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
wall 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.
Finis
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