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 a naively 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
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 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 rationalism, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul
the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper of 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 inmost biological
heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not
numerically great, minority of our species.
Man's first instincts and emotions form 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
belonged to a sphere 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 to 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 around 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.
(continued next month)