by H. P. Lovecraft
(Copyright 1927, by W. Paul Cook)
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 Procius and in modern
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 eldritch weirdness. Dante is a pioneer in the classic capture
of macabre atmosphere, and in Spencer'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 Launcelot, the ghost of Sir Gawaine, and the
tomb-fiend seen by Sir Galahad--whilst other and cruder specimens were
doubtless set forth in the Supernatural Horror in Literature cheap and
sensational "chapbooks" vulgarly hawked about and devoured by the
ignorant. In Elizabethan drama, with its "Dr. Faustus," the witches in
"Macbeth," and the horrible gruesomeness of Webster, we may easily
discern the strong hold of the daemoniac on the public mind; a hold
intensified by the very real fear of living witchcraft, whose terrors,
first witnessed 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 list of treatises
on witchcraft and daemonology which aid in exciting the imagination of
the reading world.
(Continued Next Month)