by H. P. Lovecraft
(Copyright 1927, W. Paul Cook)
Through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, we behold a
growing mass of fugitive legendry and balladry of darksome cast; still,
however, held down beneath the surface of polite and accepted
literature. Chap-books of horror and weirdness multiplied, and we
glimpse the eager interest of the people through fragments like DeFoe’s
_Apparition of Mrs. Veal_, a homely tale of a dead woman’s spectral
visit to a distant friend, written to advertise covertly a badly
selling theological disquisition on death. The upper orders of society
were now losing faith in the supernatural, and indulging in a period of
classic rationalism. Then, beginning with the translations of Eastern
tales in Queen Anne’s reign and taking definite form toward the middle
of the century, comes the revival of romantic feeling—the era of new
joy in Nature, and in the radiance of past times, strange scenes, bold
deeds, and incredible marvels. We feel it first in the poets, whose
utterances take on new qualities of wonder, strangeness, and
shuddering. And finally, after the timid appearance of a few weird
scenes in the novels of the day—such as Smollett’s _Adventures of
Ferdinand, Count Fathom_—the released instinct precipitates itself in
the birth of a new school of writing; the “Gothic” school of horrible
and fantastic prose fiction, long and short, whose literary posterity
is destined to become so numerous, and in many cases so resplendent in
artistic merit. It is, when one reflects upon it, genuinely remarkable
that weird narration as a fixed and academically recognized literary
form should have been so late of final birth. The impulse and
atmosphere are as old as man, but the typical weird tale of standard
literature is a child of the eighteenth century.
(Next month we will give you a much longer installment of this article,
in which Mr. Lovecraft takes up the third section, “The Early Gothic
Novel.”)
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