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.
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