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.
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