doomed city at the jungle’s edge, primarily to be excited. And finally, the and a ghostly lutanist heard only by those technical patois of “occultism” or pseudo­ about to die (cf. Alice’s spectral harpsichord science ought carefully to be avoided; lest in Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables); the charm of casual verisimilitude be whilst The Queen’s Enemies retells the smothered in unconvincing pedantry. anecdote of Herodotus in which a vengeful princess invites her foes to a subterranean Dr. James, practicing what he preaches, banquet and lets in the Nile to drown them. approaches his themes in a light and often conversational way. Creating the illusion of But no amount of mere description can every­day events, he introduces his abnormal convey more than a fraction of Lord phenomena cautiously and gradually; Dunsany’s pervasive charm. His prismatic relieved at every turn by touches of homely cities and unheard­of rites are touched with and prosaic detail, and sometimes spiced a sureness which only mastery can engender, with a snatch or two of antiquarian and we thrill with a sense of actual scholarship. Conscious of the close relation participation in his secret mysteries. To the between present weirdness and accumulated truly imaginative he is a talisman and a key tradition, he generally provides remote unlocking rich storehouses of dream and historical antecedents for his incidents; thus fragmentary memory; so that we may think being able to utilise very aptly his exhaustive of him not only as a poet, but as one who knowledge of the past, and his ready and makes each reader a poet as well. convincing command of archaic diction and colouring. A favourite scene for a James tale is some centuried cathedral, which the At the opposite pole of genius from Lord author can describe with all the familiar Dunsany, and gifted with an almost diabolic minuteness of a specialist in that field. power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily life, is the scholarly Sly humorous vignettes and bits of life­like Montague Rhodes James, Provost of Eton genre portraiture and characterisation are College, antiquary of note, and recognised often to be found in Dr. James’s narratives, authority on mediaeval manuscripts and and serve in his skilled hands to augment the cathedral history. Dr. James, long fond of general effect rather than to spoil it, as the telling spectral tales at Christmastide, has same qualities would tend to do with a lesser become by slow degrees a literary weird craftsman. In inventing a new type of ghost, fictionist of the very first rank; and has he has departed considerably from the developed a distinctive style and method conventional Gothic tradition; for where the likely to serve as models for an enduring line older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and of disciples. apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, The art of Dr. James is by no means dwarfish, and hairy—a sluggish, hellish haphazard, and in the preface to one of his night­abomination midway betwixt beast collections he has formulated three very and man—and usually touched before it is sound rules for macabre composition. A seen. Sometimes the spectre is of still more

43 eccentric composition; a roll of flannel with are whispered. The Count, who flourished spidery eyes, or an invisible entity which early in the seventeenth century, was a stern moulds itself in bedding and shews a face of landlord, and famous for his severity toward crumpled linen. Dr. James has, it is clear, an poachers and delinquent tenants. His cruel intelligent and scientific knowledge of punishments were bywords, and there were human nerves and feelings; and knows just dark rumours of influences which even how to apportion statement, imagery, and survived his interment in the great subtle suggestions in order to secure the best mausoleum he built near the church—as in results with his readers. He is an artist in the case of the two peasants who hunted on incident and arrangement rather than in his preserves one night a century after his atmosphere, and reaches the emotions more death. There were hideous screams in the often through the intellect than directly. This woods, and near the tomb of Count Magnus method, of course, with its occasional an unnatural laugh and the clang of a great absences of sharp climax, has its drawbacks door. Next morning the priest found the two as well as its advantages; and many will miss men; one a maniac, and the other dead, with the thorough atmospheric tension which the flesh of his face sucked from the bones. writers like Machen are careful to build up with words and scenes. But only a few of the Mr. Wraxall hears all these tales, and tales are open to the charge of tameness. stumbles on more guarded references to a Generally the laconic unfolding of abnormal Black Pilgrimage once taken by the Count; a events in adroit order is amply sufficient to pilgrimage to Chorazin in Palestine, one of produce the desired effect of cumulative the cities denounced by Our Lord in the horror. Scriptures, and in which old priests say that Antichrist is to be born. No one dares to hint The short stories of Dr. James are contained just what that Black Pilgrimage was, or what in four small collections, entitled respectively strange being or thing the Count brought Ghost­Stories of an Antiquary, More Ghost back as a companion. Meanwhile Mr. Stories of an Antiquary, A Thin Ghost and Wraxall is increasingly anxious to explore Others, and A Warning to the Curious. There the mausoleum of Count Magnus, and finally is also a delightful juvenile phantasy, The secures permission to do so, in the company Five Jars, which has its spectral of a deacon. He finds several monuments adumbrations. Amidst this wealth of material and three copper sarcophagi, one of which is it is hard to select a favourite or especially the Count’s. Round the edge of this latter are typical tale, though each reader will no several bands of engraved scenes, including doubt have such preferences as his a singular and hideous delineation of a temperament may determine. pursuit—the pursuit of a frantic man through a forest by a squat muffled figure “Count Magnus” is assuredly one of the best, with a devil­fish’s tentacle, directed by a tall forming as it does a veritable Golconda of cloaked man on a neighbouring hillock. The suspense and suggestion. Mr. Wraxall is an sarcophagus has three massive steel English traveller of the middle nineteenth padlocks, one of which is lying open on the century, sojourning in Sweden to secure floor, reminding the traveller of a metallic material for a book. Becoming interested in clash he heard the day before when passing the ancient family of De la Gardie, near the the mausoleum and wishing idly that he village of Råbäck, he studies its records; and might see Count Magnus. finds particular fascination in the builder of the existing manor­house, one Count His fascination augmented, and the key Magnus, of whom strange and terrible things being accessible, Mr. Wraxall pays the

44 mausoleum a second and solitary visit and clergyman sent for. Each night after that the finds another padlock unfastened. The next discoverer feels a stealthy presence and day, his last in Råbäck, he again goes alone detects a horrible odour of mould outside to bid the long­dead Count farewell. Once the door of his hotel room, till finally the more queerly impelled to utter a whimsical clergyman makes a daylight replacement of wish for a meeting with the buried the stone at the mouth of the treasure­vault nobleman, he now sees to his disquiet that in the well—out of which something had only one of the padlocks remains on the come in the dark to avenge the disturbing of great sarcophagus. Even as he looks, that last old Abbot Thomas’s gold. As he completes lock drops noisily to the floor, and there his work the cleric observes a curious toad­ comes a sound as of creaking hinges. Then like carving on the ancient well­head, with the monstrous lid appears very slowly to rise, the Latin motto “Depositum custodi—keep and Mr. Wraxall flees in panic fear without that which is committed to thee.” refastening the door of the mausoleum. Other notable James tales are “The Stalls of During his return to England the traveller Barchester Cathedral”, in which a grotesque feels a curious uneasiness about his fellow­ carving comes curiously to life to avenge the passengers on the canal­boat which he secret and subtle murder of an old Dean by employs for the earlier stages. Cloaked his ambitious successor; “‘Oh, Whistle, and figures make him nervous, and he has a I’ll Come to You, My Lad’”, which tells of the sense of being watched and followed. Of horror summoned by a strange metal whistle twenty­eight persons whom he counts, only found in a mediaeval church ruin; and “An twenty­six appear at meals; and the missing Episode of Cathedral History”, where the two are always a tall cloaked man and a dismantling of a pulpit uncovers an archaic shorter muffled figure. Completing his water tomb whose lurking daemon spreads panic travel at Harwich, Mr. Wraxall takes frankly and pestilence. Dr. James, for all his light to flight in a closed carriage, but sees two touch, evokes fright and hideousness in their cloaked figures at a crossroad. Finally he most shocking forms; and will certainly lodges at a small house in a village and stand as one of the few really creative spends the time making frantic notes. On the masters in his darksome province. second morning he is found dead, and during the inquest seven jurors faint at sight of the body. The house where he stayed is For those who relish speculation regarding never again inhabited, and upon its the future, the tale of supernatural horror demolition half a century later his provides an interesting field. Combated by a manuscript is discovered in a forgotten mounting wave of plodding realism, cynical cupboard. flippancy, and sophisticated disillusionment, it is yet encouraged by a parallel tide of In “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” a British growing mysticism, as developed both antiquary unriddles a cipher on some through the fatigued reaction of “occultists” Renaissance painted windows, and thereby and religious fundamentalists against discovers a centuried hoard of gold in a materialistic discovery and through the niche half way down a well in the courtyard stimulation of wonder and fancy by such of a German abbey. But the crafty depositor enlarged vistas and broken barriers as had set a guardian over that treasure, and modern science has given us with its intra­ something in the black well twines its arms atomic chemistry, advancing astrophysics, around the searcher’s neck in such a manner doctrines of relativity, and probings into that the quest is abandoned, and a biology and human thought. At the present

45 moment the favouring forces would appear to have somewhat of an advantage; since there is unquestionably more cordiality shewn 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.

46 Notes on Writing Weird Fiction to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and flaming sunsets momentarily suggest. These persons include My reason for writing stories is to give great authors as well as insignificant myself the satisfaction of visualising more amateurs like myself—Dunsany, Poe, Arthur clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, Machen, M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, and Walter de la Mare being typical masters beauty, and adventurous expectancy which in this field. are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, As to how I write a story—there is no one occurrences, and images encountered in art way. Each one of my tales has a different and literature. I choose weird stories because history. Once or twice I have literally written they suit my inclination best—one of my out a dream; but usually I start with a mood strongest and most persistent wishes being or idea or image which I wish to express, to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some and revolve it in my mind until I can think of strange suspension or violation of the galling a good way of embodying it in some chain of limitations of time, space, and natural law dramatic occurrences capable of being which for ever imprison us and frustrate our recorded in concrete terms. I tend to run curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces through a mental list of the basic conditions beyond the radius of our sight and analysis. or situations best adapted to such a mood or These stories frequently emphasise the idea or image, and then begin to speculate element of horror because fear is our deepest on logical and naturally motivated and strongest emotion, and the one which explanations of the given mood or idea or best lends itself to the creation of nature­ image in terms of the basic condition or defying illusions. Horror and the unknown situation chosen. or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing The actual process of writing is of course as picture of shattered natural law or cosmic varied as the choice of theme and initial alienage or “outsideness” without laying conception; but if the history of all my tales stress on the emotion of fear. The reason were analysed, it is just possible that the why time plays a great part in so many of my following set of rules might be deduced from tales is that this element looms up in my the average procedure: mind as the most profoundly dramatic and (1) Prepare a synopsis or scenario of events grimly terrible thing in the universe. Conflict in the order of their absolute occurrence — with time seems to me the most potent and not the order of their narration. Describe fruitful theme in all human expression. with enough fulness to cover all vital points and motivate all incidents planned. Details, While my chosen form of story­writing is comments, and estimates of consequences obviously a special and perhaps a narrow are sometimes desirable in this temporary one, it is none the less a persistent and framework. permanent type of expression, as old as (2) Prepare a second synopsis or scenario of literature itself. There will always be a small events—this one in order of narration (not percentage of persons who feel a burning actual occurrence), with ample fulness and curiosity about unknown outer space, and a detail, and with notes as to changing burning desire to escape from the prison­ perspective, stresses, and climax. Change the house of the known and the real into those original synopsis to fit if such a change will enchanted lands of incredible adventure and increase the dramatic force or general infinite possibilities which dreams open up effectiveness of the story. Interpolate or

47 delete incidents at will—never being bound how I shall develop the idea—this beginning by the original conception even if the forming a problem to be motivated and ultimate result be a tale wholly different exploited. from that first planned. Let additions and alterations be made whenever suggested by There are, I think, four distinct types of anything in the formulating process. weird story; one expressing a mood or (3) Write out the story—rapidly, fluently, feeling, another expressing a pictorial and not too critically—following the second conception, a third expressing a general or narrative­order synopsis. Change situation, condition, legend, or intellectual incidents and plot whenever the developing conception, and a fourth explaining a definite process seems to suggest such change, never tableau or specific dramatic situation or being bound by any previous design. If the climax. In another way, weird tales may be development suddenly reveals new grouped into two rough categories—those in opportunities for dramatic effect or vivid which the marvel or horror concerns some storytelling, add whatever is thought condition or phenomenon, and those in which advantageous—going back and reconciling it concerns some action of persons in the early parts to the new plan. Insert and connexion with a bizarre condition or delete whole sections if necessary or phenomenon. desirable, trying different beginnings and endings until the best arrangement is found. Each weird story—to speak more particularly But be sure that all references throughout of the horror type—seems to involve five the story are thoroughly reconciled with the definite elements: (a) some basic, underlying final design. Remove all possible horror or abnormality—condition, entity, superfluities—words, sentences, paragraphs, etc.—, (b) the general effects or bearings of or whole episodes or elements—observing the horror, (c) the mode of manifestation— the usual precautions about the reconciling object embodying the horror and of all references. phenomena observed—, (d) the types of (4) Revise the entire text, paying attention to fear­reaction pertaining to the horror, and vocabulary, syntax, rhythm of prose, (e) the specific effects of the horror in proportioning of parts, niceties of tone, grace relation to the given set of conditions. and convincingness or transitions (scene to scene, slow and detailed action to rapid and In writing a weird story I always try very sketchy time­covering action and vice carefully to achieve the right mood and versa. . . . etc., etc., etc.), effectiveness of atmosphere, and place the emphasis where it beginning, ending, climaxes, etc., dramatic belongs. One cannot, except in immature suspense and interest, plausibility and pulp charlatan–fiction, present an account of atmosphere, and various other elements. impossible, improbable, or inconceivable (5) Prepare a neatly typed copy—not phenomena as a commonplace narrative of hesitating to add final revisory touches objective acts and conventional emotions. where they seem in order. Inconceivable events and conditions have a special handicap to overcome, and this can The first of these stages is often purely a be accomplished only through the mental one—a set of conditions and maintenance of a careful realism in every happenings being worked out in my head, phase of the story except that touching on the and never set down until I am ready to one given marvel. This marvel must be prepare a detailed synopsis of events in treated very impressively and deliberately— order of narration. Then, too, I sometimes with a careful emotional “build­up”—else it begin even the actual writing before I know will seem flat and unconvincing. Being the

48 principal thing in the story, its mere existence should overshadow the characters and events. But the characters and events must be consistent and natural except where they touch the single marvel. In relation to the central wonder, the characters should shew the same overwhelming emotion which similar characters would shew toward such a wonder in real life. Never have a wonder taken for granted. Even when the characters are supposed to be accustomed to the wonder I try to weave an air of awe and impressiveness corresponding to what the reader should feel. A casual style ruins any serious fantasy.

Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood. The moment it tries to be anything else it becomes cheap, puerile, and unconvincing. Prime emphasis should be given to subtle suggestion—imperceptible hints and touches of selective associative detail which express shadings of moods and build up a vague illusion of the strange reality of the unreal. Avoid bald catalogues of incredible happenings which can have no substance or meaning apart from a sustaining cloud of colour and symbolism.

These are the rules or standards which I have followed—consciously or unconsciously —ever since I first attempted the serious writing of fantasy. That my results are successful may well be disputed—but I feel at least sure that, had I ignored the considerations mentioned in the last few paragraphs, they would have been much worse than they are.

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