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SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE
H. P. Lovecraft
Lovecraft's unedited work entered Canadian
Public Domain on January 1st, 1988,
I.
INTRODUCTION
THE
OLDEST and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and
strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few
psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for
all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a
literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a
materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions
and external events, and of a naïvely insipid idealism which deprecates
the æsthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to "uplift" the
reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in spite of
all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained
remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and
elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must
necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite
sensitiveness.
The
appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands
from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for
detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the
spell of the daily routine to respond to tappings from outside, and
tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental
distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in
the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these
ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But the
sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy
invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of
rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill
of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved
a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in
mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval
with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it,
and too much a part of our innermost biological heritage to lose keen
potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of
our species.
Man's
first instincts and emotions formed his response to the environment in
which he found himself. Definite feelings based on pleasure and pain
grew up around the phenomena whose causes and effects he understood,
whilst around those which he did not understand -- and the universe
teemed with them in the early days -- were naturally woven such
personifications, marvelous interpretations, and sensations of awe and
fear as would be hit upon by a race having few and simple ideas and
limited experience. The unknown, being likewise the unpredictable,
became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of
boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly
extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of
existence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part. The
phenomenon of dreaming likewise helped to build up the notion of an
unreal or spiritual world; and in general, all the conditions of savage
dawn -- life so strongly conduced toward a feeling of the supernatural,
that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man's very
hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition.
That saturation must, as a matter of plain scientific fact, be regarded
as virtually permanent so far as the subconscious mind and inner
instincts are concerned; for though the area of the unknown has been
steadily contracting for thousands of years, an infinite reservoir of
mystery still engulfs most of the outer cosmos, whilst a vast residuum
of powerful inherited associations clings round all the objects and
processes that were once mysterious; however well they may now be
explained. And more than this, there is an actual physiological fixation
of the old instincts in our nervous tissue, which would make them
obscurely operative even were the conscious mind to be purged of all
sources of wonder.
Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than
pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the
unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional
religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more
maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular
supernatural folklore. This tendency, too, is naturally enhanced by the
fact that uncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus making
any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities.
When to this sense of fear and evil the inevitable fascination of wonder
and curiosity is superadded, there is born a composite body of keen
emotion and imaginative provocation whose vitality must of necessity
endure as long as the human race itself. Children will always be afraid
of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will
always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of
strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press
hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead
and the moonstruck can glimpse.
With
this foundation, no one need wonder at the existence of a literature of
cosmic fear. It has always existed, and always will exist; and no better
evidence of its tenacious vigour can be cited than the impulse which now
and then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands
at it in isolated tales, as if to discharge from their minds certain
phantasmal shapes which would otherwise haunt them. Thus Dickens wrote
several eerie narratives; Browning, the hideous poem Childe
Roland; Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; Dr.
Holmes, the subtle novel Elsie Venner; F. Marion Crawford,
The Upper Berth and a number of other examples; Mrs.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, social worker, The Yellow Wall Paper;
whilst the humorist, W. W. Jacobs, produced that able melodramatic bit
called The Monkey's Paw.
This
type of fear-literature must not be confounded with a type externally
similar but psychologically widely different; the literature of mere
physical fear and the mundanely gruesome. Such writing, to be sure, has
its place, as has the conventional or even whimsical or humorous ghost
story where formalism or the author's knowing wink removes the true
sense of the morbidly unnatural; but these things are not the literature
of cosmic fear in its purest sense. The true weird tale has something
more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains
according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable
dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a
hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its
subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain -- a malign
and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which
are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the dæmons of
unplumbed space.
Naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any
theoretical model. Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics
have their dull spots. Moreover, much of the choicest weird work is
unconscious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material
whose massed effect may be of a very different cast. Atmosphere is the
all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the
dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation. We may say,
as a general thing, that a weird story whose intent is to teach or
produce a social effect, or one in which the horrors are finally
explained away by natural means, is not a genuine tale of cosmic fear;
but it remains a fact that such narratives often possess, in isolated
sections, atmospheric touches which fulfill every condition of true
supernatural horror-literature. Therefore we must judge a weird tale not
by the author's intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by the
emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point. If the
proper sensations are excited, such a "high spot" must be admitted on
its own merits as weird literature, no matter how prosaically it is
later dragged down. The one test of the really weird is simply this --
whether of not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread,
and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of
awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching
of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim. And
of course, the more completely and unifiedly a story conveys this
atmosphere the better it is as a work of art in the given medium.
II.
THE DAWN OF THE HORROR TALE
AS
may naturally be expected of a form so closely connected with primal
emotion, the horror-tale is as old as human thought and speech
themselves.
Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all
races, and is crystallised in the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and
sacred writings. It was, indeed, a prominent feature of the elaborate
ceremonial magic, with its rituals for the evocation of dæmons and
spectres, which flourished from prehistoric times, and which reached its
highest development in Egypt and the Semitic nations. Fragments like the
Book of Enoch and the Claviculae of Solomon well illustrate the power of
the weird over the ancient Eastern mind, and upon such things were based
enduring systems and traditions whose echoes extend obscurely even to
the present time. Touches of this transcendental fear are seen in
classic literature, and there is evidence of its still greater emphasis
in a ballad literature which paralleled the classic stream but vanished
for lack of a written medium. The Middle Ages, steeped in fanciful
darkness, gave it an enormous impulse toward expression; and East and
West alike were busy preserving and amplifying the dark heritage, both
of random folklore and of academically formulated magic and cabalism,
which had descended to them. Witch, werewolf, vampire, and ghoul brooded
ominously on the lips of bard and grandam, and needed but little
encouragement to take the final step across the boundary that divides
the chanted tale or song from the formal literary composition. In the
Orient, the weird tale tended to assume a gorgeous colouring and
sprightliness which almost transmuted it into sheer phantasy. In the
West, where the mystical Teuton had come down from his black boreal
forests and the Celt remembered strange sacrifices in Druidic groves, it
assumed a terrible intensity and convincing seriousness of atmosphere
which doubled the force of its half-told, half-hinted horrors.
Much
of the power of Western horror-lore was undoubtedly due to the hidden
but often suspected presence of a hideous cult of nocturnal worshippers
whose strange customs -- descended from pre-Aryan and pre-agricultural
times when a squat race of Mongoloids roved over Europe with their
flocks and herds -- were rooted in the most revolting fertility-rites of
immemorial antiquity. Ibis secret religion, stealthily handed down
amongst peasants for thousands of years despite the outward reign of the
Druidic, Graeco-Roman, and Christian faiths in the regions involved, was
marked by wild "Witches' Sabbaths" in lonely woods and atop distant
hills on Walpurgis-Night and Hallowe'en, the traditional
breeding-seasons of the goats and sheep and cattle; and became the
source of vast riches of sorcery-legend, besides provoking extensive
witchcraft -- prosecutions of which the Salem affair forms the chief
American example. Akin to it in essence, and perhaps connected with it
in fact, was the frightful secret system of inverted theology or
Satan-worship which produced such horrors as the famous "Black Mass";
whilst operating toward the same end we may note the activities of those
whose aims were somewhat more scientific or philosophical -- the
astrologers, cabalists, and alchemists of the Albertus Magnus or Ramond
Lully type, with whom such rude ages invariably abound. The prevalence
and depth of the mediæval horror-spirit in Europe, intensified by the
dark despair which waves of pestilence brought, may be fairly gauged by
the grotesque carvings slyly introduced into much of the finest later
Gothic ecclesiastical work of the time; the dæmoniac gargoyles of Notre
Dame and Mont St. Michel being among the most famous specimens. And
throughout the period, it must be remembered, there existed amongst
educated and uneducated alike a most unquestioning faith in every form
of the supernatural; from the gentlest doctrines of Christianity to the
most monstrous morbidities of witchcraft and black magic. It was from no
empty background that the Renaissance magicians and alchemists --
Nostradamus, Trithemius, Dr. John Dee, Robert Fludd, and the like --
were born.
In
this fertile soil were nourished types and characters of sombre myth and
legend which persist in weird literature to this day, more or less
disguised or altered by modern technique. Many of them were taken from
the earliest oral sources, and form part of mankind's permanent
heritage. The shade which appears and demands the burial of its bones,
the dæmon lover who comes to bear away his still living bride, the
death-fiend or psychopomp riding the night-wind, the man-wolf, the
sealed chamber, the deathless sorcerer -- all these may be found in that
curious body of mediæval lore which the late Mr. Baring-Gould so
effectively assembled in book form. Wherever the mystic Northern blood
was strongest, the atmosphere of the popular tales became most intense;
for in the Latin races there is a touch of basic rationality which
denies to even their strangest superstitions many of the overtones of
glamour so characteristic of our own forest-born and ice-fostered
whisperings.
Just
as all fiction first found extensive embodiment in poetry, so is it in
poetry that we first encounter the permanent entry of the weird into
standard literature. Most of the ancient instances, curiously enough,
are in prose; as the werewolf incident in Petronius, the gruesome
passages in Apuleius, the brief but celebrated letter of Pliny the
Younger to Sura, and the odd compilation On Wonderful Events
by the Emperor Hadrian's Greek freedman, Phlegon. It is in Phlegon that
we first find that hideous tale of the corpse-bride, Philinnion
and Machates, later related by Proclus and in modem times forming
the inspiration of Goethe's Bride of Corinth and Washington
Irving's German Student. But by the time the old Northern
myths take literary form, and in that later time when the weird appears
as a steady element in the literature of the day, we find it mostly in
metrical dress; as indeed we find the greater part of the strictly
imaginative writing of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Scandinavian
Eddas and Sagas thunder with cosmic horror, and shake with the stark
fear of Ymir and his shapeless spawn; whilst our own Anglo-Saxon
Beowulf and the later Continental Nibelung tales are full of
eldritcli weirdness. Dante is a pioneer in the classic capture of
macabre atmosphere, and in Spenser's stately stanzas will be seen more
than a few touches of fantastic terror in landscape, incident, and
character. Prose literature gives us Malory's Morte d'Arthur,
in which are presented many ghastly situations taken from early ballad
sources -- the theft of the sword and silk from the corpse in Chapel
Perilous by Sir Galahad -- whilst other and cruder specimens were
doubtless set forth in the cheap and sensational "chapbooks" vulgarly
hawked about and devoured by the ignorant. In Elizabethan drama, with
its Dr. Faustus, the witches in Macbeth, the
ghost in Hamlet, and the horrible gruesomeness of Webster
we may easily discern the strong hold of the dæmoniac: on the public
mind; a hold intensified by the very real fear of living witchcraft,
whose terrors, wildest at first on the Continent, begin to echo loudly
in English ears as the witch-hunting crusades of James the First gain
headway. To the lurking mystical prose of the ages is added a long line
of treatises on witchcraft and dæmonology which aid in exciting the
imagination of the reading world.
Through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century we behold a
growing mass of fugitive legendry and balladry of darksome cast; still,
however, held down beneath the surface of polite and accepted
literature. Chapbooks of horror and weirdness multiplied, and we glimpse
the eager interest of the people through fragments like Defoe's
Apparition of Mrs. Veal, a homely tale of a dead woman's spectral
visit to a distant friend, written to advertise covertly a badly selling
theological disquisition on death. The upper orders of society were now
losing faith in the supernatural, and indulging in a period of classic
rationalism. Then, beginning with the translations of Eastern tales in
Queen Anne's reign and taking definite form toward the middle of the
century, comes the revival of romantic feeling -- the era of new joy in
nature, and in the radiance of past times, strange scenes, bold deeds,
and incredible marvels. We feel it first in the poets, whose utterances
take on new qualities of wonder, strangeness, and shuddering. And
finally, after the timid appearance of a few weird scenes in the novels
of the day -- such as Smollett's Adventures of Ferdinand, Count
Fathom -- the release instinct precipitates itself in the birth
of a new school of writing; the "Gothic" school of horrible and
fantastic prose fiction, long and short, whose literary posterity is
destined to become so numerous, and in many cases so resplendent in
artistic merit. It is, when one reflects upon it, genuinely remarkable
that weird narration as a fixed and academically recognized literary
form should have been so late of final birth. The impulse and atmosphere
are as old as man, but the typical weird tale of standard literature is
a child of the eighteenth century.
III.
THE EARLY GOTHIC NOVEL
THE
shadow-haunted landscapes of Ossian, the chaotic visions of William
Blake, the grotesque witch dances in Burns's Tam O'Shanter,
the sinister dæmonism of Coleridge's Christobel and
Ancient Mariner, the ghostly charm of James Hogg's Kilmeny,
and the more restrained approaches to cosmic horror in Lamia
and many of Keats's other poems, are typical British illustrations of
the advent of the weird to formal literature. Our Teutonic cousins of
the Continent were equally receptive to the rising flood, and Burger's
Wild Huntsman and the even more famous dæmon-bridegroom
ballad of Lenore -- both imitated in English by Scott,
whose respect for the supernatural was always great -- are only a taste
of the eerie wealth which German song had commenced to provide. Thomas
Moore adapted from such sources the legend of the ghoulish statue-bride
(later used by Prosper Merimée in The Venus of Ille, and
traceable back to great antiquity) which echoes so shiveringly in his
ballad of The Ring; whilst Goethe's deathless masterpiece
Faust, crossing from mere balladry into the classic, cosmic
tragedy of the ages, may be held as the ultimate height to which this
German poetic impulse arose.
But
it remained for a very sprightly and worldly Englishman -- none other
than Horace Walpole himself -- to give the growing impulse definite
shape and become the actual founder of the literary horror-story as a
permanent form. Fond of mediæval romance and mystery as a dilettante's
diversion, and with a quaintly imitated Gothic castle as his abode at
Strawberry Hill, Walpole in 1764 published The Castle of Otranto;
a tale of the supernatural which, though thoroughly unconvincing and
mediocre in itself, was destined to exert an almost unparalleled
influence on the literature of the weird. First venturing it only as a
"translation" by one "William Marshal, Gent." from the Italian of a
mythical "Onuphrio Muralto," the author later acknowledged his
connection with the book and took pleasure in its wide and instantaneous
popularity -- a popularity which extended to many editions, early
dramatization, and wholesale imitation both in England and in Germany.
The
story -- tedious, artificial, and melodramatic -- is further impaired by
a brisk and prosaic style whose urbane sprightliness nowhere permits the
creation of a truly weird atmosphere. It tells of Manfred, an
unscrupulous and usurping prince determined to found a line, who after
the mysterious sudden death of his only son Conrad on the latter's
bridal morn, attempts to put away his wife Hippolita and wed the lady
destined for the unfortunate youth -- the lad, by the way, having been
crushed by the preternatural fall of a gigantic helmet in the castle
courtyard. Isabella, the widowed bride, flees from his design; and
encounters in subterranean crypts beneath the castle a noble young
preserver, Theodore, who seems to be a peasant yet strangely resembles
the old lord Alfonso who ruled the domain before Manfred's time. Shortly
thereafter supernatural phenomena assail the castle in diverse ways;
fragments of gigantic armour being discovered here and therd, a portrait
walking out of its frame, a thunderclap destroying the edifice, and a
colossal armoured spectre of Alfonso rising out of the rains to ascend
through parting clouds to the bosom of St. Nicholas. Theodore, having
wooed Manfred's daughter Matilda and lost her through death -- for she
is slain by her father by mistake -- is discovered to be the son of
Alfonso and rightful heir to the estate. He concludes the tale by
wedding Isabella and preparing to live happily ever after, whilst
Manfred -- whose usurpation was the cause of his son's supernatural
death and his own supernatural harassings -- retires to a monastery for
penitence; his saddened wife seeking asylum in a neighbouring convent.
Such
is the tale; flat stilted, and altogther devoid of the true cosmic
horror which makes weird literature. Yet such was the thirst of the age
for those touches of strangeness and spectral antiquity which it
reflects, that it was seriously received by the soundest readers and
raised in spite of its intrinsic ineptness to a pedestal of lofty
importance in literary history. What it did above all else was to create
a novel type of scene, puppet-characters, and incidents; which, handled
to better advantage by writers more naturally adapted to weird creation,
stimulated the growth of an imitative Gothic school which in turn
inspired the real weavers of cosmic terror -- the line of actual artists
beginning with Poe. This novel dramatic paraphernalia consisted first of
all of the Gothic castle, with its awesome antiquity, vast distances and
famblings, deserted or ruined wings, damp corridors, unwholesome hidden
catacombs, and galaxy of ghosts and appalling legends, as a nucleus of
suspense and dæmoniac fright. In addition, it included the tyrannical
and malevolent nobleman as villain; the saintly, long-persecuted, and
generally insipid heroine who undergoes the major terrors and serves as
a point of view and focus for the reader's sympathies; the valorous and
immaculate hero, always of high birth but often in humble disguise; the
convention of high-sounding foreign names, moistly Italian, for the
characters; and the infinite array of stage properties which includes
strange lights, damp trap-doors, extinguished lamps, mouldy hidden
manuscripts, creaking hinges, shaking arras, and the like. All this
paraphernalia reappears with amusing sameness, yet sometimes with
tremendous effect, throughout the history of the Gothic novel; and is by
no means extinct even today, though subtler technique now forces it to
assume a less naive and obvious form. An harmonious milieu for a new
school had been found, and the writing world was not slow to grasp the
opportunity.
German romance at once responded to the Walpole influence, and soon
became a byword for the weird and ghastly. In England one of the first
imitators was the celebrated Mrs. Barbauld, then Miss Aikin, who in 1773
published an unfinished fragment called Sir Bertrand, in
which the strings of genuine terror were truly touched with no clumsy
hand. A nobleman on a dark and lonely moor, attracted by a tolling bell
and distant light, enters a strange and ancient turreted castle whose
doors open and close and whose bluish will-o'-the-wisps lead up
mysterious staircases toward dead hands and animated black statues. A
coffin with a dead lady, whom Sir Bertrand kisses, is finally reached;
and upon the kiss the scene dissolves to give place to a splendid
apartment where the lady, restored to life, holds a banquet in honor of
her rescuer. Walpole admired this tale, though he accorded less respect
to an even more prominent offspring of his Otranto --
The Old English Baron, by Clara Reeve, published in 1777. Truly
enough, this tale lacks the real vibration to the note of outer darkness
and mystery which distinguishes Mrs. Barbauld's fragment; and though
less crude than Walpole's novel, and more artistically economical of
horror in its possession of only one spectral figure, it is nevertheless
too definitely insipid for greatness. Here again we have the virtuous
heir to the castle disguised as a peasant and restored to his heritage
through the ghost of his father; and here again we have a case of wide
popularity leading to many editions, dramatization, and ultimate
translation into French. Miss Reeve wrote another weird novel,
unfortunately unpublished and lost.
The
Gothic novel was now settled as a literary form, and instances multiply
bewilderingly as the eighteenth century draws toward its close.
The Recess, written in 1785 by Mrs. Sophia Lee, has the historic
element, revolving round the twin daughters of Mary, Queen of Scots; and
though devoid of the supernatural, employs the Walpole scenery and
mechanism with great dexterity. Five years later, and all existing lamps
are paled by the rising of a fresh luminary order -- Mrs. Ann Radcliffe
(1764-1823), whose famous novels made terror and suspense a fashion, and
who set new and higher standards in the domain of macabre and
fear-inspiring atmosphere despite a provoking custom of destroying her
own phantoms at the last through labored mechanical explanations. To the
familiar Gothic trappings of her predecessors Mrs. Radcliffe added a
genuine sense of the unearthly in scene and incident which closely
approached genius; every touch of setting and action contributing
artistically to the impression of illimitable frightfulness which she
wished to convey. A few sinister details like a track of blood on castle
stairs, a groan from a distant vault, or a weird song in a nocturnal
forest can with her conjure up the most powerful images of imminent
horror; surpassing by far the extravagant and toilsome elaborations of
others. Nor are these images in themselves any the less potent because
they are explained away before the end of the novel. Mrs. Radcliffe's
visual imagination was very strong, and appears as much in her
delightful landscape touches -- always in broad, glamorously pictorial
outline, and never in close detail -- as in her weird phantasies. Her
prime weaknesses, aside from the habit of prosaic disillusionment, are a
tendency toward erroneous geography and history and a fatal predilection
for bestrewing her novels with insipid little poems, attributed to one
or another of the characters.
Mrs.
Radcliffe wrote six novels; The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne
(1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the
Forest (1792), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794),
The Italian (1797), and Gaston de Blondeville,
composed in 1802 but first published posthumously in 1826. Of these
Udolpho is by far the most famous, and may be taken as a
type of the early Gothic tale at its best. It is the chronicle of Emily,
a young Frenchwoman transplanted to an ancient and portentous castle in
the Apennines through the death of her parents and the marriage of her
aunt to the lord of the castle -- the scheming nobleman, Montoni.
Mysterious sounds, opened doors, frightful legends, and a nameless
horror in a niche behind a black veil all operate in quick succession to
unnerve the heroine and her faithful attendant, Annette; but finally,
after the death of her aunt, she escapes with the aid of a
fellow-prisoner whom she has discovered. On the way home she stops at a
chateau filled with fresh horrors -- the abandoned wing where the
departed chatelaine dwelt, and the bed of death with the black pall --
but is finally restored to security and happiness with her lover
Valancourt, after the clearing-up of a secret which seemed for a time to
involve her birth in mystery. Clearly, this is only familiar material
re-worked; but it is so well re-worked that Udolpho will
always be a classic. Mrs. Radcliffe's characters are puppets, but they
are less markedly so than those of her forerunners. And in atmospheric
creation she stands preëminent among those of her time.
Of
Mrs. Radcliffe's countless imitators, the American novelist Charles
Brockden Brown stands the closest in spirit and method. Like her, he
injured his creations by natural explanations; but also like her, he had
in uncanny atmospheric power which gives his horrors a frightful
vitality as long as they remain unexplained. He differed from her in
contemptuously discarding the external Gothic paraphernalia and
properties and choosing modern American scenes for his Mysteries; but
this repudiation did not extend to the Gothic spirit and type of
incident. Brown's novels involve some memorably frightful scenes, and
excel even Mrs. Radcliffe's in describing the operations of the
perturbed mind. Edgar Hunily starts with a sleep-walker
digging a grave, but is later impaired by touches of Godwinian
didacticism. Ormond involves a member of a sinister secret
brotherhood. That and Arthur Mervyn both describe the
plague of yellow fever, which the author had witnessed in Philadelphia
and New York. But Brown's most famous book is Wieland; or, the
Transformation (1798), in which a Pennsylvania German, engulfed
by a wave of religious fanaticism, hears "voices" and slays his wife and
children as a sacrifice. His sister Clara, who tells the story, narrowly
escapes. The scene, laid at the woodland estate of Mittingen on the
Schuylkill's remote reaches, is drawn with extreme vividness; and the
terrors of Clara, beset by spectral tones, gathering fears, and the
sound of strange footsteps in the lonely house, are all shaped with
truly artistic force. In the end a lame ventriloquial explanation is
offered, but the atmosphere is genuine while it lasts. Carwin, the
malign ventriloquist, is a typical villain of the Manfred or Montoni
type.
IV.
THE APEX OF GOTHIC ROMANCE
HORROR in literature attains a new malignity in the work of Matthew
Gregory Lewis (1773-1818), whose novel The Monk (1796)
achieved marvelous popularity and earned him the nickname "Monk" Lewis.
This young author, educated in Germany and saturated with a body of wild
Teuton lore unknown to Mrs. Radcliffe, turned to terror in forms more
violent than his gentle predecessor had ever dared to think of; and
produced as a result a masterpiece of active nightmare whose general
Gothic cast is spiced with added stores of ghoulishness. The story is
one of a Spanish monk, Ambrosio, who from a state of over-proud virtue
is tempted to the very nadir of evil by a fiend in the guise of the
maiden Matilda; and who is finally, when awaiting death at the
Inquisition's hands, induced to purchase escape at the price of his soul
from the Devil, because he deems both body and soul already lost.
Forthwith the mocking Fiend snatches him to a lonely place, tells him he
has sold his soul in vain since both pardon and a chance for salvation
were approaching at the moment of his hideous bargain, and completes the
sardonic betrayal by rebuking him for his unnatural crimes, and casting
his body down a precipice whilst his soul is borne off for ever to
perdition. The novel contains some appalling descriptions such as the
incantation in the vaults beneath the convent cemetery, the burning of
the convent, and the final end of the wretched abbot. In the sub-plot
where the Marquis de las Cisternas meets the spectre of his erring
ancestress, The Bleeding Nun, there are many enormously potent strokes;
notably the visit of the animated corpse to the Marquis's bedside, and
the cabalistic ritual whereby the Wandering Jew helps him to fathom and
banish his dead tormentor. Nevertheless The Monk drags
sadly when read as a whole. It is too long and too diffuse, and much of
its potency is marred by flippancy and by an awkwardly excessive
reaction against those canons of decorum which Lewis at first despised
as prudish. One great thing may be said of the author; that he never
ruined his ghostly visions with a natural explanation. He succeeded in
breaking up the Radcliffian tradition and expanding the field of the
Gothic novel. Lewis wrote much more than The Monk. His
drama, The Castle Spectre, was produced in 1798, and he
later found time to pen other fictions in ballad form -- Tales of
Terror (1799), The Tales of Wonder (1801), and a
succession of translations from the German. Gothic romances, both
English and German, now appeared in multitudinous and mediocre
profusion. Most of them were merely ridiculous in the light of mature
taste, and Miss Austen's famous satire Northanger Abbey was
by no means an unmerited rebuke to a school which had sunk far toward
absurdity. This particular school was petering out, but before its final
subordination there arose its last and greatest figure in the person of
Charles Robert Maturin (1782-1824), an obscure and eccentric Irish
clergyman. Out of an ample body of miscellaneous writing which includes
one confused Radcliffian imitation called The Fatal Revenge; or,
the Family of Montorio (1807), Maturin at length envolved the
vivid horror-masterpiece of Melmoth, the Wanderer (1820),
in which the Gothic tale climbed to altitudes of sheer spiritual fright
which it had never known before.
Melmoth is the tale of an Irish Gentleman who, in the
seventeenth century, obtained a preternaturally extended life from the
Devil at the price of his soul. If he can persuade another to take the
bargain off his hands, and assume his existing state, he can be saved;
but this he can never manage to effect, no matter how assiduously he
haunts those whom despair has made reckless and frantic. The framework
of the story is very clumsy; involving tedious length, digressive
episodes, narratives within narratives, and labored dovetailing and
coincidence; but at various points in the endless rambling there is felt
a pulse of power undiscoverable in any previous work of this kind -- a
kinship to the essential truth of human nature, an understanding of the
profoundest sources of actual cosmic fear, and a white heat of
sympathetic passion on the writer's part which makes the book a true
document of æsthetic self-expression rather than a mere clever compound
of artifice. No unbiased reader can doubt that with Melmoth
an enormous stride in the evolution of the horror-tale is represented.
Fear is taken out of the realm of the conventional and exalted into a
hideous cloud over mankind's very destiny. Maturin's shudders, the work
of one capable of shuddering himself, are of the sort that convince,
Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis are fair game for the parodist, but it would be
difficult to find a false note in the feverishly intensified action and
high atmospheric tension of the Irishman whose less sophisticated
emotions and strain of Celtic mysticism gave him the finest possible
natural equipment for his task. Without a doubt Maturin is a man of
authentic genius, and he was so recognized by Balzac, who grouped
Melmoth with Molière's Don Juan, Gthe's Faust,
and Byron's Manfred as the supreme allegorical figures of
modern European literature, and wrote a whimsical piece called
Melmoth Reconciled, in which the Wanderer succeeds in passing his
infernal bargain on to a Parisian bank defaulter, who in turn hands it
along a chain of victims until a reveling gambler dies with it in his
possession, and by his damnation ends the curse. Scott, Rossetti,
Thackeray and Baudelaire are the other titans who gave Maturin their
unqualified admiration, and there is much significance in the fact that
Oscar Wilde, after his disgrace and exile, chose for his last days in
Paris the assumed name of "Sebastian Melmoth."
Melmoth contains scenes which even now have not lost their
power to evoke dread. It begins with a deathbed -- an old miser is dying
of sheer fright because of something he has seen, coupled with a
manuscript he has read and a family portrait which hangs in an obscure
closet of his centuried home in County Wicklow. He sends to Trinity
College, Dublin, for his nephew John; and the latter upon arriving notes
many uncanny things. The eyes of the portrait in the closet glow
horribly, and twice a figure strangely resembling the portrait appears
momentarily at the door. Dread hangs over that house of the Melmoths,
one of whose ancestors, "J. Melmoth, 1646," the portrait represents. The
dying miser declares that this man -- at a date slightly before 1800 --
is alive. Finally the miser dies, and the nephew is told in the will to
destroy both the portrait and a manuscript to be found in a certain
drawer. Reading the manuscript, which was written late in the
seventeenth century by an Englishman named Stanton, young John learns of
a terrible incident in Spain in 1677, when the writer met a horrible
fellow-countryman and was told of how he had stared to death a priest
who tried to denounce him as one filled with fearsome evil. Later, after
meeting the man again in London, Stanton is cast into a madhouse and
visited by the stranger, whose approach is heralded by spectral music
and whose eyes have a more than mortal glare. Melmoth the Wanderer --
for such is the malign visitor -- offers the captive freedom if he will
take over his bargain with the Devil; but like all others whom Melmoth
has approached, Stanton is proof against temptation. Melmoth's
description of the horrors of a life in a madhouse, used to tempt
Stanton, is one of the most potent passages of the book. Stanton is at
length liberated, and spends the rest of his life tracking down Melmoth,
whose family and ancestral abode he discovers. With the family he leaves
the manuscript, which by young John's time is badly ruinous and
fragmentary. John destroys both portrait and manuscript, but in sleep is
visited by his horrible ancestor, who leaves a black and blue mark on
his wrist.
Young
John soon afterward receives as a visitor a shipwrecked Spaniard, Alonzo
de Moncada, who has escaped from compulsory monasticism and from the
perils of the Inquisition. He has suffered horribly -- and the
descriptions of his experiences under torment and in the vaults through
which he once essays escape are classic -- but had the strength to
resist Melmoth the Wanderer when approached at his darkest hour in
prison. At the house of a Jew who sheltered him after his escape he
discovers a wealth of manuscript relating other exploits of Melmoth,
including his wooing of an Indian island maiden, Immalee, who later
comes into her birthright in Spain and is known as Donna Isidora; and of
his horrible marriage to her by the corpse of a dead anchorite at
midnight in the ruined chapel of a shunned and abhorred monastery.
Moncada's narrative to young John takes up the bulk of Maturin's
four-volume book; this disproportion being considered one of the chief
technical faults of the composition.
At
last the colloquies of John and Moncada are interrupted by the entrance
of Melmoth the Wanderer himself, his piercing eyes now fading, and
decrepitude swiftly overtaking him. The term of his bargain has
approached its end, and he has come home after a century and a half to
meet his fate. Warning all others from the room, no matter what sounds
they may hear in the night, he awaits the end alone. Young John and
Moncada hear frightful ululations, but do not intrude till silence comes
toward morning. They then find the room empty. Clayey footprints lead
out a rear door to a cliff overlooking the sea, and near the edge of the
precipice is a track indicating the forcible dragging of some heavy
body. The Wanderer's scarf is found on a crag some distance below the
brink, but nothing further is ever seen or heard of him.
Such
is the story, and none can fail to notice the difference between this
modulated, suggestive, and artistically moulded horror and -- to use the
words of Professor George Saintsbury -- "the artful but rather jejune
rationalism of Mrs. Radcliffe, and the too often puerile extravagance,
the bad taste, and the sometimes slipshod style of Lewis." Maturin's
style in itself deserves particular praise, for its forcible directness
and vitality lift it altogether above the pompous artificialities of
which his predecessors are guilty. Professor Edith Birkhead, in her
history of the Gothic novel, justly observes that "with all his faults
Maturin was the greatest as well as the last of the Goths."
Melmoth was widely read and eventually dramatized, but its late
date in the evolution of the Gothic tale deprived it of the tumultuous
popularity of Udolpho and The Monk.
V.
THE AFTERMATH OF GOTHIC FICTION
MEANWHILE other hands had not been idle, so that above the dreary
plethora of trash like Marquis von Grosse's Horrid Mysteries
(1796), Mrs. Roche's Children of the Abbey (1798), Mrs.
Dacre's Zofloya; or, the Moor (1806), and the poet
Shelley's schoolboy effusions Zastro (1810) and St.
Irvine (1811) (both imitations of Zofloya) there
arose many memorable weird works both in English and German. Classic in
merit, and markedly different from its fellows because of its foundation
in the Oriental tale rather than the Walpolesque Gothic novel, is the
celebrated History of the Caliph Vathek by the wealthy
dilettante William Beckford, first written in the French language but
published in an English translation before the appearance of the
original. Eastern tales, introduced to European literature early in the
eighteenth century through Galland's French translation of the
inexhaustibly opulent Arabian Nights, had become a reigning
fashion; being used both for allegory and for amusement. The sly humour
which only the Eastern mind knows how to mix with weirdness had
captivated a sophisticated generation, till Bagdad and Damascus names
became as freely strewn through popular literature as dashing Italian
and Spanish ones were soon to be. Beckford, well read in Eastern
romance, caught the atmosphere with unusual receptivity; and in his
fantastic volume reflected very potently the haughty luxury, sly
disillusion, bland cruelty, urbane treachery, and shadowy spectral
horror of the Saracen spirit. His seasoning of the ridiculous seldom
mars the force of his sinister theme, and the tale marches onward with a
phantasmagoric pomp in which the laughter is that of skeletons feasting
under arabesque domes. Vathek is a tale of the grandson of
the Caliph Haroun, who, tormented by that ambition for super-terrestrial
power, pleasure and learning which animates the average Gothic villain
or Byronic hero (essentially cognate types), is lured by an evil genius
to seek the subterranean throne of the mighty and fabulous pre-Adamite
sultans in the fiery halls of Eblis, the Mahometan Devil. The
descriptions of Vathek's palaces and diversions, of his scheming
soweress-mother Carathis and her witch-tower with the fifty one-eyed
negresses, of his pilgrimage to the haunted ruins of Istakhar (Persepolis)
and of the impish bride Nouronihar whom he treacherously acquired on the
way, of Istakhar's primordial towers and terraces in the burning
moonlight of the waste, and of the terrible Cyclopean halls of Eblis,
where, lured by glittering promises, each victim is compelled to wander
in anguish for ever, his right hand upon his blazingly ignited and
eternally burning heart, are triumphs of weird colouring which raise the
book to a permaneat place in English letters. No less notable are the
three Episodes of Vathek, intended for insertion in the
tale as narratives of Vathek's fellow-victims in Eblis' infernal halls,
which remained unpublished throughout the author's lifetime and were
discovered as recently as 1909 by the scholar Lewis Melville whilst
collecting material for his Life and Letters of William Beckford.
Beckford, however, lacks the essential mysticism which marks the acutest
form of the weird; so that his tales have a certain knowing Latin
hardness and clearness preclusive of sheer panic fright.
But
Beckford remained alone in his devotion to the Orient. Other writers,
closer to the Gothic tradition and to European life in general, were
content to follow more faithfully in the lead of Walpole. Among the
countless producers of terror-literature in these times may be mentioned
the Utopian economic theorist William Godwin, who followed his famous
but non-supernatural Caleb Williams (1794) with the
intendedly weird St. Leon (1799), in which the theme of the
elixir of life, as developed by the imaginary secret order of "Rosicrucians,"
is handled with ingeniousness if not with atmospheric convincingness.
This element of Rosicrucianism, fostesed by a wave of popular magical
interest exemplified in the vogue of the charlatan Cagliostro and the
publication of Francis Barrett's The Magus (1801), a
curious and compendious treatise on occult principles and ceremonies, of
which a reprint was made as lately as 1896, figures in Bulwer-Lytton and
in many late Gothic novels, especially that remote and enfeebled
posterity which straggled far down into the nineteenth century and was
represented by George W.M. Reynold's Faust and the Demon
and Wagner the Wehr-Wolf. Caleb Williams,
though non-supernatural, has many authentic touches of terror. It is the
tale of a servant persecuted by a master whom he has found guilty of
murder, and displays an invention and skill which have kept it alive in
a fashion to this day. It was dramatized as The Iron Chest,
and in that form was almost equally celebrated. Godwin, however, was too
much the conscious teacher and prosaic man of thought to create a
genuine weird masterpiece.
His
daughter, the wife of Shelley, was much more successful; and her
inimitable Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1817)
is one of the horror-classics of all time. Composed in competition with
her husband, Lord Byron, and Dr. John William Polidori in an effort to
prove supremacy in horror-making, Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein
was the only one of the rival narratives to be brought to an elaborate
completion; and criticism has failed to prove that the best parts are
due to Shelley rather than to her. The novel, somewhat tinged but
scarcely marred by moral didacticism, tells of the artificial human
being moulded from charnel fragments by Victor Frankenstein, a young
Swiss medical student. Created by its designer "in the mad pride of
intellectuality," the monster possesses full intelligence but owns a
hideously loathsome form. It is rejected by mankind, becomes embittered,
and at length begins the successive murder of all whom Frankenstein
loves best, friends and family. It demands that Frankenstein create a
wife for it; and when the student finally refuses in horror lest the
world be populated with such monsters, it departs with a hideous threat
"to be with him on his wedding night." Upon that night the bride is
strangled, and from that time on Frankenstein hunts down the monster,
even into the wastes of the Arctic. In the end, whilst seeking shelter
on the ship of the man who tells the story, Frankenstein himself is
killed by the shocking object of his search and creation of his
presumptuous pride. Some of the scenes in Frankenstein are
unforgettable, as when the newly animated monster enters its creator's
room, parts the curtains of his bed, and gazes at him in the yellow
moonlight with watery eyes -- "if eyes they may be called." Mrs. Shelley
wrote other novels, including the fairly notable Last Man;
but never duplicated the success of her first effort. It has the true
touch of cosmic fear, no matter how much the movement may lag in places.
Dr. Polidori developed his competing idea as a long short story,
The Vampyre; in which we behold a suave villain of the true
Gothic or Byronic type, and encounter some excellent passages of stark
fright, including a terrible nocturnal experience in a shunned Grecian
wood.
In
this same period Sir Walter Scott frequently concerned himself with the
weird, weaving it into many of his novels and poems, and sometimes
producing such independent bits of narration as The Tapestried
Chamber or Wandering Willie's Tale in
Redgauntlet, in the latter of which the force of the spectral and
the diabolic is enhanced by a grotesque homeliness of speech and
atmosphere. In 1830 Scott published his Letters on Demonology and
Witchcraft, which still forms one of our best compendia of
European witch-lore. Washington Irving is another famous figure not
unconnected with the weird; for though most of his ghosts are too
whimsical and humorous to form genuinely spectral literature, a distinct
inclination in this direction is to be noted in many of his productions.
The German Student in Tales of a Traveler
(1824) is a slyly concise and effective presentation of the old legend
of the dead bride, whilst woven into the cosmic tissue of The
Money Diggers in the same volume is more than one hint of
piratical apparitions in the realms which Captain Kidd once roamed.
Thomas Moore also joined the ranks of the macabre artists in the poem
Alciphron, which he later elaborated into the prose novel
of The Epicurean (1827). Though merely relating the
adventures of a young Athenian duped by the artifice of cunning Egyptian
priests, Moore manages to infuse much genuine horror into his account of
subterranean frights and wonders beneath the primordial temples of
Memphis. De Quincey more than once revels in grotesque and arabesque
terrors, though with a desultoriness and learned pomp which deny him the
rank of specialist.
This
era likewise saw the rise of William Harrison Ainsworth, whose romantic
novels teem with the eerie and the gruesome. Capt. Marryat, besides
writing such short tales as The Werewolf, made a memorable
contribution in The Phantom Ship (1839), founded on the
legend of the Flying Dutchman, whose spectral and accursed vessel sails
for ever near the Cape of Good Hope. Dickens now rises with occasional
weird bits like The Signalman, a tale of ghastly warning
conforming to a very common pattern and touched with a verisimilitude
which allied it as much with the coming psychological school as with the
dying Gothic school. At this time a wave of interest in spiritualistic
charlatanry, mediumism, Hindoo theosophy, and such matters, much like
that of the present day, was flourishing; so that the number of weird
tales with a "Psychic" or pseudo-scientific basis became very
considerable. For a number of these the prolific and popular Edward
Bulwer-Lytton was responsible; and despite the large doses of turgid
rhetoric and empty romanticism in his products, his success in the
weaving of a certain kind of bizarre charm cannot be denied.
The House and the Brain, which hints of Rosicrucianism and
at a malign and deathless figure perhaps suggested by Louis XV's
mysterious courtier St. Germain, yet survives as one of the best short
haunted-house tales ever written. The novel Zanoni (1842)
contains similar elements more elaborately handled, and introduces a
vast unknown sphere of being pressing on our own world and guarded by a
horrible "Dweller of the Threshold" who haunts those who try to enter
and fail. Here we have a benign brotherhood kept alive from age to age
till finally reduced to a single member, and as a hero an ancient
Chaldaean sorcerer surviving in the pristine bloom of youth to perish on
the guillotine of the French Revolution. Though full of the conventional
spirit of romance, marred by a ponderous network of symbolic and
didactic meanings, and left unconvincing through lack of perfect
atmospheric realization of the situations hinging on the spectral world,
Zanoni is really an excellent performance as a romantic
novel; and can be read with genuine interest by the not too
sophisticated reader. It is amusing to note that in describing an
attempted initiation into the ancient brotherhood the author cannot
escape using the stock Gothic castle of Walpolian lineage.
In
A Strange Story (1862) Bulwer-Lytton shows a marked
improvement in the creation of weird images and moods. The novel,
despite enormous length, a highly artificial plot bolstered up by
opportune coincidences, and an atmosphere of homiletic pseudo-science
designed to please the matter-of-fact and purposeful Victorian reader,
is exceedingly effective as a narrative; evoking instantaneous and
unflagging interest, and furnishing many potent -- if somewhat
melodramatic -- tableaux and climaxes. Again we have the mysterious user
of life's elixir in the person of the soulless magician Margrave, whose
dark exploits stand out with dramatic vividness against the modern
background of a quiet English town and of the Australian bush; and again
we have shadowy intimations of a vast spectral world of the unknown in
the very air about us -- this time handled with much greater power and
vitality than in Zanoni. One of the two great incantation
passages, where the hero is driven by a luminous evil spirit to rise at
night in his sleep, take a strange Egyptian wand, and evoke nameless
presences in the haunted and mausoleum-facing pavilion of a famous
Renaissance alchemist, truly stands among the major terror scenes of
literature. Just enough is suggested, and just little enough is told.
Unknown words are twice dictated to the sleep-walker, and as he repeats
them the ground trembles, and all the dogs of the countryside begin to
bay at half-seen amorphous shadows that stalk athwart the moonlight.
When a third set of unknown words is prompted, the sleep-walker's spirit
suddenly rebels at uttering them, as if the soul could recognize
ultimate abysmal horrors concealed from the mind; and at last an
apparition of an absent sweetheart and good angel breaks the malign
spell. This fragment well illustrates how far Lord Lytton was capable of
progressing beyond his usual pomp and stock romance toward that
crystalline essence of artistic fear which belongs to the domain of
poetry. In describing certain details of incantations, Lytton was
greatly indebted to his amusingly serious occult studies, in the course
of which he came in touch with that odd French scholar and cabalist
Alphonse Louis Constant ("Eliphas Levy"), who claimed to possess the
secrets of ancient magic, and to have evoked the spectre of the old
Grecian wizard Apollonius of Tyana, who lived in Nero's times.
The
romantic, semi-Gothic, quasi-moral tradition here represented was
carried far down the nineteenth century by such authors as Joseph
Sheridan LeFanu, Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H. Rider Haggard (whose
She is really remarkably good), Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G.
Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson -- the latter of whom, despite an
atrocious tendency toward jaunty mannerisms, created permanent classics
in Markheim, The Body Snatcher, and Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Indeed, we may say that this school still
survives; for to it clearly belong such of our contemporary horror-tales
as specialise in events rather than atmospheric details, address the
intellect rather than a malign tensity or psychological verisimilitude,
and take a definite stand in sympathy with mankind and its welfare. It
has its undeniable strength, and because of its "human element" commands
a wider audience than does the sheer artistic nightmare. If not quite so
potent as the latter, it is because a diluted product can never achieve
the intensity of a concentrated essence.
Quite
alone both as a novel and as a piece of terror-literature stands the
famous Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë, with its
mad vistas of bleak, windswept Yorkshire moors and the violent,
distorted lives they foster. Though primarily a tale of life, and of
human passions in agony and conflict, its epically cosmic setting
affords room for horror of the most spiritual sort. Heathcliff, the
modified Byronic villain-hero, is a strange dark waif found in the
streets as a small child and speaking only a strange gibberish till
adopted by the family he ultimately ruins. That he is in truth a
diabolic spirit rather than a human being is more than once suggested,
and the unreal is further approached in the experience of the visitor
who encounters a plaintive child-ghost at a bough-brushed upper window.
Between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is a tie deeper and more
terrible than human love. After her death he twice disturbs her grave,
and is haunted by an impalpable presence which can be nothing less thin
her spirit. The spirit enters his life more and more, and at last he
becomes confident of some imminent mystical reunion. He says he feels a
strange change approaching, and ceases to take nourishment. At night he
either walks abroad or opens the casement by his bed. When he dies the
casement is still swinging open to the pouring rain, and a queer smile
pervades the stiffened face. They bury him in a grave beside the mound
he has haunted for eighteen years, and small shepherd boys say that he
yet walks with his Catherine in the churchyard and on the moor when it
rains. Their faces, too, are sometimes seen on rainy nights behind that
upper casement at Wuthering Heights. Miss Bront&eeuml;'s eerie terror is
no mere Gothic echoe, but a tense expression of man's shuddering
reaction to the unknown. In this respect, Wuthering Heights
becomes the symbol of a literary transition, and marks the growth of a
new and sounder school.
VI.
SPECTRAL LITERATURE ON THE CONTINENT
ON
the continent literary horror fared well. The celebrated short tales and
novels of Ernst Theodor Wihelm Hoffmann (1776-1822) are a by-word for
mellowness of background and maturity of form, though they incline to
levity and extravagance, and lack the exalted moments of stark,
breathless terror which a less sophisticated writer might have achieved.
Generally they convey the grotesque rather than the terrible. Most
artistic of all the continental weird tales is the German classic
Undine (1814), by Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Baron de la Motte
Fouqu&eeacute;. In this story of a water-spirit who married a mortal and
gained a human soul there is a delicate fineness of craftsmanship which
makes it notable in any department of literature, and an easy
naturalness which places it close to the genuine folk-myth. It is, in
fact, derived from a tale told by the Renaissance physician and
alchemist Paracelsus in his Treatise on Elemental Sprites.
Undine, daughter of a powerful water-prince, was exchanged by her father
as a small child for a fisherman's daughter, in order that she might
acquire a soul by wedding a human being. Meeting the noble youth
Huldbrand at the cottage of her fosterfather by the sea at the edge of a
haunted wood, she soon marries him, and accompanies him to his ancestral
castle of Ringstetten. Huldbrand, however, eventually wearies of his
wife's supernatural affiliations, and especially of the appearances of
her uncle, the malicious woodland waterfall-spirit Kuhleborn; a
weariness increased by his growing affection for Bertalda, who turns out
to be the fisherman's child for whom Undine was changed. At length, on a
voyage down the Danube, he is provoked by some innocent act of his
devoted wife to utter the angry words which consign her back to her
supernatural element; from which she can, by the laws of her species,
return only once -- to kill him, whether she will of no, if ever he
prove unfaithful to her memory. Later, when Huldbrand is about to be
married to Bertalda, Undine returns for her sad duty, and bears his life
away in tears. When he is buried among his fathers in the village
churchyard a veiled, snow-white female figure appears among the
mourners, but after the prayer is seen no more. In her place is seen a
little silver spring, which murmurs its way almost completely around the
new grave, and empties into a neighboring lake. The villagers show it to
this day, and say that Undine and her Huldbrand are thus united in
death. Many passages and atmospheric touches in this tale reveal Fouqué
as an accomplished artist in the field of the macabre; especially the
descriptions of the haunted wood with its gigantic snow-white man and
various unnamed terrors, which occur early in the narrative.
Not
so well known as Undine, but remarkable for its convincing
realism and freedom from Gothic stock devices, is the Amber Witch
of Wilhelm Meinhold, another product of the German fantastic genius of
the earlier nineteenth century. This tale, which is laid in the time of
the Thirty Years' War, purports to be a clergyman's manuscript found in
an old church at Coserow, and centres round the writer's daughter, Maria
Schweidler, who is wrongly accused of witchcraft. She has found a
deposit of amber which she keeps secret for various reasons, and the
unexplained wealth obtained from this lends colour to the accusation; an
accusation instigated by the malice of the wolf-hunting nobleman Wittich
Appelmann, who has vainly pursued her with ignoble designs. The deeds of
a real witch, who afterward comes to a horrible supernatural end in
prison, are glibly imputed to the hapless Maria; and after a typical
witchcraft trial with forced confessions under torture she is about to
be burned at the stake when saved just in time by her lover, a noble
youth from a neighboring district. Meinho1d's great strength is in his
air of casual and realistic verisimilitude, which intensifies our
suspense and sense of the unseen by half persuading us that the menacing
events must somehow be either the truth or very dose to the truth.
Indeed, so thorough is this realism that a popular magazine once
published the main points of The Amber Witch as an actual
occurrence of the seventeenth century!
In
the present generation German horror-fiction is most notably represented
by Hanns Heinz Ewers, who brings to bear on his dark conceptions an
effective knowledge of modem psychology. Novels like The
Sorcerer's Apprentice and Alrune, and short stories
like The Spider, contain distinctive qualities which raise
them to a classic level.
But
France as well as Germany has been active in the realm of weirdness.
Victor Hugo, in such tales as Hans of Iceland, and Balzac,
in The Wild Ass's Skin, Seraphita, and
Louis Lambert, both employ supernaturalism to a greater or less
extent; though generally only as a means to some more human end, and
without the sincere and dæmonic intensity which characterizes the born
artist in shadows. It is in Theophile Gautier that we first seem to find
an authentic French sense of the unreal world, and here there appears a
spectral mystery which, though not continuously used, is recognizable at
once as something alike genuine and profound. Short tales like
Avatar, The Foot of the Mummy, and Clarimonde
display glimpses of forbidden vistas that allure, tantalize, and
sometime horrify; whilst the Egyptian visions evoked in One of
Cleopatra's Nights are of the keenest and most expressive
potency. Gautier captured the inmost soul of æon-weighted Egypt, with
its cryptic life and Cyclopean architecture, and uttered once and for
all the eternal horror of its nether world of catacombs, where to the
end of time millions of stiff, spiced corpses will stare up in the
blackness with glassy eyes, awaiting some awesome and unrelatable
summons. Gustave Flaubert ably continued the tradition of Gautier in
orgies of poetic phantasy like The Temptation of St. Anthony,
and but for a strong realistic bias might have been an arch-weaver of
tapestried terrors. Later on we see the stream divide, producing strange
poets and fantaisistes of the symbolic and decadent schools whose dark
interests really centre more in abnormalities of human thought and
instinct than in the actual supernatural, and subtle story-tellers whose
thrills are quite directly derived from the night-black wells of cosmic
unreality. Of the former class of "artists in sin" the illustrious poet
Baudelaire, influenced vastly by Poe, is the supreme type; whilst the
psychological novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, a true child of the
eighteen-nineties, is at once the summation and finale. The latter and
purely narrative class is continued by Prosper Merimée, whose
Venus of Ille presents in terse and convincing prose the same
ancient statue-bride theme which Thomas Moore cast in ballad form in
The Ring.
The
horror-tales of the powerful and cynical Guy de Maupassant, written as
his final madness gradually overtook him, present individualities of
their own; being rather the morbid outpourings of a realistic mind in a
pathological state than the healthy imaginative products of a vision
naturally disposed toward phantasy and sensitive to the normal illusions
of the unseen. Nevertheless they are of the keenest interest and
poignancy; suggesting with marvelous force the imminence of nameless
terrors, and the relentless dogging of an ill-starred individual by
hideous and menacing representatives of the outer blackness. Of these
stories The Horla is generally regarded as the masterpiece.
Relating the advent to France of an invisible being who lives on water
and milk, sways the minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a
horde of extra-terrestrial organisms arrived on earth to subjugate an4
overwhelm mankind, this tense narrative is perhaps without a peer in its
particular department; notwithstanding its indebtedness to a tale by the
American Fitz-James O'Brien for details in describing the actual
presence of the unseen monster. Other potently dark creations of de
Maupassant are Who Knows?, The Spectre,
He, The Diary of a Madman, The White Wolf,
On the River, and the grisly verses entitled Horror.
The
collaborators Erckmann-Chatrian enriched French literature with many
spectral fancies like The Man-Wolf, in which a transmitted
curse works toward its end in a traditional Gothic-castle setting. Their
power of creating a shuddering midnight atmosphere was tremendous
despite a tendency toward natural explanations and scientific wonders;
and few short tales contain greater horror than The Invisible Eye,
where a malignant old hag weaves nocturnal hypnotic spells which induce
the successive occupants of a certain inn chamber to hang themselves on
a cross-beam. The Owl's Ear and The Waters of Death
are full of engulfing darkness and mystery, the latter embodying the
familiar over-grown-spider theme so frequently employed by weird
fictionists. Villiers de l'Isle Adam likewise followed the macabre
school; his Torture by Hope, the tale of a stake-condemned
prisoner permitted to escape in order to feel the pangs of recapture,
being held by some to constitute the most harrowing short story in
literature. This type, however, is less a part of the weird tradition
than a class peculiar to itself -- the so-called conte cruel, in
which the wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic
tantalizations, frustrations, and gruesome physical horrors. Almost
wholly devoted to this form is the living writer Maurice Level, whose
very brief episodes have lent themselves so readily to theatrical
adaptation in the "thrillers" of the Grand Guignol. As a matter of fact,
the French genius is more naturally suited to this dark realism than to
the suggestion of the unseen; since the latter process requires, for its
best and most sympathetic development on a large scale, the inherent
mysticism of the Northern mind.
A
very flourishing, though till recently quite hidden, branch of weird
literature is that of the Jews, kept alive and nourished in obscurity by
the sombre heritage of early Eastern magic, apocalyptic literature, and
cabbalism. The Semitic mind, like the Celtic and Teutonic, seems to
possess marked mystical inclinations; and the wealth of underground
horror-lore surviving in ghettoes and synagogues must be much more
considerable than is generally imagined. Cabbalism itself, so prominent
during the Middle Ages, is a system of philosophy explaining the
universe as emanations of the Deity, and involving the existence of
strange spiritual realms and beings apart from the visible world of
which dark glimpses may be obtained through certain secret incantations.
Its ritual is bound up with mystical interpretations of the Old
Testament, and attributes an esoteric significance to each letter of the
Hebrew alphabet -- a circumstance which has imparted to Hebrew letters a
sort of spectral glamour and potency in the popular literature of magic.
Jewish folklore has preserved much of the terror and mystery of the
past, and when more thoroughly studied is likely to exert considerable
influence on weird fiction. The best examples of its literary use so far
are the German novel The Golem, by Gustave Meyrink, and the
drama The Dyhhuk, by the Jewish writer using the pseudonym
"Ansky." The former, with its haunting shadowy suggestions of marvels
and horrors just beyond reach, is laid in Prague, and describes with
singular mastery that city's ancient ghetto with its spectral, peaked
gables. The name is derived from a fabulous artificial giant supposed to
be made and animated by mediæval rabbis according to a certain cryptic
formula. The Dyhbuk, translated and produced in America in
1925, and more recently produced as an opera, describes with singular
power the possession of a living body by the evil soul of a dead man.
Both golems and dybbuks are fixed types, and serve as frequent
ingredients of later Jewish tradition.
VII.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
IN
the eighteen-thirties occurred a literary dawn directly affecting not
only the history of the weird tale, but that of short fiction as a
whole; and indirectly moulding the trends and fortunes of a great
European æsthetic school. It is our good fortune as Americans to be able
to claim that dawn as our own, for it came in the person of our most
illustrious and unfortunate fellow-countryman Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's
fame has been subject to curious undulations, and it is now a fashion
amongst the "advanced intelligentsia" to minimize his importance both as
an artist and as an influence; but it would be hard for any mature and
reflective critic to deny the tremendous value of his work and the
persuasive potency of his mind as an opener of artistic vistas. True,
his type of outlook may have been anticipated; but it was he who first
realized its possibilities and gave it supreme form and systematic
expression. True also, that subsequent writers may have produced greater
single tales than his; but again we must comprehend that it was only he
who taught them by example and precept the art which they, having the
way cleared for them and given an explicit guide, were perhaps able to
carry to greater lengths. Whatever his limitations, Poe did that which
no one else ever did or could have done; and to him we owe the modern
horror-story in its final and perfected state.
Before Poe the bulk of weird writers had worked largely in the dark;
without an understanding of the psychological basis of the horror
appeal, and hampered by more or legs of conformity to certain empty
literary conventions such as the happy ending, virtue rewarded, and in
general a hollow moral didacticism, acceptance of popular standards and
values, and striving of the author to obtrude his own emotions into the
story and take sides with the partisans of the majority's artificial
ideas. Poe, on the other hand, perceived the essential impersonality of
the real artist; and knew that the function of creative fiction is
merely to express and interpret events and sensations as they are,
regardless of how they tend or what they prove -- good or evil,
attractive or repulsive, stimulating or depressing, with the author
always acting as a vivid and detached chronicler rather than as a
teacher, sympathizer, or vendor of opinion. He saw clearly that all
phases of life and thought are equally eligible as a subject matter for
the artist, and being inclined by temperament to strangeness and gloom,
decided to be the interpreter of those powerful feelings and frequent
happenings which attend pain rather than pleasure, decay rather than
growth, terror rather than tranquility, and which are fundamentally
either adverse or indifferent to the tastes and traditional outward
sentiments of mankind, and to the health, sanity, and normal expansive
welfare of the species.
Poe's
spectres thus acquired a convincing malignity possessed by none of their
predecessors, and established a new standard of realism in the annals of
literary horror. The impersonal and artistic intent, moreover, was aided
by a scientific attitude not often found before; whereby Poe studied the
human mind rather than the usages of Gothic fiction, and worked with an
analytical knowledge of terror's true sources which doubled the force of
his narratives and emancipated him from all the absurdities inherent in
merely conventional shudder-coining. This example having been set, later
authors were naturally forced to conform to it in order to compete at
all; so that in this way a definite change begin to affect the main
stream of macabre writing. Poe, too, set a fashion in consummate
craftsmanship; and although today some of his own work seems slightly
melodramatic and unsophisticated, we can constantly trace his influence
in such things as the maintenance of a single mood and achievement of a
single impression in a tale, and the rigorous paring down of incidents
to such as have a direct bearing on the plot and will figure prominently
in the climax. Truly may it be said that Poe invented the short story in
its present form. His elevation of disease, perversity, and decay to the
level of artistically expressible themes was likewise infinitely
far-reaching in effect; for avidly seized, sponsored, and intensified by
his eminent French admirer Charles Pierre Baudelaire, it became the
nucleus of the principal æsthetic movements in France, thus making Poe
in a sense the father of the Decadents and the Symbolists.
Poet
and critic by nature and supreme attainment, logician and philosopher by
taste and mannerism, Poe was by no means immune from defects and
affectations. His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his
blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humor, and his often
vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice must all be recognized and
forgiven. Beyond and above them, and dwarfing them to insignificance,
was a master's vision of the terror that stalks about and within us, and
the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss.
Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery
called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and
feeling, that vision had power to project itself in blackly magical
crystallisations and transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile
America of the thirties and forties such a moon-nourished garden of
gorgeous poison fungi as not even the nether slopes of Saturn might
boast. Verses and tales alike sustain the burthen of cosmic panic. The
raven whose noisome beak pierces the heart, the ghouls that toll iron
bells in pestilential steeples, the vault of Ulalume in the black
October night, the shocking spires and domes under the sea, the "wild,
weird clime that lieth, sublime, out of Space -- out of Time" -- all
these things and more leer at us amidst maniacal rattlings in the
seething nightmare of the poetry. And in the prose there yawn open for
us the very jaws of the pit -- inconceivable abnormalities slyly hinted
into a horrible half-knowledge by words whose innocence we scarcely
doubt till the cracked tension of the speaker's hollow voice bids us
fear their nameless implications; dæmoniac patterns and presences
slumbering noxiously till waked for one phobic instant into a shrieking
revelation that cackles itself to sudden madness or explodes in
memorable and cataclysmic echoes. A Witches' Sabbath of horror flinging
off decorous robes is flashed before us -- a sight the more monstrous
because of the scientific skill with which every particular is marshaled
and brought into an easy apparent relation to the known gruesomeness of
material life.
Poe's
tales, of course, fall into several classes; some of which contain a
purer essence of spiritual horror than others. The tales of logic and
ratiocination, forerunners of the modern detective story, are not to be
included at all in weird literature; whilst certain others, probably
influenced considerably by Hoffmann, possess an extravagance which
relegates them to the borderline of the grotesque. Still a third group
deal with abnormal psychology and monomania in such a way as to express
terror but not weirdness. A substantial residuum, however, represent the
literature of supernatural horror in its acutest form; and give their
author a permanent and unassailable place as deity and fountainhead of
all modern diabolic fiction. Who can forget the terrible swollen ship
poised on the billow-chasm's edge in MS. Found in a Bottle
-- the dark intimations of her unhallowed age and monstrous growth, her
sinister crew of unseeing greybeards, and her frightful southward rush
under full sail through the ice of the Antarctic night, sucked onward by
some resistless devil-current toward a vortex of eldritch enlightenment
which must end in destruction?
Then
there is the unutterable M. Valdemar, kept together by
hypnotism for seven months after his death, and uttering frantic sounds
but a moment before the breaking of the spell leaves him "a nearly
liquid mass of loathsome, of detestable putrescence." In the
Narrative of A. Gordon Pym the voyagers reach first a strange
south polar land of murderous savages where nothing is white and where
vast rocky ravines have the form of titanic Egyptian letters spelling
terrible primal arcana of earth; and thereafter a still more mysterious
realm where everything is white, and where shrouded giants and
snowy-plumed birds guard a cryptic cataract of mist which empties from
immeasurable celestial heights into a torrid milky sea.
Metzengerstein horrifies with its malign hints of a monstrous
metempsychosis -- the mad nobleman who burns the stable of his
hereditary foe; the colossal unknown horse that issues from the blazing
building after the owner has perished therein; the vanishing bit of
ancient tapestry where was shown the giant horse of the victim's
ancestor in the Crusades; the madman's wild and constant riding on the
great horse, and his fear and hatred of the steed; the meaningless
prophecies that brood obscurely over the warring houses; and finally,
the burning of the madman's palace and the death therein of the owner,
borne helpless into the flames and up the vast staircase astride the
beast he had ridden so strangely. Afterward the rising smoke of the
ruins take the form of a gigantic horse. The Man of the Crowd,
telling of one who roams day and night to mingle with streams of people
as if afraid to be alone, has quieter effects, but implies nothing less
of cosmic fear. Poe's mind was never far from terror and decay, and we
see in every tale, poem, and philosophical dialogue a tense eagerness to
fathom unplumbed wells of night, to pierce the veil of death, and to
reign in fancy as lord of the frightful mysteries of time and space.
Certain of Poe's tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic
form which makes them veritable beacon-lights in the province of the
short story. Poe could, when he wished, give to his prose a richly
poetic cast; employing that archaic and Orientalised style with jeweled
phrase, quasi-Biblical repetition, and recurrent burthen so successfully
used by later writers like Oscar Wilde and Lord Dunsany; and in the
cases where he has done this we have an effect of lyrical phantasy
almost narcotic in essence -- an opium pageant of dream in the language
of dream, with every unnatural colour and grotesque image bodied forth
in a symphony of corresponding sound. The Masque of the Red Death,
Silence, a Fable, and Shadow, a Parable, are
assuredly poems in every sense of the word save the metrical one, and
owe as much of their power to aural cadence as to visual imagery. But it
is in two of the less openly poetic tales, Ligeia and
The Fall of the House of Usher -- especially the latter -- that
one finds those very summits of artistry whereby Poe takes his place at
the head of fictional miniaturists. Simple and straightforward in plot,
both of these tales owe their supreme magic to the cunning development
which appears in the selection and collocation of every least incident.
Ligeia tells of a first wife of lofty and mysterious
origin, who after death returns through a preternatural force of will to
take possession of the body of a second wife; imposing even her physical
appearance on the temporary reanimated corpse of her victim at the last
moment. Despite a suspicion of prolixity and topheaviness, the narrative
reaches its terrific climax with relentless power. Usher,
whose superiority in detail and proportion is very marked, hints
shudderingly of obscure life in inorganic things, and displays an
abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a long and isolated
family history -- a brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly
ancient house all sharing a single soul and meeting one common
dissolution at the same moment.
These
bizarre conceptions, so awkward in unskillful hands, become under Poe's
spell living and convincing terrors to haunt our nights; and all because
the author understood so perfectly the very mechanics and physiology of
fear and strangeness -- the essential details to emphasise, the precise
incongruities and conceits to select as preliminaries or concomitants to
horror, the exact incidents and allusions to throw out innocently in
advance as symbols or prefigurings of each major step toward the hideous
dénouement to come, the nice adjustments of cumulative force and
the unerring accuracy in linkage of parts which make for faultless unity
throughout and thunderous effectiveness at the climactic moment, the
delicate nuances of scenic and landscape value to select in establishing
and sustaining the desired mood and vitalising the desired illusion --
principles of this kind, and dozens of obscurer ones too elusive to be
described or even fully comprehended by any ordinary commentator.
Melodrama and unsophistication there may be -- we are told of one
fastidious Frenchman who could not bear to read Poe except in
Baudelaire's urbane and Gallically modulated translation -- but all
traces of such things are wholly overshadowed by a potent and inborn
sense of the spectral, the morbid, and the horrible which gushed forth
from every cell of the artist's creative mentality and stamped his
macabre work with the ineffaceable mark of supreme genius. Poe's weird
tales are alive in a manner that few others can ever hope to
be.
Like
most fantaisistes, Poe excels in incidents and broad narrative effects
rather than in character drawing. His typical protagonist is generally a
dark, handsome, proud, melancholy, intellectual, highly sensitive,
capricious, introspective, isolated, and sometimes slightly mad
gentleman of ancient family and opulent circumstances; usually deeply
learned in strange lore, and darkly ambitious of penetrating to
forbidden secrets of the universe. Aside from a high-sounding name, this
character obviously derives little from the early Gothic novel; for he
is clearly neither the wooden hero nor the diabolical villain of
Radcliffian or Ludovician romance. Indirectly, however, he does possess
a sort of genealogical connection; since his gloomy, ambitious and
anti-social qualities savour strongly of the typical Byronic hero, who
in turn is definitely an offspring,of the Gothic Manfreds, Montonis, and
Ambrosios. More particular qualities appear to be derived from the
psychology of Poe himself, who certainly possessed much of the
depression, sensitiveness, mad aspiration, loneliness, and extravagant
freakishness which he attributes to his haughty and solitary victims of
Fate.
VIII.
THE WEIRD TRADITION IN AMERICA
THE
public for whom Poe wrote, though grossly unappreciative of his art, was
by no means accustomed to the horrors with which he dealt. America,
besides inheriting the usual dark folk-lore of Europe, had an additional
fund of weird associations to draw upon; so that spectral legends had
already been recognised as fruitful subject-matter for literature.
Charles Brockden Brown had achieved phenomenal fame with his Radcliffian
romances, and Washington Irving's lighter treatment of eerie themes had
quickly become classic. This additional fund proceeded, as Paul Elmer
More has pointed out, from the keen spiritual and theological interests
of the first colonists, plus the strange and forbidding nature of the
scene into which they were plunged. The vast and gloomy virgin forests
in whose perpetual twilight all terrors might well lurk; the hordes of
coppery Indians whose strange, saturnine visages and violent customs
hinted strongly at traces of infernal origin; the free rein given tinder
the influence of Puritan theocracy to all manner of notions respecting
man's relation to the stern and vengeful God of the Calvinists, and to
the sulphureous Adversary of that God, about whom so much was thundered
in the pulpits each Sunday; and the morbid introspection developed by an
isolated backwoods life devoid of normal amusements and of the
recreational mood, harassed by commands for theological
self-examination, keyed to unnatural emotional repression, and forming
above all a mere grim struggle for survival -- all these things
conspired to produce an environment in which the black whisperings of
sinister grandams were heard far beyond the chimney corner, and in which
tales of witchcraft and unbelievable secret monstrosities lingered long
after the dread days of the Salem nightmare.
Poe
represents the newer, more disillusioned, and more technically finished
of the weird schools that rose out of this propitious milieu. Another
school -- the tradition of moral values, gentle restraint, and mild,
leisurely phantasy tinged more or less with the whimsical -- was
represented by another famous, misunderstood, and lonely figure in
American letters -- the shy and sensitive Nathaniel Hawthorne, scion of
antique Salem and great-grandson of one of the bloodiest of the old
witchcraft judges. In Hawthorne we have none of the violence, the
daring, the high colouring, the intense dramatic sense, the cosmic
malignity, and the undivided and impersonal artistry of Poe. Here,
instead, is a gentle soul cramped by the Puritanism of early New
England; shadowed and wistful, and grieved at an unmoral universe which
everywhere transcends the conventional patterns thought by our
forefathers to represent divine and immutable law. Evil, a very real
force to Hawthorne, appears on every hand as a lurking and conquering
adversary; and the visible world becomes in his fancy a theatre of
infinite tragedy and woe, with unseen half-existent influences hovering
over it and through it, battling for supremacy and moulding the
destinies of the hapless mortals who form its vain and self-deluded
population. The heritage of American weirdness was his to a most intense
degree, and he saw a dismal throng of vague specters behind the common
phenomena of life; but he was not disinterested enough to value
impressions, sensations, and beauties of narration for their own sake.
He must needs weave his phantasy into some quietly melancholy fabric of
didactic or allegorical cast, in which his meekly resigned cynicism may
display with naive moral appraisal the perfidy of a human race which he
cannot cease to cherish and mourn despite his insight into its
hypocrisy. Supernatural horror, then, is never a primarily object with
Hawthorne; though its impulses were so deeply woven into his personality
that he cannot help suggesting it with the force of genius when he calls
upon the unreal world to illustrate the pensive sermon he wishes to
preach.
Hawthorne's intimations of the weird, always gentle, elusive, and
restrained, may be traced throughout his work. The mood that produced
them found one delightful vent in the Teutonised retelling of classic
myths for children contained in A Wonder Book and
Tanglewood Tales, and at other times exercised itself in casting
a certain strangeness and intangible witchery or malevolence over events
not meant to be actually supernatural; as in the macabre posthumous
novel Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, which invests with a peculiar
sort of repulsion a house existing to this day in Salem, and abutting on
the ancient Charter Street Burying Ground. In The Marble Faun,
whose design was sketched out in an Italian villa reputed to be haunted,
a tremendous background of genuine phantasy and mystery palpitates just
beyond the common reader's sight; and glimpses of fabulous blood in
mortal veins are hinted at during the course of a romance which cannot
help being interesting despite the persistent incubus of moral allegory,
anti-Popery propaganda, and a Puritan prudery which has caused the
modern writer D. H. Lawrence to express a longing to treat the author in
a highly undignified manner. Septimius Felton, a posthumous
novel whose, idea was to have been elaborated and incorporated into the
unfinished Dolliver Romance, touches on the Elixir of Life
in a more or less capable fashion whilst the notes for a never-written
tale to be called The Ancestral Footstep show what
Hawthorne would have done with an intensive treatment of an old English
superstition -- that of an ancient and accursed line whose members left
footprints of blood as they walked-which appears incidentally in both
Septimius Felton and Dr. Grimshawe's Secret.
Many
of Hawthorne's shorter tales exhibit weirdness, either of atmosphere or
of incident, to a remarkable degree. Edward Randolph's Portrait,
in Legends of the Province House, has its diabolic moments.
The Minister's Black Veil (founded on an actual incident)
and The Ambitious Guest imply much more than they state,
whilst Ethan Grand -- a fragment of a longer work never
completed -- rises to genuine heights of cosmic fear with its vignette
of the wild hill country and the blazing, desolate lime-kilns, and its
delineation of the Byronic "unpardonable sinner," whose troubled life
ends with a peal of fearful laughter in the night as he seeks rest
amidst the flames of the furnace. Some of Hawthorne's notes tell of
weird tales he would have written had he lived longer -- an especially
vivid plot being that concerning a baffling stranger who appeared now
and then in public assemblies, and who was at last followed and found to
come and go from a very ancient grave.
But
foremost as a finished, artistic unit among all our author's weird
material is the famous and exquisitely wrought novel, The House of
the Seven Gables, in which the relentless working out of an
ancestral curse is developed with astonishing power against the sinister
background of a very ancient Salem house -- one of those peaked Gothic
affairs which formed the first regular building-up of our New England
coast towns but which gave way after the seventeenth century to the more
familiar gambrel-roofed or classic Georgian types now known as
"Colonial." Of these old gabled Gothic houses scarcely a dozen are to be
seen today in their original condition throughout the United States, but
one well known to Hawthorne still stands in Turner Street, Salem, and is
pointed out with doubtful authority as the scene and inspiration of the
romance. Such an edifice, with its spectral peaks, its clustered
chimneys, its overhanging second story, its grotesque corner-brackets,
and its diamond-paned lattice windows, is indeed an object well
calculated to evoke sombre reflections; typifying as it does the dark
Puritan age of concealed horror and witch-whispers which preceded the
beauty, rationality, and spaciousness of the eighteenth century.
Hawthorne saw many in his youth, and knew the black tales connected with
some of them. He heard, too, many rumours of a curse upon his own line
as the result of his great-grandfather's severity as a witchcraft judge
in 1692.
From
this setting came the immortal tale -- New England's greatest
contribution to weird literature -- and we can feel in an instant the
authenticity of the atomosphere presented to us. Stealthy horror and
disease lurk within the weather-blackened, moss-crusted, and
elm-shadowed walls of the archaic dwelling so vividly displayed, and we
grasp the brooding malignity of the place when we read that its builder
-- old Colonel Pyncheon -- snatched the land with peculiar ruthlessness
from its original settler, Matthew Maule, whom he condemned to the
gallows as a wizard in the year of the panic. Maule died cursing old
Pyncheon -- "God will give him blood to drink" -- and the waters of the
old well on the seized land turned bitter. Maule's carpenter son
consented to build the great gabled house for his fathet's triumphant
enemy, but the old Colonel died strangely on the day of its dedication.
Then followed generations of odd vicissitudes, with queer whispers about
the dark powers of the Maules, and sometimes terrible ends befalling the
Pyncheons.
The
overshadowing malevolence of the ancient house -- almost as alive as
Poe's House of Usher, though in a subtler way -- pervades the tale as a
recurrent motif pervades in operatic tragedy; and when the main story is
reached, we behold the modern Pyncheons in a pitiable state of decay.
Poor old Hepzibah, the eccentric reduced gentlewoman; childlike,
unfortunate Clifford, just released from undeserved imprisonment; sly
and treacherous judge Pyncheon, who is the old Colonel an over again --
all these figures are tremendous symbols, and are well matched by the
stunted vegetation and anæmic fowls in the garden. It was almost a pity
to supply a fairly happy ending, with a union of sprightly Phbe, cousin
and last scion of the Pyncheons, to the prepossessing young man who
turns out to be the last of the Maules. This union, presumably, ends the
curse. Hawthorne avoids all violence of diction or movement, and keeps
his implications of terror well in the background; but occasional
glimpses amply serve to sustain the mood and redeem the work from pure
allegorical aridity. Incidents like the bewitching of Alice Pyncheon in
the early eighteenth century, and the spectral music of her harpsichord
which precedes a death in the family -- the latter a variant of an
immemorial type of Aryan myth -- link the action directly with the
supernatural; whilst the dead nocturnal vigil of old judge Pyncheon in
the ancient parlour, with his frightfully ticking watch, is stark horror
of the most poignant and genuine sort. The way in which the judge's
death is first adumbrated by the motions and sniffing of a strange cat
outside the window, long before the fact is suspected by the reader or
by any of the characters, is a stroke of genius which Poe could not have
surpassed. Later the strange cat watches intently outside that same
window in the night and on the next day, for -- something. It is clearly
the psychopomp of primeval myth, fitted and adapted with infinite
deftness to its latter-day setting.
But Hawthorne left no well-defined literary posterity. His mood and
attitude belonged to the age which closed with him, and it is the spirit
of Poe -- who so clearly and realistically understood the natural basis
of the horror-appeal and the correct mechanics of its achievement --
which survived and blossomed. Among the earliest of Poe's disciples may
be reckoned the brilliant young Irishman Fitz James O'Brien (1828-1862),
who became naturalised as an American and perished honourably in the
Civil War. It is he who gave us What Was It?, the first
well-shaped short story of a tangible but invisible being, and the
prototype of de Maupassant's Horla; he also who created the
inimitable Diamond Lens, in which a young microscopist
falls in love with a maiden of in infinitesimal world which he has
discovered in a drop of water. O'Brien's early death undoubtedly
deprived us of some masterful tales of strangeness and terror, though
his genius was not, properly speaking, of the same titan quality which
characterised Poe and Hawthorne.
Closer to real greatness was the eccentric and saturnine journalist
Ambrose Bierce, born in 1842; who likewise entered the Civil War, but
survived to write some immortal tales and to disappear in 1913 in as
great a cloud of mystery as any he ever evoked from his nightmare fancy.
Bierce was a satirist and pamphleteer of note, but the bulk of his
artistic reputation must rest upon his grim and savage short stories; a
large number of which deal with the Civil War and form the most vivid
and realistic expression which that conflict has yet received in
fiction. Virtually all of Bierce's tales are tales of horror; and whilst
many of them treat only of the physical and psychological horrors within
Nature, a substantial proportion admit the malignly supernatural and
form a leading element in America's fund of weird literature. Mr. Samuel
Loveman, a living poet and critic who was personally acquainted with
Bierce, thus sums up the genius of the great "shadow-maker" in the
preface to some of his letters:
In
Bierce the evocation of horror becomes for the first time not so much
the prescription or perversion of Poe and Maupassant, but an atmosphere
definite and uncannily precise. Words, so simple that one would be prone
to ascribe them to the limitations of a literary hwk, take on an unholy
horror, a new and unguessed transformation. In Poe one finds it a
tour de force, in Maupassant a nervous engagement of the flagellated
climax. To Bierce, simply and sincerely, diabolism held in its tormented
death a legitimate and reliant means to the end. Yet a tacit
confirmation with Nature is in every instance insisted upon.
In
The Death of Halpin Frayser flowers, verdure, and the
boughs and leaves of trees are magnificently placed as an opposing foil
to unnatural malignity. Not the accustomed golden world, but a world
pervaded with the mystery of blue and the breathless recalcitrance of
dreams is Bierces. Yet, curiously, inhumanity is not altogether absent.
The
"inhumanity" mentioned by Mr. Loveman finds vent in a rare strain of
sardonic comedy and graveyard humour, and a kind of delight in images of
cruelty and tantalising disappointment. The former quality is well
illustrated by some of the subtitles in the darker narratives; such as
"One does not always eat what is on the table", describing a body laid
out for a coroner's inquest, and "A man though naked may be in rags,"
referring to a frightfully mangled corpse.
Bierce's work is in general somewhat uneven. Many of the stories are
obviously mechanical, and marred by a jaunty and commonplacely
artificial style derived from journalistic models; but the grim
malevolence stalking through all of them is unmistakable, and several
stand out as permanent mountain-peaks of American weird writing. The
Death of Halpin Frayser, called by Frederic Taber Cooper
the most fiendishly ghastly tale in the literature of the Anglo-Saxon
race, tells of a body skulking by night without a soul in a weird and
horribly ensanguined wood, and of a man beset by ancestral memories who
met death at the claws of that which had been his fervently loved
mother. The Damned Thing, frequently copied in popular
anthologies, chronicles the hideous devastations of an invisible entity
that waddles and flounders on the hills and in the wheatfields by night
and day. The Suitable Surroundings evoke's with singular
subtlety yet apparent simplicity a piercing sense of the terror which
may reside in the written word. In the story the weird author Colston
says to his friend Marsh, "You are brave enough to read me in a
street-car, but -- in a deserted house -- alone -- in the forest -- at
night! Bah! I have a manuscript in my pocket that would kill you!" Marsh
reads the manuscript in "the suitable surroundings -- and it does kill
him. The Middle Toe of the Right Foot is clumsily
developed, but has a powerful climax. A man named Manton has horribly
killed his two children and his wife, the latter of whom lacked the
middle toe of the right foot. Ten years later he returns much altered to
the neighbourhood; and, being secretly recognised, is provoked into a
bowie-knife duel in the dark, to be held in the now abandond house where
his crime was committed. When the moment of the duel arrives a trick is
played upon him; and he is left without an antagonist, shut in a
night-black ground floor room of the reputedly haunted edifice, with the
thick dust of a decade on every hand. No, knife is drawn against him,
for only a thorough scare is intended; but on the next day he is found
crouched in a corner with distorted face, dead of sheer fright at
something he has seen. The only clue visible to the discoverers is one
having terrible implications: "In the dust of years that lay thick upon
the floor -- leading from the door by which they had entered, straight
across the room to within a yard of Manton's crouching corpse -- were
three parallel lines of footprints -- light but definite impressions of
bare feet, the outer ones those of small children, the inner a woman's.
From the point at which they ended they did not return; they pointed all
one way." And, of course, the woman's prints showed a lack of the middle
toe of the right foot. The Spook House, told with a
severely homely air of journalistic verisimilitude, conveys terrible
hints of shocking mystery. In 1858 an entire family of seven persons
disappears suddenly and unaccountably from a plantation house in eastern
Kentucky, leaving all its possessions untouched -- furniture, clothing,
food supplies, horses, cattle, and slaves. About a year later two men of
high standing are forced by a storm to take shelter in the deserted
dwelling, and in so doing stumble into a strange subterranean room lit
by an unaccountable greenish light and having an iron door which cannot
be opened from within. In this room lie the decayed corpses of all the
missing family; and as one of the discoverers rushes forward to embrace
a body he seems to recognise, the other is so overpowered by a strange
foetor that he accidentally shuts his companion in the vault and loses
consciousness. Recovering his senses six weeks later, the survivor is
unable to find the hidden room; and the house is burned during the Civil
War. The imprisoned discoverer is never seen or heard of again.
Bierce seldom realises the atmospheric possibilities of his themes as
vividly as Poe; and much of his work contains a certain touch of
naiveté, prosaic angularity, or early-American provincialism which
contrasts somewhat with the efforts of later horror-masters.
Nevertheless the genuineness and artistry of his dark intimations are
always unmistakable, so that his greatness is in no danger of eclipse.
As arranged in his definitively collected works, Bierce's weird tales
occur mainly in two volumes, Can Such Things Be? and
In the Midst of Life. The former, indeed, is almost wholly given
over to, the supernatural.
Much of the best in American horror-literature has come from pens not
mainly devoted to that medium. Oliver Wendell Holmes's historic
Elsie Venner suggests with admirable restraint an unnatural
ophidian element in a young woman prenatally influenced, and sustains
the atmosphere with finely discriminating landscape touches. In
The Turn of the Screw Henry James triumphs over his inevitable
pomposity and prolixity sufficiently well to create a truly potent air
of sinister menace; depicting the hideous influence of two dead and evil
servants, Peter Quint and the governess, Miss Jessel, over a small boy
and girl who had been under their care. James is perhaps too diffuse,
too unctuously urbane, and too much addicted to subtleties of speech to
realise fully all the wild and devastating horror in his situations; but
for all that there is a rare and mounting tide of fright, culminating in
the death of the little boy, which gives the novelette a permanent place
in its special class.
F. Marion Crawford produced several weird tales of varying quality, now
collected in a volume entitled Wandering Ghosts. For
the Blood Is the Life touches powerfully on a case of moon-cursed
vampirism near an ancient tower on the rocks of the lonely South Italian
seacoast. The Dead Smile treats of family horrors in an old
house and an ancestral vault in Ireland, and introduces the banshee with
considerable force. The Upper Berth, however, is Crawford's
weird masterpiece; and is one of the most tremendous horror-stories in
all literature. In this tale of a suicide-haunted stateroom such things
as the spectral saltwater dampness, the strangely open porthole, and the
nightmare struggle with the nameless object are handled with
incomparable dexterity.
Very genuine, though not without the typical mannered extravagance of
the eighteen-nineties, is the strain of horror in the early work of
Robert W. Chambers, since renowned for products of a very different
quality. The King in Yellow, a series of vaguely connected
short stories having as a background a monstrous and suppressed book
whose perusal brings fright, madness, and spectral tragedy, really
achieves notable heights of cosmic fear in spite of uneven interest and
a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio
atmosphere made popular by Du Maurier's Trilby. The most
powerful of its tales, perhaps, is The Yellow Sign, in
which is introduced a silent and terrible churchyard watchman with a
face like a puffy grave-worm's. A boy, describing a tussle he has had
with this creature, shivers and sickens as he relates a certain detail.
"Well, it's Gawd's truth that when I 'it 'im 'e grabbed me wrists, Sir,
and when I twisted 'is soft, mushy fist one of 'is fingers come off in
me 'and." An artist, who after seeing him has shared with another a
strange dream of a nocturnal hearse, is shocked by the voice with which
the watchman accosts him. The fellow emits a muttering sound that fills
the head "like thick oily smoke from a fat-rendering vat or an odour of
noisome decay." What he mumbles is merely this: "Have you found the
Yellow Sign?"
A weirdly hieroglyphed onyx talisman, picked up on the street by the
sharer of his dream, is shortly given the artist; and after stumbling
queerly upon the hellish and forbidden book of horrors the two learn,
among other hideous things which no sane mortal should know, that this
talisman is indeed the nameless Yellow Sign handed down from the
accursed cult of Hastur -- from primordial Carcosa, whereof the volume
treats, and some nightmare memory of which seeks to lurk latent and
ominous at the back of all men's minds. Soon they hear the rumbling of
the black-plumed hearse driven by the flabby and corpse-faced watchman.
He enters the night-shrouded house in quest of the Yellow Sign, all
bolts and bars rotting at his touch. And when the people rush in, drawn
by a scream that no human throat could utter, they find three forms on
the floor -- two dead and one dying. One of the dead shapes is far gone
in decay. It is the churchyard watchman, and the doctor exclaims, "That
man must have been dead for months." It is worth observing that the
author derives most of the names and allusions connected with his
eldritch land of primal memory from the tales of Ambrose Bierce. Other
early works of Mr. Chambers displaying the outré and macabre element are
The Maker of Moons and In Search of the Unknown.
One cannot help regretting that he did not further develop a vein in
which he could so easily have become a recognised master.
Horror material of authentic force may be found in the work of the New
England realist Mary E. Wilkins, whose volume of short tales, The
Wind in the Rosebush, contains a number of noteworthy
achievements. In The Shadows on the Wall we are shown with
consummate skill the response of a staid New England household to
uncanny tragedy; and the sourceless shadow of the poisoned brother well
prepares us for the climactic moment when the shadow of the secret
murderer, who has killed himself in a neighbouring city, suddenly
appears beside it. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in The Yellow Wall
Paper, rises to a classic level in subtly delineating the madness
which crawls over a woman dwelling in the hideously papered room where a
madwoman was once confined.
In The Dead Valley the eminent architect and mediævalist
Ralph Adams Cram achieves a memorably potent degree of vague regional
horror through subtleties of atmosphere and description.
Still further carrying on our spectral tradition is the gifted and
versatile humourist Irvin S. Cobb, whose work both early and recent
contains some finely weird specimens. Fishhead, an early
achievement, is banefully effective in its portrayal of unnatural
affinities between a hybrid idiot and the strange fish of an isolated
lake, which at the last avenge their biped kinsman's murder. Later work
of Mr. Cobb introduces an element of possible science, as in the tale of
hereditary memory where a modern man with a negroid strain utters words
in African jungle speech when run down by a train under visual and aural
circumstances recalling the maiming of his black ancestor by a
rhinoceros a century before.
Extremely high in artistic stature is the novel The Dark Chamber
(1927) by the late Leonard Cline. This is the tale of a man who -- with
the characteristic ambition of the Gothic or Byronic hero-villain --
seeks to defy nature and recapture every moment of his past life through
the abnormal stimulation of memory. To this end he employs endless
notes, records, mnemonic objects, and pictures -- and finally odours,
music, and exotic drugs. At last his ambition goes beyond his personal
life and readies toward the black abysses of hereditary memory
-- even back to pre-human days amidst the steaming swamps of the
carboniferous age, and to still more unimaginable deeps of primal time
and entity. He calls for madder music and takes stranger drugs, and
finally his great dog grows oddly afraid of him. A noxious animal stench
encompasses him, and he grows vacant-faced and subhuman. In the end he
takes to the woods, howling at night beneath windows. He is finally
found in a thicket, mangled to death. Beside him is the mangled corpse
of his dog. They have killed each other. The atmosphere of this novel is
malevolently potent, much attention being paid to the central figure's
sinister home and household.
A less subtle and well-balanced but nevertheless highly effective
creation is Herbert S. Gorman's novel, The Place Called Dagon,
which relates the dark history of a western Massachusetts back-water
where the descendants of refugees from the Salem witchcraft still keep
alive the morbid and degenerate horrors of the Black Sabbat.
Sinister
House, by Leland Hall, has touches of magnificent atmosphere but
is marred by a somewhat mediocre romanticism.
Very notable in their way are some of the weird conceptions of the
novelist and short-story writer Edward Lucas White, most of whose themes
arise from actual dreams. The Song of The Siren has a very
persuasive strangeness, while such things as Lukundoo and
The Snout arouse darker apprehensions. Mr. White imparts a
very peculiar quality to his tales -- an oblique sort of glamour which
has its own distinctive type of convincingness.
Of younger Americans, none strikes the note of cosmic horror so well as
the California poet, artist and fictionist Clark Ashton Smith, whose
bizarre writing, drawings, paintings and stories are the delight of a
sensitive few. Mr. Smith has for his background a universe of remote and
paralysing fright-jungles of poisonous and iridescent blossoms on the
moons of Saturn, evil and grotesque temples in Atlantis, Lemuria, and
forgotten elder worlds, and dank morasses of spotted death-fungi in
spectral countries beyond earth's rim. His longest and most ambitious
poem, The Hashish-Eater, is in pentameter blank verse; and
opens up chaotic and incredible vistas of kaleidoscopic nightmare in the
spaces between the stars. In sheet dæmonic strangeness and fertility of
conception, Mr. Smith is perhaps unexcelled by, any, other writer dead
or living. Who else has seen such gorgeous, luxuriant, and feverishly
distorted visions of infinite spheres and multiple dimensions and lived
to tell the tale? His short stories deal powerfully with other galaxies,
worlds, and dimensions, as well as with strange regions and æons on the
earth. He tells of primal Hyperborea and its black amorphous god
Tsathoggua; of the lost continent Zothique, and of the fabulous,
Vampire-curst land of Averoigne in mediæval France. Some of Mr. Smith's
best work can be found in the brochure entitled The Double Shadow
and Other Fantasies (1933).
IX.
THE WEIRD TRADITION IN THE BRITISH ISLES
RECENT British literature, besides including the three or four greatest
fantaisistes of the present age, has been gratifyingly fertile in the
element of the weird. Rudyard Kipling has often approached it, and has,
despite the omnipresent mannerisms, handled it with indubitable mastery
in such tales as The Phantom Rickshaw, The Finest
Story in the World, The Recrudescence of Imray, and
The Mark of the Beast. This latter is of particular
poignancy; the pictures of the naked leper-priest who mewed like an
otter, of the spots which appeared on the chest of the man that priest
cursed, of the growing carnivorousness of the victim and of the fear
which horses began to display toward him, and of the eventually
half-accomplished transformation of that victim into a leopard, being
things which no reader is ever likely to forget. The final defeat of the
malignant sorcery does not impair the force of the tale or the validity
of its mystery.
Lafcadio Hearn, strange, wandering, and exotic, departs still farther
from the realm of the real; and with the supreme artistry of a sensitive
poet weaves phantasies impossible to an author of the solid roast beef
type. His Fantastics, written in America, contains some of
the most impressive ghoulishness in all literature; whilst his
Kwaidan, written in Japan, crystallises with matchless skill and
delicacy the eerie lore and whispered legends of that richly colourful
nation. Still more of Helm's wizardry of language is shown in some of
his translations from the French, especially from Gautier and Flaubert.
His version of the latter's Temptation of St. Anthony is a
classic of fevered and riotous imagery clad in the magic of singing
words.
Oscar
Wilde may likewise be given a place amongst weird writers, both for
certain of his exquisite fairy tales, and for his vivid Picture of
Dorian Gray, in which a marvellous portrait for years assumes the
duty of aging and coarsening instead of its original, who meanwhile
plunges into every excess of vice and crime without the outward loss of
youth, beauty, and freshness. There is a sudden and potent climax when
Dorian Gray, at last become a murderer, seeks to destroy the painting
whose changes testify to his moral degeneracy. He stabs it with a knife,
and a hideous cry and crash are heard; but when the servants enter they
find it in all its pristine loveliness. "Lying on the floor was a dead
man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered,
wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not until they had examined
the rings that they recognised who he was."
Matthew Phipps Shiel, author of many weird, grotesque, and adventurous
novels and tales, occasionally attains a high level of horrific magic.
Xelucha is a noxiously hideous fragment, but is excelled by
Mr. Shiel's undoubted masterpiece, The House of Sounds,
floridly written in the "yellow nineties," and recast with more artistic
restraint in the early twentieth century. Ibis story, in final form,
deserves a place among the foremost things of its kind. It tells of a
creeping horror and menace trickling down the centuries on a sub-arctic
island off the coast of Norway; where, amidst the sweep of daemon winds
and the ceaseless din of hellish waves and cataracts, a vengeful dead
man built a brazen tower of terror. It is vaguely like, yet infinitely
unlike, Poe's Fall of the House of Usher. In the novel
The Purple Cloud Mr. Shiel describes with tremendous power
a curse which came out of the arctic to destroy mankind, and which for a
time appears to have left but a single inhabitant on our planet. The
sensations of this lone survivor as he realises his position, and roams
through the corpse-littered and treasure-strewn cities of the world as
their absolute master, are delivered with a skill and artistry falling
little short of actual majesty. Unfortunately the second half of the
book, with its conventionally romantic element, involves a distinct
letdown.
Better known than Shiel is the ingenious Bram Stoker, who created many
starkly horrific conceptions in a series of novels whose poor technique
sadly impairs their net effect. The Lair of the White Worm,
dealing with a gigantic primitive entity that lurks in a vault beneath
an ancient castle, utterly ruins a magnificent idea by a development
almost infantile. The Jewel of Seven Stars, touching on a
strange Egyptian resurrection, is less crudely written. But best of all
is the famous Dracula, which has become almost the standard
modern exploitation of the frightful vampire myth. Count Dracula, a
vampire, dwells in a horrible castle in the Carpathians, but finally
migrates to England with the design of populating the country with
fellow vampires. How an Englishman fares within Dracula's stronghold of
terrors, and how the dead fiend's plot for domination is at last
defeated, are elements which unite to form a tale now justly assigned a
permanent place in English letters. Dracula evoked many
similar novels of supernatural horror, among which the best are perhaps
The Beetle, by Richard Marsh, Brood of the
Witch-Queen, by "Sax Rohmer" (Arthur Sarsfield Ward), and
The Door of the Unreal, by Gerald Bliss. The latter handles quite
dexterously the standard werewolf superstition. Much subtler and more
artistic, and told with singular skill through the juxtaposed narratives
of the several characters, is the novel Cold Harbour, by
Francis Brett Young, in which an ancient house of strange malignancy is
powerfully delineated. The mocking and well-nigh omnipotent fiend
Humphrey Furnival holds echoes of the Manfred-Montoni type of early
Gothic "villain," but is redeemed from triteness by many clever
individualities. Only the slight diffuseness of explanation at the
close, and the somewhat too free use of divination as a plot factor,
keep this tale from approaching absolute perfection.
In
the novel Witch Wood John Buchan depicts with tremendous
force a survival of the evil Sabbat in a lonely district of Scotland.
The description of the black forest with the evil stone, and of the
terrible cosmic adumbrations when the horror is finally extirpated, will
repay one for wading through the very gradual action and plethora of
Scottish dialect. Some of Mr. Buchan's short stories are also extremely
vivid in their spectral intimations; The Green Wildebeest,
a tale of African witchcraft, The Wind in the Portico, with
its awakening of dead Britanno-Roman horrors, and Skule Skerry,
with its touches of sub-arctic fright, being especially remarkable.
Clemence Housman, in the brief novelette The Werewolf,
attains a high degree of gruesome tension and achieves to some extent
the atmosphere of authentic folklore. In The Elixir of Life
Arthur Ransome attains some darkly excellent effects despite a general
naiveté of plot, while H. B. Drake's The Shadowy Thing
summons up strange and terrible vistas. George Macdonald's Lilith
has a compelling bizarrerie all its own, the first and simpler of the
two versions being perhaps the more effective.
Deserving of distinguished notice as a forceful craftsman to whom an
unseen mystic world is, ever a dose and vital reality is the poet Walter
de la Mare, whose haunting verse and exquisite prose alike bear
consistent traces of a strange vision reaching deeply into veiled
spheres of beauty and terrible and forbidden dimensions of being. In the
novel The Return we see the soul of a dead man reach out of
its grave of two centuries and fasten itself upon the flesh of the
living, so that even the face of the victim becomes that which had long
ago returned to dust. Of the shorter tales, of which several volumes
exist, many are unforgettable for their command of fear's and sorcery's
darkest ramifications; notably Seaton's Aunt, in which
there lowers a noxious background of malignant vampirism; The
Tree, which tells of a frightful vegetable growth in the yard of
a starving artist; Out of the Deep, wherein we are given
leave to imagine what thing answered the summons of a dying wastrel in a
dark lonely house when he pulled a long-feared bell-cord in the attic of
his dread-haunted boyhood; A Recluse, which hints at what
sent a chance guest flying from a house in the night; Mr. Kempe,
which shows us a mad clerical hermit in quest of the human soul,
dwelling in a frightful sea-cliff region beside an archaic abandoned
chapel; and All-Hallows, a glimpse of dæmoniac forces
besieging a lonely mediaeval church and miraculously restoring the
rotting masonry. De la Mare does not make fear the sole or even the
dominant element of most of his tales, being apparently more interested
in the subtleties of character involved. Occasionally he sinks to sheer
whimisical phantasy of the Barrie order. Still he is among the very few
to whom unreality is a vivid, living presence; and as such he is able to
put into his occasional fear-studies a keen potency which only a rare
master can achieve. His poem The Listeners restores the
Gothic shudder to modern verse.
The
weird short story has fared well of late, an important contributor being
the versatile E. F. Benson, whose The Man Who Went Too Far
breathes whisperingly of a house at the edge of a dark wood, and of
Pan's hoof-mark on the breast of a dead man. Mr. Benson's volume,
Visible and Invisible, contains several stories of singular
power; notably Negotiam Perambulans, whose unfolding
reveals an abnormal monster from an ancient ecclesiastical panel which
performs an act of miraculous vengeance in a lonely village on the
Cornish coast, and The Horror-Horn, through which lopes a
terrible half-human survival dwelling on unvisited Alpine peaks.
The Face, in another collection, is lethally potent, in its
relentless aura of doom. H. R. Wakefield, in his collections, They
Return at Evening and Others Who Return, manages now
and then to achieve great heights of horror despite a vitiating air of
sophistication. The most notable stories are The Red Lodge
with its slimy acqueous evil, He Cometh and He Passeth By, And He
Shall Sing, The Cairn, Look Up There,
Blind Man's Buff, and that bit of lurking millennial
horror, The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster. Mention has been
made of the weird work of H.G. Wells and A. Conan Doyle. The former, in
The Ghost of Fear, reaches a very high level while all the
items in Thirty Strange Stories have strong fantastic
implications. Doyle now and then struck a powerfully spectral note, as
in The Captain of the Pole-Star, a tale of arctic
ghostliness, and Lot No. 249, wherein the reanimated mummy
theme is used with more than ordinary skill. Hugh Walpole, of the same
family as the founder of Gothic fiction, has sometimes approached the
bizarre with much success, his short story Mrs. Lunt
carrying a very poignant shudder. John Metcalfe, in the collection
published as The Smoking Leg, attains now and then a rare
pitch of potency, the tale entitled The Bad Lands,
containing graduations of horror that strongly savour of genius. More
whimiscial and inclined toward the amiable and innocuous phantasy of Sir
J. M. Barrie are the short tales of E.M. Forster, grouped under the
title of The Celestial Omnibus. Of these only one, dealing
with a glimpse of Pan and his aura of fright, may be said to hold the
true element of cosmic horror. Mrs. H.D. Everett, though adhering to
very old and conventional models, occasionally reaches singular heights
of spiritual terror in her collection of short stories, The Death
Mask. L. P. Hartley is notable for his incisive and extremely
ghastly tale, A Visitor from Down Under, May Sinclair's
Uncanny Stories contain more of traditional "occultism"
than of that creative treatment of fear which marks mastery in this
field, and are inclined to lay more stress on human emotions and
psychological delving than upon the stark phenomena of a cosmos utterly
unreal. It may be well to remark here that occult believers are probably
less effective than materialists in delineating the spectral and the
fantastic, since to them the phantom world is so commonplace a reality
that they tend to refer to it with less awe, remoteness, and
impressiveness thin do those who see in it an absolute and stupendous
violation of the natural order.
Of
rather uneven stylistic quality, but vast occasional power in its
suggestion of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of
life, is the work of William Hope Hodgson, known today far less than it
deserves to be. Despite a tendency toward conventionally sentimental
conceptions of the universe, and of man's relation to it and to his
fellows, Mr. Hodgson is perhaps second only to Algernon Blackwood in his
serious treatment of unreality. Few can equal him in adumbrating the
nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities through
casual hints and insignificant details, or in conveying feelings of the
spectral and the abnormal in connection with regions or buildings.
In
The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907) we are shown a variety
of malign marvels and accursed unknown lands as encountered by the
survivors of a sunken ship. The brooding menace in the earlier parts of
the book is impossible to surpass, though a letdown in the direction of
ordinary romance and adventure occurs toward the end. An inaccurate and
pseudo-romantic attempt to reproduce eighteenth-century prose detracts
from the general effect, but the really profound nautical erudition
everywhere displayed is a compensating factor.
The House on the Borderland (1908) -- perhaps the greatest
of all Mr. Hodgson's works -- tells of a lonely and evilly regarded
house in Ireland which forms a focus for hideous otherworld forces and
sustains a siege by blasphemous hybrid anomalies from a hidden abyss
below. The wanderings of the Narrator's spirit through limitless
light-years of cosmic space and Kalpas of eternity, and its witnessing
of the solar system's final destruction, constitute something almost
unique in standard literature. And everywhere there is manifest the
author's power to suggest vague, ambushed horrors in natural scenery.
But for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality this book would be a
classic of the first water.
The Ghost Pirates (1909), regarded by Mr. Hodgson as
rounding out a trilogy with the two previously mentioned works, is a
powerful account of a doomed and haunted ship on its last voyage, and of
the terrible sea-devils (of quasi-human aspect, and perhaps the spirits
of bygone buccaneers) that besiege it and finally drag it down to an
unknown fate. With its command of maritime knowledge, and its clever
selection of hints and incidents suggestive of latent horrors in nature,
this book at times reaches enviable peaks of power.
The Night Land (1912) is a long-extended (538 pp.) tale of
the earth's infinitely remote future-billions of billions of years
ahead, after the death of the sun. It is told in a rather clumsy
fashion, as the dreams of a man in the seventeenth century, whose mind
merges with its own future incarnation; and is seriously marred by
painful verboseness, repetitiousness, artificial and nauseously sticky
romantic sentimentality, and an attempt at archaic language even more
grotesque and absurd than that in Glen Carrig.
Allowing for all its faults, it is yet one of the most potent pieces of
macabre imagination ever written. The picture of a night-black, dead
planet, with the remains of the human race concentrated in a
stupendously vast mental pyramid and besieged by monstrous, hybrid, and
altogether unknown forces of the darkness, is something that no reader
can ever forget: Shapes and entities of an altogether non-human and
inconceivable sort -- the prowlers of the black, man-forsaken, and
unexplored world outside the pyramid -- are suggested and partly
described with ineffable potency; while the night-land landscape with
its chasms and slopes and dying volcanism takes on an almost sentient
terror beneath the author's touch.
Midway in the book the central figure ventures outside the pyramid on a
quest through death-haunted realms untrod by man for millions of years
-- and in his slow, minutely described, day-by-day progress over
unthinkable leagues of immemorial blackness there is a sense of cosmic
alienage, breathless mystery, and terrified expectancy unrivalled in the
whole range of literature. The last quarter of the book drags woefully,
but fails to spoil the tremendous power of the whole. Mr. Hodgson's
later volume, Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, consists of
several longish short stories published many years before in magazines.
In quality it falls conspicuously below the level of the other books. We
here find a more or less conventional stock figure of the "infallible
detective" type -- the progeny of M. Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, and the
close kin of Algernon Blackwood's John Silence -- moving through scenes
and events badly marred by an atmosphere of professional "occultism." A
few of the episodes, however, are of undeniable power, and afford
glimpses of the peculiar genius characteristic of the author.
Naturally it is impossible in brief sketch to trace out all the classic
modern uses of the terror element. The ingredient must of necessity
enter into all work, both prose and verse, treating broadly of life; and
we are therefore not surprised to find a share in such writers as the
poet Browning, whose Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
is instinct with hideous menace, or the novelist Joseph Conrad, who
often wrote of the dark secrets within the sea, and of the dæmoniac
driving power of Fate as influencing the lives of lonely and maniacally
resolute men. Its trail is one of infinite ramifications; but we must
here confine ourselves to its appearance in a relatively unmixed state,
where it determines and dominates the work of art containing it.
Somewhat separate from the main British stream is that current of
weirdness in Irish literature which came to the fore in the Celtic
Renaissance of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ghost
and fairy lore have always been of great prominence in Ireland, and for
over a hundred years have been recorded by a line of such faithful
transcribers and translators as William Carleton, T. Crofton Croker,
Lady Wilde -- mother of Oscar Wilde -- Douglas Hyde, and W.B. Yeats.
Brought to notice by the modern movement, this body of myth has been
carefully collected and studied; and its salient features reproduced in
the work of later figures like Yeats, J. M. Synge, "A. E.," Lady
Gregory, Padraic Colum, James Stephens and their colleagues.
Whilst on the whole more whimsically fantastic than terrible, such
folklore and its consciously artistic counterparts contain much that
falls truly within the domain of cosmic horror. Tales of burials in
sunken churches beneath haunted lakes, accounts of death-heralding
banshees and sinister changelings, ballads of spectres and "the unholy
creatures of the Raths" -- all these have their poignant and definite
shivers, and mark a strong and distinctive element in weird literature.
Despite homely grotesqueness and absolute naiveté, there is genuine
nightmare in the class of narrative represented by the yarn of Teig
O'Kane, who in punishment for his wild life was ridden all night by a
hideous corpse that demanded burial and drove him from churchyard to
churchyard as the dead rose up loathsomely in each one and refused to
accommodate the newcomer with a berth. Yeats, undoubtedly the greatest
figure of the Irish revival if not the greatest of all living poets, has
accomplished notable things both in original work and in the
codification of old legends.
X.
THE MODERN MASTERS
THE
best horror-tales of today, profiting by the long evolution of the type,
possess a naturalness, convincingness, artistic smoothness, and skilful
intensity of appeal quite beyond comparison with anything in the Gothic
work of a century or more ago. Technique, craftsmanship, experience, and
psychological knowledge have advanced tremendously with the passing
years, so that much of the older work seems naive and artificial;
redeemed, when redeemed at all, only by a genius which conquers heavy
limitations. The tone of jaunty and inflated romance, full of false
motivation and investing every conceivable event with a counterfeit
significance and carelessly inclusive glamour, is now confined to
lighter and more whimiscal phases of supernatural writing. Serious weird
stories are either made realistically intense by dose consistency and
perfect fidelity to Nature except in the one supernatural direction
which the author allows himself, or else cast altogether in the realm of
phantasy, with atmosphere cunningly adapted to the visualisation of a
delicately exotic world of unreality beyond space and time, in which
almost anything may happen if it but happen in true accord with certain
types of imagination and illusion normal to the sensitive human brain.
This, at least, is the dominant tendency; though of course many great
contemporary writers slip occasionally into some of the flashy postures
of immature romanticism or into bits of the equally empty and absurd
jargon of pseudo-scientific "occultism," now at one of its periodic high
tides.
Of
living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if
any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen, author of some dozen
tales long and short, in which the elements of hidden horror and
brooding fright attain an almost incomparable substance and realistic
acuteness. Mr. Machen, a general man of letters and master of an
exquisitely lyrical and expressive prose style, has perhaps put more
conscious effort into his picaresque Chronicles of Clemendy,
his refreshing essays, his vivid autobiographical volumes, his fresh and
spirited translations, and above all his memorable epic of the sensitive
æsthetic mind, The Hill of Dreams, in which the youthful
hero responds to the magic of that ancient Welsh environment which is
the author's own, and lives a dream-life in the Roman city of Isca
Silurum, now shrunk to the relic-strown village of Caerleon-on-Usk. But
the fact remains that his powerful horror-material of the nineties and
earlier nineteen-hundreds stands alone in its class, and marks a
distinct epoch in the history of this literary form.
Mr.
Machen, with an impressionable Celtic heritage linked to keen youthful
memories of the wild domed hills, archaic forests, and cryptical Roman
ruins of the Gwent countryside, has developed an imaginative life of
rare beauty, intensity, and historic background. He has absorbed the
mediaeval mystery of dark woods and ancient customs, and is a champion
of the Middle Ages in all things -- including the Catholic faith. He has
yielded, likewise, to the spell of the Britanno-Roman life which once
surged over his native region; and finds strange magic in the fortified
camps, tessellated pavements, fragments of statues, and kindred things
which tell of the day when classicism reigned and Latin was the language
of the country. A young American poet, Frank Belknap Long, has well
summarised this dreamer's rich endowments and wizardry of expression in
the sonnet On Reading Arthur Machen:
There
is a glory in the autumn wood,
The ancient lanes of England wind and climb
Past wizard oaks and gorse and tangled thyme
To where a fort of mighty empire stood:
There is a glamour in the autumn sky;
The reddened clouds are writhing in the glow
Of some great fire, and there are glints below
Of tawny yellow where the embers die.
I wait, for he will show me, clear and cold,
High-rais'd in splendour, sharp against the North,
The Roman eagles, and through mists of gold
The marching legions as they issue forth:
I wait, for I would share with him again
The ancient wisdom, and the ancient pain.
Of
Mr. Machen's horror-tales the most famous is perhaps The Great God
Pan (1894) which tells of a singular and terrible experiment and
its consequences. A young woman, through surgery of the brain-cells, is
made to see the vast and monstrous deity of Nature, and becomes an idiot
in consequence, dying less than a year later. Years afterward a strange,
ominous, and foreign-looking child named Helen Vaughan is placed to
board with a family in rural Wales, and haunts the woods in
unaccountable fashion. A little boy is thrown out of his mind at sight
of someone or something he spies with her, and a young girl comes to a
terrible end in similar fashion. All this mystery is strangely
interwoven with the Roman rural deities of the place, as sculptured in
antique fragments. After another lapse of years, a woman of strangely
exotic beauty appears in society, drives her husband to horror and
death, causes an artist to paint unthinkable paintings of Witches'
Sabbaths, creates an epidemic of suicide among the men of her
acquaintance, and is finally discovered to be a frequenter of the lowest
dens of vice in London, where even the most callous degenerates are
shocked at her enormities. Through the clever comparing of notes on the
part of those who have had word of her at various stages of her career,
this woman is discovered to be the girl Helen Vaughan, who is the child
-- by no mortal father -- of the young woman on whom the brain
experiment was made. She is a daughter of hideous Pan himself, and at
the last is put to death amidst horrible transmutations of form
involving changes of sex and a descent to the most primal manifestations
of the life-principle.
But
the charm of the tale is in the telling. No one could begin to describe
the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph
abounds without following fully the precise order in which Mr. Machen
unfolds his gradual hints and revelations. Melodrama is undeniably
present, and coincidence is stretched to a length which appears absurd
upon analysis; but in the malign witchery of the tale as a whole these
trifles are forgotten, and the sensitive reader reaches the end with
only an appreciative shudder and a tendency to repeat the words of one
of the characters: "It is too incredible, too monstrous; such things can
never be in this quiet world.... Why, man, if such a case were possible,
our earth would be a nightmare."
Less
famous and less complex in plot than The Great God Pan, but
definitely finer in atmosphere and general artistic value, is the
curious and dimly disquieting chronicle called The White People,
whose central portion purports to be the diary or notes of a little girl
whose nurse has introduced her to some of the forbidden magic and
soul-blasting traditions of the noxious witch-cult -- the cult whose
whispered lore was handed down long lines of peasantry throughout
Western Europe, and whose members sometimes stole forth at night, one by
one, to meet in black woods and lonely places for the revolting orgies
of the Witches' Sabbath. Mr. Machen's narrative, a triumph of skilful
selectiveness and restraint, accumulates enormous power as it flows on
in a stream of innocent childish prattle, introducing allusions to
strange "nymphs," "Dols," "voolas," "white, green, and scarlet
ceremonies," "Aklo letters," "Chian language," "Mao games," and the
like. The rites learned by the nurse from her witch grandmother are
taught to the child by the time she is three years old, and her artless
accounts of the dangerous secret revelations possess a lurking terror
generously mixed with pathos. Evil charms well known to anthropologists
are described with juvenile naiveté, and finally there comes a winter
afternoon journey into the old Welsh hills, performed under an
imaginative spell which lends to the wild scenery an added weirdness,
strangeness, and suggestion of grotesque sentience. The details of this
journey are given with marvellous vividness, and form to the keen critic
a masterpiece of fantastic writing, with almost unlimited power in the
intimation of potent hideousness and cosmic aberration. At length the
child -- whose age is then thirteen -- comes upon a cryptic and
banefully beautiful thing in the midst of a dark and inaccessible wood.
In the end horror overtakes her in a manner deftly prefigured by an
anecdote in the prologue, but she poisons herself in time. Like the
mother of Helen Vaughan in The Great God Pan, she has seen
that frightful deity. She is discovered dead in the dark wood beside the
cryptic thing she found; and that thing -- a whitely luminous statue of
Roman workmanship about which dire mediæval rumours had clustered -- is
affrightedly hammered into dust by the searchers.
In
the episodic novel of The Three Impostors, a work whose,
merit as a whole is somewhat marred by an imitation of the jaunty
Stevenson manner, occur certain tales which perhaps represent the
highwater mark of Machen's skill as a terror-weaver. Here we find in its
most artistic form a favourite weird conception of the author's; the
notion that beneath the mounds and rocks of the wild Welsh hills dwell
subterraneously that squat primitive race whose vestiges gave rise to
our common folk legends of fairies, elves, and the "little people," and
whose acts are even now responsible for certain unexplained
disappearances, and occasional substitutions of strange dark
"changelings" for normal infants. This theme receives its finest
treatment in the episode entitled The Novel Of The Black Seal;
where a professor, having discovered a singular identity between certain
characters scrawled on Welsh limestone rocks and those existing in a
prehistoric black seal from Babylon, sets out on a course of discovery
which leads him to unknown and terrible things. A queer passage in the
ancient geographer Solinus, a series of mysterious disappearances in the
lonely reaches of Wales, a strange idiot son born to a rural mother
after a fright in which her inmost faculties were shaken; all these
things suggest to the professor a hideous connection and a condition
revolting to any friend and respecter of the human race. He hires the
idiot boy, who jabbers strangely at times in a repulsive hissing voice,
and is subject to odd epileptic seizures. Once, after such a seizure in
the professor's study by night, disquieting odours and evidences of
unnatural presences are found; and soon after that the professor leaves
a bulky document and goes into the weird hills with feverish expectancy
and strange terror in his heart. He never returns, but beside a
fantastic stone in the wild country are found his watch, money, and
ring, done up with catgut in a parchment bearing the same terrible
characters as those on the black Babylonish seal and the rock in the
Welsh mountains.
The
bulky document explains enough to bring up the most hideous vistas.
Professor Gregg, from the massed evidence presented by the Welsh
disappearances, the rock inscription, the accounts of ancient
geographers, and the black seal, has decided that a frightful race of
dark primal beings of immemorial antiquity and wide former diffusion
still dwell beneath the hills of unfrequented Wales. Further research
has unriddled the message of the black seal, and proved that the idiot
boy, a son of some father more terrible than mankind, is the heir of
monstrous memories and possibilities. That strange night in the study
the professor invoked "the awful transmutation of the hills" by the aid
of the black seal, and aroused in the hybrid idiot the horrors of his
shocking paternity. He "saw his body swell and become distended as a
bladder, while the face blackened. . . ." And then the supreme effects
of the invocation appeared, and Professor Gregg knew the stark frenzy of
cosmic panic in its darkest form. He knew the abysmal gulfs of
abnormality that he had opened, and went forth into the wild hills
prepared and resigned. He would meet the unthinkable "Little People" --
and his document ends with a rational observation: "If unhappily I do
not return from my journey, there is no need to conjure up here a
picture of the awfulness of my fate."
Also
in The Three Imposters is the Novel of the White
Powder, which approaches the absolute culmination of loathsome
fright. Francis Leicester, a young law student nervously worn out by
seclusion and overwork, has a prescription filled by an old apothecary
none too careful about the state of his drugs. The substance, it later
turns out, is an unusual salt which time and varying temperature have
accidentally changed to something very strange and terrible; nothing
less, in short, than the mediæval vinum sabbati, whose
consumption at the horrible orgies of the Witches' Sabbath gave rise to
shocking transformations and -- if injudiciously used -- to unutterable
consequences. Innocently enough, the youth regularly imbibes the powder
in a glass of water after meals; and at first seems substantially
benefited. Gradually, however, his improved spirits take the form of
dissipation; he is absent from home a great deal, and appears to have
undergone a repellent psychological change. One day an odd livid spot
appears on his right hand, and he afterward returns to his seclusion;
finally keeping himself shut within his room and admitting none of the
household. The doctor calls for an interview, and departs in a palsy of
horror, saying that he can do no more in that house. Two weeks later the
patient's sister, walking outside, sees a monstrous thing at the
sickroom window; and servants report that food left at the locked door
is no longer touched. Summons at the door bring only a sound of
shuffling and a demand in a thick gurgling voice to be let alone. At
last an awful happening is reported by a shuddering housemaid. The
ceiling of the room below Leicester's is stained with a hideous black
fluid, and a pool of viscid abomination has dripped to the bed beneath.
Dr. Haberden, now persuaded to return to the house, breaks down the
young man's door and strikes again and again with an iron bar at the
blasphemous semiliving thing he finds there. It is "a dark and putrid
mass, seething with corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid
nor solid, but melting and changing." Burning points like eyes shine out
of its midst, and before it is dispatched it tries to lift what might
have been an arm. Soon afterward the physician, unable to endure the
memory of what he has beheld, dies at sea while bound for a new life in
America. Mr. Machen returns to the dæmoniac "Little People" in The
Red Hand and The Shining Pyramid; and in The
Terror, a wartime story, he treats with very potent mystery the
effect of man's modern repudiation of spirituality on the beasts of the
world, which are thus led to question his supremacy and to unite for his
extermination. Of utmost delicacy, and passing from mere horror into
true mysticism, is The Great Return, a story of the Graal,
also a product of the war period. Too well known to need description
here is the tale of The Bowmen; which, taken for authentic
narration, gave rise to the widespread legend of the "Angels of Mons" --
ghosts of the old English archers of Crecy and Agincourt who fought in
1914 beside the hard-pressed ranks of England's glorious "Old
Contemptibles."
Less
intense than Mr. Machen in delineating the extremes of stark fear, yet
infinitely more closely wedded to the idea of an unreal world constantly
pressing upon ours is the inspired and prolific Algernon Blackwood,
amidst whose voluminous and uneven work may be found some of the finest
spectral literature of this or any age. Of the quality of Mr.
Blackwood's genius there can be no dispute; for no one has even
approached the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which he
records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences,
or the preternatural insight with which he builds up detail by detail
the complete sensations and perceptions leading from reality into
supernormal life or vision. Without notable command of the poetic
witchery of mere words, he is the one absolute and unquestioned master
of weird atmosphere; and can evoke what amounts almost to a story from a
simple fragment of humourless psychological description. Above all
others he understands how fully some sensitive minds dwell forever on
the borderland of dream, and how relatively slight is the distinction
betwixt those images formed from actual objects and those excited by the
play of the imagination.
Mr.
Blackwood's lesser work is marred by several defects such as ethical
didacticism, occasional insipid whimsicality, the flatness of benignant
supernaturalism, and a too free use of the trade jargon of modem
"occultism." A fault of his more serious efforts is that diffuseness and
long-windedness which results from an excessively elaborate attempt,
under the handicap of a somewhat bald and journalistic style devoid of
intrinsic magic, colour, and vitality, to visualise precise sensations
and nuances of uncanny suggestion. But in spite of all this, the major
products of Mr. Blackwood attain a genuinely classic level, and evoke as
does nothing else in literature in awed convinced sense of the imminence
of strange spiritual spheres of entities.
The
well-nigh endless array of Mr. Blackwood's fiction includes both novels
and shorter tales, the latter sometimes independent and sometimes
arrayed in series. Foremost of all must be reckoned The Willows,
in which the nameless presences on a desolate Danube island are horribly
felt and recognised by a pair of idle voyagers. Here art and restraint
in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of
lasting poignancy is produced without a, single strained passage or a
single false note. Another amazingly potent though less artistically
finished tale is The Wendigo, where we are confronted by
horrible evidences of a vast forest dæmon about which North Woods
lumbermen whisper at evening. The manner in which certain footprints
tell certain unbelievable things is really a marked triumph in
craftsmanship. In An Episode in a Lodging House we behold
frightful presences summoned out of black space by a sorcerer, and
The Listener tells of the awful psychic residuum creeping about
an old house where a leper died. In the volume titled Incredible
Adventures occur some of the finest tales which the author has
yet produced, leading the fancy to wild rites on nocturnal hills, to
secret and terrible aspects lurking behind stolid scenes, and to
unimaginable vaults of mystery below the sands and pyramids of Egypt;
all with a serious finesse and delicacy that convince where a cruder or
lighter treatment would merely amuse. Some of these accounts are hardly
stories at all, but rather studies in elusive impressions and
half-remembered snatches of dream. Plot is everywhere negligible, and
atmosphere reigns untrammelled.
John Silence -- Physician Extraordinary is a book of five
related tales, through which a single character runs his triumphant
course. Marred only by traces of the popular and conventional
detective-story atmosphere -- for Dr. Silence is one of those benevolent
geniuses who employ their remarkable powers to aid worthy fellow-men in
difficulty -- these narratives contain some of the author's best work,
and produce an illusion at once emphatic and lasting. The opening tale,
A Psychical Invasion, relates what befell a sensitive
author in a house once the scene of dark deeds, and how a legion of
fiends was exorcised. Ancient Sorceries, perhaps the finest
tale in the book, gives an almost hypnotically vivid account of an old
French town where once the unholy Sabbath was kept by all the people in
the form of cats. In The Nemesis of Fire a hideous
elemental is evoked by new-spilt blood, whilst Secret Worship
tells of a German school where Satanism held sway, and where long
afterward an evil aura remained. The Camp of the Dog is a
werewolf tale, but is weakened by moralisation and professional
"occultism."
Too
subtle, perhaps, for definite classification as horror-tales, yet
possibly more truly artistic in an absolute sense, are such delicate
phantasies as Jimbo or The Centaur. Mr.
Blackwood achieves in these novels a close and palpitant approach to the
inmost substance of dream, and works enormous havoc with the
conventional barriers between reality and imagination.
Unexcelled in the sorcery of crystalline singing prose, and supreme in
the creation of a gorgeous and languorous world of iridescently exotic
vision, is Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Eighteenth Baron Dunsany,
whose tales and short plays form an almost unique element in our
literature. Inventor of a new mythology and weaver of surprising
folklore, Lord Dunsany stands dedicated to a strange world of fantastic
beauty, and pledged to eternal warfare against the coarseness and
ugliness of diurnal reality. His point of view is the most truly cosmic
of any held in the literature of any period. As sensitive as Poe to
dramatic values and the significance of isolated words and details, and
far better equipped rhetorically through a simple lyric style based on
the prose of the King James Bible, this author draws with tremendous
effectiveness on nearly every body of myth and legend within the circle
of European culture; producing a composite or eclectic cycle of phantasy
in which Eastern colour, Hellenic form, Teutonic sombreness and Celtic
wistfulness are so superbly blended that each sustains and supplements
the rest without sacrifice or perfect congruity and homogeneity. In most
cases Dunsany's lands are fabulous -- "beyond the East," or "at the edge
of the world." His system of original personal and place names, with
roots drawn from classical, Oriental, and other sources, is a marvel of
versatile inventiveness and poetic discrimination; as one may see from
such specimens as "Argimenes," "Bethmoora," "Poltarnees," "Camorak," "Iluriel,"
or "Sardathrion."
Beauty rather than terror is the keynote of Dunsany's work. He loves the
vivid green of jade and of copper domes, and the delicate flush of
sunset on the ivory minarets of impossible dream-cities. Humour and
irony, too, are often present to impart a gentle cynicism and modify
what might otherwise possess a naïve intensity. Nevertheless, as is
inevitable in a master of triumphant unreality, there are occasional
touches of cosmic fright which come well within the authentic tradition.
Dunsany loves to hint slyly and adroitly of monstrous things and
incredible dooms, as one hints in a fairy tale. In The Book of
Wonder we read of Hlo-Hlo, the gigantic spider-idol which does
not always stay at home; of what the Sphinx feared in the forest; of
Slith, the thief who jumps over the edge of the world after seeing a
certain light lit and knowing who lit it; of the anthropophagous;
Gibbelins, who inhabit an evil tower and guard a treasure; of the Gnoles,
who live in the forest and from whom it is not well to steal; of the
City of Never, and the eyes that watch in the Under Pits; and of kindred
things of darkness. A Dreamer's Tales tells of the mystery
that sent forth all men from Bethmoora in the desert; of the vast gate
of Perdondaris, that was carved from a single piece of ivory;
and of the voyage of poor old Bill, whose captain cursed the crew and
paid calls on nasty-looking isles new-risen from the sea, with low
thatched cottages having evil, obscure windows.
Many
of Dunsany's short plays are replete with spectral fear. In The
Gods of the Mountain seven beggars impersonate the seven green
idols on a distant hill, and enjoy ease and honour in a city of
worshippers until they hear that the real idols are missing from
their wonted seats. A very ungainly sight in the dusk is reported
to them -- "rock should not wall in the evening" -- and at last, as they
sit awaiting the arrival of a troop of dancers, they note that the
approaching footsteps are heavier than those of good dancers ought to
be. Then things ensue, and in the end the presumptuous blasphemers are
turned to green jade statues by the very walking statues whose sanctity
they outraged. But mere plot is the very least merit of this
marvellously effective play. The incidents and developments are those of
a supreme master, so that the whole forms one of the most important
contributions of the present age not only to drama, but to literature in
general. A Night at an Inn tells of four thieves who have
stolen the emerald eye of Klesh, a monstrous Hindoo god. They lure to
their room and succeed in slaying the three priestly avengers who are on
their track, but in the night Mesh comes gropingly for his eye; and
having gained it and departed, calls each of the despoilers out into the
darkness for an unnamed punishment. In The Laughter of the Gods
there is a doomed city at the jungle's edge, and a ghostly lutanist
heard only by those about to die (cf. Alice's spectral harpsichord in
Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables); whilst The
Queen's Enemies retells the anecdote of Herodotus in which a
vengeful princess invites her foes to a subterranean banquet and lets in
the Nile to drown them. But no amount of mere description can convey
more than a fraction of Lord Dunsany's pervasive charm. His prismatic
cities and unheard of rites are touched with a sureness which only
mastery can engender, and we thrill with a sense of actual participation
in his secret mysteries. To the truly imaginative he is a talisman and a
key unlocking rich storehouses of dream and fragmentary memory; so that
we may think of him not only as a poet, but as one who makes each reader
a poet as well.
At
the opposite pole of genius from Lord Dunsany, and gifted with an almost
diabolic power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of
prosaic daily life, is the scholarly Montague Rhodes James, Provost of
Eton College, antiquary of note, and recognized authority on mediæval
manuscripts and cathedral history. Dr. James, long fond of telling
spectral tales at Christmastide, has become by slow degrees a literary
weird fictionist of the very first rank; and has developed a distinctive
style and method likely to serve as models for an enduring line of
disciples.
The
art of Dr. James is by no means haphazard, and in the preface to one of
his collections he has formulated three very sound rules for macabre
composition. A ghost story, he believes, should have a familiar setting
in the modem period, in order to approach closely the reader's sphere of
experience. Its spectral phenomena, moreover, should be malevolent
rather than beneficent; since fear is the emotion primarily to
be excited. And finally, the technical patois of "occultism" or
pseudo-science ought carefully to be avoided; lest the charm of casual
verisimilitude be smothered in unconvincing pedantry.
Dr.
James, practicing what he preaches, approaches his themes in a light and
often conversational way. Creating the illusion of every-day events, he
introduces his abnormal phenomena cautiously and gradually; relieved at
every turn by touches of homely and prosaic detail, and sometimes spiced
with a snatch or two of antiquarian scholarship. Conscious of the dose
relation between present weirdness and accumulated tradition, he
generally provides remote historical antecedents for his incidents; thus
being able to utilise very aptly his exhaustive knowledge of the past,
and his ready and convincing command of archaic diction and colouring. A
favourite scene for a James tale is some centuried cathedral, which the
author can describe with all the familiar minuteness of a specialist in
that field.
Sly
humourous vignettes and bits of lifelike genre portraiture and
characterisation are often to be found in Dr. James's narratives, and
serve in his skilled hands to augment the general effect rather than to
spoil it, as the same qualities would tend to do with a lesser
craftsman. In inventing a new type of ghost, he has departed
considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition; for where the older
stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the
sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairy --
a sluggish, hellish night -- abomination midway betwixt beast and man --
and usually touched before it is seen. Sometimes the
spectre is of still more eccentric composition; a roll of flannel with
spidery eyes, or an invisible entity which moulds itself in bedding and
shows a face of crumpled linen. Dr. James has, it is clear, an
intelligent and scientific knowledge of human nerves and feelings; and
knows just how to apportion statement, imagery, and subtle suggestions
in order to secure the best results with his readers. He is an artist in
incident and arrangement rather than in atmosphere, and reaches the
emotions more often through the intellect than directly. This method, of
course, with its occasional absences of sharp climax, has its drawbacks
as well as its advantages; and many will miss the thorough atmospheric
tension which writers like Machen are careful to build up with words and
scenes. But only a few of the tales are open to the charge of tameness.
Generally the laconic unfolding of abnormal events in adroit order is
amply sufficient to produce the desired effect of cumulative horror.
The
short stories of Dr. James are contained in four small collections,
entitled respectively Ghost Stories of an Antiquary,
More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, A Thin Ghost and
Others, and A Warning to the Curious. There is also
a delightful juvenile phantasy, The Five Jars, which has
its spectral adumbrations. Amidst this wealth of material it is hard to
select a favourite or especially typical tale, though each reader will
no doubt have such preferences as his temperament may determine.
Count Magnus is assuredly one of the best, forming as it
does a veritable Golconda of suspense and suggestion. Mr. Wraxall is an
English traveller of the middle nineteenth century, sojourning in Sweden
to secure material for a book. Becoming interested in the ancient family
of De La Gardie, near the village of Raback, he studies its records; and
finds particular fascination in the builder of the existing Manor-house,
one Count Magnus, of whom strange and terrible things are whispered. The
Count, who flourished early in the seventeenth century, was a stern
landlord, and famous for his severity toward poachers and delinquent
tenants. His cruel punishments were bywords, and there were dark rumours
of influences which even survived his interment in the great mausoleum
he built near the church -- as in the case of the two peasants who
hunted on his preserves one night a century after his death. There were
hideous screams in the woods, and near the tomb of Count Magnus an
unnatural laugh and the clang of a great door. Next morning the priest
found the two men; one a maniac, and the other dead, with the flesh of
his face sucked from the bones.
Mr.
Wraxall hears all these tales, and stumbles on more guarded references
to a Black Pilgrimage once taken by the Count, a pilgrimage to Chorazin
in Palestine, one of the cities denounced by Our Lord in the Scriptures,
and in which old priests say that Antichrist is to be born. No one dares
to hint just what that Black Pilgrimage was, or what strange being or
thing the Count brought back as a companion. Meanwhile Mr. Wraxall is
increasingly anxious to explore the mausoleum of Count Magnus, and
finally secures permission to do so, in the company of a deacon. He
finds several monuments and three copper sarcophagi, one of which is the
Count's. Round the edge of this latter are several bands of engraved
scenes, including a singular and hideous delineation of a pursuit -- the
pursuit of a frantic man through a forest by a squat muffled figure with
a devil-fish's tentacle, directed by a tall cloaked man on a
neighbouring hillock. The sarcophagus has three massive steel padlocks,
one of which is lying open on the floor, reminding the traveller of a
metallic clash he heard the day before when passing the mausoleum and
wishing idly that he might see Count Magnus.
His
fascination augmented, and the key being accessible, Mr. Wraxall pays
the mausoleum a second and solitary visit and finds another padlock
unfastened. The next day, his last in Raback, he again goes alone to bid
the long-dead Count farewell. Once more queerly impelled to utter a
whimsical wish for a meeting with the buried nobleman, he now sees to
his disquiet that only one of the padlocks remains on the great
sarcophagus. Even as he looks, that last lock drops noisily to the
floor, and there comes a sound as of creaking hinges. Then the monstrous
lid appears very slowly to rise, and Mr. Wraxall flees in panic fear
without refastening the door of the mausoleum.
During his return to England the traveller feels a curious uneasiness
about his fellow-passengers on the canal-boat which he employs for the
earlier stages. Cloaked figures make him nervous, and he has a sense of
being watched and followed. Of twenty-eight persons whom he counts, only
twenty-six appear at meals; and the missing two are always a tall
cloaked man and a shorter muffled figure. Completing his water travel at
Harwich, Mr. Wraxall takes frankly to flight in a closed carriage, but
sees two cloaked figures at a crossroad. Finally he lodges at a small
house in a village and spends the time making frantic notes. On the
second morning he is found dead, and during the inquest seven jurors
faint at sight of the body. The house where he stayed is never again
inhabited, and upon its demolition half a century later his manuscript
is discovered in a forgotten cupboard.
In
The Treasure of Abbot Thomas a British antiquary unriddles
a cipher on some Renaissance painted windows, and thereby discovers a
centuried hoard of gold in a niche halfway down a well in the courtyard
of a German abbey. But the crafty depositor had set a guardian over that
treasure, and something in the black well twines its arms around the
searcher's neck in such a manner that the quest is abandoned, and a
clergyman sent for. Each night after that the discoverer feels a
stealthy presence and detects a horrible odour of mould outside the door
of his hotel room, till finally the clergyman makes a daylight
replacement of the stone at the mouth of the treasure-vault in the well
-- out of which something had come in the dark to avenge the disturbing
of old Abbot Thomas's gold. As he completes his work the cleric observes
a curious toad-like carving on the ancient well-head, with the Latin
motto "Depositum custodi -- keep that which is committed to
thee."
Other
notable James tales are The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral,
in which a grotesque carving comes curiously to life to avenge the
secret and subtle murder of an old Dean by his ambitious successor:
Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, which tells of the
horror summoned by a strange metal whistle found in a mediævel church
ruin; and An Episode of Cathedral History, where the
dismantling of a pulpit uncovers an archaic tomb whose lurking daemon
spreads panic and pestilence. Dr. James, for all his light touch, evokes
fright and hideousness in their most shocking form, and will certainly
stand as one of the few really creative masters in his darksome
province.
For
those who relish speculation regarding the future, the tale of
supernatural horror provides an interesting field. Combated by a
mounting wave of plodding realism, cynical flippancy, and sophisticated
disillusionment, it is yet encouraged by a parallel tide of growing
mysticism, as developed both through the fatigued reaction of
"occultists" and religious fundamentalists against materialistic
discovery and through the stimulation of wonder and fancy by such
enlarged vistas and broken barriers as modern science has given us with
its intra-atomic chemistry, advancing astrophysics, doctrines of
relativity, and probings into biology and human thought. At the present
moment the favouring forces would appear to have somewhat of an
advantage; since there is unquestionably more cordiality shown toward
weird writings than when, thirty years ago, the best of Arthur Machen's
work fell on the stony ground of the smart and cocksure 'nineties.
Ambrose Bierce, almost unknown in his own time, has now reached
something like general recognition.
Startling mutations, however, are not to be looked for in either
direction. In any case an approximate balance of tendencies will
continue to exist; and while we may justly expect a further
subtilisation of technique, we have no reason to think that the general
position of the spectral in literature will be altered. It is a narrow
though essential branch of human expression, and will chiefly appeal as
always to a limited audience with keen special sensibilities. Whatever
universal masterpiece of tomorrow may be wrought from phantasm or terror
will owe its acceptance rather to a supreme workmanship than to a
sympathetic theme. Yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive
handicap? Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of
onyx.
(End.)
SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE
H. P. Lovecraft
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