Supernatural Horror In Literature by H. P. LovecraftSupernatural Horror In 
Literature
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1926-27, Revised 1933 
Published in The Recluse in 1927 
I. Introduction
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and 
strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists 
will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the 
genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against 
it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings 
to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naïvely insipid 
idealism which deprecates the æsthetic motive and calls for a didactic 
literature to "uplift" the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. 
But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and 
attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and 
elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be 
poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness. 
The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from 
the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from 
everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily 
routine to respond to tappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and 
events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will 
always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of 
course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But 
the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy 
invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of 
rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the 
chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a 
psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental 
experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the 
religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part 
of our innermost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, 
though not numerically great, minority of our species. 
Man's first instincts and emotions formed his response to the environment in 
which he found himself. Definite feelings based on pleasure and pain grew up 
around the phenomena whose causes and effects he understood, whilst around those 
which he did not understand -- and the universe teemed with them in the early 
days -- were naturally woven such personifications, marvelous interpretations, 
and sensations of awe and fear as would be hit upon by a race having few and 
simple ideas and limited experience. The unknown, being likewise the 
unpredictable, became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent 
source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly 
extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence 
whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part. The phenomenon of dreaming 
likewise helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world; and in 
general, all the conditions of savage dawn -- life so strongly conduced toward a 
feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with 
which man's very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and 
superstition. That saturation must, as a matter of plain scientific fact, be 
regarded as virtually permanent so far as the subconscious mind and inner 
instincts are concerned; for though the area of the unknown has been steadily 
contracting for thousands of years, an infinite reservoir of mystery still 
engulfs most of the outer cosmos, whilst a vast residuum of powerful inherited 
associations clings round all the objects and processes that were once 
mysterious; however well they may now be explained. And more than this, there is 
an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous tissue, 
which would make them obscurely operative even were the conscious mind to be 
purged of all sources of wonder. 
Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and 
because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the 
first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has 
fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to 
figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore. This tendency, too, is 
naturally enhanced by the fact that uncertainty and danger are always closely 
allied; thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil 
possibilities. When to this sense of fear and evil the inevitable fascination of 
wonder and curiosity is superadded, there is born a composite body of keen 
emotion and imaginative provocation whose vitality must of necessity endure as 
long as the human race itself. Children will always be afraid of the dark, and 
men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the 
thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in 
the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy 
dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse. 
With this foundation, no one need wonder at the existence of a literature of 
cosmic fear. It has always existed, and always will exist; and no better 
evidence of its tenacious vigour can be cited than the impulse which now and 
then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands at it in 
isolated tales, as if to discharge from their minds certain phantasmal shapes 
which would otherwise haunt them. Thus Dickens wrote several eerie narratives; 
Browning, the hideous poem Childe Roland; Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; 
Dr. Holmes, the subtle novel Elsie Venner; F. Marion Crawford, The Upper Berth 
and a number of other examples; Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, social worker, 
The Yellow Wall Paper; whilst the humorist, W. W. Jacobs, produced that able 
melodramatic bit called The Monkey's Paw. 
This type of fear-literature must not be confounded with a type externally 
similar but psychologically widely different; the literature of mere physical 
fear and the mundanely gruesome. Such writing, to be sure, has its place, as has 
the conventional or even whimsical or humorous ghost story where formalism or 
the author's knowing wink removes the true sense of the morbidly unnatural; but 
these things are not the literature of cosmic fear in its purest sense. The true 
weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted 
form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and 
unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be 
a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of 
that most terrible conception of the human brain -- a malign and particular 
suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard 
against the assaults of chaos and the dæmons of unplumbed space. 
Naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any 
theoretical model. Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their 
dull spots. Moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing 
in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of 
a very different cast. Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final 
criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a 
given sensation. We may say, as a general thing, that a weird story whose intent 
is to teach or produce a social effect, or one in which the horrors are finally 
explained away by natural means, is not a genuine tale of cosmic fear; but it 
remains a fact that such narratives often possess, in isolated sections, 
atmospheric touches which fulfill every condition of true supernatural 
horror-literature. Therefore we must judge a weird tale not by the author's 
intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which 
it attains at its least mundane point. If the proper sensations are excited, 
such a "high spot" must be admitted on its own merits as weird literature, no 
matter how prosaically it is later dragged down. The one test of the really 
weird is simply this -- whether of not there be excited in the reader a profound 
sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle 
attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the 
scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim. 
And of course, the more completely and unifiedly a story conveys this atmosphere 
the better it is as a work of art in the given medium. 
II. The Dawn Of The Horror Tale
As may naturally be expected of a form so closely connected with primal emotion, 
the horror-tale is as old as human thought and speech themselves. 
Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races, 
and is crystallised in the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and sacred 
writings. It was, indeed, a prominent feature of the elaborate ceremonial magic, 
with its rituals for the evocation of dæmons and spectres, which flourished from 
prehistoric times, and which reached its highest development in Egypt and the 
Semitic nations. Fragments like the Book of Enoch and the Claviculae of Solomon 
well illustrate the power of the weird over the ancient Eastern mind, and upon 
such things were based enduring systems and traditions whose echoes extend 
obscurely even to the present time. Touches of this transcendental fear are seen 
in classic literature, and there is evidence of its still greater emphasis in a 
ballad literature which paralleled the classic stream but vanished for lack of a 
written medium. The Middle Ages, steeped in fanciful darkness, gave it an 
enormous impulse toward expression; and East and West alike were busy preserving 
and amplifying the dark heritage, both of random folklore and of academically 
formulated magic and cabalism, which had descended to them. Witch, werewolf, 
vampire, and ghoul brooded ominously on the lips of bard and grandam, and needed 
but little encouragement to take the final step across the boundary that divides 
the chanted tale or song from the formal literary composition. In the Orient, 
the weird tale tended to assume a gorgeous colouring and sprightliness which 
almost transmuted it into sheer phantasy. In the West, where the mystical Teuton 
had come down from his black boreal forests and the Celt remembered strange 
sacrifices in Druidic groves, it assumed a terrible intensity and convincing 
seriousness of atmosphere which doubled the force of its half-told, half-hinted 
horrors. 
Much of the power of Western horror-lore was undoubtedly due to the hidden but 
often suspected presence of a hideous cult of nocturnal worshippers whose 
strange customs -- descended from pre-Aryan and pre-agricultural times when a 
squat race of Mongoloids roved over Europe with their flocks and herds -- were 
rooted in the most revolting fertility-rites of immemorial antiquity. Ibis 
secret religion, stealthily handed down amongst peasants for thousands of years 
despite the outward reign of the Druidic, Graeco-Roman, and Christian faiths in 
the regions involved, was marked by wild "Witches' Sabbaths" in lonely woods and 
atop distant hills on Walpurgis-Night and Hallowe'en, the traditional 
breeding-seasons of the goats and sheep and cattle; and became the source of 
vast riches of sorcery-legend, besides provoking extensive witchcraft -- 
prosecutions of which the Salem affair forms the chief American example. Akin to 
it in essence, and perhaps connected with it in fact, was the frightful secret 
system of inverted theology or Satan-worship which produced such horrors as the 
famous "Black Mass"; whilst operating toward the same end we may note the 
activities of those whose aims were somewhat more scientific or philosophical -- 
the astrologers, cabalists, and alchemists of the Albertus Magnus or Ramond 
Lully type, with whom such rude ages invariably abound. The prevalence and depth 
of the mediæval horror-spirit in Europe, intensified by the dark despair which 
waves of pestilence brought, may be fairly gauged by the grotesque carvings 
slyly introduced into much of the finest later Gothic ecclesiastical work of the 
time; the dæmoniac gargoyles of Notre Dame and Mont St. Michel being among the 
most famous specimens. And throughout the period, it must be remembered, there 
existed amongst educated and uneducated alike a most unquestioning faith in 
every form of the supernatural; from the gentlest doctrines of Christianity to 
the most monstrous morbidities of witchcraft and black magic. It was from no 
empty background that the Renaissance magicians and alchemists -- Nostradamus, 
Trithemius, Dr. John Dee, Robert Fludd, and the like -- were born. 
In this fertile soil were nourished types and characters of sombre myth and 
legend which persist in weird literature to this day, more or less disguised or 
altered by modern technique. Many of them were taken from the earliest oral 
sources, and form part of mankind's permanent heritage. The shade which appears 
and demands the burial of its bones, the dæmon lover who comes to bear away his 
still living bride, the death-fiend or psychopomp riding the night-wind, the 
man-wolf, the sealed chamber, the deathless sorcerer -- all these may be found 
in that curious body of mediæval lore which the late Mr. Baring-Gould so 
effectively assembled in book form. Wherever the mystic Northern blood was 
strongest, the atmosphere of the popular tales became most intense; for in the 
Latin races there is a touch of basic rationality which denies to even their 
strangest superstitions many of the overtones of glamour so characteristic of 
our own forest-born and ice-fostered whisperings. 
Just as all fiction first found extensive embodiment in poetry, so is it in 
poetry that we first encounter the permanent entry of the weird into standard 
literature. Most of the ancient instances, curiously enough, are in prose; as 
the werewolf incident in Petronius, the gruesome passages in Apuleius, the brief 
but celebrated letter of Pliny the Younger to Sura, and the odd compilation On 
Wonderful Events by the Emperor Hadrian's Greek freedman, Phlegon. It is in 
Phlegon that we first find that hideous tale of the corpse-bride, Philinnion and 
Machates, later related by Proclus and in modem times forming the inspiration of 
Goethe's Bride of Corinth and Washington Irving's German Student. But by the 
time the old Northern myths take literary form, and in that later time when the 
weird appears as a steady element in the literature of the day, we find it 
mostly in metrical dress; as indeed we find the greater part of the strictly 
imaginative writing of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Scandinavian Eddas 
and Sagas thunder with cosmic horror, and shake with the stark fear of Ymir and 
his shapeless spawn; whilst our own Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and the later 
Continental Nibelung tales are full of 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 armoured spectre of Alfonso rising out of 
the rains to ascend through parting clouds to the bosom of St. Nicholas. 
Theodore, having wooed Manfred's daughter Matilda and lost her through death -- 
for she is slain by her father by mistake -- is discovered to be the son of 
Alfonso and rightful heir to the estate. He concludes the tale by wedding 
Isabella and preparing to live happily ever after, whilst Manfred -- whose 
usurpation was the cause of his son's supernatural death and his own 
supernatural harassings -- retires to a monastery for penitence; his saddened 
wife seeking asylum in a neighbouring convent. 
Such is the tale; flat, stilted, and altogther devoid of the true cosmic horror 
which makes weird literature. Yet such was the thirst of the age for those 
touches of strangeness and spectral antiquity which it reflects, that it was 
seriously received by the soundest readers and raised in spite of its intrinsic 
ineptness to a pedestal of lofty importance in literary history. What it did 
above all else was to create a novel type of scene, puppet-characters, and 
incidents; which, handled to better advantage by writers more naturally adapted 
to weird creation, stimulated the growth of an imitative Gothic school which in 
turn inspired the real weavers of cosmic terror -- the line of actual artists 
beginning with Poe. This novel dramatic paraphernalia consisted first of all of 
the Gothic castle, with its awesome antiquity, vast distances and 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, mostly 
Italian, for the characters; and the infinite array of stage properties which 
includes strange lights, damp trap-doors, extinguished lamps, mouldy hidden 
manuscripts, creaking hinges, shaking arras, and the like. All this 
paraphernalia reappears with amusing sameness, yet sometimes with tremendous 
effect, throughout the history of the Gothic novel; and is by no means extinct 
even today, though subtler technique now forces it to assume a less naive and 
obvious form. An harmonious milieu for a new school had been found, and the 
writing world was not slow to grasp the opportunity. 
German romance at once responded to the Walpole influence, and soon became a 
byword for the weird and ghastly. In England one of the first imitators was the 
celebrated Mrs. Barbauld, then Miss Aikin, who in 1773 published an unfinished 
fragment called Sir Bertrand, in which the strings of genuine terror were truly 
touched with no clumsy hand. A nobleman on a dark and lonely moor, attracted by 
a tolling bell and distant light, enters a strange and ancient turreted castle 
whose doors open and close and whose bluish will-o'-the-wisps lead up mysterious 
staircases toward dead hands and animated black statues. A coffin with a dead 
lady, whom Sir Bertrand kisses, is finally reached; and upon the kiss the scene 
dissolves to give place to a splendid apartment where the lady, restored to 
life, holds a banquet in honor of her rescuer. Walpole admired this tale, though 
he accorded less respect to an even more prominent offspring of his Otranto -- 
The Old English Baron, by Clara Reeve, published in 1777. Truly enough, this 
tale lacks the real vibration to the note of outer darkness and mystery which 
distinguishes Mrs. Barbauld's fragment; and though less crude than Walpole's 
novel, and more artistically economical of horror in its possession of only one 
spectral figure, it is nevertheless too definitely insipid for greatness. Here 
again we have the virtuous heir to the castle disguised as a peasant and 
restored to his heritage through the ghost of his father; and here again we have 
a case of wide popularity leading to many editions, dramatization, and ultimate 
translation into French. Miss Reeve wrote another weird novel, unfortunately 
unpublished and lost. 
The Gothic novel was now settled as a literary form, and instances multiply 
bewilderingly as the eighteenth century draws toward its close. The Recess, 
written in 1785 by Mrs. Sophia Lee, has the historic element, revolving round 
the twin daughters of Mary, Queen of Scots; and though devoid of the 
supernatural, employs the Walpole scenery and mechanism with great dexterity. 
Five years later, and all existing lamps are paled by the rising of a fresh 
luminary order -- Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), whose famous novels made 
terror and suspense a fashion, and who set new and higher standards in the 
domain of macabre and fear-inspiring atmosphere despite a provoking custom of 
destroying her own phantoms at the last through labored mechanical explanations. 
To the familiar Gothic trappings of her predecessors Mrs. Radcliffe added a 
genuine sense of the unearthly in scene and incident which closely approached 
genius; every touch of setting and action contributing artistically to the 
impression of illimitable frightfulness which she wished to convey. A few 
sinister details like a track of blood on castle stairs, a groan from a distant 
vault, or a weird song in a nocturnal forest can with her conjure up the most 
powerful images of imminent horror; surpassing by far the extravagant and 
toilsome elaborations of others. Nor are these images in themselves any the less 
potent because they are explained away before the end of the novel. Mrs. 
Radcliffe's visual imagination was very strong, and appears as much in her 
delightful landscape touches -- always in broad, glamorously pictorial outline, 
and never in close detail -- as in her weird phantasies. Her prime weaknesses, 
aside from the habit of prosaic disillusionment, are a tendency toward erroneous 
geography and history and a fatal predilection for bestrewing her novels with 
insipid little poems, attributed to one or another of the characters. 
Mrs. Radcliffe wrote six novels; The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A 
Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1792), The Mysteries of 
Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1797), and Gaston de Blondeville, composed in 1802 
but first published posthumously in 1826. Of these Udolpho is by far the most 
famous, and may be taken as a type of the early Gothic tale at its best. It is 
the chronicle of Emily, a young Frenchwoman transplanted to an ancient and 
portentous castle in the Apennines through the death of her parents and the 
marriage of her aunt to the lord of the castle -- the scheming nobleman, 
Montoni. Mysterious sounds, opened doors, frightful legends, and a nameless 
horror in a niche behind a black veil all operate in quick succession to unnerve 
the heroine and her faithful attendant, Annette; but finally, after the death of 
her aunt, she escapes with the aid of a fellow-prisoner whom she has discovered. 
On the way home she stops at a chateau filled with fresh horrors -- the 
abandoned wing where the departed chatelaine dwelt, and the bed of death with 
the black pall -- but is finally restored to security and happiness with her 
lover Valancourt, after the clearing-up of a secret which seemed for a time to 
involve her birth in mystery. Clearly, this is only familiar material re-worked; 
but it is so well re-worked that Udolpho will always be a classic. Mrs. 
Radcliffe's characters are puppets, but they are less markedly so than those of 
her forerunners. And in atmospheric creation she stands preëminent among those 
of her time. 
Of Mrs. Radcliffe's countless imitators, the American novelist Charles Brockden 
Brown stands the closest in spirit and method. Like her, he injured his 
creations by natural explanations; but also like her, he had in uncanny 
atmospheric power which gives his horrors a frightful vitality as long as they 
remain unexplained. He differed from her in contemptuously discarding the 
external Gothic paraphernalia and properties and choosing modern American scenes 
for his Mysteries; but this repudiation did not extend to the Gothic spirit and 
type of incident. Brown's novels involve some memorably frightful scenes, and 
excel even Mrs. Radcliffe's in describing the operations of the perturbed mind. 
Edgar Hunily starts with a sleep-walker digging a grave, but is later impaired 
by touches of Godwinian didacticism. Ormond involves a member of a sinister 
secret brotherhood. That and Arthur Mervyn both describe the plague of yellow 
fever, which the author had witnessed in Philadelphia and New York. But Brown's 
most famous book is Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798), in which a 
Pennsylvania German, engulfed by a wave of religious fanaticism, hears "voices" 
and slays his wife and children as a sacrifice. His sister Clara, who tells the 
story, narrowly escapes. The scene, laid at the woodland estate of Mittingen on 
the Schuylkill's remote reaches, is drawn with extreme vividness; and the 
terrors of Clara, beset by spectral tones, gathering fears, and the sound of 
strange footsteps in the lonely house, are all shaped with truly artistic force. 
In the end a lame ventriloquial explanation is offered, but the atmosphere is 
genuine while it lasts. Carwin, the malign ventriloquist, is a typical villain 
of the Manfred or Montoni type. 
IV. The Apex Of Gothic Romance
Horror in literature attains a new malignity in the work of Matthew Gregory 
Lewis (1773-1818), whose novel The Monk (1796) achieved marvelous popularity and 
earned him the nickname "Monk" Lewis. This young author, educated in Germany and 
saturated with a body of wild Teuton lore unknown to Mrs. Radcliffe, turned to 
terror in forms more violent than his gentle predecessor had ever dared to think 
of; and produced as a result a masterpiece of active nightmare whose general 
Gothic cast is spiced with added stores of ghoulishness. The story is one of a 
Spanish monk, Ambrosio, who from a state of over-proud virtue is tempted to the 
very nadir of evil by a fiend in the guise of the maiden Matilda; and who is 
finally, when awaiting death at the Inquisition's hands, induced to purchase 
escape at the price of his soul from the Devil, because he deems both body and 
soul already lost. Forthwith the mocking Fiend snatches him to a lonely place, 
tells him he has sold his soul in vain since both pardon and a chance for 
salvation were approaching at the moment of his hideous bargain, and completes 
the sardonic betrayal by rebuking him for his unnatural crimes, and casting his 
body down a precipice whilst his soul is borne off for ever to perdition. The 
novel contains some appalling descriptions such as the incantation in the vaults 
beneath the convent cemetery, the burning of the convent, and the final end of 
the wretched abbot. In the sub-plot where the Marquis de las Cisternas meets the 
spectre of his erring ancestress, The Bleeding Nun, there are many enormously 
potent strokes; notably the visit of the animated corpse to the Marquis's 
bedside, and the cabalistic ritual whereby the Wandering Jew helps him to fathom 
and banish his dead tormentor. Nevertheless The Monk drags sadly when read as a 
whole. It is too long and too diffuse, and much of its potency is marred by 
flippancy and by an awkwardly excessive reaction against those canons of decorum 
which Lewis at first despised as prudish. One great thing may be said of the 
author; that he never ruined his ghostly visions with a natural explanation. He 
succeeded in breaking up the Radcliffian tradition and expanding the field of 
the Gothic novel. Lewis wrote much more than The Monk. His drama, The Castle 
Spectre, was produced in 1798, and he later found time to pen other fictions in 
ballad form -- Tales of Terror (1799), The Tales of Wonder (1801), and a 
succession of translations from the German. Gothic romances, both English and 
German, now appeared in multitudinous and mediocre profusion. Most of them were 
merely ridiculous in the light of mature taste, and Miss Austen's famous satire 
Northanger Abbey was by no means an unmerited rebuke to a school which had sunk 
far toward absurdity. This particular school was petering out, but before its 
final subordination there arose its last and greatest figure in the person of 
Charles Robert Maturin (1782-1824), an obscure and eccentric Irish clergyman. 
Out of an ample body of miscellaneous writing which includes one confused 
Radcliffian imitation called The Fatal Revenge; or, the Family of Montorio 
(1807), Maturin at length envolved the vivid horror-masterpiece of Melmoth, the 
Wanderer (1820), in which the Gothic tale climbed to altitudes of sheer 
spiritual fright which it had never known before. 
Melmoth is the tale of an Irish Gentleman who, in the seventeenth century, 
obtained a preternaturally extended life from the Devil at the price of his 
soul. If he can persuade another to take the bargain off his hands, and assume 
his existing state, he can be saved; but this he can never manage to effect, no 
matter how assiduously he haunts those whom despair has made reckless and 
frantic. The framework of the story is very clumsy; involving tedious length, 
digressive episodes, narratives within narratives, and labored dovetailing and 
coincidence; but at various points in the endless rambling there is felt a pulse 
of power undiscoverable in any previous work of this kind -- a kinship to the 
essential truth of human nature, an understanding of the profoundest sources of 
actual cosmic fear, and a white heat of sympathetic passion on the writer's part 
which makes the book a true document of æsthetic self-expression rather than a 
mere clever compound of artifice. No unbiased reader can doubt that with Melmoth 
an enormous stride in the evolution of the horror-tale is represented. Fear is 
taken out of the realm of the conventional and exalted into a hideous cloud over 
mankind's very destiny. Maturin's shudders, the work of one capable of 
shuddering himself, are of the sort that convince. Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis are 
fair game for the parodist, but it would be difficult to find a false note in 
the feverishly intensified action and high atmospheric tension of the Irishman 
whose less sophisticated emotions and strain of Celtic mysticism gave him the 
finest possible natural equipment for his task. Without a doubt Maturin is a man 
of authentic genius, and he was so recognized by Balzac, who grouped Melmoth 
with Molière's Don Juan, Gothe's Faust, and Byron's Manfred as the supreme 
allegorical figures of modern European literature, and wrote a whimsical piece 
called Melmoth Reconciled, in which the Wanderer succeeds in passing his 
infernal bargain on to a Parisian bank defaulter, who in turn hands it along a 
chain of victims until a reveling gambler dies with it in his possession, and by 
his damnation ends the curse. Scott, Rossetti, Thackeray and Baudelaire are the 
other titans who gave Maturin their unqualified admiration, and there is much 
significance in the fact that Oscar Wilde, after his disgrace and exile, chose 
for his last days in Paris the assumed name of "Sebastian Melmoth." 
Melmoth contains scenes which even now have not lost their power to evoke dread. 
It begins with a deathbed -- an old miser is dying of sheer fright because of 
something he has seen, coupled with a manuscript he has read and a family 
portrait which hangs in an obscure closet of his centuried home in County 
Wicklow. He sends to Trinity College, Dublin, for his nephew John; and the 
latter upon arriving notes many uncanny things. The eyes of the portrait in the 
closet glow horribly, and twice a figure strangely resembling the portrait 
appears momentarily at the door. Dread hangs over that house of the Melmoths, 
one of whose ancestors, "J. Melmoth, 1646," the portrait represents. The dying 
miser declares that this man -- at a date slightly before 1800 -- is alive. 
Finally the miser dies, and the nephew is told in the will to destroy both the 
portrait and a manuscript to be found in a certain drawer. Reading the 
manuscript, which was written late in the seventeenth century by an Englishman 
named Stanton, young John learns of a terrible incident in Spain in 1677, when 
the writer met a horrible fellow-countryman and was told of how he had stared to 
death a priest who tried to denounce him as one filled with fearsome evil. 
Later, after meeting the man again in London, Stanton is cast into a madhouse 
and visited by the stranger, whose approach is heralded by spectral music and 
whose eyes have a more than mortal glare. Melmoth the Wanderer -- for such is 
the malign visitor -- offers the captive freedom if he will take over his 
bargain with the Devil; but like all others whom Melmoth has approached, Stanton 
is proof against temptation. Melmoth's description of the horrors of a life in a 
madhouse, used to tempt Stanton, is one of the most potent passages of the book. 
Stanton is at length liberated, and spends the rest of his life tracking down 
Melmoth, whose family and ancestral abode he discovers. With the family he 
leaves the manuscript, which by young John's time is badly ruinous and 
fragmentary. John destroys both portrait and manuscript, but in sleep is visited 
by his horrible ancestor, who leaves a black and blue mark on his wrist. 
Young John soon afterward receives as a visitor a shipwrecked Spaniard, Alonzo 
de Moncada, who has escaped from compulsory monasticism and from the perils of 
the Inquisition. He has suffered horribly -- and the descriptions of his 
experiences under torment and in the vaults through which he once essays escape 
are classic -- but had the strength to resist Melmoth the Wanderer when 
approached at his darkest hour in prison. At the house of a Jew who sheltered 
him after his escape he discovers a wealth of manuscript relating other exploits 
of Melmoth, including his wooing of an Indian island maiden, Immalee, who later 
comes into her birthright in Spain and is known as Donna Isidora; and of his 
horrible marriage to her by the corpse of a dead anchorite at midnight in the 
ruined chapel of a shunned and abhorred monastery. Moncada's narrative to young 
John takes up the bulk of Maturin's four-volume book; this disproportion being 
considered one of the chief technical faults of the composition. 
At last the colloquies of John and Moncada are interrupted by the entrance of 
Melmoth the Wanderer himself, his piercing eyes now fading, and decrepitude 
swiftly overtaking him. The term of his bargain has approached its end, and he 
has come home after a century and a half to meet his fate. Warning all others 
from the room, no matter what sounds they may hear in the night, he awaits the 
end alone. Young John and Moncada hear frightful ululations, but do not intrude 
till silence comes toward morning. They then find the room empty. Clayey 
footprints lead out a rear door to a cliff overlooking the sea, and near the 
edge of the precipice is a track indicating the forcible dragging of some heavy 
body. The Wanderer's scarf is found on a crag some distance below the brink, but 
nothing further is ever seen or heard of him. 
Such is the story, and none can fail to notice the difference between this 
modulated, suggestive, and artistically moulded horror and -- to use the words 
of Professor George Saintsbury -- "the artful but rather jejune rationalism of 
Mrs. Radcliffe, and the too often puerile extravagance, the bad taste, and the 
sometimes slipshod style of Lewis." Maturin's style in itself deserves 
particular praise, for its forcible directness and vitality lift it altogether 
above the pompous artificialities of which his predecessors are guilty. 
Professor Edith Birkhead, in her history of the Gothic novel, justly observes 
that "with all his faults Maturin was the greatest as well as the last of the 
Goths." Melmoth was widely read and eventually dramatized, but its late date in 
the evolution of the Gothic tale deprived it of the tumultuous popularity of 
Udolpho and The Monk. 
V. The Aftermath Of Gothic Fiction
Meanwhile other hands had not been idle, so that above the dreary plethora of 
trash like Marquis von Grosse's Horrid Mysteries (1796), Mrs. Roche's Children 
of the Abbey (1798), Mrs. Dacre's Zofloya; or, the Moor (1806), and the poet 
Shelley's schoolboy effusions Zastro (1810) and St. Irvine (1811) (both 
imitations of Zofloya) there arose many memorable weird works both in English 
and German. Classic in merit, and markedly different from its fellows because of 
its foundation in the Oriental tale rather than the Walpolesque Gothic novel, is 
the celebrated History of the Caliph Vathek by the wealthy dilettante William 
Beckford, first written in the French language but published in an English 
translation before the appearance of the original. Eastern tales, introduced to 
European literature early in the eighteenth century through Galland's French 
translation of the inexhaustibly opulent Arabian Nights, had become a reigning 
fashion; being used both for allegory and for amusement. The sly humour which 
only the Eastern mind knows how to mix with weirdness had captivated a 
sophisticated generation, till Bagdad and Damascus names became as freely strewn 
through popular literature as dashing Italian and Spanish ones were soon to be. 
Beckford, well read in Eastern romance, caught the atmosphere with unusual 
receptivity; and in his fantastic volume reflected very potently the haughty 
luxury, sly disillusion, bland cruelty, urbane treachery, and shadowy spectral 
horror of the Saracen spirit. His seasoning of the ridiculous seldom mars the 
force of his sinister theme, and the tale marches onward with a phantasmagoric 
pomp in which the laughter is that of skeletons feasting under arabesque domes. 
Vathek is a tale of the grandson of the Caliph Haroun, who, tormented by that 
ambition for super-terrestrial power, pleasure and learning which animates the 
average Gothic villain or Byronic hero (essentially cognate types), is lured by 
an evil genius to seek the subterranean throne of the mighty and fabulous 
pre-Adamite sultans in the fiery halls of Eblis, the Mahometan Devil. The 
descriptions of Vathek's palaces and diversions, of his scheming soweress-mother 
Carathis and her witch-tower with the fifty one-eyed negresses, of his 
pilgrimage to the haunted ruins of Istakhar (Persepolis) and of the impish bride 
Nouronihar whom he treacherously acquired on the way, of Istakhar's primordial 
towers and terraces in the burning moonlight of the waste, and of the terrible 
Cyclopean halls of Eblis, where, lured by glittering promises, each victim is 
compelled to wander in anguish for ever, his right hand upon his blazingly 
ignited and eternally burning heart, are triumphs of weird colouring which raise 
the book to a permaneat place in English letters. No less notable are the three 
Episodes of Vathek, intended for insertion in the tale as narratives of Vathek's 
fellow-victims in Eblis' infernal halls, which remained unpublished throughout 
the author's lifetime and were discovered as recently as 1909 by the scholar 
Lewis Melville whilst collecting material for his Life and Letters of William 
Beckford. Beckford, however, lacks the essential mysticism which marks the 
acutest form of the weird; so that his tales have a certain knowing Latin 
hardness and clearness preclusive of sheer panic fright. 
But Beckford remained alone in his devotion to the Orient. Other writers, closer 
to the Gothic tradition and to European life in general, were content to follow 
more faithfully in the lead of Walpole. Among the countless producers of 
terror-literature in these times may be mentioned the Utopian economic theorist 
William Godwin, who followed his famous but non-supernatural Caleb Williams 
(1794) with the intendedly weird St. Leon (1799), in which the theme of the 
elixir of life, as developed by the imaginary secret order of "Rosicrucians," is 
handled with ingeniousness if not with atmospheric convincingness. This element 
of Rosicrucianism, fostesed by a wave of popular magical interest exemplified in 
the vogue of the charlatan Cagliostro and the publication of Francis Barrett's 
The Magus (1801), a curious and compendious treatise on occult principles and 
ceremonies, of which a reprint was made as lately as 1896, figures in 
Bulwer-Lytton and in many late Gothic novels, especially that remote and 
enfeebled posterity which straggled far down into the nineteenth century and was 
represented by George W.M. Reynold's Faust and the Demon and Wagner the 
Wehr-Wolf. Caleb Williams, though non-supernatural, has many authentic touches 
of terror. It is the tale of a servant persecuted by a master whom he has found 
guilty of murder, and displays an invention and skill which have kept it alive 
in a fashion to this day. It was dramatized as The Iron Chest, and in that form 
was almost equally celebrated. Godwin, however, was too much the conscious 
teacher and prosaic man of thought to create a genuine weird masterpiece. 
His daughter, the wife of Shelley, was much more successful; and her inimitable 
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1817) is one of the horror-classics of 
all time. Composed in competition with her husband, Lord Byron, and Dr. John 
William Polidori in an effort to prove supremacy in horror-making, Mrs. 
Shelley's Frankenstein was the only one of the rival narratives to be brought to 
an elaborate completion; and criticism has failed to prove that the best parts 
are due to Shelley rather than to her. The novel, somewhat tinged but scarcely 
marred by moral didacticism, tells of the artificial human being moulded from 
charnel fragments by Victor Frankenstein, a young Swiss medical student. Created 
by its designer "in the mad pride of intellectuality," the monster possesses 
full intelligence but owns a hideously loathsome form. It is rejected by 
mankind, becomes embittered, and at length begins the successive murder of all 
whom Frankenstein loves best, friends and family. It demands that Frankenstein 
create a wife for it; and when the student finally refuses in horror lest the 
world be populated with such monsters, it departs with a hideous threat "to be 
with him on his wedding night." Upon that night the bride is strangled, and from 
that time on Frankenstein hunts down the monster, even into the wastes of the 
Arctic. In the end, whilst seeking shelter on the ship of the man who tells the 
story, Frankenstein himself is killed by the shocking object of his search and 
creation of his presumptuous pride. Some of the scenes in Frankenstein are 
unforgettable, as when the newly animated monster enters its creator's room, 
parts the curtains of his bed, and gazes at him in the yellow moonlight with 
watery eyes -- "if eyes they may be called." Mrs. Shelley wrote other novels, 
including the fairly notable Last Man; but never duplicated the success of her 
first effort. It has the true touch of cosmic fear, no matter how much the 
movement may lag in places. Dr. Polidori developed his competing idea as a long 
short story, The Vampyre; in which we behold a suave villain of the true Gothic 
or Byronic type, and encounter some excellent passages of stark fright, 
including a terrible nocturnal experience in a shunned Grecian wood. 
In this same period Sir Walter Scott frequently concerned himself with the 
weird, weaving it into many of his novels and poems, and sometimes producing 
such independent bits of narration as The Tapestried Chamber or Wandering 
Willie's Tale in Redgauntlet, in the latter of which the force of the spectral 
and the diabolic is enhanced by a grotesque homeliness of speech and atmosphere. 
In 1830 Scott published his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, which still 
forms one of our best compendia of European witch-lore. Washington Irving is 
another famous figure not unconnected with the weird; for though most of his 
ghosts are too whimsical and humorous to form genuinely spectral literature, a 
distinct inclination in this direction is to be noted in many of his 
productions. The German Student in Tales of a Traveler (1824) is a slyly concise 
and effective presentation of the old legend of the dead bride, whilst woven 
into the cosmic tissue of The Money Diggers in the same volume is more than one 
hint of piratical apparitions in the realms which Captain Kidd once roamed. 
Thomas Moore also joined the ranks of the macabre artists in the poem Alciphron, 
which he later elaborated into the prose novel of The Epicurean (1827). Though 
merely relating the adventures of a young Athenian duped by the artifice of 
cunning Egyptian priests, Moore manages to infuse much genuine horror into his 
account of subterranean frights and wonders beneath the primordial temples of 
Memphis. De Quincey more than once revels in grotesque and arabesque terrors, 
though with a desultoriness and learned pomp which deny him the rank of 
specialist. 
This era likewise saw the rise of William Harrison Ainsworth, whose romantic 
novels teem with the eerie and the gruesome. Capt. Marryat, besides writing such 
short tales as The Werewolf, made a memorable contribution in The Phantom Ship 
(1839), founded on the legend of the Flying Dutchman, whose spectral and 
accursed vessel sails for ever near the Cape of Good Hope. Dickens now rises 
with occasional weird bits like The Signalman, a tale of ghastly warning 
conforming to a very common pattern and touched with a verisimilitude which 
allied it as much with the coming psychological school as with the dying Gothic 
school. At this time a wave of interest in spiritualistic charlatanry, 
mediumism, Hindoo theosophy, and such matters, much like that of the present 
day, was flourishing; so that the number of weird tales with a "Psychic" or 
pseudo-scientific basis became very considerable. For a number of these the 
prolific and popular Edward Bulwer-Lytton was responsible; and despite the large 
doses of turgid rhetoric and empty romanticism in his products, his success in 
the weaving of a certain kind of bizarre charm cannot be denied. 
The House and the Brain, which hints of Rosicrucianism and at a malign and 
deathless figure perhaps suggested by Louis XV's mysterious courtier St. 
Germain, yet survives as one of the best short haunted-house tales ever written. 
The novel Zanoni (1842) contains similar elements more elaborately handled, and 
introduces a vast unknown sphere of being pressing on our own world and guarded 
by a horrible "Dweller of the Threshold" who haunts those who try to enter and 
fail. Here we have a benign brotherhood kept alive from age to age till finally 
reduced to a single member, and as a hero an ancient Chaldaean sorcerer 
surviving in the pristine bloom of youth to perish on the guillotine of the 
French Revolution. Though full of the conventional spirit of romance, marred by 
a ponderous network of symbolic and didactic meanings, and left unconvincing 
through lack of perfect atmospheric realization of the situations hinging on the 
spectral world, Zanoni is really an excellent performance as a romantic novel; 
and can be read with genuine interest by the not too sophisticated reader. It is 
amusing to note that in describing an attempted initiation into the ancient 
brotherhood the author cannot escape using the stock Gothic castle of Walpolian 
lineage. 
In A Strange Story (1862) Bulwer-Lytton shows a marked improvement in the 
creation of weird images and moods. The novel, despite enormous length, a highly 
artificial plot bolstered up by opportune coincidences, and an atmosphere of 
homiletic pseudo-science designed to please the matter-of-fact and purposeful 
Victorian reader, is exceedingly effective as a narrative; evoking instantaneous 
and unflagging interest, and furnishing many potent -- if somewhat melodramatic 
-- tableaux and climaxes. Again we have the mysterious user of life's elixir in 
the person of the soulless magician Margrave, whose dark exploits stand out with 
dramatic vividness against the modern background of a quiet English town and of 
the Australian bush; and again we have shadowy intimations of a vast spectral 
world of the unknown in the very air about us -- this time handled with much 
greater power and vitality than in Zanoni. One of the two great incantation 
passages, where the hero is driven by a luminous evil spirit to rise at night in 
his sleep, take a strange Egyptian wand, and evoke nameless presences in the 
haunted and mausoleum-facing pavilion of a famous Renaissance alchemist, truly 
stands among the major terror scenes of literature. Just enough is suggested, 
and just little enough is told. Unknown words are twice dictated to the 
sleep-walker, and as he repeats them the ground trembles, and all the dogs of 
the countryside begin to bay at half-seen amorphous shadows that stalk athwart 
the moonlight. When a third set of unknown words is prompted, the sleep-walker's 
spirit suddenly rebels at uttering them, as if the soul could recognize ultimate 
abysmal horrors concealed from the mind; and at last an apparition of an absent 
sweetheart and good angel breaks the malign spell. This fragment well 
illustrates how far Lord Lytton was capable of progressing beyond his usual pomp 
and stock romance toward that crystalline essence of artistic fear which belongs 
to the domain of poetry. In describing certain details of incantations, Lytton 
was greatly indebted to his amusingly serious occult studies, in the course of 
which he came in touch with that odd French scholar and cabalist Alphonse Louis 
Constant ("Eliphas Levy"), who claimed to possess the secrets of ancient magic, 
and to have evoked the spectre of the old Grecian wizard Apollonius of Tyana, 
who lived in Nero's times. 
The romantic, semi-Gothic, quasi-moral tradition here represented was carried 
far down the nineteenth century by such authors as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, 
Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H. Rider Haggard (whose She is really remarkably 
good), Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson -- the latter 
of whom, despite an atrocious tendency toward jaunty mannerisms, created 
permanent classics in Markheim, The Body Snatcher, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 
Indeed, we may say that this school still survives; for to it clearly belong 
such of our contemporary horror-tales as specialise in events rather than 
atmospheric details, address the intellect rather than a malign tensity or 
psychological verisimilitude, and take a definite stand in sympathy with mankind 
and its welfare. It has its undeniable strength, and because of its "human 
element" commands a wider audience than does the sheer artistic nightmare. If 
not quite so potent as the latter, it is because a diluted product can never 
achieve the intensity of a concentrated essence. 
Quite alone both as a novel and as a piece of terror-literature stands the 
famous Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë, with its mad vistas of bleak, 
windswept Yorkshire moors and the violent, distorted lives they foster. Though 
primarily a tale of life, and of human passions in agony and conflict, its 
epically cosmic setting affords room for horror of the most spiritual sort. 
Heathcliff, the modified Byronic villain-hero, is a strange dark waif found in 
the streets as a small child and speaking only a strange gibberish till adopted 
by the family he ultimately ruins. That he is in truth a diabolic spirit rather 
than a human being is more than once suggested, and the unreal is further 
approached in the experience of the visitor who encounters a plaintive 
child-ghost at a bough-brushed upper window. Between Heathcliff and Catherine 
Earnshaw is a tie deeper and more terrible than human love. After her death he 
twice disturbs her grave, and is haunted by an impalpable presence which can be 
nothing less than 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 
Brontë's eerie terror is no mere Gothic echoe, but a tense expression of man's 
shuddering reaction to the unknown. In this respect, Wuthering Heights becomes 
the symbol of a literary transition, and marks the growth of a new and sounder 
school. 
VI. Spectral Literature On The Continent
On the continent literary horror fared well. The celebrated short tales and 
novels of Ernst Theodor Wihelm Hoffmann (1776-1822) are a by-word for mellowness 
of background and maturity of form, though they incline to levity and 
extravagance, and lack the exalted moments of stark, breathless terror which a 
less sophisticated writer might have achieved. Generally they convey the 
grotesque rather than the terrible. Most artistic of all the continental weird 
tales is the German classic Undine (1814), by Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Baron de 
la Motte Fouqué. 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 or no, if ever he prove unfaithful to her memory. Later, when Huldbrand is 
about to be married to Bertalda, Undine returns for her sad duty, and bears his 
life away in tears. When he is buried among his fathers in the village 
churchyard a veiled, snow-white female figure appears among the mourners, but 
after the prayer is seen no more. In her place is seen a little silver spring, 
which murmurs its way almost completely around the new grave, and empties into a 
neighboring lake. The villagers show it to this day, and say that Undine and her 
Huldbrand are thus united in death. Many passages and atmospheric touches in 
this tale reveal Fouqué as an accomplished artist in the field of the macabre; 
especially the descriptions of the haunted wood with its gigantic snow-white man 
and various unnamed terrors, which occur early in the narrative. 
Not so well known as Undine, but remarkable for its convincing realism and 
freedom from Gothic stock devices, is the Amber Witch of Wilhelm Meinhold, 
another product of the German fantastic genius of the earlier nineteenth 
century. This tale, which is laid in the time of the Thirty Years' War, purports 
to be a clergyman's manuscript found in an old church at Coserow, and centres 
round the writer's daughter, Maria Schweidler, who is wrongly accused of 
witchcraft. She has found a deposit of amber which she keeps secret for various 
reasons, and the unexplained wealth obtained from this lends colour to the 
accusation; an accusation instigated by the malice of the wolf-hunting nobleman 
Wittich Appelmann, who has vainly pursued her with ignoble designs. The deeds of 
a real witch, who afterward comes to a horrible supernatural end in prison, are 
glibly imputed to the hapless Maria; and after a typical witchcraft trial with 
forced confessions under torture she is about to be burned at the stake when 
saved just in time by her lover, a noble youth from a neighboring district. 
Meinhold'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 modern psychology. Novels like The Sorcerer's Apprentice and 
Alrune, and short stories like The Spider, contain distinctive qualities which 
raise them to a classic level. 
But France as well as Germany has been active in the realm of weirdness. Victor 
Hugo, in such tales as Hans of Iceland, and Balzac, in The Wild Ass's Skin, 
Seraphita, and Louis Lambert, both employ supernaturalism to a greater or less 
extent; though generally only as a means to some more human end, and without the 
sincere and dæmonic intensity which characterizes the born artist in shadows. It 
is in Theophile Gautier that we first seem to find an authentic French sense of 
the unreal world, and here there appears a spectral mystery which, though not 
continuously used, is recognizable at once as something alike genuine and 
profound. Short tales like Avatar, The Foot of the Mummy, and Clarimonde display 
glimpses of forbidden vistas that allure, tantalize, and sometime horrify; 
whilst the Egyptian visions evoked in One of Cleopatra's Nights are of the 
keenest and most expressive potency. Gautier captured the inmost soul of 
æon-weighted Egypt, with its cryptic life and Cyclopean architecture, and 
uttered once and for all the eternal horror of its nether world of catacombs, 
where to the end of time millions of stiff, spiced corpses will stare up in the 
blackness with glassy eyes, awaiting some awesome and unrelatable summons. 
Gustave Flaubert ably continued the tradition of Gautier in orgies of poetic 
phantasy like The Temptation of St. Anthony, and but for a strong realistic bias 
might have been an arch-weaver of tapestried terrors. Later on we see the stream 
divide, producing strange poets and fantaisistes of the symbolic and decadent 
schools whose dark interests really centre more in abnormalities of human 
thought and instinct than in the actual supernatural, and subtle story-tellers 
whose thrills are quite directly derived from the night-black wells of cosmic 
unreality. Of the former class of "artists in sin" the illustrious poet 
Baudelaire, influenced vastly by Poe, is the supreme type; whilst the 
psychological novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, a true child of the 
eighteen-nineties, is at once the summation and finale. The latter and purely 
narrative class is continued by Prosper Merimée, whose Venus of Ille presents in 
terse and convincing prose the same ancient statue-bride theme which Thomas 
Moore cast in ballad form in The Ring. 
The horror-tales of the powerful and cynical Guy de Maupassant, written as his 
final madness gradually overtook him, present individualities of their own; 
being rather the morbid outpourings of a realistic mind in a pathological state 
than the healthy imaginative products of a vision naturally disposed toward 
phantasy and sensitive to the normal illusions of the unseen. Nevertheless they 
are of the keenest interest and poignancy; suggesting with marvelous force the 
imminence of nameless terrors, and the relentless dogging of an ill-starred 
individual by hideous and menacing representatives of the outer blackness. Of 
these stories The Horla is generally regarded as the masterpiece. Relating the 
advent to France of an invisible being who lives on water and milk, sways the 
minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extra-terrestrial 
organisms arrived on earth to subjugate and overwhelm mankind, this tense 
narrative is perhaps without a peer in its particular department; 
notwithstanding its indebtedness to a tale by the American Fitz-James O'Brien 
for details in describing the actual presence of the unseen monster. Other 
potently dark creations of de Maupassant are Who Knows?, The Spectre, He, The 
Diary of a Madman, The White Wolf, On the River, and the grisly verses entitled 
Horror. 
The collaborators Erckmann-Chatrian enriched French literature with many 
spectral fancies like The Man-Wolf, in which a transmitted curse works toward 
its end in a traditional Gothic-castle setting. Their power of creating a 
shuddering midnight atmosphere was tremendous despite a tendency toward natural 
explanations and scientific wonders; and few short tales contain greater horror 
than The Invisible Eye, where a malignant old hag weaves nocturnal hypnotic 
spells which induce the successive occupants of a certain inn chamber to hang 
themselves on a cross-beam. The Owl's Ear and The Waters of Death are full of 
engulfing darkness and mystery, the latter embodying the familiar 
over-grown-spider theme so frequently employed by weird fictionists. Villiers de 
l'Isle Adam likewise followed the macabre school; his Torture by Hope, the tale 
of a stake-condemned prisoner permitted to escape in order to feel the pangs of 
recapture, being held by some to constitute the most harrowing short story in 
literature. This type, however, is less a part of the weird tradition than a 
class peculiar to itself -- the so-called conte cruel, in which the wrenching of 
the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalizations, frustrations, and 
gruesome physical horrors. Almost wholly devoted to this form is the living 
writer Maurice Level, whose very brief episodes have lent themselves so readily 
to theatrical adaptation in the "thrillers" of the Grand Guignol. As a matter of 
fact, the French genius is more naturally suited to this dark realism than to 
the suggestion of the unseen; since the latter process requires, for its best 
and most sympathetic development on a large scale, the inherent mysticism of the 
Northern mind. 
A very flourishing, though till recently quite hidden, branch of weird 
literature is that of the Jews, kept alive and nourished in obscurity by the 
sombre heritage of early Eastern magic, apocalyptic literature, and cabbalism. 
The Semitic mind, like the Celtic and Teutonic, seems to possess marked mystical 
inclinations; and the wealth of underground horror-lore surviving in ghettoes 
and synagogues must be much more considerable than is generally imagined. 
Cabbalism itself, so prominent during the Middle Ages, is a system of philosophy 
explaining the universe as emanations of the Deity, and involving the existence 
of strange spiritual realms and beings apart from the visible world of which 
dark glimpses may be obtained through certain secret incantations. Its ritual is 
bound up with mystical interpretations of the Old Testament, and attributes an 
esoteric significance to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet -- a circumstance 
which has imparted to Hebrew letters a sort of spectral glamour and potency in 
the popular literature of magic. Jewish folklore has preserved much of the 
terror and mystery of the past, and when more thoroughly studied is likely to 
exert considerable influence on weird fiction. The best examples of its literary 
use so far are the German novel The Golem, by Gustave Meyrink, and the drama The 
Dyhbuk, by the Jewish writer using the pseudonym "Ansky." The former, with its 
haunting shadowy suggestions of marvels and horrors just beyond reach, is laid 
in Prague, and describes with singular mastery that city's ancient ghetto with 
its spectral, peaked gables. The name is derived from a fabulous artificial 
giant supposed to be made and animated by mediæval rabbis according to a certain 
cryptic formula. The Dyhbuk, translated and produced in America in 1925, and 
more recently produced as an opera, describes with singular power the possession 
of a living body by the evil soul of a dead man. Both golems and dyhbuks 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 less of conformity to certain empty literary conventions such as the 
happy ending, virtue rewarded, and in general a hollow moral didacticism, 
acceptance of popular standards and values, and striving of the author to 
obtrude his own emotions into the story and take sides with the partisans of the 
majority's artificial ideas. Poe, on the other hand, perceived the essential 
impersonality of the real artist; and knew that the function of creative fiction 
is merely to express and interpret events and sensations as they are, regardless 
of how they tend or what they prove -- good or evil, attractive or repulsive, 
stimulating or depressing, with the author always acting as a vivid and detached 
chronicler rather than as a teacher, sympathizer, or vendor of opinion. He saw 
clearly that all phases of life and thought are equally eligible as a subject 
matter for the artist, and being inclined by temperament to strangeness and 
gloom, decided to be the interpreter of those powerful feelings and frequent 
happenings which attend pain rather than pleasure, decay rather than growth, 
terror rather than tranquility, and which are fundamentally either adverse or 
indifferent to the tastes and traditional outward sentiments of mankind, and to 
the health, sanity, and normal expansive welfare of the species. 
Poe's spectres thus acquired a convincing malignity possessed by none of their 
predecessors, and established a new standard of realism in the annals of 
literary horror. The impersonal and artistic intent, moreover, was aided by a 
scientific attitude not often found before; whereby Poe studied the human mind 
rather than the usages of Gothic fiction, and worked with an analytical 
knowledge of terror's true sources which doubled the force of his narratives and 
emancipated him from all the absurdities inherent in merely conventional 
shudder-coining. This example having been set, later authors were naturally 
forced to conform to it in order to compete at all; so that in this way a 
definite change begin to affect the main stream of macabre writing. Poe, too, 
set a fashion in consummate craftsmanship; and although today some of his own 
work seems slightly melodramatic and unsophisticated, we can constantly trace 
his influence in such things as the maintenance of a single mood and achievement 
of a single impression in a tale, and the rigorous paring down of incidents to 
such as have a direct bearing on the plot and will figure prominently in the 
climax. Truly may it be said that Poe invented the short story in its present 
form. His elevation of disease, perversity, and decay to the level of 
artistically expressible themes was likewise infinitely far-reaching in effect; 
for avidly seized, sponsored, and intensified by his eminent French admirer 
Charles Pierre Baudelaire, it became the nucleus of the principal æsthetic 
movements in France, thus making Poe in a sense the father of the Decadents and 
the Symbolists. 
Poet and critic by nature and supreme attainment, logician and philosopher by 
taste and mannerism, Poe was by no means immune from defects and affectations. 
His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in 
stilted and laboured pseudo-humor, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical 
prejudice must all be recognized and forgiven. Beyond and above them, and 
dwarfing them to insignificance, was a master's vision of the terror that stalks 
about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously 
close abyss. Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery 
called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and feeling, 
that vision had power to project itself in blackly magical crystallisations and 
transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile America of the thirties and 
forties such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi as not even the 
nether slopes of Saturn might boast. Verses and tales alike sustain the burthen 
of cosmic panic. The raven whose noisome beak pierces the heart, the ghouls that 
toll iron bells in pestilential steeples, the vault of Ulalume in the black 
October night, the shocking spires and domes under the sea, the "wild, weird 
clime that lieth, sublime, out of Space -- out of Time" -- all these things and 
more leer at us amidst maniacal rattlings in the seething nightmare of the 
poetry. And in the prose there yawn open for us the very jaws of the pit -- 
inconceivable abnormalities slyly hinted into a horrible half-knowledge by words 
whose innocence we scarcely doubt till the cracked tension of the speaker's 
hollow voice bids us fear their nameless implications; dæmoniac patterns and 
presences slumbering noxiously till waked for one phobic instant into a 
shrieking revelation that cackles itself to sudden madness or explodes in 
memorable and cataclysmic echoes. A Witches' Sabbath of horror flinging off 
decorous robes is flashed before us -- a sight the more monstrous because of the 
scientific skill with which every particular is marshaled and brought into an 
easy apparent relation to the known gruesomeness of material life. 
Poe's tales, of course, fall into several classes; some of which contain a purer 
essence of spiritual horror than others. The tales of logic and ratiocination, 
forerunners of the modern detective story, are not to be included at all in 
weird literature; whilst certain others, probably influenced considerably by 
Hoffmann, possess an extravagance which relegates them to the borderline of the 
grotesque. Still a third group deal with abnormal psychology and monomania in 
such a way as to express terror but not weirdness. A substantial residuum, 
however, represent the literature of supernatural horror in its acutest form; 
and give their author a permanent and unassailable place as deity and 
fountainhead of all modern diabolic fiction. Who can forget the terrible swollen 
ship poised on the billow-chasm's edge in MS. Found in a Bottle -- the dark 
intimations of her unhallowed age and monstrous growth, her sinister crew of 
unseeing greybeards, and her frightful southward rush under full sail through 
the ice of the Antarctic night, sucked onward by some resistless devil-current 
toward a vortex of eldritch enlightenment which must end in destruction? 
Then there is the unutterable M. Valdemar, kept together by hypnotism for seven 
months after his death, and uttering frantic sounds but a moment before the 
breaking of the spell leaves him "a nearly liquid mass of loathsome, of 
detestable putrescence." In the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym the voyagers reach 
first a strange south polar land of murderous savages where nothing is white and 
where vast rocky ravines have the form of titanic Egyptian letters spelling 
terrible primal arcana of earth; and thereafter a still more mysterious realm 
where everything is white, and where shrouded giants and snowy-plumed birds 
guard a cryptic cataract of mist which empties from immeasurable celestial 
heights into a torrid milky sea. Metzengerstein horrifies with its malign hints 
of a monstrous metempsychosis -- the mad nobleman who burns the stable of his 
hereditary foe; the colossal unknown horse that issues from the blazing building 
after the owner has perished therein; the vanishing bit of ancient tapestry 
where was shown the giant horse of the victim's ancestor in the Crusades; the 
madman's wild and constant riding on the great horse, and his fear and hatred of 
the steed; the meaningless prophecies that brood obscurely over the warring 
houses; and finally, the burning of the madman's palace and the death therein of 
the owner, borne helpless into the flames and up the vast staircase astride the 
beast he had ridden so strangely. Afterward the rising smoke of the ruins take 
the form of a gigantic horse. The Man of the Crowd, telling of one who roams day 
and night to mingle with streams of people as if afraid to be alone, has quieter 
effects, but implies nothing less of cosmic fear. Poe's mind was never far from 
terror and decay, and we see in every tale, poem, and philosophical dialogue a 
tense eagerness to fathom unplumbed wells of night, to pierce the veil of death, 
and to reign in fancy as lord of the frightful mysteries of time and space. 
Certain of Poe's tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form 
which makes them veritable beacon-lights in the province of the short story. Poe 
could, when he wished, give to his prose a richly poetic cast; employing that 
archaic and Orientalised style with jeweled phrase, quasi-Biblical repetition, 
and recurrent burthen so successfully used by later writers like Oscar Wilde and 
Lord Dunsany; and in the cases where he has done this we have an effect of 
lyrical phantasy almost narcotic in essence -- an opium pageant of dream in the 
language of dream, with every unnatural colour and grotesque image bodied forth 
in a symphony of corresponding sound. The Masque of the Red Death, Silence, a 
Fable, and Shadow, a Parable, are assuredly poems in every sense of the word 
save the metrical one, and owe as much of their power to aural cadence as to 
visual imagery. But it is in two of the less openly poetic tales, Ligeia and The 
Fall of the House of Usher -- especially the latter -- that one finds those very 
summits of artistry whereby Poe takes his place at the head of fictional 
miniaturists. Simple and straightforward in plot, both of these tales owe their 
supreme magic to the cunning development which appears in the selection and 
collocation of every least incident. Ligeia tells of a first wife of lofty and 
mysterious origin, who after death returns through a preternatural force of will 
to take possession of the body of a second wife; imposing even her physical 
appearance on the temporary reanimated corpse of her victim at the last moment. 
Despite a suspicion of prolixity and topheaviness, the narrative reaches its 
terrific climax with relentless power. Usher, whose superiority in detail and 
proportion is very marked, hints shudderingly of obscure life in inorganic 
things, and displays an abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a 
long and isolated family history -- a brother, his twin sister, and their 
incredibly ancient house all sharing a single soul and meeting one common 
dissolution at the same moment. 
These bizarre conceptions, so awkward in unskillful hands, become under Poe's 
spell living and convincing terrors to haunt our nights; and all because the 
author understood so perfectly the very mechanics and physiology of fear and 
strangeness -- the essential details to emphasise, the precise incongruities and 
conceits to select as preliminaries or concomitants to horror, the exact 
incidents and allusions to throw out innocently in advance as symbols or 
prefigurings of each major step toward the hideous dénouement to come, the nice 
adjustments of cumulative force and the unerring accuracy in linkage of parts 
which make for faultless unity throughout and thunderous effectiveness at the 
climactic moment, the delicate nuances of scenic and landscape value to select 
in establishing and sustaining the desired mood and vitalising the desired 
illusion -- principles of this kind, and dozens of obscurer ones too elusive to 
be described or even fully comprehended by any ordinary commentator. Melodrama 
and unsophistication there may be -- we are told of one fastidious Frenchman who 
could not bear to read Poe except in Baudelaire's urbane and Gallically 
modulated translation -- but all traces of such things are wholly overshadowed 
by a potent and inborn sense of the spectral, the morbid, and the horrible which 
gushed forth from every cell of the artist's creative mentality and stamped his 
macabre work with the ineffaceable mark of supreme genius. Poe's weird tales are 
alive in a manner that few others can ever hope to be. 
Like most fantaisistes, Poe excels in incidents and broad narrative effects 
rather than in character drawing. His typical protagonist is generally a dark, 
handsome, proud, melancholy, intellectual, highly sensitive, capricious, 
introspective, isolated, and sometimes slightly mad gentleman of ancient family 
and opulent circumstances; usually deeply learned in strange lore, and darkly 
ambitious of penetrating to forbidden secrets of the universe. Aside from a 
high-sounding name, this character obviously derives little from the early 
Gothic novel; for he is clearly neither the wooden hero nor the diabolical 
villain of Radcliffian or Ludovician romance. Indirectly, however, he does 
possess a sort of genealogical connection; since his gloomy, ambitious and 
anti-social qualities savour strongly of the typical Byronic hero, who in turn 
is definitely an offspring,of the Gothic Manfreds, Montonis, and Ambrosios. More 
particular qualities appear to be derived from the psychology of Poe himself, 
who certainly possessed much of the depression, sensitiveness, mad aspiration, 
loneliness, and extravagant freakishness which he attributes to his haughty and 
solitary victims of Fate. 
VIII. The Weird Tradition In America
The public for whom Poe wrote, though grossly unappreciative of his art, was by 
no means accustomed to the horrors with which he dealt. America, besides 
inheriting the usual dark folk-lore of Europe, had an additional fund of weird 
associations to draw upon; so that spectral legends had already been recognised 
as fruitful subject-matter for literature. Charles Brockden Brown had achieved 
phenomenal fame with his Radcliffian romances, and Washington Irving's lighter 
treatment of eerie themes had quickly become classic. This additional fund 
proceeded, as Paul Elmer More has pointed out, from the keen spiritual and 
theological interests of the first colonists, plus the strange and forbidding 
nature of the scene into which they were plunged. The vast and gloomy virgin 
forests in whose perpetual twilight all terrors might well lurk; the hordes of 
coppery Indians whose strange, saturnine visages and violent customs hinted 
strongly at traces of infernal origin; the free rein given tinder the influence 
of Puritan theocracy to all manner of notions respecting man's relation to the 
stern and vengeful God of the Calvinists, and to the sulphureous Adversary of 
that God, about whom so much was thundered in the pulpits each Sunday; and the 
morbid introspection developed by an isolated backwoods life devoid of normal 
amusements and of the recreational mood, harassed by commands for theological 
self-examination, keyed to unnatural emotional repression, and forming above all 
a mere grim struggle for survival -- all these things conspired to produce an 
environment in which the black whisperings of sinister grandams were heard far 
beyond the chimney corner, and in which tales of witchcraft and unbelievable 
secret monstrosities lingered long after the dread days of the Salem nightmare. 
Poe represents the newer, more disillusioned, and more technically finished of 
the weird schools that rose out of this propitious milieu. Another school -- the 
tradition of moral values, gentle restraint, and mild, leisurely phantasy tinged 
more or less with the whimsical -- was represented by another famous, 
misunderstood, and lonely figure in American letters -- the shy and sensitive 
Nathaniel Hawthorne, scion of antique Salem and great-grandson of one of the 
bloodiest of the old witchcraft judges. In Hawthorne we have none of the 
violence, the daring, the high colouring, the intense dramatic sense, the cosmic 
malignity, and the undivided and impersonal artistry of Poe. Here, instead, is a 
gentle soul cramped by the Puritanism of early New England; shadowed and 
wistful, and grieved at an unmoral universe which everywhere transcends the 
conventional patterns thought by our forefathers to represent divine and 
immutable law. Evil, a very real force to Hawthorne, appears on every hand as a 
lurking and conquering adversary; and the visible world becomes in his fancy a 
theatre of infinite tragedy and woe, with unseen half-existent influences 
hovering over it and through it, battling for supremacy and moulding the 
destinies of the hapless mortals who form its vain and self-deluded population. 
The heritage of American weirdness was his to a most intense degree, and he saw 
a dismal throng of vague specters behind the common phenomena of life; but he 
was not disinterested enough to value impressions, sensations, and beauties of 
narration for their own sake. He must needs weave his phantasy into some quietly 
melancholy fabric of didactic or allegorical cast, in which his meekly resigned 
cynicism may display with naive moral appraisal the perfidy of a human race 
which he cannot cease to cherish and mourn despite his insight into its 
hypocrisy. Supernatural horror, then, is never a primarily object with 
Hawthorne; though its impulses were so deeply woven into his personality that he 
cannot help suggesting it with the force of genius when he calls upon the unreal 
world to illustrate the pensive sermon he wishes to preach. 
Hawthorne's intimations of the weird, always gentle, elusive, and restrained, 
may be traced throughout his work. The mood that produced them found one 
delightful vent in the Teutonised retelling of classic myths for children 
contained in A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, and at other times exercised 
itself in casting a certain strangeness and intangible witchery or malevolence 
over events not meant to be actually supernatural; as in the macabre posthumous 
novel Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, which invests with a peculiar sort of repulsion a 
house existing to this day in Salem, and abutting on the ancient Charter Street 
Burying Ground. In The Marble Faun, whose design was sketched out in an Italian 
villa reputed to be haunted, a tremendous background of genuine phantasy and 
mystery palpitates just beyond the common reader's sight; and glimpses of 
fabulous blood in mortal veins are hinted at during the course of a romance 
which cannot help being interesting despite the persistent incubus of moral 
allegory, anti-Popery propaganda, and a Puritan prudery which has caused the 
modern writer D. H. Lawrence to express a longing to treat the author in a 
highly undignified manner. Septimius Felton, a posthumous novel whose, idea was 
to have been elaborated and incorporated into the unfinished Dolliver Romance, 
touches on the Elixir of Life in a more or less capable fashion whilst the notes 
for a never-written tale to be called The Ancestral Footstep show what Hawthorne 
would have done with an intensive treatment of an old English superstition -- 
that of an ancient and accursed line whose members left footprints of blood as 
they walked-which appears incidentally in both Septimius Felton and Dr. 
Grimshawe's Secret. 
Many of Hawthorne's shorter tales exhibit weirdness, either of atmosphere or of 
incident, to a remarkable degree. Edward Randolph's Portrait, in Legends of the 
Province House, has its diabolic moments. The Minister's Black Veil (founded on 
an actual incident) and The Ambitious Guest imply much more than they state, 
whilst Ethan Grand -- a fragment of a longer work never completed -- rises to 
genuine heights of cosmic fear with its vignette of the wild hill country and 
the blazing, desolate lime-kilns, and its delineation of the Byronic 
"unpardonable sinner," whose troubled life ends with a peal of fearful laughter 
in the night as he seeks rest amidst the flames of the furnace. Some of 
Hawthorne's notes tell of weird tales he would have written had he lived longer 
-- an especially vivid plot being that concerning a baffling stranger who 
appeared now and then in public assemblies, and who was at last followed and 
found to come and go from a very ancient grave. 
But foremost as a finished, artistic unit among all our author's weird material 
is the famous and exquisitely wrought novel, The House of the Seven Gables, in 
which the relentless working out of an ancestral curse is developed with 
astonishing power against the sinister background of a very ancient Salem house 
-- one of those peaked Gothic affairs which formed the first regular building-up 
of our New England coast towns but which gave way after the seventeenth century 
to the more familiar gambrel-roofed or classic Georgian types now known as 
"Colonial." Of these old gabled Gothic houses scarcely a dozen are to be seen 
today in their original condition throughout the United States, but one well 
known to Hawthorne still stands in Turner Street, Salem, and is pointed out with 
doubtful authority as the scene and inspiration of the romance. Such an edifice, 
with its spectral peaks, its clustered chimneys, its overhanging second story, 
its grotesque corner-brackets, and its diamond-paned lattice windows, is indeed 
an object well calculated to evoke sombre reflections; typifying as it does the 
dark Puritan age of concealed horror and witch-whispers which preceded the 
beauty, rationality, and spaciousness of the eighteenth century. Hawthorne saw 
many in his youth, and knew the black tales connected with some of them. He 
heard, too, many rumours of a curse upon his own line as the result of his 
great-grandfather's severity as a witchcraft judge in 1692. 
From this setting came the immortal tale -- New England's greatest contribution 
to weird literature -- and we can feel in an instant the authenticity of the 
atomosphere presented to us. Stealthy horror and disease lurk within the 
weather-blackened, moss-crusted, and elm-shadowed walls of the archaic dwelling 
so vividly displayed, and we grasp the brooding malignity of the place when we 
read that its builder -- old Colonel Pyncheon -- snatched the land with peculiar 
ruthlessness from its original settler, Matthew Maule, whom he condemned to the 
gallows as a wizard in the year of the panic. Maule died cursing old Pyncheon -- 
"God will give him blood to drink" -- and the waters of the old well on the 
seized land turned bitter. Maule's carpenter son consented to build the great 
gabled house for his fathet's triumphant enemy, but the old Colonel died 
strangely on the day of its dedication. Then followed generations of odd 
vicissitudes, with queer whispers about the dark powers of the Maules, and 
sometimes terrible ends befalling the Pyncheons. 
The overshadowing malevolence of the ancient house -- almost as alive as Poe's 
House of Usher, though in a subtler way -- pervades the tale as a recurrent 
motif pervades in operatic tragedy; and when the main story is reached, we 
behold the modern Pyncheons in a pitiable state of decay. Poor old Hepzibah, the 
eccentric reduced gentlewoman; childlike, unfortunate Clifford, just released 
from undeserved imprisonment; sly and treacherous judge Pyncheon, who is the old 
Colonel an over again -- all these figures are tremendous symbols, and are well 
matched by the stunted vegetation and anæmic fowls in the garden. It was almost 
a pity to supply a fairly happy ending, with a union of sprightly Phbe, cousin 
and last scion of the Pyncheons, to the prepossessing young man who turns out to 
be the last of the Maules. This union, presumably, ends the curse. Hawthorne 
avoids all violence of diction or movement, and keeps his implications of terror 
well in the background; but occasional glimpses amply serve to sustain the mood 
and redeem the work from pure allegorical aridity. Incidents like the bewitching 
of Alice Pyncheon in the early eighteenth century, and the spectral music of her 
harpsichord which precedes a death in the family -- the latter a variant of an 
immemorial type of Aryan myth -- link the action directly with the supernatural; 
whilst the dead nocturnal vigil of old judge Pyncheon in the ancient parlour, 
with his frightfully ticking watch, is stark horror of the most poignant and 
genuine sort. The way in which the judge's death is first adumbrated by the 
motions and sniffing of a strange cat outside the window, long before the fact 
is suspected by the reader or by any of the characters, is a stroke of genius 
which Poe could not have surpassed. Later the strange cat watches intently 
outside that same window in the night and on the next day, for -- something. It 
is clearly the psychopomp of primeval myth, fitted and adapted with infinite 
deftness to its latter-day setting. 
But Hawthorne left no well-defined literary posterity. His mood and attitude 
belonged to the age which closed with him, and it is the spirit of Poe -- who so 
clearly and realistically understood the natural basis of the horror-appeal and 
the correct mechanics of its achievement -- which survived and blossomed. Among 
the earliest of Poe's disciples may be reckoned the brilliant young Irishman 
Fitz James O'Brien (1828-1862), who became naturalised as an American and 
perished honourably in the Civil War. It is he who gave us What Was It?, the 
first well-shaped short story of a tangible but invisible being, and the 
prototype of de Maupassant's Horla; he also who created the inimitable Diamond 
Lens, in which a young microscopist falls in love with a maiden of in 
infinitesimal world which he has discovered in a drop of water. O'Brien's early 
death undoubtedly deprived us of some masterful tales of strangeness and terror, 
though his genius was not, properly speaking, of the same titan quality which 
characterised Poe and Hawthorne. 
Closer to real greatness was the eccentric and saturnine journalist Ambrose 
Bierce, born in 1842; who likewise entered the Civil War, but survived to write 
some immortal tales and to disappear in 1913 in as great a cloud of mystery as 
any he ever evoked from his nightmare fancy. Bierce was a satirist and 
pamphleteer of note, but the bulk of his artistic reputation must rest upon his 
grim and savage short stories; a large number of which deal with the Civil War 
and form the most vivid and realistic expression which that conflict has yet 
received in fiction. Virtually all of Bierce's tales are tales of horror; and 
whilst many of them treat only of the physical and psychological horrors within 
Nature, a substantial proportion admit the malignly supernatural and form a 
leading element in America's fund of weird literature. Mr. Samuel Loveman, a 
living poet and critic who was personally acquainted with Bierce, thus sums up 
the genius of the great "shadow-maker" in the preface to some of his letters: 
  In Bierce the evocation of horror becomes for the first time not so much the 
  prescription or perversion of Poe and Maupassant, but an atmosphere definite 
  and uncannily precise. Words, so simple that one would be prone to ascribe 
  them to the limitations of a literary hwk, take on an unholy horror, a new and 
  unguessed transformation. In Poe one finds it a tour de force, in Maupassant a 
  nervous engagement of the flagellated climax. To Bierce, simply and sincerely, 
  diabolism held in its tormented death a legitimate and reliant means to the 
  end. Yet a tacit confirmation with Nature is in every instance insisted upon. 
  In The Death of Halpin Frayser flowers, verdure, and the boughs and leaves of 
  trees are magnificently placed as an opposing foil to unnatural malignity. Not 
  the accustomed golden world, but a world pervaded with the mystery of blue and 
  the breathless recalcitrance of dreams is Bierces. Yet, curiously, inhumanity 
  is not altogether absent. 
The "inhumanity" mentioned by Mr. Loveman finds vent in a rare strain of 
sardonic comedy and graveyard humour, and a kind of delight in images of cruelty 
and tantalising disappointment. The former quality is well illustrated by some 
of the subtitles in the darker narratives; such as "One does not always eat what 
is on the table", describing a body laid out for a coroner's inquest, and "A man 
though naked may be in rags," referring to a frightfully mangled corpse. 
Bierce's work is in general somewhat uneven. Many of the stories are obviously 
mechanical, and marred by a jaunty and commonplacely artificial style derived 
from journalistic models; but the grim malevolence stalking through all of them 
is unmistakable, and several stand out as permanent mountain-peaks of American 
weird writing. The Death of Halpin Frayser, called by Frederic Taber Cooper the 
most fiendishly ghastly tale in the literature of the Anglo-Saxon race, tells of 
a body skulking by night without a soul in a weird and horribly ensanguined 
wood, and of a man beset by ancestral memories who met death at the claws of 
that which had been his fervently loved mother. The Damned Thing, frequently 
copied in popular anthologies, chronicles the hideous devastations of an 
invisible entity that waddles and flounders on the hills and in the wheatfields 
by night and day. The Suitable Surroundings evoke's with singular subtlety yet 
apparent simplicity a piercing sense of the terror which may reside in the 
written word. In the story the weird author Colston says to his friend Marsh, 
"You are brave enough to read me in a street-car, but -- in a deserted house -- 
alone -- in the forest -- at night! Bah! I have a manuscript in my pocket that 
would kill you!" Marsh reads the manuscript in "the suitable surroundings -- and 
it does kill him. The Middle Toe of the Right Foot is clumsily developed, but 
has a powerful climax. A man named Manton has horribly killed his two children 
and his wife, the latter of whom lacked the middle toe of the right foot. Ten 
years later he returns much altered to the neighbourhood; and, being secretly 
recognised, is provoked into a bowie-knife duel in the dark, to be held in the 
now abandond house where his crime was committed. When the moment of the duel 
arrives a trick is played upon him; and he is left without an antagonist, shut 
in a night-black ground floor room of the reputedly haunted edifice, with the 
thick dust of a decade on every hand. No knife is drawn against him, for only a 
thorough scare is intended; but on the next day he is found crouched in a corner 
with distorted face, dead of sheer fright at something he has seen. The only 
clue visible to the discoverers is one having terrible implications: "In the 
dust of years that lay thick upon the floor -- leading from the door by which 
they had entered, straight across the room to within a yard of Manton's 
crouching corpse -- were three parallel lines of footprints -- light but 
definite impressions of bare feet, the outer ones those of small children, the 
inner a woman's. From the point at which they ended they did not return; they 
pointed all one way." And, of course, the woman's prints showed a lack of the 
middle toe of the right foot. The Spook House, told with a severely homely air 
of journalistic verisimilitude, conveys terrible hints of shocking mystery. In 
1858 an entire family of seven persons disappears suddenly and unaccountably 
from a plantation house in eastern Kentucky, leaving all its possessions 
untouched -- furniture, clothing, food supplies, horses, cattle, and slaves. 
About a year later two men of high standing are forced by a storm to take 
shelter in the deserted dwelling, and in so doing stumble into a strange 
subterranean room lit by an unaccountable greenish light and having an iron door 
which cannot be opened from within. In this room lie the decayed corpses of all 
the missing family; and as one of the discoverers rushes forward to embrace a 
body he seems to recognise, the other is so overpowered by a strange foetor that 
he accidentally shuts his companion in the vault and loses consciousness. 
Recovering his senses six weeks later, the survivor is unable to find the hidden 
room; and the house is burned during the Civil War. The imprisoned discoverer is 
never seen or heard of again. 
Bierce seldom realises the atmospheric possibilities of his themes as vividly as 
Poe; and much of his work contains a certain touch of naiveté, prosaic 
angularity, or early-American provincialism which contrasts somewhat with the 
efforts of later horror-masters. Nevertheless the genuineness and artistry of 
his dark intimations are always unmistakable, so that his greatness is in no 
danger of eclipse. As arranged in his definitively collected works, Bierce's 
weird tales occur mainly in two volumes, Can Such Things Be? and In the Midst of 
Life. The former, indeed, is almost wholly given over to, the supernatural. 
Much of the best in American horror-literature has come from pens not mainly 
devoted to that medium. Oliver Wendell Holmes's historic Elsie Venner suggests 
with admirable restraint an unnatural ophidian element in a young woman 
prenatally influenced, and sustains the atmosphere with finely discriminating 
landscape touches. In The Turn of the Screw Henry James triumphs over his 
inevitable pomposity and prolixity sufficiently well to create a truly potent 
air of sinister menace; depicting the hideous influence of two dead and evil 
servants, Peter Quint and the governess, Miss Jessel, over a small boy and girl 
who had been under their care. James is perhaps too diffuse, too unctuously 
urbane, and too much addicted to subtleties of speech to realise fully all the 
wild and devastating horror in his situations; but for all that there is a rare 
and mounting tide of fright, culminating in the death of the little boy, which 
gives the novelette a permanent place in its special class. 
F. Marion Crawford produced several weird tales of varying quality, now 
collected in a volume entitled Wandering Ghosts. For the Blood Is the Life 
touches powerfully on a case of moon-cursed vampirism near an ancient tower on 
the rocks of the lonely South Italian seacoast. The Dead Smile treats of family 
horrors in an old house and an ancestral vault in Ireland, and introduces the 
banshee with considerable force. The Upper Berth, however, is Crawford's weird 
masterpiece; and is one of the most tremendous horror-stories in all literature. 
In this tale of a suicide-haunted stateroom such things as the spectral 
saltwater dampness, the strangely open porthole, and the nightmare struggle with 
the nameless object are handled with incomparable dexterity. 
Very genuine, though not without the typical mannered extravagance of the 
eighteen-nineties, is the strain of horror in the early work of Robert W. 
Chambers, since renowned for products of a very different quality. The King in 
Yellow, a series of vaguely connected short stories having as a background a 
monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings fright, madness, and spectral 
tragedy, really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear in spite of uneven 
interest and a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio 
atmosphere made popular by Du Maurier's Trilby. The most powerful of its tales, 
perhaps, is The Yellow Sign, in which is introduced a silent and terrible 
churchyard watchman with a face like a puffy grave-worm's. A boy, describing a 
tussle he has had with this creature, shivers and sickens as he relates a 
certain detail. "Well, it's Gawd's truth that when I 'it 'im 'e grabbed me 
wrists, Sir, and when I twisted 'is soft, mushy fist one of 'is fingers come off 
in me 'and." An artist, who after seeing him has shared with another a strange 
dream of a nocturnal hearse, is shocked by the voice with which the watchman 
accosts him. The fellow emits a muttering sound that fills the head "like thick 
oily smoke from a fat-rendering vat or an odour of noisome decay." What he 
mumbles is merely this: "Have you found the Yellow Sign?" 
A weirdly hieroglyphed onyx talisman, picked up on the street by the sharer of 
his dream, is shortly given the artist; and after stumbling queerly upon the 
hellish and forbidden book of horrors the two learn, among other hideous things 
which no sane mortal should know, that this talisman is indeed the nameless 
Yellow Sign handed down from the accursed cult of Hastur -- from primordial 
Carcosa, whereof the volume treats, and some nightmare memory of which seeks to 
lurk latent and ominous at the back of all men's minds. Soon they hear the 
rumbling of the black-plumed hearse driven by the flabby and corpse-faced 
watchman. He enters the night-shrouded house in quest of the Yellow Sign, all 
bolts and bars rotting at his touch. And when the people rush in, drawn by a 
scream that no human throat could utter, they find three forms on the floor -- 
two dead and one dying. One of the dead shapes is far gone in decay. It is the 
churchyard watchman, and the doctor exclaims, "That man must have been dead for 
months." It is worth observing that the author derives most of the names and 
allusions connected with his eldritch land of primal memory from the tales of 
Ambrose Bierce. Other early works of Mr. Chambers displaying the outré and 
macabre element are The Maker of Moons and In Search of the Unknown. One cannot 
help regretting that he did not further develop a vein in which he could so 
easily have become a recognised master. 
Horror material of authentic force may be found in the work of the New England 
realist Mary E. Wilkins, whose volume of short tales, The Wind in the Rosebush, 
contains a number of noteworthy achievements. In The Shadows on the Wall we are 
shown with consummate skill the response of a staid New England household to 
uncanny tragedy; and the sourceless shadow of the poisoned brother well prepares 
us for the climactic moment when the shadow of the secret murderer, who has 
killed himself in a neighbouring city, suddenly appears beside it. Charlotte 
Perkins Gilman, in The Yellow Wall Paper, rises to a classic level in subtly 
delineating the madness which crawls over a woman dwelling in the hideously 
papered room where a madwoman was once confined. 
In The Dead Valley the eminent architect and mediævalist Ralph Adams Cram 
achieves a memorably potent degree of vague regional horror through subtleties 
of atmosphere and description. 
Still further carrying on our spectral tradition is the gifted and versatile 
humourist Irvin S. Cobb, whose work both early and recent contains some finely 
weird specimens. Fishhead, an early achievement, is banefully effective in its 
portrayal of unnatural affinities between a hybrid idiot and the strange fish of 
an isolated lake, which at the last avenge their biped kinsman's murder. Later 
work of Mr. Cobb introduces an element of possible science, as in the tale of 
hereditary memory where a modern man with a negroid strain utters words in 
African jungle speech when run down by a train under visual and aural 
circumstances recalling the maiming of his black ancestor by a rhinoceros a 
century before. 
Extremely high in artistic stature is the novel The Dark Chamber (1927) by the 
late Leonard Cline. This is the tale of a man who -- with the characteristic 
ambition of the Gothic or Byronic hero-villain -- seeks to defy nature and 
recapture every moment of his past life through the abnormal stimulation of 
memory. To this end he employs endless notes, records, mnemonic objects, and 
pictures -- and finally odours, music, and exotic drugs. At last his ambition 
goes beyond his personal life and readies toward the black abysses of hereditary 
memory -- even back to pre-human days amidst the steaming swamps of the 
carboniferous age, and to still more unimaginable deeps of primal time and 
entity. He calls for madder music and takes stranger drugs, and finally his 
great dog grows oddly afraid of him. A noxious animal stench encompasses him, 
and he grows vacant-faced and subhuman. In the end he takes to the woods, 
howling at night beneath windows. He is finally found in a thicket, mangled to 
death. Beside him is the mangled corpse of his dog. They have killed each other. 
The atmosphere of this novel is malevolently potent, much attention being paid 
to the central figure's sinister home and household. 
A less subtle and well-balanced but nevertheless highly effective creation is 
Herbert S. Gorman's novel, The Place Called Dagon, which relates the dark 
history of a western Massachusetts back-water where the descendants of refugees 
from the Salem witchcraft still keep alive the morbid and degenerate horrors of 
the Black Sabbat. 
Sinister House, by Leland Hall, has touches of magnificent atmosphere but is 
marred by a somewhat mediocre romanticism. 
Very notable in their way are some of the weird conceptions of the novelist and 
short-story writer Edward Lucas White, most of whose themes arise from actual 
dreams. The Song of The Siren has a very persuasive strangeness, while such 
things as Lukundoo and The Snout arouse darker apprehensions. Mr. White imparts 
a very peculiar quality to his tales -- an oblique sort of glamour which has its 
own distinctive type of convincingness. 
Of younger Americans, none strikes the note of cosmic horror so well as the 
California poet, artist and fictionist Clark Ashton Smith, whose bizarre 
writing, drawings, paintings and stories are the delight of a sensitive few. Mr. 
Smith has for his background a universe of remote and paralysing fright-jungles 
of poisonous and iridescent blossoms on the moons of Saturn, evil and grotesque 
temples in Atlantis, Lemuria, and forgotten elder worlds, and dank morasses of 
spotted death-fungi in spectral countries beyond earth's rim. His longest and 
most ambitious poem, The Hashish-Eater, is in pentameter blank verse; and opens 
up chaotic and incredible vistas of kaleidoscopic nightmare in the spaces 
between the stars. In sheet dæmonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Mr. 
Smith is perhaps unexcelled by, any, other writer dead or living. Who else has 
seen such gorgeous, luxuriant, and feverishly distorted visions of infinite 
spheres and multiple dimensions and lived to tell the tale? His short stories 
deal powerfully with other galaxies, worlds, and dimensions, as well as with 
strange regions and æons on the earth. He tells of primal Hyperborea and its 
black amorphous god Tsathoggua; of the lost continent Zothique, and of the 
fabulous, Vampire-curst land of Averoigne in mediæval France. Some of Mr. 
Smith's best work can be found in the brochure entitled The Double Shadow and 
Other Fantasies (1933). 
IX. The Weird Tradition In The British Isles
Recent British literature, besides including the three or four greatest 
fantaisistes of the present age, has been gratifyingly fertile in the element of 
the weird. Rudyard Kipling has often approached it, and has, despite the 
omnipresent mannerisms, handled it with indubitable mastery in such tales as The 
Phantom Rickshaw, The Finest Story in the World, The Recrudescence of Imray, and 
The Mark of the Beast. This latter is of particular poignancy; the pictures of 
the naked leper-priest who mewed like an otter, of the spots which appeared on 
the chest of the man that priest cursed, of the growing carnivorousness of the 
victim and of the fear which horses began to display toward him, and of the 
eventually half-accomplished transformation of that victim into a leopard, being 
things which no reader is ever likely to forget. The final defeat of the 
malignant sorcery does not impair the force of the tale or the validity of its 
mystery. 
Lafcadio Hearn, strange, wandering, and exotic, departs still farther from the 
realm of the real; and with the supreme artistry of a sensitive poet weaves 
phantasies impossible to an author of the solid roast beef type. His Fantastics, 
written in America, contains some of the most impressive ghoulishness in all 
literature; whilst his Kwaidan, written in Japan, crystallises with matchless 
skill and delicacy the eerie lore and whispered legends of that richly colourful 
nation. Still more of Helm's wizardry of language is shown in some of his 
translations from the French, especially from Gautier and Flaubert. His version 
of the latter's Temptation of St. Anthony is a classic of fevered and riotous 
imagery clad in the magic of singing words. 
Oscar Wilde may likewise be given a place amongst weird writers, both for 
certain of his exquisite fairy tales, and for his vivid Picture of Dorian Gray, 
in which a marvellous portrait for years assumes the duty of aging and 
coarsening instead of its original, who meanwhile plunges into every excess of 
vice and crime without the outward loss of youth, beauty, and freshness. There 
is a sudden and potent climax when Dorian Gray, at last become a murderer, seeks 
to destroy the painting whose changes testify to his moral degeneracy. He stabs 
it with a knife, and a hideous cry and crash are heard; but when the servants 
enter they find it in all its pristine loveliness. "Lying on the floor was a 
dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, 
wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not until they had examined the rings 
that they recognised who he was." 
Matthew Phipps Shiel, author of many weird, grotesque, and adventurous novels 
and tales, occasionally attains a high level of horrific magic. Xelucha is a 
noxiously hideous fragment, but is excelled by Mr. Shiel's undoubted 
masterpiece, The House of Sounds, floridly written in the "yellow nineties," and 
recast with more artistic restraint in the early twentieth century. Ibis story, 
in final form, deserves a place among the foremost things of its kind. It tells 
of a creeping horror and menace trickling down the centuries on a sub-arctic 
island off the coast of Norway; where, amidst the sweep of daemon winds and the 
ceaseless din of hellish waves and cataracts, a vengeful dead man built a brazen 
tower of terror. It is vaguely like, yet infinitely unlike, Poe's Fall of the 
House of Usher. In the novel The Purple Cloud Mr. Shiel describes with 
tremendous power a curse which came out of the arctic to destroy mankind, and 
which for a time appears to have left but a single inhabitant on our planet. The 
sensations of this lone survivor as he realises his position, and roams through 
the corpse-littered and treasure-strewn cities of the world as their absolute 
master, are delivered with a skill and artistry falling little short of actual 
majesty. Unfortunately the second half of the book, with its conventionally 
romantic element, involves a distinct letdown. 
Better known than Shiel is the ingenious Bram Stoker, who created many starkly 
horrific conceptions in a series of novels whose poor technique sadly impairs 
their net effect. The Lair of the White Worm, dealing with a gigantic primitive 
entity that lurks in a vault beneath an ancient castle, utterly ruins a 
magnificent idea by a development almost infantile. The Jewel of Seven Stars, 
touching on a strange Egyptian resurrection, is less crudely written. But best 
of all is the famous Dracula, which has become almost the standard modern 
exploitation of the frightful vampire myth. Count Dracula, a vampire, dwells in 
a horrible castle in the Carpathians, but finally migrates to England with the 
design of populating the country with fellow vampires. How an Englishman fares 
within Dracula's stronghold of terrors, and how the dead fiend's plot for 
domination is at last defeated, are elements which unite to form a tale now 
justly assigned a permanent place in English letters. Dracula evoked many 
similar novels of supernatural horror, among which the best are perhaps The 
Beetle, by Richard Marsh, Brood of the Witch-Queen, by "Sax Rohmer" (Arthur 
Sarsfield Ward), and The Door of the Unreal, by Gerald Bliss. The latter handles 
quite dexterously the standard werewolf superstition. Much subtler and more 
artistic, and told with singular skill through the juxtaposed narratives of the 
several characters, is the novel Cold Harbour, by Francis Brett Young, in which 
an ancient house of strange malignancy is powerfully delineated. The mocking and 
well-nigh omnipotent fiend Humphrey Furnival holds echoes of the Manfred-Montoni 
type of early Gothic "villain," but is redeemed from triteness by many clever 
individualities. Only the slight diffuseness of explanation at the close, and 
the somewhat too free use of divination as a plot factor, keep this tale from 
approaching absolute perfection. 
In the novel Witch Wood John Buchan depicts with tremendous force a survival of 
the evil Sabbat in a lonely district of Scotland. The description of the black 
forest with the evil stone, and of the terrible cosmic adumbrations when the 
horror is finally extirpated, will repay one for wading through the very gradual 
action and plethora of Scottish dialect. Some of Mr. Buchan's short stories are 
also extremely vivid in their spectral intimations; The Green Wildebeest, a tale 
of African witchcraft, The Wind in the Portico, with its awakening of dead 
Britanno-Roman horrors, and Skule Skerry, with its touches of sub-arctic fright, 
being especially remarkable. 
Clemence Housman, in the brief novelette The Werewolf, attains a high degree of 
gruesome tension and achieves to some extent the atmosphere of authentic 
folklore. In The Elixir of Life Arthur Ransome attains some darkly excellent 
effects despite a general naiveté of plot, while H. B. Drake's The Shadowy Thing 
summons up strange and terrible vistas. George Macdonald's Lilith has a 
compelling bizarrerie all its own, the first and simpler of the two versions 
being perhaps the more effective. 
Deserving of distinguished notice as a forceful craftsman to whom an unseen 
mystic world is, ever a dose and vital reality is the poet Walter de la Mare, 
whose haunting verse and exquisite prose alike bear consistent traces of a 
strange vision reaching deeply into veiled spheres of beauty and terrible and 
forbidden dimensions of being. In the novel The Return we see the soul of a dead 
man reach out of its grave of two centuries and fasten itself upon the flesh of 
the living, so that even the face of the victim becomes that which had long ago 
returned to dust. Of the shorter tales, of which several volumes exist, many are 
unforgettable for their command of fear's and sorcery's darkest ramifications; 
notably Seaton's Aunt, in which there lowers a noxious background of malignant 
vampirism; The Tree, which tells of a frightful vegetable growth in the yard of 
a starving artist; Out of the Deep, wherein we are given leave to imagine what 
thing answered the summons of a dying wastrel in a dark lonely house when he 
pulled a long-feared bell-cord in the attic of his dread-haunted boyhood; A 
Recluse, which hints at what sent a chance guest flying from a house in the 
night; Mr. Kempe, which shows us a mad clerical hermit in quest of the human 
soul, dwelling in a frightful sea-cliff region beside an archaic abandoned 
chapel; and All-Hallows, a glimpse of dæmoniac forces besieging a lonely 
mediaeval church and miraculously restoring the rotting masonry. De la Mare does 
not make fear the sole or even the dominant element of most of his tales, being 
apparently more interested in the subtleties of character involved. Occasionally 
he sinks to sheer whimisical phantasy of the Barrie order. Still he is among the 
very few to whom unreality is a vivid, living presence; and as such he is able 
to put into his occasional fear-studies a keen potency which only a rare master 
can achieve. His poem The Listeners restores the Gothic shudder to modern verse. 

The weird short story has fared well of late, an important contributor being the 
versatile E. F. Benson, whose The Man Who Went Too Far breathes whisperingly of 
a house at the edge of a dark wood, and of Pan's hoof-mark on the breast of a 
dead man. Mr. Benson's volume, Visible and Invisible, contains several stories 
of singular power; notably Negotiam Perambulans, whose unfolding reveals an 
abnormal monster from an ancient ecclesiastical panel which performs an act of 
miraculous vengeance in a lonely village on the Cornish coast, and The 
Horror-Horn, through which lopes a terrible half-human survival dwelling on 
unvisited Alpine peaks. The Face, in another collection, is lethally potent, in 
its relentless aura of doom. H. R. Wakefield, in his collections, They Return at 
Evening and Others Who Return, manages now and then to achieve great heights of 
horror despite a vitiating air of sophistication. The most notable stories are 
The Red Lodge with its slimy acqueous evil, He Cometh and He Passeth By, And He 
Shall Sing, The Cairn, Look Up There, Blind Man's Buff, and that bit of lurking 
millennial horror, The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster. Mention has been made of 
the weird work of H.G. Wells and A. Conan Doyle. The former, in The Ghost of 
Fear, reaches a very high level while all the items in Thirty Strange Stories 
have strong fantastic implications. Doyle now and then struck a powerfully 
spectral note, as in The Captain of the Pole-Star, a tale of arctic ghostliness, 
and Lot No. 249, wherein the reanimated mummy theme is used with more than 
ordinary skill. Hugh Walpole, of the same family as the founder of Gothic 
fiction, has sometimes approached the bizarre with much success, his short story 
Mrs. Lunt carrying a very poignant shudder. John Metcalfe, in the collection 
published as The Smoking Leg, attains now and then a rare pitch of potency, the 
tale entitled The Bad Lands, containing graduations of horror that strongly 
savour of genius. More whimiscial and inclined toward the amiable and innocuous 
phantasy of Sir J. M. Barrie are the short tales of E.M. Forster, grouped under 
the title of The Celestial Omnibus. Of these only one, dealing with a glimpse of 
Pan and his aura of fright, may be said to hold the true element of cosmic 
horror. Mrs. H.D. Everett, though adhering to very old and conventional models, 
occasionally reaches singular heights of spiritual terror in her collection of 
short stories, The Death Mask. L. P. Hartley is notable for his incisive and 
extremely ghastly tale, A Visitor from Down Under, May Sinclair's Uncanny 
Stories contain more of traditional "occultism" than of that creative treatment 
of fear which marks mastery in this field, and are inclined to lay more stress 
on human emotions and psychological delving than upon the stark phenomena of a 
cosmos utterly unreal. It may be well to remark here that occult believers are 
probably less effective than materialists in delineating the spectral and the 
fantastic, since to them the phantom world is so commonplace a reality that they 
tend to refer to it with less awe, remoteness, and impressiveness thin do those 
who see in it an absolute and stupendous violation of the natural order. 
Of rather uneven stylistic quality, but vast occasional power in its suggestion 
of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life, is the work of 
William Hope Hodgson, known today far less than it deserves to be. Despite a 
tendency toward conventionally sentimental conceptions of the universe, and of 
man's relation to it and to his fellows, Mr. Hodgson is perhaps second only to 
Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality. Few can equal him in 
adumbrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities 
through casual hints and insignificant details, or in conveying feelings of the 
spectral and the abnormal in connection with regions or buildings. 
In The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907) we are shown a variety of malign marvels 
and accursed unknown lands as encountered by the survivors of a sunken ship. The 
brooding menace in the earlier parts of the book is impossible to surpass, 
though a letdown in the direction of ordinary romance and adventure occurs 
toward the end. An inaccurate and pseudo-romantic attempt to reproduce 
eighteenth-century prose detracts from the general effect, but the really 
profound nautical erudition everywhere displayed is a compensating factor. 
The House on the Borderland (1908) -- perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hodgson's 
works -- tells of a lonely and evilly regarded house in Ireland which forms a 
focus for hideous otherworld forces and sustains a siege by blasphemous hybrid 
anomalies from a hidden abyss below. The wanderings of the Narrator's spirit 
through limitless light-years of cosmic space and Kalpas of eternity, and its 
witnessing of the solar system's final destruction, constitute something almost 
unique in standard literature. And everywhere there is manifest the author's 
power to suggest vague, ambushed horrors in natural scenery. But for a few 
touches of commonplace sentimentality this book would be a classic of the first 
water. 
The Ghost Pirates (1909), regarded by Mr. Hodgson as rounding out a trilogy with 
the two previously mentioned works, is a powerful account of a doomed and 
haunted ship on its last voyage, and of the terrible sea-devils (of quasi-human 
aspect, and perhaps the spirits of bygone buccaneers) that besiege it and 
finally drag it down to an unknown fate. With its command of maritime knowledge, 
and its clever selection of hints and incidents suggestive of latent horrors in 
nature, this book at times reaches enviable peaks of power. 
The Night Land (1912) is a long-extended (538 pp.) tale of the earth's 
infinitely remote future-billions of billions of years ahead, after the death of 
the sun. It is told in a rather clumsy fashion, as the dreams of a man in the 
seventeenth century, whose mind merges with its own future incarnation; and is 
seriously marred by painful verboseness, repetitiousness, artificial and 
nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality, and an attempt at archaic language 
even more grotesque and absurd than that in Glen Carrig. 
Allowing for all its faults, it is yet one of the most potent pieces of macabre 
imagination ever written. The picture of a night-black, dead planet, with the 
remains of the human race concentrated in a stupendously vast mental pyramid and 
besieged by monstrous, hybrid, and altogether unknown forces of the darkness, is 
something that no reader can ever forget: Shapes and entities of an altogether 
non-human and inconceivable sort -- the prowlers of the black, man-forsaken, and 
unexplored world outside the pyramid -- are suggested and partly described with 
ineffable potency; while the night-land landscape with its chasms and slopes and 
dying volcanism takes on an almost sentient terror beneath the author's touch. 
Midway in the book the central figure ventures outside the pyramid on a quest 
through death-haunted realms untrod by man for millions of years -- and in his 
slow, minutely described, day-by-day progress over unthinkable leagues of 
immemorial blackness there is a sense of cosmic alienage, breathless mystery, 
and terrified expectancy unrivalled in the whole range of literature. The last 
quarter of the book drags woefully, but fails to spoil the tremendous power of 
the whole. Mr. Hodgson's later volume, Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, consists of 
several longish short stories published many years before in magazines. In 
quality it falls conspicuously below the level of the other books. We here find 
a more or less conventional stock figure of the "infallible detective" type -- 
the progeny of M. Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, and the close kin of Algernon 
Blackwood's John Silence -- moving through scenes and events badly marred by an 
atmosphere of professional "occultism." A few of the episodes, however, are of 
undeniable power, and afford glimpses of the peculiar genius characteristic of 
the author. 
Naturally it is impossible in brief sketch to trace out all the classic modern 
uses of the terror element. The ingredient must of necessity enter into all 
work, both prose and verse, treating broadly of life; and we are therefore not 
surprised to find a share in such writers as the poet Browning, whose Childe 
Roland to the Dark Tower Came is instinct with hideous menace, or the novelist 
Joseph Conrad, who often wrote of the dark secrets within the sea, and of the 
dæmoniac driving power of Fate as influencing the lives of lonely and maniacally 
resolute men. Its trail is one of infinite ramifications; but we must here 
confine ourselves to its appearance in a relatively unmixed state, where it 
determines and dominates the work of art containing it. 
Somewhat separate from the main British stream is that current of weirdness in 
Irish literature which came to the fore in the Celtic Renaissance of the later 
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ghost and fairy lore have always been 
of great prominence in Ireland, and for over a hundred years have been recorded 
by a line of such faithful transcribers and translators as William Carleton, T. 
Crofton Croker, Lady Wilde -- mother of Oscar Wilde -- Douglas Hyde, and W.B. 
Yeats. Brought to notice by the modern movement, this body of myth has been 
carefully collected and studied; and its salient features reproduced in the work 
of later figures like Yeats, J. M. Synge, "A. E.," Lady Gregory, Padraic Colum, 
James Stephens and their colleagues. 
Whilst on the whole more whimsically fantastic than terrible, such folklore and 
its consciously artistic counterparts contain much that falls truly within the 
domain of cosmic horror. Tales of burials in sunken churches beneath haunted 
lakes, accounts of death-heralding banshees and sinister changelings, ballads of 
spectres and "the unholy creatures of the Raths" -- all these have their 
poignant and definite shivers, and mark a strong and distinctive element in 
weird literature. Despite homely grotesqueness and absolute naiveté, there is 
genuine nightmare in the class of narrative represented by the yarn of Teig 
O'Kane, who in punishment for his wild life was ridden all night by a hideous 
corpse that demanded burial and drove him from churchyard to churchyard as the 
dead rose up loathsomely in each one and refused to accommodate the newcomer 
with a berth. Yeats, undoubtedly the greatest figure of the Irish revival if not 
the greatest of all living poets, has accomplished notable things both in 
original work and in the codification of old legends. 
X. The Modern Masters
The best horror-tales of today, profiting by the long evolution of the type, 
possess a naturalness, convincingness, artistic smoothness, and skilful 
intensity of appeal quite beyond comparison with anything in the Gothic work of 
a century or more ago. Technique, craftsmanship, experience, and psychological 
knowledge have advanced tremendously with the passing years, so that much of the 
older work seems naive and artificial; redeemed, when redeemed at all, only by a 
genius which conquers heavy limitations. The tone of jaunty and inflated 
romance, full of false motivation and investing every conceivable event with a 
counterfeit significance and carelessly inclusive glamour, is now confined to 
lighter and more whimiscal phases of supernatural writing. Serious weird stories 
are either made realistically intense by dose consistency and perfect fidelity 
to Nature except in the one supernatural direction which the author allows 
himself, or else cast altogether in the realm of phantasy, with atmosphere 
cunningly adapted to the visualisation of a delicately exotic world of unreality 
beyond space and time, in which almost anything may happen if it but happen in 
true accord with certain types of imagination and illusion normal to the 
sensitive human brain. This, at least, is the dominant tendency; though of 
course many great contemporary writers slip occasionally into some of the flashy 
postures of immature romanticism or into bits of the equally empty and absurd 
jargon of pseudo-scientific "occultism," now at one of its periodic high tides. 
Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any 
can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen, author of some dozen tales long 
and short, in which the elements of hidden horror and brooding fright attain an 
almost incomparable substance and realistic acuteness. Mr. Machen, a general man 
of letters and master of an exquisitely lyrical and expressive prose style, has 
perhaps put more conscious effort into his picaresque Chronicles of Clemendy, 
his refreshing essays, his vivid autobiographical volumes, his fresh and 
spirited translations, and above all his memorable epic of the sensitive 
æsthetic mind, The Hill of Dreams, in which the youthful hero responds to the 
magic of that ancient Welsh environment which is the author's own, and lives a 
dream-life in the Roman city of Isca Silurum, now shrunk to the relic-strown 
village of Caerleon-on-Usk. But the fact remains that his powerful 
horror-material of the nineties and earlier nineteen-hundreds stands alone in 
its class, and marks a distinct epoch in the history of this literary form. 
Mr. Machen, with an impressionable Celtic heritage linked to keen youthful 
memories of the wild domed hills, archaic forests, and cryptical Roman ruins of 
the Gwent countryside, has developed an imaginative life of rare beauty, 
intensity, and historic background. He has absorbed the mediaeval mystery of 
dark woods and ancient customs, and is a champion of the Middle Ages in all 
things -- including the Catholic faith. He has yielded, likewise, to the spell 
of the Britanno-Roman life which once surged over his native region; and finds 
strange magic in the fortified camps, tessellated pavements, fragments of 
statues, and kindred things which tell of the day when classicism reigned and 
Latin was the language of the country. A young American poet, Frank Belknap 
Long, has well summarised this dreamer's rich endowments and wizardry of 
expression in the sonnet On Reading Arthur Machen: 
  There is a glory in the autumn wood, 
  The ancient lanes of England wind and climb 
  Past wizard oaks and gorse and tangled thyme 
  To where a fort of mighty empire stood: 
  There is a glamour in the autumn sky; 
  The reddened clouds are writhing in the glow 
  Of some great fire, and there are glints below 
  Of tawny yellow where the embers die. 
  I wait, for he will show me, clear and cold, 
  High-rais'd in splendour, sharp against the North, 
  The Roman eagles, and through mists of gold 
  The marching legions as they issue forth: 
  I wait, for I would share with him again 
  The ancient wisdom, and the ancient pain. 
Of Mr. Machen's horror-tales the most famous is perhaps The Great God Pan (1894) 
which tells of a singular and terrible experiment and its consequences. A young 
woman, through surgery of the brain-cells, is made to see the vast and monstrous 
deity of Nature, and becomes an idiot in consequence, dying less than a year 
later. Years afterward a strange, ominous, and foreign-looking child named Helen 
Vaughan is placed to board with a family in rural Wales, and haunts the woods in 
unaccountable fashion. A little boy is thrown out of his mind at sight of 
someone or something he spies with her, and a young girl comes to a terrible end 
in similar fashion. All this mystery is strangely interwoven with the Roman 
rural deities of the place, as sculptured in antique fragments. After another 
lapse of years, a woman of strangely exotic beauty appears in society, drives 
her husband to horror and death, causes an artist to paint unthinkable paintings 
of Witches' Sabbaths, creates an epidemic of suicide among the men of her 
acquaintance, and is finally discovered to be a frequenter of the lowest dens of 
vice in London, where even the most callous degenerates are shocked at her 
enormities. Through the clever comparing of notes on the part of those who have 
had word of her at various stages of her career, this woman is discovered to be 
the girl Helen Vaughan, who is the child -- by no mortal father -- of the young 
woman on whom the brain experiment was made. She is a daughter of hideous Pan 
himself, and at the last is put to death amidst horrible transmutations of form 
involving changes of sex and a descent to the most primal manifestations of the 
life-principle. 
But the charm of the tale is in the telling. No one could begin to describe the 
cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds 
without following fully the precise order in which Mr. Machen unfolds his 
gradual hints and revelations. Melodrama is undeniably present, and coincidence 
is stretched to a length which appears absurd upon analysis; but in the malign 
witchery of the tale as a whole these trifles are forgotten, and the sensitive 
reader reaches the end with only an appreciative shudder and a tendency to 
repeat the words of one of the characters: "It is too incredible, too monstrous; 
such things can never be in this quiet world.... Why, man, if such a case were 
possible, our earth would be a nightmare." 
Less famous and less complex in plot than The Great God Pan, but definitely 
finer in atmosphere and general artistic value, is the curious and dimly 
disquieting chronicle called The White People, whose central portion purports to 
be the diary or notes of a little girl whose nurse has introduced her to some of 
the forbidden magic and soul-blasting traditions of the noxious witch-cult -- 
the cult whose whispered lore was handed down long lines of peasantry throughout 
Western Europe, and whose members sometimes stole forth at night, one by one, to 
meet in black woods and lonely places for the revolting orgies of the Witches' 
Sabbath. Mr. Machen's narrative, a triumph of skilful selectiveness and 
restraint, accumulates enormous power as it flows on in a stream of innocent 
childish prattle, introducing allusions to strange "nymphs," "Dols," "voolas," 
"white, green, and scarlet ceremonies," "Aklo letters," "Chian language," "Mao 
games," and the like. The rites learned by the nurse from her witch grandmother 
are taught to the child by the time she is three years old, and her artless 
accounts of the dangerous secret revelations possess a lurking terror generously 
mixed with pathos. Evil charms well known to anthropologists are described with 
juvenile naiveté, and finally there comes a winter afternoon journey into the 
old Welsh hills, performed under an imaginative spell which lends to the wild 
scenery an added weirdness, strangeness, and suggestion of grotesque sentience. 
The details of this journey are given with marvellous vividness, and form to the 
keen critic a masterpiece of fantastic writing, with almost unlimited power in 
the intimation of potent hideousness and cosmic aberration. At length the child 
-- whose age is then thirteen -- comes upon a cryptic and banefully beautiful 
thing in the midst of a dark and inaccessible wood. In the end horror overtakes 
her in a manner deftly prefigured by an anecdote in the prologue, but she 
poisons herself in time. Like the mother of Helen Vaughan in The Great God Pan, 
she has seen that frightful deity. She is discovered dead in the dark wood 
beside the cryptic thing she found; and that thing -- a whitely luminous statue 
of Roman workmanship about which dire mediæval rumours had clustered -- is 
affrightedly hammered into dust by the searchers. 
In the episodic novel of The Three Impostors, a work whose, merit as a whole is 
somewhat marred by an imitation of the jaunty Stevenson manner, occur certain 
tales which perhaps represent the highwater mark of Machen's skill as a 
terror-weaver. Here we find in its most artistic form a favourite weird 
conception of the author's; the notion that beneath the mounds and rocks of the 
wild Welsh hills dwell subterraneously that squat primitive race whose vestiges 
gave rise to our common folk legends of fairies, elves, and the "little people," 
and whose acts are even now responsible for certain unexplained disappearances, 
and occasional substitutions of strange dark "changelings" for normal infants. 
This theme receives its finest treatment in the episode entitled The Novel Of 
The Black Seal; where a professor, having discovered a singular identity between 
certain characters scrawled on Welsh limestone rocks and those existing in a 
prehistoric black seal from Babylon, sets out on a course of discovery which 
leads him to unknown and terrible things. A queer passage in the ancient 
geographer Solinus, a series of mysterious disappearances in the lonely reaches 
of Wales, a strange idiot son born to a rural mother after a fright in which her 
inmost faculties were shaken; all these things suggest to the professor a 
hideous connection and a condition revolting to any friend and respecter of the 
human race. He hires the idiot boy, who jabbers strangely at times in a 
repulsive hissing voice, and is subject to odd epileptic seizures. Once, after 
such a seizure in the professor's study by night, disquieting odours and 
evidences of unnatural presences are found; and soon after that the professor 
leaves a bulky document and goes into the weird hills with feverish expectancy 
and strange terror in his heart. He never returns, but beside a fantastic stone 
in the wild country are found his watch, money, and ring, done up with catgut in 
a parchment bearing the same terrible characters as those on the black 
Babylonish seal and the rock in the Welsh mountains. 
The bulky document explains enough to bring up the most hideous vistas. 
Professor Gregg, from the massed evidence presented by the Welsh disappearances, 
the rock inscription, the accounts of ancient geographers, and the black seal, 
has decided that a frightful race of dark primal beings of immemorial antiquity 
and wide former diffusion still dwell beneath the hills of unfrequented Wales. 
Further research has unriddled the message of the black seal, and proved that 
the idiot boy, a son of some father more terrible than mankind, is the heir of 
monstrous memories and possibilities. That strange night in the study the 
professor invoked "the awful transmutation of the hills" by the aid of the black 
seal, and aroused in the hybrid idiot the horrors of his shocking paternity. He 
"saw his body swell and become distended as a bladder, while the face blackened. 
. . ." And then the supreme effects of the invocation appeared, and Professor 
Gregg knew the stark frenzy of cosmic panic in its darkest form. He knew the 
abysmal gulfs of abnormality that he had opened, and went forth into the wild 
hills prepared and resigned. He would meet the unthinkable "Little People" -- 
and his document ends with a rational observation: "If unhappily I do not return 
from my journey, there is no need to conjure up here a picture of the awfulness 
of my fate." 
Also in The Three Imposters is the Novel of the White Powder, which approaches 
the absolute culmination of loathsome fright. Francis Leicester, a young law 
student nervously worn out by seclusion and overwork, has a prescription filled 
by an old apothecary none too careful about the state of his drugs. The 
substance, it later turns out, is an unusual salt which time and varying 
temperature have accidentally changed to something very strange and terrible; 
nothing less, in short, than the mediæval vinum sabbati, whose consumption at 
the horrible orgies of the Witches' Sabbath gave rise to shocking 
transformations and -- if injudiciously used -- to unutterable consequences. 
Innocently enough, the youth regularly imbibes the powder in a glass of water 
after meals; and at first seems substantially benefited. Gradually, however, his 
improved spirits take the form of dissipation; he is absent from home a great 
deal, and appears to have undergone a repellent psychological change. One day an 
odd livid spot appears on his right hand, and he afterward returns to his 
seclusion; finally keeping himself shut within his room and admitting none of 
the household. The doctor calls for an interview, and departs in a palsy of 
horror, saying that he can do no more in that house. Two weeks later the 
patient's sister, walking outside, sees a monstrous thing at the sickroom 
window; and servants report that food left at the locked door is no longer 
touched. Summons at the door bring only a sound of shuffling and a demand in a 
thick gurgling voice to be let alone. At last an awful happening is reported by 
a shuddering housemaid. The ceiling of the room below Leicester's is stained 
with a hideous black fluid, and a pool of viscid abomination has dripped to the 
bed beneath. Dr. Haberden, now persuaded to return to the house, breaks down the 
young man's door and strikes again and again with an iron bar at the blasphemous 
semiliving thing he finds there. It is "a dark and putrid mass, seething with 
corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting and 
changing." Burning points like eyes shine out of its midst, and before it is 
dispatched it tries to lift what might have been an arm. Soon afterward the 
physician, unable to endure the memory of what he has beheld, dies at sea while 
bound for a new life in America. Mr. Machen returns to the dæmoniac "Little 
People" in The Red Hand and The Shining Pyramid; and in The Terror, a wartime 
story, he treats with very potent mystery the effect of man's modern repudiation 
of spirituality on the beasts of the world, which are thus led to question his 
supremacy and to unite for his extermination. Of utmost delicacy, and passing 
from mere horror into true mysticism, is The Great Return, a story of the Graal, 
also a product of the war period. Too well known to need description here is the 
tale of The Bowmen; which, taken for authentic narration, gave rise to the 
widespread legend of the "Angels of Mons" -- ghosts of the old English archers 
of Crecy and Agincourt who fought in 1914 beside the hard-pressed ranks of 
England's glorious "Old Contemptibles." 
Less intense than Mr. Machen in delineating the extremes of stark fear, yet 
infinitely more closely wedded to the idea of an unreal world constantly 
pressing upon ours is the inspired and prolific Algernon Blackwood, amidst whose 
voluminous and uneven work may be found some of the finest spectral literature 
of this or any age. Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood's genius there can be no 
dispute; for no one has even approached the skill, seriousness, and minute 
fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things 
and experiences, or the preternatural insight with which he builds up detail by 
detail the complete sensations and perceptions leading from reality into 
supernormal life or vision. Without notable command of the poetic witchery of 
mere words, he is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere; 
and can evoke what amounts almost to a story from a simple fragment of 
humourless psychological description. Above all others he understands how fully 
some sensitive minds dwell forever on the borderland of dream, and how 
relatively slight is the distinction betwixt those images formed from actual 
objects and those excited by the play of the imagination. 
Mr. Blackwood's lesser work is marred by several defects such as ethical 
didacticism, occasional insipid whimsicality, the flatness of benignant 
supernaturalism, and a too free use of the trade jargon of modem "occultism." A 
fault of his more serious efforts is that diffuseness and long-windedness which 
results from an excessively elaborate attempt, under the handicap of a somewhat 
bald and journalistic style devoid of intrinsic magic, colour, and vitality, to 
visualise precise sensations and nuances of uncanny suggestion. But in spite of 
all this, the major products of Mr. Blackwood attain a genuinely classic level, 
and evoke as does nothing else in literature in awed convinced sense of the 
imminence of strange spiritual spheres of entities. 
The well-nigh endless array of Mr. Blackwood's fiction includes both novels and 
shorter tales, the latter sometimes independent and sometimes arrayed in series. 
Foremost of all must be reckoned The Willows, in which the nameless presences on 
a desolate Danube island are horribly felt and recognised by a pair of idle 
voyagers. Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest 
development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a, 
single strained passage or a single false note. Another amazingly potent though 
less artistically finished tale is The Wendigo, where we are confronted by 
horrible evidences of a vast forest dæmon about which North Woods lumbermen 
whisper at evening. The manner in which certain footprints tell certain 
unbelievable things is really a marked triumph in craftsmanship. In An Episode 
in a Lodging House we behold frightful presences summoned out of black space by 
a sorcerer, and The Listener tells of the awful psychic residuum creeping about 
an old house where a leper died. In the volume titled Incredible Adventures 
occur some of the finest tales which the author has yet produced, leading the 
fancy to wild rites on nocturnal hills, to secret and terrible aspects lurking 
behind stolid scenes, and to unimaginable vaults of mystery below the sands and 
pyramids of Egypt; all with a serious finesse and delicacy that convince where a 
cruder or lighter treatment would merely amuse. Some of these accounts are 
hardly stories at all, but rather studies in elusive impressions and 
half-remembered snatches of dream. Plot is everywhere negligible, and atmosphere 
reigns untrammelled. 
John Silence -- Physician Extraordinary is a book of five related tales, through 
which a single character runs his triumphant course. Marred only by traces of 
the popular and conventional detective-story atmosphere -- for Dr. Silence is 
one of those benevolent geniuses who employ their remarkable powers to aid 
worthy fellow-men in difficulty -- these narratives contain some of the author's 
best work, and produce an illusion at once emphatic and lasting. The opening 
tale, A Psychical Invasion, relates what befell a sensitive author in a house 
once the scene of dark deeds, and how a legion of fiends was exorcised. Ancient 
Sorceries, perhaps the finest tale in the book, gives an almost hypnotically 
vivid account of an old French town where once the unholy Sabbath was kept by 
all the people in the form of cats. In The Nemesis of Fire a hideous elemental 
is evoked by new-spilt blood, whilst Secret Worship tells of a German school 
where Satanism held sway, and where long afterward an evil aura remained. The 
Camp of the Dog is a werewolf tale, but is weakened by moralisation and 
professional "occultism." 
Too subtle, perhaps, for definite classification as horror-tales, yet possibly 
more truly artistic in an absolute sense, are such delicate phantasies as Jimbo 
or The Centaur. Mr. Blackwood achieves in these novels a close and palpitant 
approach to the inmost substance of dream, and works enormous havoc with the 
conventional barriers between reality and imagination. 
Unexcelled in the sorcery of crystalline singing prose, and supreme in the 
creation of a gorgeous and languorous world of iridescently exotic vision, is 
Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Eighteenth Baron Dunsany, whose tales and 
short plays form an almost unique element in our literature. Inventor of a new 
mythology and weaver of surprising folklore, Lord Dunsany stands dedicated to a 
strange world of fantastic beauty, and pledged to eternal warfare against the 
coarseness and ugliness of diurnal reality. His point of view is the most truly 
cosmic of any held in the literature of any period. As sensitive as Poe to 
dramatic values and the significance of isolated words and details, and far 
better equipped rhetorically through a simple lyric style based on the prose of 
the King James Bible, this author draws with tremendous effectiveness on nearly 
every body of myth and legend within the circle of European culture; producing a 
composite or eclectic cycle of phantasy in which Eastern colour, Hellenic form, 
Teutonic sombreness and Celtic wistfulness are so superbly blended that each 
sustains and supplements the rest without sacrifice or perfect congruity and 
homogeneity. In most cases Dunsany's lands are fabulous -- "beyond the East," or 
"at the edge of the world." His system of original personal and place names, 
with roots drawn from classical, Oriental, and other sources, is a marvel of 
versatile inventiveness and poetic discrimination; as one may see from such 
specimens as "Argimenes," "Bethmoora," "Poltarnees," "Camorak," "Iluriel," or 
"Sardathrion." 
Beauty rather than terror is the keynote of Dunsany's work. He loves the vivid 
green of jade and of copper domes, and the delicate flush of sunset on the ivory 
minarets of impossible dream-cities. Humour and irony, too, are often present to 
impart a gentle cynicism and modify what might otherwise possess a naïve 
intensity. Nevertheless, as is inevitable in a master of triumphant unreality, 
there are occasional touches of cosmic fright which come well within the 
authentic tradition. Dunsany loves to hint slyly and adroitly of monstrous 
things and incredible dooms, as one hints in a fairy tale. In The Book of Wonder 
we read of Hlo-Hlo, the gigantic spider-idol which does not always stay at home; 
of what the Sphinx feared in the forest; of Slith, the thief who jumps over the 
edge of the world after seeing a certain light lit and knowing who lit it; of 
the anthropophagous; Gibbelins, who inhabit an evil tower and guard a treasure; 
of the Gnoles, who live in the forest and from whom it is not well to steal; of 
the City of Never, and the eyes that watch in the Under Pits; and of kindred 
things of darkness. A Dreamer's Tales tells of the mystery that sent forth all 
men from Bethmoora in the desert; of the vast gate of Perdondaris, that was 
carved from a single piece of ivory; and of the voyage of poor old Bill, whose 
captain cursed the crew and paid calls on nasty-looking isles new-risen from the 
sea, with low thatched cottages having evil, obscure windows. 
Many of Dunsany's short plays are replete with spectral fear. In The Gods of the 
Mountain seven beggars impersonate the seven green idols on a distant hill, and 
enjoy ease and honour in a city of worshippers until they hear that the real 
idols are missing from their wonted seats. A very ungainly sight in the dusk is 
reported to them -- "rock should not walk in the evening" -- and at last, as 
they sit awaiting the arrival of a troop of dancers, they note that the 
approaching footsteps are heavier than those of good dancers ought to be. Then 
things ensue, and in the end the presumptuous blasphemers are turned to green 
jade statues by the very walking statues whose sanctity they outraged. But mere 
plot is the very least merit of this marvellously effective play. The incidents 
and developments are those of a supreme master, so that the whole forms one of 
the most important contributions of the present age not only to drama, but to 
literature in general. A Night at an Inn tells of four thieves who have stolen 
the emerald eye of Klesh, a monstrous Hindoo god. They lure to their room and 
succeed in slaying the three priestly avengers who are on their track, but in 
the night Mesh comes gropingly for his eye; and having gained it and departed, 
calls each of the despoilers out into the darkness for an unnamed punishment. In 
The Laughter of the Gods there is a doomed city at the jungle's edge, and a 
ghostly lutanist heard only by those about to die (cf. Alice's spectral 
harpsichord in Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables); whilst The Queen's 
Enemies retells the anecdote of Herodotus in which a vengeful princess invites 
her foes to a subterranean banquet and lets in the Nile to drown them. But no 
amount of mere description can convey more than a fraction of Lord Dunsany's 
pervasive charm. His prismatic cities and unheard of rites are touched with a 
sureness which only mastery can engender, and we thrill with a sense of actual 
participation in his secret mysteries. To the truly imaginative he is a talisman 
and a key unlocking rich storehouses of dream and fragmentary memory; so that we 
may think of him not only as a poet, but as one who makes each reader a poet as 
well. 
At the opposite pole of genius from Lord Dunsany, and gifted with an almost 
diabolic power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily 
life, is the scholarly Montague Rhodes James, Provost of Eton College, antiquary 
of note, and recognized authority on mediæval manuscripts and cathedral history. 
Dr. James, long fond of telling spectral tales at Christmastide, has become by 
slow degrees a literary weird fictionist of the very first rank; and has 
developed a distinctive style and method likely to serve as models for an 
enduring line of disciples. 
The art of Dr. James is by no means haphazard, and in the preface to one of his 
collections he has formulated three very sound rules for macabre composition. A 
ghost story, he believes, should have a familiar setting in the modem period, in 
order to approach closely the reader's sphere of experience. Its spectral 
phenomena, moreover, should be malevolent rather than beneficent; since fear is 
the emotion primarily to be excited. And finally, the technical patois of 
"occultism" or pseudo-science ought carefully to be avoided; lest the charm of 
casual verisimilitude be smothered in unconvincing pedantry. 
Dr. James, practicing what he preaches, approaches his themes in a light and 
often conversational way. Creating the illusion of every-day events, he 
introduces his abnormal phenomena cautiously and gradually; relieved at every 
turn by touches of homely and prosaic detail, and sometimes spiced with a snatch 
or two of antiquarian scholarship. Conscious of the dose relation between 
present weirdness and accumulated tradition, he generally provides remote 
historical antecedents for his incidents; thus being able to utilise very aptly 
his exhaustive knowledge of the past, and his ready and convincing command of 
archaic diction and colouring. A favourite scene for a James tale is some 
centuried cathedral, which the author can describe with all the familiar 
minuteness of a specialist in that field. 
Sly humourous vignettes and bits of lifelike genre portraiture and 
characterisation are often to be found in Dr. James's narratives, and serve in 
his skilled hands to augment the general effect rather than to spoil it, as the 
same qualities would tend to do with a lesser craftsman. In inventing a new type 
of ghost, he has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition; 
for where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly 
through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairy 
-- a sluggish, hellish night -- abomination midway betwixt beast and man -- and 
usually touched before it is seen. Sometimes the spectre is of still more 
eccentric composition; a roll of flannel with spidery eyes, or an invisible 
entity which moulds itself in bedding and shows a face of crumpled linen. Dr. 
James has, it is clear, an intelligent and scientific knowledge of human nerves 
and feelings; and knows just how to apportion statement, imagery, and subtle 
suggestions in order to secure the best results with his readers. He is an 
artist in incident and arrangement rather than in atmosphere, and reaches the 
emotions more often through the intellect than directly. This method, of course, 
with its occasional absences of sharp climax, has its drawbacks as well as its 
advantages; and many will miss the thorough atmospheric tension which writers 
like Machen are careful to build up with words and scenes. But only a few of the 
tales are open to the charge of tameness. Generally the laconic unfolding of 
abnormal events in adroit order is amply sufficient to produce the desired 
effect of cumulative horror. 
The short stories of Dr. James are contained in four small collections, entitled 
respectively Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, 
A Thin Ghost and Others, and A Warning to the Curious. There is also a 
delightful juvenile phantasy, The Five Jars, which has its spectral 
adumbrations. Amidst this wealth of material it is hard to select a favourite or 
especially typical tale, though each reader will no doubt have such preferences 
as his temperament may determine. 
Count Magnus is assuredly one of the best, forming as it does a veritable 
Golconda of suspense and suggestion. Mr. Wraxall is an English traveller of the 
middle nineteenth century, sojourning in Sweden to secure material for a book. 
Becoming interested in the ancient family of De La Gardie, near the village of 
Raback, he studies its records; and finds particular fascination in the builder 
of the existing Manor-house, one Count Magnus, of whom strange and terrible 
things are whispered. The Count, who flourished early in the seventeenth 
century, was a stern landlord, and famous for his severity toward poachers and 
delinquent tenants. His cruel punishments were bywords, and there were dark 
rumours of influences which even survived his interment in the great mausoleum 
he built near the church -- as in the case of the two peasants who hunted on his 
preserves one night a century after his death. There were hideous screams in the 
woods, and near the tomb of Count Magnus an unnatural laugh and the clang of a 
great door. Next morning the priest found the two men; one a maniac, and the 
other dead, with the flesh of his face sucked from the bones. 
Mr. Wraxall hears all these tales, and stumbles on more guarded references to a 
Black Pilgrimage once taken by the Count, a pilgrimage to Chorazin in Palestine, 
one of the cities denounced by Our Lord in the Scriptures, and in which old 
priests say that Antichrist is to be born. No one dares to hint just what that 
Black Pilgrimage was, or what strange being or thing the Count brought back as a 
companion. Meanwhile Mr. Wraxall is increasingly anxious to explore the 
mausoleum of Count Magnus, and finally secures permission to do so, in the 
company of a deacon. He finds several monuments and three copper sarcophagi, one 
of which is the Count's. Round the edge of this latter are several bands of 
engraved scenes, including a singular and hideous delineation of a pursuit -- 
the pursuit of a frantic man through a forest by a squat muffled figure with a 
devil-fish's tentacle, directed by a tall cloaked man on a neighbouring hillock. 
The sarcophagus has three massive steel padlocks, one of which is lying open on 
the floor, reminding the traveller of a metallic clash he heard the day before 
when passing the mausoleum and wishing idly that he might see Count Magnus. 
His fascination augmented, and the key being accessible, Mr. Wraxall pays the 
mausoleum a second and solitary visit and finds another padlock unfastened. The 
next day, his last in Raback, he again goes alone to bid the long-dead Count 
farewell. Once more queerly impelled to utter a whimsical wish for a meeting 
with the buried nobleman, he now sees to his disquiet that only one of the 
padlocks remains on the great sarcophagus. Even as he looks, that last lock 
drops noisily to the floor, and there comes a sound as of creaking hinges. Then 
the monstrous lid appears very slowly to rise, and Mr. Wraxall flees in panic 
fear without refastening the door of the mausoleum. 
During his return to England the traveller feels a curious uneasiness about his 
fellow-passengers on the canal-boat which he employs for the earlier stages. 
Cloaked figures make him nervous, and he has a sense of being watched and 
followed. Of twenty-eight persons whom he counts, only twenty-six appear at 
meals; and the missing two are always a tall cloaked man and a shorter muffled 
figure. Completing his water travel at Harwich, Mr. Wraxall takes frankly to 
flight in a closed carriage, but sees two cloaked figures at a crossroad. 
Finally he lodges at a small house in a village and spends the time making 
frantic notes. On the second morning he is found dead, and during the inquest 
seven jurors faint at sight of the body. The house where he stayed is never 
again inhabited, and upon its demolition half a century later his manuscript is 
discovered in a forgotten cupboard. 
In The Treasure of Abbot Thomas a British antiquary unriddles a cipher on some 
Renaissance painted windows, and thereby discovers a centuried hoard of gold in 
a niche halfway down a well in the courtyard of a German abbey. But the crafty 
depositor had set a guardian over that treasure, and something in the black well 
twines its arms around the searcher's neck in such a manner that the quest is 
abandoned, and a clergyman sent for. Each night after that the discoverer feels 
a stealthy presence and detects a horrible odour of mould outside the door of 
his hotel room, till finally the clergyman makes a daylight replacement of the 
stone at the mouth of the treasure-vault in the well -- out of which something 
had come in the dark to avenge the disturbing of old Abbot Thomas's gold. As he 
completes his work the cleric observes a curious toad-like carving on the 
ancient well-head, with the Latin motto "Depositum custodi -- keep that which is 
committed to thee." 
Other notable James tales are The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, in which a 
grotesque carving comes curiously to life to avenge the secret and subtle murder 
of an old Dean by his ambitious successor: Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, 
which tells of the horror summoned by a strange metal whistle found in a 
mediævel church ruin; and An Episode of Cathedral History, where the dismantling 
of a pulpit uncovers an archaic tomb whose lurking daemon spreads panic and 
pestilence. Dr. James, for all his light touch, evokes fright and hideousness in 
their most shocking form, and will certainly stand as one of the few really 
creative masters in his darksome province. 
For those who relish speculation regarding the future, the tale of supernatural 
horror provides an interesting field. Combated by a mounting wave of plodding 
realism, cynical flippancy, and sophisticated disillusionment, it is yet 
encouraged by a parallel tide of growing mysticism, as developed both through 
the fatigued reaction of "occultists" and religious fundamentalists against 
materialistic discovery and through the stimulation of wonder and fancy by such 
enlarged vistas and broken barriers as modern science has given us with its 
intra-atomic chemistry, advancing astrophysics, doctrines of relativity, and 
probings into biology and human thought. At the present moment the favouring 
forces would appear to have somewhat of an advantage; since there is 
unquestionably more cordiality shown toward weird writings than when, thirty 
years ago, the best of Arthur Machen's work fell on the stony ground of the 
smart and cocksure 'nineties. Ambrose Bierce, almost unknown in his own time, 
has now reached something like general recognition. 
Startling mutations, however, are not to be looked for in either direction. In 
any case an approximate balance of tendencies will continue to exist; and while 
we may justly expect a further subtilisation of technique, we have no reason to 
think that the general position of the spectral in literature will be altered. 
It is a narrow though essential branch of human expression, and will chiefly 
appeal as always to a limited audience with keen special sensibilities. Whatever 
universal masterpiece of tomorrow may be wrought from phantasm or terror will 
owe its acceptance rather to a supreme workmanship than to a sympathetic theme. 
Yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? Radiant with beauty, 
the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx. 



Last modified: 02/26/2000 17:15:16 
