H.P. Lovecraft - Supernatural Horror In Literature

H.P. LOVECRAFT

SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE

Written late 1925—Summer 1927
First published in The Recluse, No. 1, 1927

CONTENTS

* Introduction
* The Dawn Of The Horror Tale
* The Early Gothic Novel
* The Apex Of Gothic Romance
* The Aftermath Of Gothic Fiction
* Spectral Literature On The Continent
* Edgar Allan Poe
* The Weird Tradition In America
* The Weird Tradition In The British Isles
* The Modern Masters

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
rationalization, 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 formalized 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 vigor 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 crystallized 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 specters, 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
coloring 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 worshipers 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 Halloween, 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 Raymond 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 eldritch 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 there, a portrait walking out of its frame, a
thunderclap destroying the edifice, and a colossal armored specter 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 neighboring convent.

Such is the tale; flat stilted, and altogether 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
ramblings, 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,
moldy 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 fantasies. 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 pre-eminent 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 vigor 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 Specter, 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 evolved 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, Gœthe's Faust, and Byron's
Manfred as the supreme allegorical figures of modern European literature, and
wrote a whimsical piece called Melmoth Reconciled, in which the Wanderer
succeeds in passing his infernal bargain on to a Parisian bank defaulter, who
in turn hands it along a chain of victims until a reveling gambler dies with it
in his possession, and by his damnation ends the curse. Scott, Rossetti,
Thackeray and Baudelaire are the other titans who gave Maturin their
unqualified admiration, and there is much significance in the fact that Oscar
Wilde, after his disgrace and exile, chose for his last days in Paris the
assumed name of "Sebastian Melmoth."

Melmoth contains scenes which even now have not lost their power to evoke
dread. It begins with a deathbed—an old miser is dying of sheer fright because
of something he has seen, coupled with a manuscript he has read and a family
portrait which hangs in an obscure closet of his centuried home in County
Wicklow. He sends to Trinity College, Dublin, for his nephew John; and the
latter upon arriving notes many uncanny things. The eyes of the portrait in the
closet glow horribly, and twice a figure strangely resembling the portrait
appears momentarily at the door. Dread hangs over that house of the Melmoths,
one of whose ancestors, "J. Melmoth, 1646," the portrait represents. The dying
miser declares that this man—at a date slightly before 1800—is alive. Finally
the miser dies, and the nephew is told in the will to destroy both the portrait
and a manuscript to be found in a certain drawer. Reading the manuscript, which
was written late in the seventeenth century by an Englishman named Stanton,
young John learns of a terrible incident in Spain in 1677, when the writer met
a horrible fellow-countryman and was told of how he had stared to death a
priest who tried to denounce him as one filled with fearsome evil. Later, after
meeting the man again in London, Stanton is cast into a madhouse and visited by
the stranger, whose approach is heralded by spectral music and whose eyes have
a more than mortal glare. Melmoth the Wanderer—for such is the malign
visitor—offers the captive freedom if he will take over his bargain with the
Devil; but like all others whom Melmoth has approached, Stanton is proof
against temptation. Melmoth's description of the horrors of a life in a
madhouse, used to tempt Stanton, is one of the most potent passages of the
book. Stanton is at length liberated, and spends the rest of his life tracking
down Melmoth, whose family and ancestral abode he discovers. With the family he
leaves the manuscript, which by young John's time is badly ruinous and
fragmentary. John destroys both portrait and manuscript, but in sleep is
visited by his horrible ancestor, who leaves a black and blue mark on his wrist.

Young John soon afterward receives as a visitor a shipwrecked Spaniard, Alonzo
de Moncada, who has escaped from compulsory monasticism and from the perils of
the Inquisition. He has suffered horribly—and the descriptions of his
experiences under torment and in the vaults through which he once essays escape
are classic—but had the strength to resist Melmoth the Wanderer when approached
at his darkest hour in prison. At the house of a Jew who sheltered him after
his escape he discovers a wealth of manuscript relating other exploits of
Melmoth, including his wooing of an Indian island maiden, Immalee, who later
comes into her birthright in Spain and is known as Donna Isidora; and of his
horrible marriage to her by the corpse of a dead anchorite at midnight in the
ruined chapel of a shunned and abhorred monastery. Moncada's narrative to young
John takes up the bulk of Maturin's four-volume book; this disproportion being
considered one of the chief technical faults of the composition.

At last the colloquies of John and Moncada are interrupted by the entrance of
Melmoth the Wanderer himself, his piercing eyes now fading, and decrepitude
swiftly overtaking him. The term of his bargain has approached its end, and he
has come home after a century and a half to meet his fate. Warning all others
from the room, no matter what sounds they may hear in the night, he awaits the
end alone. Young John and Moncada hear frightful ululations, but do not intrude
till silence comes toward morning. They then find the room empty. Clayey
footprints lead out a rear door to a cliff overlooking the sea, and near the
edge of the precipice is a track indicating the forcible dragging of some heavy
body. The Wanderer's scarf is found on a crag some distance below the brink,
but nothing further is ever seen or heard of him.

Such is the story, and none can fail to notice the difference between this
modulated, suggestive, and artistically moulded horror and—to use the words of
Professor George Saintsbury—"the artful but rather jejune rationalism of Mrs.
Radcliffe, and the too often puerile extravagance, the bad taste, and the
sometimes slipshod style of Lewis." Maturin's style in itself deserves
particular praise, for its forcible directness and vitality lift it altogether
above the pompous artificialities of which his predecessors are guilty.
Professor Edith Birkhead, in her history of the Gothic novel, justly observes
that "with all his faults Maturin was the greatest as well as the last of the
Goths." Melmoth was widely read and eventually dramatized, but its late date in
the evolution of the Gothic tale deprived it of the tumultuous popularity of
Udolpho and The Monk.

V. THE AFTERMATH OF GOTHIC FICTION

MEANWHILE other hands had not been idle, so that above the dreary plethora of
trash like Marquis von Grosse's Horrid Mysteries (1796), Mrs. Roche's Children
of the Abbey (1798), Mrs. Dacre's Zofloya; or, the Moor (1806), and the poet
Shelley's schoolboy effusions Zastro (1810) and St. Irvine (1811) (both
imitations of Zofloya) there arose many memorable weird works both in English
and German. Classic in merit, and markedly different from its fellows because
of its foundation in the Oriental tale rather than the Walpolesque Gothic
novel, is the celebrated History of the Caliph Vathek by the wealthy dilettante
William Beckford, first written in the French language but published in an
English translation before the appearance of the original. Eastern tales,
introduced to European literature early in the eighteenth century through
Galland's French translation of the inexhaustibly opulent Arabian Nights, had
become a reigning fashion; being used both for allegory and for amusement. The
sly humor which only the Eastern mind knows how to mix with weirdness had
captivated a sophisticated generation, till Baghdad 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 sorceress-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 coloring which raise the book to a permanent 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, fostered by a wave of popular magical interest
exemplified in the vogue of the charlatan Cagliostro and the publication of
Francis Barrett's The Magus (1801), a curious and compendious treatise on
occult principles and ceremonies, of which a reprint was made as lately as
1896, figures in Bulwer-Lytton and in many late Gothic novels, especially that
remote and enfeebled posterity which straggled far down into the nineteenth
century and was represented by George W.M. Reynold's Faust and the Demon and
Wagner the Wehr-Wolf. Caleb Williams, though non-supernatural, has many
authentic touches of terror. It is the tale of a servant persecuted by a master
whom he has found guilty of murder, and displays an invention and skill which
have kept it alive in a fashion to this day. It was dramatized as The Iron
Chest, and in that form was almost equally celebrated. Godwin, however, was too
much the conscious teacher and prosaic man of thought to create a genuine weird
masterpiece.

His daughter, the wife of Shelley, was much more successful; and her
inimitable Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1817) is one of the horror-
classics of all time. Composed in competition with her husband, Lord Byron, and
Dr. John William Polidori in an effort to prove supremacy in horror-making,
Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein was the only one of the rival narratives to be
brought to an elaborate completion; and criticism has failed to prove that the
best parts are due to Shelley rather than to her. The novel, somewhat tinged
but scarcely marred by moral didacticism, tells of the artificial human being
moulded from charnel fragments by Victor Frankenstein, a young Swiss medical
student. Created by its designer "in the mad pride of intellectuality," the
monster possesses full intelligence but owns a hideously loathsome form. It is
rejected by mankind, becomes embittered, and at length begins the successive
murder of all whom Frankenstein loves best, friends and family. It demands that
Frankenstein create a wife for it; and when the student finally refuses in
horror lest the world be populated with such monsters, it departs with a
hideous threat "to be with him on his wedding night." Upon that night the bride
is strangled, and from that time on Frankenstein hunts down the monster, even
into the wastes of the Arctic. In the end, whilst seeking shelter on the ship
of the man who tells the story, Frankenstein himself is killed by the shocking
object of his search and creation of his presumptuous pride. Some of the scenes
in Frankenstein are unforgettable, as when the newly animated monster enters
its creator's room, parts the curtains of his bed, and gazes at him in the
yellow moonlight with watery eyes—"if eyes they may be called." Mrs. Shelley
wrote other novels, including the fairly notable Last Man; but never duplicated
the success of her first effort. It has the true touch of cosmic fear, no
matter how much the movement may lag in places. Dr. Polidori developed his
competing idea as a long short story, The Vampyre; in which we behold a suave
villain of the true Gothic or Byronic type, and encounter some excellent
passages of stark fright, including a terrible nocturnal experience in a
shunned Grecian wood.

In this same period Sir Walter Scott frequently concerned himself with the
weird, weaving it into many of his novels and poems, and sometimes producing
such independent bits of narration as The Tapestried Chamber or Wandering
Willie's Tale in Redgauntlet, in the latter of which the force of the spectral
and the diabolic is enhanced by a grotesque homeliness of speech and
atmosphere. In 1830 Scott published his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft,
which still forms one of our best compendia of European witch-lore. Washington
Irving is another famous figure not unconnected with the weird; for though most
of his ghosts are too whimsical and humorous to form genuinely spectral
literature, a distinct inclination in this direction is to be noted in many of
his productions. The German Student in Tales of a Traveler (1824) is a slyly
concise and effective presentation of the old legend of the dead bride, whilst
woven into the cosmic tissue of The Money Diggers in the same volume is more
than one hint of piratical apparitions in the realms which Captain Kidd once
roamed. Thomas Moore also joined the ranks of the macabre artists in the poem
Alciphron, which he later elaborated into the prose novel of The Epicurean
(1827). Though merely relating the adventures of a young Athenian duped by the
artifice of cunning Egyptian priests, Moore manages to infuse much genuine
horror into his account of subterranean frights and wonders beneath the
primordial temples of Memphis. De Quincey more than once revels in grotesque
and arabesque terrors, though with a desultoriness and learned pomp which deny
him the rank of specialist.

This era likewise saw the rise of William Harrison Ainsworth, whose romantic
novels teem with the eerie and the gruesome. Capt. Marryat, besides writing
such short tales as The Werewolf, made a memorable contribution in The Phantom
Ship (1839), founded on the legend of the Flying Dutchman, whose spectral and
accursed vessel sails for ever near the Cape of Good Hope. Dickens now rises
with occasional weird bits like The Signalman, a tale of ghastly warning
conforming to a very common pattern and touched with a verisimilitude which
allied it as much with the coming psychological school as with the dying Gothic
school. At this time a wave of interest in spiritualistic charlatanry,
mediumism, Hindoo theosophy, and such matters, much like that of the present
day, was flourishing; so that the number of weird tales with a "Psychic" or
pseudo-scientific basis became very considerable. For a number of these the
prolific and popular Edward Bulwer- Lytton was responsible; and despite the
large doses of turgid rhetoric and empty romanticism in his products, his
success in the weaving of a certain kind of bizarre charm cannot be denied.

The House and the Brain, which hints of Rosicrucianism and at a malign and
deathless figure perhaps suggested by Louis XV's mysterious courtier St.
Germain, yet survives as one of the best short haunted-house tales ever
written. The novel Zanoni (1842) contains similar elements more elaborately
handled, and introduces a vast unknown sphere of being pressing on our own
world and guarded by a horrible "Dweller of the Threshold" who haunts those who
try to enter and fail. Here we have a benign brotherhood kept alive from age to
age till finally reduced to a single member, and as a hero an ancient Chaldaean
sorcerer surviving in the pristine bloom of youth to perish on the guillotine
of the French Revolution. Though full of the conventional spirit of romance,
marred by a ponderous network of symbolic and didactic meanings, and left
unconvincing through lack of perfect atmospheric realization of the situations
hinging on the spectral world, Zanoni is really an excellent performance as a
romantic novel; and can be read with genuine interest by the not too
sophisticated reader. It is amusing to note that in describing an attempted
initiation into the ancient brotherhood the author cannot escape using the
stock Gothic castle of Walpolian lineage.

In A Strange Story (1862) Bulwer-Lytton shows a marked improvement in the
creation of weird images and moods. The novel, despite enormous length, a
highly artificial plot bolstered up by opportune coincidences, and an
atmosphere of homiletic pseudo-science designed to please the matter-of-fact
and purposeful Victorian reader, is exceedingly effective as a narrative;
evoking instantaneous and unflagging interest, and furnishing many potent —if
somewhat melodramatic—tableaux and climaxes. Again we have the mysterious user
of life's elixir in the person of the soulless magician Margrave, whose dark
exploits stand out with dramatic vividness against the modern background of a
quiet English town and of the Australian bush; and again we have shadowy
intimations of a vast spectral world of the unknown in the very air about
us—this time handled with much greater power and vitality than in Zanoni. One
of the two great incantation passages, where the hero is driven by a luminous
evil spirit to rise at night in his sleep, take a strange Egyptian wand, and
evoke nameless presences in the haunted and mausoleum-facing pavilion of a
famous Renaissance alchemist, truly stands among the major terror scenes of
literature. Just enough is suggested, and just little enough is told. Unknown
words are twice dictated to the sleep-walker, and as he repeats them the ground
trembles, and all the dogs of the countryside begin to bay at half-seen
amorphous shadows that stalk athwart the moonlight. When a third set of unknown
words is prompted, the sleep-walker's spirit suddenly rebels at uttering them,
as if the soul could recognize ultimate abysmal horrors concealed from the
mind; and at last an apparition of an absent sweetheart and good angel breaks
the malign spell. This fragment well illustrates how far Lord Lytton was
capable of progressing beyond his usual pomp and stock romance toward that
crystalline essence of artistic fear which belongs to the domain of poetry. In
describing certain details of incantations, Lytton was greatly indebted to his
amusingly serious occult studies, in the course of which he came in touch with
that odd French scholar and cabalist Alphonse Louis Constant ("Eliphas Levy"),
who claimed to possess the secrets of ancient magic, and to have evoked the
vigor of the old Grecian wizard Apollonius of Tyana, who lived in Nero's times.

The romantic, semi-Gothic, quasi-moral tradition here represented was carried
far down the nineteenth century by such authors as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu,
Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H. Rider Haggard (whose She is really remarkably
good), Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson—the latter
of whom, despite an atrocious tendency toward jaunty mannerisms, created
permanent classics in Markheim, The Body Snatcher, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Indeed, we may say that this school still survives; for to it clearly belong
such of our contemporary horror-tales as specialize 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 echo, 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
centers 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 color 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 center 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 Specter, 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 cabalism.
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. Cabalism 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 Dybbuk, 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 Dybbuk, translated
and produced in America in 1925, and more recently produced as an opera,
describes with singular power the possession of a living body by the evil soul
of a dead man. Both golems and dybbuks are fixed types, and serve as frequent
ingredients of later Jewish tradition.

VII. EDGAR ALLAN POE

IN the eighteen-thirties occurred a literary dawn directly affecting not only
the history of the weird tale, but that of short fiction as a whole; and
indirectly moulding the trends and fortunes of a great European æsthetic
school. It is our good fortune as Americans to be able to claim that dawn as
our own, for it came in the person of our most illustrious and unfortunate
fellow-countryman Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's fame has been subject to curious
undulations, and it is now a fashion amongst the "advanced intelligentsia" to
minimize his importance both as an artist and as an influence; but it would be
hard for any mature and reflective critic to deny the tremendous value of his
work and the persuasive potency of his mind as an opener of artistic vistas.
True, his type of outlook may have been anticipated; but it was he who first
realized its possibilities and gave it supreme form and systematic expression.
True also, that subsequent writers may have produced greater single tales than
his; but again we must comprehend that it was only he who taught them by
example and precept the art which they, having the way cleared for them and
given an explicit guide, were perhaps able to carry to greater lengths.
Whatever his limitations, Poe did that which no one else ever did or could have
done; and to him we owe the modern horror-story in its final and perfected
state.

Before Poe the bulk of weird writers had worked largely in the dark; without
an understanding of the psychological basis of the horror appeal, and hampered
by more or legs of conformity to certain empty literary conventions such as the
happy ending, virtue rewarded, and in general a hollow moral didacticism,
acceptance of popular standards and values, and striving of the author to
obtrude his own emotions into the story and take sides with the partisans of
the majority's artificial ideas. Poe, on the other hand, perceived the
essential impersonality of the real artist; and knew that the function of
creative fiction is merely to express and interpret events and sensations as
they are, regardless of how they tend or what they prove—good or evil,
attractive or repulsive, stimulating or depressing, with the author always
acting as a vivid and detached chronicler rather than as a teacher,
sympathizer, or vendor of opinion. He saw clearly that all phases of life and
thought are equally eligible as a subject matter for the artist, and being
inclined by temperament to strangeness and gloom, decided to be the interpreter
of those powerful feelings and frequent happenings which attend pain rather
than pleasure, decay rather than growth, terror rather than tranquility, and
which are fundamentally either adverse or indifferent to the tastes and
traditional outward sentiments of mankind, and to the health, sanity, and
normal expansive welfare of the species.

Poe's specters 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 pretense to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in
stilted and labored 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
crystallizations 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 graybeards, 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 Orientalized 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 color 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 emphasize, 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 vitalizing 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 savor 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 recognized
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 theater 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 Teutonized 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 rumors 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
atmosphere 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 father'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 Phœbe, 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 parlor, 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 naturalized as an American and
perished honorably 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 characterized 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 hack, 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 Bierce's. Yet, curiously, inhumanity
is not altogether absent.

The "inhumanity" mentioned by Mr. Loveman finds vent in a rare strain of
sardonic comedy and graveyard humor, and a kind of delight in images of cruelty
and tantalizing 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 neighborhood; and, being secretly
recognized, is provoked into a bowie-knife duel in the dark, to be held in the
now abandoned 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 recognize, the other is so overpowered by a strange fetor 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 realizes the atmospheric possibilities of his themes as vividly
as Poe; and much of his work contains a certain touch of naiveté, prosaic
angularity, or early-American provincialism which contrasts somewhat with the
efforts of later horror-masters. Nevertheless the genuineness and artistry of
his dark intimations are always unmistakable, so that his greatness is in no
danger of eclipse. As arranged in his definitively collected works, Bierce's
weird tales occur mainly in two volumes, Can Such Things Be? and In the Midst
of Life. The former, indeed, is almost wholly given over to, the supernatural.

Much of the best in American horror-literature has come from pens not mainly
devoted to that medium. Oliver Wendell Holmes's historic Elsie Venner suggests
with admirable restraint an unnatural ophidian element in a young woman
prenatally influenced, and sustains the atmosphere with finely discriminating
landscape touches. In The Turn of the Screw Henry James triumphs over his
inevitable pomposity and prolixity sufficiently well to create a truly potent
air of sinister menace; depicting the hideous influence of two dead and evil
servants, Peter Quint and the governess, Miss Jessel, over a small boy and girl
who had been under their care. James is perhaps too diffuse, too unctuously
urbane, and too much addicted to subtleties of speech to realize fully all the
wild and devastating horror in his situations; but for all that there is a rare
and mounting tide of fright, culminating in the death of the little boy, which
gives the novelette a permanent place in its special class.

F. Marion Crawford produced several weird tales of varying quality, now
collected in a volume entitled Wandering Ghosts. For the Blood Is the Life
touches powerfully on a case of moon-cursed vampirism near an ancient tower on
the rocks of the lonely South Italian seacoast. The Dead Smile treats of family
horrors in an old house and an ancestral vault in Ireland, and introduces the
banshee with considerable force. The Upper Berth, however, is Crawford's weird
masterpiece; and is one of the most tremendous horror-stories in all
literature. In this tale of a suicide-haunted stateroom such things as the
spectral saltwater dampness, the strangely open porthole, and the nightmare
struggle with the nameless object are handled with incomparable dexterity.

Very genuine, though not without the typical mannered extravagance of the
eighteen-nineties, is the strain of horror in the early work of Robert W.
Chambers, since renowned for products of a very different quality. The King in
Yellow, a series of vaguely connected short stories having as a background a
monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings fright, madness, and
spectral tragedy, really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear in spite of
uneven interest and a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic
studio atmosphere made popular by Du Maurier's Trilby. The most powerful of its
tales, perhaps, is The Yellow Sign, in which is introduced a silent and
terrible churchyard watchman with a face like a puffy grave-worm's. A boy,
describing a tussle he has had with this creature, shivers and sickens as he
relates a certain detail. "Well, it's Gawd's truth that when I 'it 'im 'e
grabbed me wrists, Sir, and when I twisted 'is soft, mushy fist one of 'is
fingers come off in me 'and." An artist, who after seeing him has shared with
another a strange dream of a nocturnal hearse, is shocked by the voice with
which the watchman accosts him. The fellow emits a muttering sound that fills
the head "like thick oily smoke from a fat-rendering vat or an odor 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 recognized 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 neighboring 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
humorist 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 odors, 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 paralyzing 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
fantasies 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, crystallizes with matchless
skill and delicacy the eerie lore and whispered legends of that richly colorful
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 marvelous 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 recognized 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 realizes 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 Harbor, 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 whimsical
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 aqueous 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 savor of genius. More whimsical 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 unrivaled 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 specters 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 skillful
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 whimsical 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 visualization 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-strewn 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 summarized this dreamer's rich endowments and wizardry of
expression in the sonnet On Reading Arthur Machen:

There is a glory in the autumn wood,
The ancient lanes of England wind and climb
Past wizard oaks and gorse and tangled thyme
To where a fort of mighty empire stood:
There is a glamour in the autumn sky;
The reddened clouds are writhing in the glow
Of some great fire, and there are glints below
Of tawny yellow where the embers die.
I wait, for he will show me, clear and cold,
High-rais'd in splendor, sharp against the North,
The Roman eagles, and through mists of gold
The marching legions as they issue forth:
I wait, for I would share with him again
The ancient wisdom, and the ancient pain.

Of Mr. Machen's horror-tales the most famous is perhaps The Great God Pan
(1894) which tells of a singular and terrible experiment and its consequences.
A young woman, through surgery of the brain-cells, is made to see the vast and
monstrous deity of Nature, and becomes an idiot in consequence, dying less than
a year later. Years afterward a strange, ominous, and foreign-looking child
named Helen Vaughan is placed to board with a family in rural Wales, and haunts
the woods in unaccountable fashion. A little boy is thrown out of his mind at
sight of someone or something he spies with her, and a young girl comes to a
terrible end in similar fashion. All this mystery is strangely interwoven with
the Roman rural deities of the place, as sculptured in antique fragments. After
another lapse of years, a woman of strangely exotic beauty appears in society,
drives her husband to horror and death, causes an artist to paint unthinkable
paintings of Witches' Sabbaths, creates an epidemic of suicide among the men of
her acquaintance, and is finally discovered to be a frequenter of the lowest
dens of vice in London, where even the most callous degenerates are shocked at
her enormities. Through the clever comparing of notes on the part of those who
have had word of her at various stages of her career, this woman is discovered
to be the girl Helen Vaughan, who is the child —by no mortal father—of the
young woman on whom the brain experiment was made. She is a daughter of hideous
Pan himself, and at the last is put to death amidst horrible transmutations of
form involving changes of sex and a descent to the most primal manifestations
of the life-principle.

But the charm of the tale is in the telling. No one could begin to describe
the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds
without following fully the precise order in which Mr. Machen unfolds his
gradual hints and revelations. Melodrama is undeniably present, and coincidence
is stretched to a length which appears absurd upon analysis; but in the malign
witchery of the tale as a whole these trifles are forgotten, and the sensitive
reader reaches the end with only an appreciative shudder and a tendency to
repeat the words of one of the characters: "It is too incredible, too
monstrous; such things can never be in this quiet world ... Why, man, if such a
case were possible, our earth would be a nightmare."

Less famous and less complex in plot than The Great God Pan, but definitely
finer in atmosphere and general artistic value, is the curious and dimly
disquieting chronicle called The White People, whose central portion purports
to be the diary or notes of a little girl whose nurse has introduced her to
some of the forbidden magic and soul-blasting traditions of the noxious witch-
cult—the cult whose whispered lore was handed down long lines of peasantry
throughout Western Europe, and whose members sometimes stole forth at night,
one by one, to meet in black woods and lonely places for the revolting orgies
of the Witches' Sabbath. Mr. Machen's narrative, a triumph of skillful
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 marvelous 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 rumors 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 favorite 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 odors 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 semi-living 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 humorless 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, color, and vitality, to
visualize 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 recognized 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 exorcized. 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 moralization and
professional "occultism."

Too subtle, perhaps, for definite classification as horror-tales, yet possibly
more truly artistic in an absolute sense, are such delicate fantasies 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 color, Hellenic
form, Teutonic somberness 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. Humor 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 honor in a city of worshipers 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 marvelously 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 utilize
very aptly his exhaustive knowledge of the past, and his ready and convincing
command of archaic diction and colouring. A favorite 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 humorous vignettes and bits of lifelike genre portraiture and
characterization 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 specter 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 favorite 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 traveler 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
rumors 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
neighboring hillock. The sarcophagus has three massive steel padlocks, one of
which is lying open on the floor, reminding the traveler 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 traveler 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 odor 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 favoring
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 subtilization 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.

THE END