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Supernatural Horror in Literature
Lovecraft, Howard Phillips
Published:
1938
Categorie(s):
Non-Fiction, Literary criticism, Gothic & Romance
Source:
http://en.wikisource.org
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About Lovecraft:
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American author of fantasy, horror
and science fiction. He is notable for blending elements of science fiction
and horror; and for popularizing "cosmic horror": the notion that some
concepts, entities or experiences are barely comprehensible to human
minds, and those who delve into such risk their sanity. Lovecraft has be-
come a cult figure in the horror genre and is noted as creator of the
"Cthulhu Mythos," a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a
"pantheon" of nonhuman creatures, as well as the famed Necronomicon,
a grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works typically had a
tone of "cosmic pessimism," regarding mankind as insignificant and
powerless in the universe. Lovecraft's readership was limited during his
life, and his works, particularly early in his career, have been criticized as
occasionally ponderous, and for their uneven quality. Nevertheless,
Lovecraft’s reputation has grown tremendously over the decades, and he
is now commonly regarded as one of the most important horror writers
of the 20th Century, exerting an influence that is widespread, though of-
ten indirect. Source: Wikipedia
Also available on Feedbooks for Lovecraft:
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(1926)
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(1931)
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(1928)
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(1934)
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(1931)
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(1936)
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(1930)
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(1927)
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(1932)
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(1919)
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Chapter
1
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 psycholo-
gists 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 materialistic sophistication
which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a na-
ively insipid idealism which deprecates the aesthetic 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 de-
mands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for
detachment from every-day life. Relatively few are free enough from the
spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings 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, re-
form, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-
corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychologic-
al pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experi-
ence as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the reli-
gious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a
part of our inmost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very
important, though not numerically great, minority of our species.
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Man's first instincts and emotions formed his response to the environ-
ment in which he found himself. Definite feelings based on pleasure and
pain grew up around the phenomena whose causes and effects he under-
stood, whilst around those which he did not understand—and the uni-
verse teemed with them in the early days—were naturally woven such
personifications, marvellous 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, be-
came for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of
boons and calamitites visitted upon mankind for cryptic and wholly
extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of exist-
ence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part. The phe-
nomenon of dreaming likewise helped to build up the notion of an un-
real 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 satur-
ation must, as matter of plain scientific fact, be regarded as virtually per-
manent so far as the subconscious mind and inner instincts are con-
cerned; 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 associ-
ations clings round all the objects and processes that were once mysteri-
ous, 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 capture and formalised by conven-
tional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more mal-
eficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernat-
ural 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 super-added, there is born a composite body of keen emotion and ima-
ginative 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
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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 moon-
struck can glimpse.
With this foundation, no one need wonder at the existence of a literat-
ure 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 cer-
tain phantasmal shapes which would otherwise haunt them. Thus Dick-
ens 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 num-
ber of other examples; Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, social worker,
"The Yellow Wall Paper"; whilst the humourist 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 extern-
ally 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 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 daemons 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 un-
conscious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through materi-
al 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 dove-
tailing 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 so-
cial effect, or one in which the horrors are finally explained away by nat-
ural means, is not a genuine tale of cosmic fear; but it remains a fact that
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