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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- 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- 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- 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- 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:
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.)
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.