II. THE DAWN OF THE HORROR TALE
AS may naturally be expected of a form so closely connected
with primal emotion, the horror-tale is as old as human thought and speech
themselves.
Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest
folklore of all races, and is crystallised in the most archaic ballads,
chronicles, and sacred writings. It was, indeed, a prominent feature of
the elaborate ceremonial magic, with its rituals for the evocation of dæmons
and spectres, which flourished from prehistoric times, and which reached
its highest development in Egypt and the Semitic nations. Fragments like
the Book of Enoch and the Claviculae of Solomon well illustrate the power
of the weird over the ancient Eastern mind, and upon such things were based
enduring systems and traditions whose echoes extend obscurely even to the
present time. Touches of this transcendental fear are seen in classic literature,
and there is evidence of its still greater emphasis in a ballad literature
which paralleled the classic stream but vanished for lack of a written
medium. The Middle Ages, steeped in fanciful darkness, gave it an enormous
impulse toward expression; and East and West alike were busy preserving
and amplifying the dark heritage, both of random folklore and of academically
formulated magic and cabalism, which had descended to them. Witch, werewolf,
vampire, and ghoul brooded ominously on the lips of bard and grandam, and
needed but little encouragement to take the final step across the boundary
that divides the chanted tale or song from the formal literary composition.
In the Orient, the weird tale tended to assume a gorgeous colouring and
sprightliness which almost transmuted it into sheer phantasy. In the West,
where the mystical Teuton had come down from his black boreal forests and
the Celt remembered strange sacrifices in Druidic groves, it assumed a
terrible intensity and convincing seriousness of atmosphere which doubled
the force of its half-told, half-hinted horrors.
Much of the power of Western horror-lore was undoubtedly
due to the hidden but often suspected presence of a hideous cult of nocturnal
worshippers whose strange customs -- descended from pre-Aryan and pre-agricultural
times when a squat race of Mongoloids roved over Europe with their flocks
and herds -- were rooted in the most revolting fertility-rites of immemorial
antiquity. Ibis secret religion, stealthily handed down amongst peasants
for thousands of years despite the outward reign of the Druidic, Graeco-Roman,
and Christian faiths in the regions involved, was marked by wild "Witches'
Sabbaths" in lonely woods and atop distant hills on Walpurgis-Night and
Hallowe'en, the traditional breeding-seasons of the goats and sheep and
cattle; and became the source of vast riches of sorcery-legend, besides
provoking extensive witchcraft -- prosecutions of which the Salem affair
forms the chief American example. Akin to it in essence, and perhaps connected
with it in fact, was the frightful secret system of inverted theology or
Satan-worship which produced such horrors as the famous "Black Mass"; whilst
operating toward the same end we may note the activities of those whose
aims were somewhat more scientific or philosophical -- the astrologers,
cabalists, and alchemists of the Albertus Magnus or Ramond Lully type,
with whom such rude ages invariably abound. The prevalence and depth of
the mediæval horror-spirit in Europe, intensified by the dark despair
which waves of pestilence brought, may be fairly gauged by the grotesque
carvings slyly introduced into much of the finest later Gothic ecclesiastical
work of the time; the dæmoniac gargoyles of Notre Dame and Mont St.
Michel being among the most famous specimens. And throughout the period,
it must be remembered, there existed amongst educated and uneducated alike
a most unquestioning faith in every form of the supernatural; from the
gentlest doctrines of Christianity to the most monstrous morbidities of
witchcraft and black magic. It was from no empty background that the Renaissance
magicians and alchemists -- Nostradamus, Trithemius, Dr. John Dee, Robert
Fludd, and the like -- were born.
In this fertile soil were nourished types and characters
of sombre myth and legend which persist in weird literature to this day,
more or less disguised or altered by modern technique. Many of them were
taken from the earliest oral sources, and form part of mankind's permanent
heritage. The shade which appears and demands the burial of its bones,
the dæmon lover who comes to bear away his still living bride, the
death-fiend or psychopomp riding the night-wind, the man-wolf, the sealed
chamber, the deathless sorcerer -- all these may be found in that curious
body of mediæval lore which the late Mr. Baring-Gould so effectively
assembled in book form. Wherever the mystic Northern blood was strongest,
the atmosphere of the popular tales became most intense; for in the Latin
races there is a touch of basic rationality which denies to even their
strangest superstitions many of the overtones of glamour so characteristic
of our own forest-born and ice-fostered whisperings.
Just as all fiction first found extensive embodiment in
poetry, so is it in poetry that we first encounter the permanent entry
of the weird into standard literature. Most of the ancient instances, curiously
enough, are in prose; as the werewolf incident in Petronius, the gruesome
passages in Apuleius, the brief but celebrated letter of Pliny the Younger
to Sura, and the odd compilation On Wonderful Events by the Emperor
Hadrian's Greek freedman, Phlegon. It is in Phlegon that we first find
that hideous tale of the corpse-bride, Philinnion and Machates,
later related by Proclus and in modem times forming the inspiration of
Goethe's Bride of Corinth and Washington Irving's German Student.
But by the time the old Northern myths take literary form, and in that
later time when the weird appears as a steady element in the literature
of the day, we find it mostly in metrical dress; as indeed we find the
greater part of the strictly imaginative writing of the Middle Ages and
Renaissance. The Scandinavian Eddas and Sagas thunder with cosmic horror,
and shake with the stark fear of Ymir and his shapeless spawn; whilst our
own Anglo-Saxon
Beowulf and the later Continental Nibelung tales
are full of eldritcli weirdness. Dante is a pioneer in the classic capture
of macabre atmosphere, and in Spenser's stately stanzas will be seen more
than a few touches of fantastic terror in landscape, incident, and character.
Prose literature gives us Malory's Morte d'Arthur, in which are
presented many ghastly situations taken from early ballad sources -- the
theft of the sword and silk from the corpse in Chapel Perilous by Sir Galahad
-- whilst other and cruder specimens were doubtless set forth in the cheap
and sensational "chapbooks" vulgarly hawked about and devoured by the ignorant.
In Elizabethan drama, with its Dr. Faustus, the witches in Macbeth,
the ghost in
Hamlet, and the horrible gruesomeness of Webster we
may easily discern the strong hold of the dæmoniac: on the public
mind; a hold intensified by the very real fear of living witchcraft, whose
terrors, wildest at first on the Continent, begin to echo loudly in English
ears as the witch-hunting crusades of James the First gain headway. To
the lurking mystical prose of the ages is added a long line of treatises
on witchcraft and dæmonology which aid in exciting the imagination
of the reading world.
Through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century
we behold a growing mass of fugitive legendry and balladry of darksome
cast; still, however, held down beneath the surface of polite and accepted
literature. Chapbooks of horror and weirdness multiplied, and we glimpse
the eager interest of the people through fragments like Defoe's Apparition
of Mrs. Veal, a homely tale of a dead woman's spectral visit to a distant
friend, written to advertise covertly a badly selling theological disquisition
on death. The upper orders of society were now losing faith in the supernatural,
and indulging in a period of classic rationalism. Then, beginning with
the translations of Eastern tales in Queen Anne's reign and taking definite
form toward the middle of the century, comes the revival of romantic feeling
-- the era of new joy in nature, and in the radiance of past times, strange
scenes, bold deeds, and incredible marvels. We feel it first in the poets,
whose utterances take on new qualities of wonder, strangeness, and shuddering.
And finally, after the timid appearance of a few weird scenes in the novels
of the day -- such as Smollett's Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom
-- the release instinct precipitates itself in the birth of a new school
of writing; the "Gothic" school of horrible and fantastic prose fiction,
long and short, whose literary posterity is destined to become so numerous,
and in many cases so resplendent in artistic merit. It is, when one reflects
upon it, genuinely remarkable that weird narration as a fixed and academically
recognized literary form should have been so late of final birth. The impulse
and atmosphere are as old as man, but the typical weird tale of standard
literature is a child of the eighteenth century.
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