Delphi Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft (Illustrated) (264 page)

IX. THE WEIRD TRADITION IN THE BRITISH ISL
ES

RECENT British literature, besides including the three or four greatest fantaisistes of the present age, has been gratifyingly fertile in the element of the weird. Rudyard Kipling has often approached it, and has, despite the omnipresent mannerisms, handled it with indubitable mastery in such tales as
The Phantom Rickshaw,
The Finest Story in the World,
The Recrudescence of Imray,
and
The Mark of the Beast.
This latter is of particular poignancy; the pictures of the naked leper-priest who mewed like an otter, of the spots which appeared on the chest of the man that priest cursed, of the growing carnivorousness of the victim and of the fear which horses began to display toward him, and of the eventually half-accomplished transformation of that victim into a leopard, being things which no reader is ever likely to forget. The final defeat of the malignant sorcery does not impair the force of the tale or the validity of its mystery.

Lafcadio Hearn, strange, wandering, and exotic, departs still farther from the realm of the real; and with the supreme artistry of a sensitive poet weaves fantasies impossible to an author of the solid roast beef type. His
Fantastics,
written in America, contains some of the most impressive ghoulishness in all literature; whilst his
Kwaidan,
written in Japan, crystallizes with matchless skill and delicacy the eerie lore and whispered legends of that richly colorful nation. Still more of Helm’s wizardry of language is shown in some of his translations from the French, especially from Gautier and Flaubert. His version of the latter’s
Temptation of St. Anthony
is a classic of fevered and riotous imagery clad in the magic of singing words.

Oscar Wilde may likewise be given a place amongst weird writers, both for certain of his exquisite fairy tales, and for his vivid
Picture of Dorian Gray,
in which a marvelous portrait for years assumes the duty of aging and coarsening instead of its original, who meanwhile plunges into every excess of vice and crime without the outward loss of youth, beauty, and freshness. There is a sudden and potent climax when Dorian Gray, at last become a murderer, seeks to destroy the painting whose changes testify to his moral degeneracy. He stabs it with a knife, and a hideous cry and crash are heard; but when the servants enter they find it in all its pristine loveliness. “Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not until they had examined the rings that they recognized who he was.”

Matthew Phipps Shiel, author of many weird, grotesque, and adventurous novels and tales, occasionally attains a high level of horrific magic.
Xelucha
is a noxiously hideous fragment, but is excelled by Mr. Shiel’s undoubted masterpiece,
The House of Sounds,
floridly written in the “yellow nineties,” and recast with more artistic restraint in the early twentieth century. Ibis story, in final form, deserves a place among the foremost things of its kind. It tells of a creeping horror and menace trickling down the centuries on a sub-arctic island off the coast of Norway; where, amidst the sweep of daemon winds and the ceaseless din of hellish waves and cataracts, a vengeful dead man built a brazen tower of terror. It is vaguely like, yet infinitely unlike, Poe’s
Fall of the House of Usher.
In the novel
The Purple Cloud
Mr. Shiel describes with tremendous power a curse which came out of the arctic to destroy mankind, and which for a time appears to have left but a single inhabitant on our planet. The sensations of this lone survivor as he realizes his position, and roams through the corpse-littered and treasure-strewn cities of the world as their absolute master, are delivered with a skill and artistry falling little short of actual majesty. Unfortunately the second half of the book, with its conventionally romantic element, involves a distinct letdown.

Better known than Shiel is the ingenious Bram Stoker, who created many starkly horrific conceptions in a series of novels whose poor technique sadly impairs their net effect.
The Lair of the White Worm,
dealing with a gigantic primitive entity that lurks in a vault beneath an ancient castle, utterly ruins a magnificent idea by a development almost infantile.
The Jewel of Seven Stars,
touching on a strange Egyptian resurrection, is less crudely written. But best of all is the famous
Dracula,
which has become almost the standard modern exploitation of the frightful vampire myth. Count Dracula, a vampire, dwells in a horrible castle in the Carpathians, but finally migrates to England with the design of populating the country with fellow vampires. How an Englishman fares within Dracula’s stronghold of terrors, and how the dead fiend’s plot for domination is at last defeated, are elements which unite to form a tale now justly assigned a permanent place in English letters.
Dracula
evoked many similar novels of supernatural horror, among which the best are perhaps
The Beetle,
by Richard Marsh,
Brood of the Witch-Queen,
by “Sax Rohmer” (Arthur Sarsfield Ward), and
The Door of the Unreal,
by Gerald Bliss. The latter handles quite dexterously the standard werewolf superstition. Much subtler and more artistic, and told with singular skill through the juxtaposed narratives of the several characters, is the novel
Cold Harbor,
by Francis Brett Young, in which an ancient house of strange malignancy is powerfully delineated. The mocking and well-nigh omnipotent fiend Humphrey Furnival holds echoes of the Manfred-Montoni type of early Gothic “villain,” but is redeemed from triteness by many clever individualities. Only the slight diffuseness of explanation at the close, and the somewhat too free use of divination as a plot factor, keep this tale from approaching absolute perfection.

In the novel
Witch Wood
John Buchan depicts with tremendous force a survival of the evil Sabbat in a lonely district of Scotland. The description of the black forest with the evil stone, and of the terrible cosmic adumbrations when the horror is finally extirpated, will repay one for wading through the very gradual action and plethora of Scottish dialect. Some of Mr. Buchan’s short stories are also extremely vivid in their spectral intimations;
The Green Wildebeest,
a tale of African witchcraft,
The Wind in the Portico,
with its awakening of dead Britanno-Roman horrors, and
Skule Skerry,
with its touches of sub-arctic fright, being especially remarkable.

Clemence Housman, in the brief novelette
The Werewolf,
attains a high degree of gruesome tension and achieves to some extent the atmosphere of authentic folklore. In
The Elixir of Life
Arthur Ransome attains some darkly excellent effects despite a general naiveté of plot, while H. B. Drake’s
The Shadowy Thing
summons up strange and terrible vistas. George Macdonald’s
Lilith
has a compelling bizarrerie all its own, the first and simpler of the two versions being perhaps the more effective.

Deserving of distinguished notice as a forceful craftsman to whom an unseen mystic world is, ever a dose and vital reality is the poet Walter de la Mare, whose haunting verse and exquisite prose alike bear consistent traces of a strange vision reaching deeply into veiled spheres of beauty and terrible and forbidden dimensions of being. In the novel
The Return
we see the soul of a dead man reach out of its grave of two centuries and fasten itself upon the flesh of the living, so that even the face of the victim becomes that which had long ago returned to dust. Of the shorter tales, of which several volumes exist, many are unforgettable for their command of fear’s and sorcery’s darkest ramifications; notably
Seaton’s Aunt,
in which there lowers a noxious background of malignant vampirism;
The Tree,
which tells of a frightful vegetable growth in the yard of a starving artist;
Out of the Deep,
wherein we are given leave to imagine what thing answered the summons of a dying wastrel in a dark lonely house when he pulled a long-feared bell-cord in the attic of his dread-haunted boyhood;
A Recluse,
which hints at what sent a chance guest flying from a house in the night;
Mr. Kempe,
which shows us a mad clerical hermit in quest of the human soul, dwelling in a frightful sea-cliff region beside an archaic abandoned chapel; and
All-Hallows,
a glimpse of dæmoniac forces besieging a lonely mediaeval church and miraculously restoring the rotting masonry. De la Mare does not make fear the sole or even the dominant element of most of his tales, being apparently more interested in the subtleties of character involved. Occasionally he sinks to sheer whimsical phantasy of the Barrie order. Still he is among the very few to whom unreality is a vivid, living presence; and as such he is able to put into his occasional fear-studies a keen potency which only a rare master can achieve. His poem
The Listeners
restores the Gothic shudder to modern verse.

The weird short story has fared well of late, an important contributor being the versatile E. F. Benson, whose
The Man Who Went Too Far
breathes whisperingly of a house at the edge of a dark wood, and of Pan’s hoof-mark on the breast of a dead man. Mr. Benson’s volume,
Visible and Invisible,
contains several stories of singular power; notably
Negotiam Perambulans,
whose unfolding reveals an abnormal monster from an ancient ecclesiastical panel which performs an act of miraculous vengeance in a lonely village on the Cornish coast, and
The Horror-Horn,
through which lopes a terrible half-human survival dwelling on unvisited Alpine peaks.
The Face,
in another collection, is lethally potent, in its relentless aura of doom. H. R. Wakefield, in his collections,
They Return at Evening
and
Others Who Return,
manages now and then to achieve great heights of horror despite a vitiating air of sophistication. The most notable stories are
The Red Lodge
with its slimy aqueous evil,
He Cometh and He Passeth By, And He Shall Sing,
The Cairn,
Look Up There,
Blind Man’s Buff,
and that bit of lurking millennial horror,
The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster.
Mention has been made of the weird work of H.G. Wells and A. Conan Doyle. The former, in
The Ghost of Fear,
reaches a very high level while all the items in
Thirty Strange Stories
have strong fantastic implications. Doyle now and then struck a powerfully spectral note, as in
The Captain of the Pole-Star,
a tale of arctic ghostliness, and
Lot No. 249,
wherein the reanimated mummy theme is used with more than ordinary skill. Hugh Walpole, of the same family as the founder of Gothic fiction, has sometimes approached the bizarre with much success, his short story
Mrs. Lunt
carrying a very poignant shudder. John Metcalfe, in the collection published as
The Smoking Leg,
attains now and then a rare pitch of potency, the tale entitled
The Bad Lands,
containing graduations of horror that strongly savor of genius. More whimsical and inclined toward the amiable and innocuous phantasy of Sir J. M. Barrie are the short tales of E.M. Forster, grouped under the title of
The Celestial Omnibus.
Of these only one, dealing with a glimpse of Pan and his aura of fright, may be said to hold the true element of cosmic horror. Mrs. H.D. Everett, though adhering to very old and conventional models, occasionally reaches singular heights of spiritual terror in her collection of short stories,
The Death Mask.
L. P. Hartley is notable for his incisive and extremely ghastly tale,
A Visitor from Down Under,
May Sinclair’s
Uncanny Stories
contain more of traditional “occultism” than of that creative treatment of fear which marks mastery in this field, and are inclined to lay more stress on human emotions and psychological delving than upon the stark phenomena of a cosmos utterly unreal. It may be well to remark here that occult believers are probably less effective than materialists in delineating the spectral and the fantastic, since to them the phantom world is so commonplace a reality that they tend to refer to it with less awe, remoteness, and impressiveness thin do those who see in it an absolute and stupendous violation of the natural order.

Of rather uneven stylistic quality, but vast occasional power in its suggestion of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life, is the work of William Hope Hodgson, known today far less than it deserves to be. Despite a tendency toward conventionally sentimental conceptions of the universe, and of man’s relation to it and to his fellows, Mr. Hodgson is perhaps second only to Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality. Few can equal him in adumbrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities through casual hints and insignificant details, or in conveying feelings of the spectral and the abnormal in connection with regions or buildings.

In
The Boats of the Glen Carrig
(1907) we are shown a variety of malign marvels and accursed unknown lands as encountered by the survivors of a sunken ship. The brooding menace in the earlier parts of the book is impossible to surpass, though a letdown in the direction of ordinary romance and adventure occurs toward the end. An inaccurate and pseudo-romantic attempt to reproduce eighteenth-century prose detracts from the general effect, but the really profound nautical erudition everywhere displayed is a compensating factor.