[In the following excerpt, originally published in a 1952 edition, Penzoldt offers a psychological analysis of Lovecraft's horror tales.]

It is not the highest, but only the pedant and the prig will deny that he enjoys being thrilled, and our superior attitude towards sensational fiction is adopted largely because the blatant and crude fail to produce this effect.

—Forrest Reid

If the short story of the supernatural is often considered as an ‘inferior’ literary genre, this is to a great extent due to the works of those authors to whom preternatural was synonymous with horror of the worst kind. To many writers the supernatural was merely a pretext for describing such things as they would never have dared to mention in terms of reality. To others the short story of the supernatural was but an outlet for unpleasant neurotic tendencies, and they chose unconsciously the most hideous symbols. The work of these writers often shocks the reader so much that he will abandon an omnibus of ghost stories after the first tale, without so much as glancing at the treasures that may be found in the rest of the collection. If the reader happens first on a pure tale of horror he may be so prejudiced against the ghost story that he will be unable to admire such masterpieces as those written by Dr. James, Blackwood, or De la Mare.¹

It is indeed a difficult task to rehabilitate the pure tale of horror and even harder, perhaps, for a lover of weird fiction, for pure horror has done much to discredit it. But well nigh any theme can be artistically treated, and while discussing the literary monstrosities I shall have to analyse in this chapter, I will try to avoid the mistake, that is so often made, of considering an author's morality a more important factor than his skill as a writer.

I consider as pure tales of horror all those stories whose main motifs inspire physical repulsion as opposed to what Blackwood calls ‘spiritual terror.’² The feeling these tales produce is one of loathing and disgust, rather than true terror and awe. The apparitions, though they are meant to be preternatural, are described as physical realities. Authors like Crawford, Machen and Lovecraft rely for effect on detailed description of such physical horrors as monsters, corpses, decay, and hideous bodily transformations, objects that frighten the reader as would any real danger but that often fail to create a genuinely ghostly atmosphere.

Before beginning a discussion of the pure tale of horror two important facts must be noted: firstly that it makes use of many different types of main motif. While some authors have chosen the classical superstitions, others have preferred to create their horrors from pseudoscientific fancies, others again have used psychology, or rather fictional psychiatry. Sometimes all three themes are combined in one tale.

Secondly, no author has specialised in the pure tale of horror. Crawford in his day was a well-known sensational novelist. Machen deserves permanent fame for his essays and criticisms such as ‘Hieroglyphics’ and his splendidly courageous educational novel The Secret Glory. Even Lovecraft, who is best known for such monstrosities as ‘Rats in the Walls’ and ‘The Call of Cthulhu,’ wrote that splendid piece of combined science fiction and fictional psychiatry ‘Shadow out of Time’—one of the finest novels in weird literature. In this [essay] I shall therefore concentrate on the analysis of different tales rather than on the man and his whole work. Yet I will try to show what were the psychological reasons which led certain authors to write horror fiction.

‘The emotions that literature deals with bear a close analogy to symptoms in neurosis or nervous diseases’ writes Albert Mordell in The Erotic Motive in Literature. If this is true of literature in general it is even truer of the short story of the supernatural, and especially of the pure tale of horror. Many of these stories are complete case-histories, which any reader with some psychoanalytical knowledge can recognise beneath the thin veneer of symbolism. Usually they describe serious cases of neurosis, but this does not mean that the author himself is a hopeless neurotic. On the contrary, although horror tales are very often written round one particular complex or obsession of which the author was unable to rid himself, the rest of his personality may be perfectly healthy. Nevertheless this one complex is usually so deeply rooted that it may be considered as incurable. The clearest indication of this is that in most horror tales the hero comes to a terrible end. The searching introspection, akin to psychoanalysis, that sometimes leads the chief character to an unconscious self-cure in psychological novels, is not found in the pure tale of horror.³ There is a tendency to use introspection in the short story of the supernatural, for example in some of Blackwood's tales and in De la Mare's famous ‘Out of the Deep,’ but these are not tales of horror.

Finally it is possible that an author, thanks to his keen intuition, may be able to express symbolically problems that have never been his own. Le Fanu is a good example of a writer possessing this faculty. It is impossible to find out whether the authors discussed in this [essay] worked in this way, for nobody except a trained analyst who had examined them could venture a definite judgment. But even if the problems voiced in the majority of horror tales are not those of their authors they are still the unconscious expression of neurotic tendencies, and reflect the astonishing intuitive powers of the writers.⁴

F. M. Crawford's ‘The Dead Smile’ from Uncanny Tales (1911) is the first example of a typical pure tale of horror that I shall examine. Many students of ghost fiction might consider E. A. Poe as the logical starting point of the analysis, but this [essay] will necessarily be chiefly a psychological study, and the symbolism of Poe's tales has already been thoroughly analysed in Marie Bonaparte's brilliant work.⁵ Some other early instances such as Le Fanu's ‘Carmilla’ might be mentioned, but the great days of the horror tale were in the beginning of the twentieth century.

The fact that the horror tale flourished in the early years of this century might seem to indicate that there is a connection between the visions of certain artists, and the terrible events that were to take place in what was then the near future. The horrors of a certain type of literature might be due to unconscious premonitions. But there is no prophecy, conscious or unconscious, to be found in the pure tale of horror. It originates in the author's subconscious, or symbolises an individual neurotic conflict which the author has observed or divined in others. In most cases the horror tale has nothing to do with what C. G. Jung calls the ‘collective subconscious.’ It would be ridiculous to consider Evers', Meyrink's or Strobl's horrors as a kind of literary anticipation of the Nazi crimes. The popular but rather precarious theory that the first traces of Nazi spirit can be found in Wagner and Nietzsche is unconvincing enough. Yet the idea that great revolutions are prepared by great philosophers, or that the great artist has a presentiment of things to come, is at least plausible. But it would be wholly absurd to consider the frequency of the horror element in the literature of a certain period and culture as a first symptom of coming revolution and the crimes that accompany it. There is for example far less use of horror in the French literature preceding the revolution than in nineteenth-century French fiction.⁶ In the same way there is far more cruelty in the English authors of the pre-Nazi period than in the works of the German writers of horror fiction. One can hardly be expected to believe that Meyrink, the Jew, was the voice of the growing German mass neurosis, while Crawford's and Machen's primitive horrors were prophecies of what was going to happen on the other side of the Channel.

There can be no doubt that the pure tale of horror has an entirely individual origin. Yet some explanation of its sudden popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century may be suggested. In England and Germany, at least, the turn of the century was the period in which subjects that had previously been taboo began to be treated in fiction. Just as authors began to talk more freely about social problems and sex, so they became more daring in their descriptions of horror. With this tendency went a certain desire for artificial excitement which was to be expected in the wealthy middle-class society of countries that for decades had not known the very real horror of wars and revolutions. The social situation was basically the same as it was in the days of the Gothic novel in England, a little later in the Romantic period in Germany, and in the America of H. P. Lovecraft. But it was mainly the outspokenness of this century that put on paper the horrors that I shall now discuss. Later, when psychoanalysis became popular, such horrors and their subconscious origin began to be explained in fiction and were openly analysed in films. Thus they lost some of their power to shock. Machen, Crawford, Benson and Lovecraft, who wrote slightly before this period, did not reach the point of using psychological analysis. They belonged to the period of transition in which certain symbols could be used, and described in the crudest colours, but were not yet understood. …

Today Howard Phillips Lovecraft has achieved posthumous but universal fame. I cannot pretend to give here a complete account of this extraordinary figure and his work, nor is there any need to do so, for August Derleth has honoured him in a fine critical study. Derleth's H. P. L., A Memoir, may be considered as the standard work on the newly discovered American master.⁷ It reveals the amazing and tragic story of the one author who, like Le Fanu, was such as the public might imagine a ghost-story writer to be: A recluse, deeply learned in ancient and forbidden lore, living outside this century in a distant past, and quaint and ghastly to behold, when by night he would roam the streets of his native Providence. Derleth's book also tells the sad tale of an author whose merits completely escaped the public's attention, until, after his death, he was suddenly hailed as a second Poe.

Indeed, during the last decade Lovecraft has been praised and overpraised. It was as if critics were trying to compensate for past neglect. In so doing they exaggerated more than a little. Perhaps scholars were somewhat amazed to find a contemporary American master in the field of weird fiction to equal English authors. But if this is the case, it seems curious that Wilbur Daniel Steele has not achieved that same glory. In many respects he is superior to Lovecraft. I am afraid that the mystery of Lovecraft's sudden fame following the complete neglect of his work must remain unsolved, but we owe much to Derleth, who more than any other was responsible for this valuable discovery.

Lovecraft's work has both great merits and great defects. He was an exceedingly cultivated and well-read man. His approach to literature and especially to weird fiction was that of a scholar as much as that of a creative artist.

Moreover his vast correspondence shows that he was a distinguished linguist and his scientific interest in language is clearly reflected by his writing. Lovecraft's tales strike us by their exceedingly rich vocabulary, verbal imagination and almost scientific research of the mot propre; and though his style is often somewhat artificial, it is clearly that of an author with a solid background of etymological learning.

No doubt the language he wrote was not the kind that would appeal to the customary public of horror fiction. This may to a certain extent explain his failure during lifetime while he wrote for popular magazines and his sudden revival when a more refined public began to take interest in his work. We shall analyse Lovecraft's style more closely at the end of our [essay] on horror fiction.

Yet Lovecraft's greatest merit was also his greatest fault. He was too well read. In his critical study The Supernatural Horror in Literature he displays an encyclopædic knowledge of supernatural fiction, and since he read that enormous amount of weird fiction with obvious pleasure he has been subjected to a corresponding series of influences. In fact he was influenced by so many authors that one is often at a loss to decide what is really Lovecraft and what some half-conscious memory of the books he has read. Some of the writers to whom he owes most are Poe, Machen, Bram Stoker, E. T. A. Hoffmann, H. G. Wells, Lord Dunsany,⁸ and perhaps William Hope Hodgson, but there are many more.

One example is the obvious influence (of Poe) on ‘The Outsider.’⁹ August Derleth writes of this story in his introduction to Best Supernatural Stories of H. P. Lovecraft, ‘It has been said of “The Outsider” that if the manuscript had been put forward as an unpublished tale by Edgar Allan Poe, none would have challenged it.’ Another example, ‘Cool Air,’¹⁰ is the story of a dead man whom will power, and a special cooling system, allow to continue life in an artificially-preserved corpse. When he finally runs out of ice the long-dead body dissolves in liquid decay. This is more than a little reminiscent of Poe's ‘Strange Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar’ with the man who dies in his mesmeric sleep and dissolves when awakened. Often the structure of Lovecraft's tales also reminds one of Poe. A comparison of the opening of ‘Pickman's Model’ with that of Poe's ‘Tell Tale Heart’ illustrates this.

You needn't think I'm crazy, Elio—plenty of others have queerer prejudices than this. Why don't you laugh at Oliver's grandfather who won't ride in a motor? If I don't like the damned subway, it's my own business; and we got here more quickly anyhow in the taxi. We'd have had to walk up the hill from Park Street if we'd taken the car.

I know I'm more nervous than I was when you saw me last year, but you don't need to hold a clinic over me. There's plenty of reason, God knows, and I fancy I'm lucky to be sane at all. Why the third degree? You didn't used to be so inquisitive.¹¹

True! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily, how calmly, I can tell you the whole story.¹²

Lovecraft's beginning is really little more than a modern form of one of the most famous openings in the history of the short story. One can understand why he was called the ‘modern Poe.’

E. T. A. Hoffmann's influence is clearly seen in such a story as ‘The Music of Erich Zann,’ and H. G. Wells' in ‘The Whisperer in the Darkness’ and ‘Shadow out of Time.’ Discussing his own work, Lovecraft wrote: ‘All my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practising black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on outside, ever ready to take possession of this earth again.’¹³ But this theme is already found in Machen's ‘The Novel of the Black Seal,’ ‘The Shining Pyramid’ and others of his tales. It can even be traced back to Bram Stoker's ‘Lair of the White Worm,’ a story about a nameless pre-human entity that lurked beneath the foundations of an ancient castle. Lovecraft professed his admiration for Stoker's idea and regretted its imperfect handling.

If one reads carefully Lovecraft's critical study on supernatural horror in literature, one is struck by his frequent remarks, on how much more some authors could have made of themes they used. It seems possible that Lovecraft deliberately shaped some themes that were already known into the type of story that he considered fitted them best. Whether in fact he did this is a question that only a specialist such as Derleth could answer.

The fact remains that when Lovecraft adopted a motif which his forerunners had already used, he frequently handled it far better. His ‘Call of Cthulhu’ and other stories on the ancient gods rank high above Machen's ‘The Novel of the Black Seal,’ ‘The Shining Pyramid’ or ‘The White People.’ His ‘Shadow out of Time,’ a novel about strange trips through time and space, and the forced exchange of human bodies with those of the mysterious pre-human ‘Great Race’ is at once reminiscent of Wells' ‘The Time Machine’ and of Machen's Tales. It also contains many Poesque scenes. Yet, as a whole, the story is infinitely more poignant and convincing than either Wells' or Machen's works. The hero's final descent into the ruined capital of the ‘Great Race,’ where he discovers his own manuscript written quadrillions of years ago, is one of the most perfect climaxes in the history of weird fiction.

It would be unjust to say that Lovecraft's inventive powers were limited to a better presentation of old themes. In ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ he created a whole mythology of his own which now and then appears in his other tales. Later some authors borrowed the Cthulhu mythology with Lovecraft's permission.¹⁴ It is a highly-evolved and completely renewed form of Machen's primitive idea. In ‘Pickman's Model’ he had used one of the most original ideas in the history of the weird tale. The story is about an artist who paints ghoulish horrors with such appalling realism that even the most callous decadents in artistic circles begin to shun his company. Finally he has only one friend left, and him he invites to a secret studio in the oldest part of Boston. This studio is connected with the remains of some old subterranean passages where the seventeenth-century sorcerers used to feast in company with nameless beings. The visitor is appalled by the even greater horror and more poignant realism of the pictures he finds in this second studio. A photograph of a suitable background is attached to each painting, a cemetery, for instance, or a morgue, for the artist never paints outside his studio. Later in the evening something is heard coming up through the vaults. The painter goes out alone to meet it and chase it back into its sinister abode. He excuses the interruption with a remark about the rats that haunt the underground passages leading to the sea and the cemetery. But his visitor has had enough, and leaves with a hasty excuse. For some reason he cannot explain, he had previously detached the photograph of the background from the most appalling and ghoulish of all the pictures and put it into his pocket. On the way home he looks at it with a sense of foreboding: It does not show a background at all, but is a photograph, taken from life, of the creature in the painting.

It is difficult to interpret the symbolism of Lovecraft's tales. It lies between the unconscious choice of horrible symbols as we find it in Machen and Crawford, and the subtle intellectual perversity that makes Hartley's ‘Travelling Grave’ the greatest tale of its kind. Lovecraft deliberately plays on the reader's subconscious fears as well as on his conscious repulsion from the scenes he is compelled to witness. While Machen and Crawford involuntarily symbolised the problems that seem to have obsessed them, Lovecraft keeps a certain critical distance from his work and simply chooses the effect he wishes to produce. Moreover he was an avowed unbeliever in the supernatural, and considered that a pure materialist would be a better writer of supernatural tales than would someone who believed in occult powers.

It may be well to remark here that occult believers are probably less effective than materialists in delineating the spectral and the fantastic, since to them the phantom world is so commonplace a reality that they tend to refer to it with less awe, remoteness, and impressiveness than do those who see in it an absolute and stupendous violation of the natural order.¹⁵

The way in which he was influenced by so many other writers makes it very difficult to decide which symbols found an echo in his own personality, which were used for subtly calculated effect, and which arose from a more or less distinct recollection of his reading.

As it is, the most dominant motif in Lovecraft's work is the nameless, ancestral horror lurking beneath the earth, or ready to invade us from the stars; the dethroned but still potent gods of old. The symbol is a very common one and is not bound to any particular complex. It therefore strikes and horrifies more readers than would any theme having a single subconscious origin. Probably C. G. Jung's theories on the collective subconscious give the only explanation of such symbols as ‘great Cthulhu,’ ‘the father Yog-Sothoth.’ According to him they would symbolise very old hereditary fears. Edgar Dacqué, the famous German palæontologist and philosopher, whose theories are somewhat different from Dr. Jung's, would, strangely enough, point to a similar origin.¹⁶ While the latter believes in an exceedingly ancient but yet subconscious origin of certain collective fears and spiritual tendencies, Dacqué suggests an equally ancient but materially existent basis for these terrors in the distant past. Perhaps such tales as ‘Pickman's Model’ or ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ are, after all, more than the result of purely intellectual search for effect.

Even if there is a true symbolism in Lovecraft's tales it is his realistic descriptions of pure shameless horror that strike one as the dominant feature. If any writer was able to cram his tales with more loathsome physical abominations than Crawford and Machen it is Howard Phillips Lovecraft. He delights in detailed descriptions of rotting corpses in every imaginable state of decay, from initial corruption to what he has charmingly called a ‘liquescent horror.’ He has a particular predilection for fat, carnivorous, and, if possible, anthropophagus rats. His descriptions of hideous stenches and his onomatopœic reproductions of a madman's yowlings are something with which even ‘Monk Lewis’ did not disgrace fiction. I could well understand Mr. Blackwood, when he once told me that to him ‘spiritual terror’ seemed entirely absent from Lovecraft's tales; for if there is any, it is hidden under so much repulsive detail that the English master may well be excused for not noticing it.

I have chosen two examples from ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ at random. They are taken from the climax, which, as always in Lovecraft's tales, is placed in an excellent position and guarantees a maximum of suspense. The story is about a man whose wife, a witch, periodically forces him to exchange bodies with her. He finally gathers enough courage to kill her, but her terrible will power enables her spirit to usurp his body, and to banish his weaker mind to her ‘rotting carcass,’ now three months dead. Nevertheless, the corpse manages to ‘claw his way out,’ and claims the aid of a friend in securing vengeance. The paper he, or ‘it,’ brings to explain the whole tragedy comes between the two quoted paragraphs:

When I opened the door into the elm-arched blackness a gust of insufferably fœtid wind almost flung me prostrate. I choked in nausea, and for a second scarcely saw the dwarfed, humped figure on the steps. The summons had been Edward's, but who was this foul, stunted parody? Where had Edward had time to go? His ring had sounded only a second before the door opened.

The caller had on one of Edward's overcoats—its bottom almost touching the ground, and its sleeves rolled back yet still covering the hands. On the head was a slouch hat pulled low, while a black silk muffler concealed the face. As I stepped unsteadily forward, the figure made a semi-liquid sound like that I had heard over the telephone—‘glub … glub …’—and thrust at me a large, closely-written paper impaled on the end of a long pencil. Still reeling from the morbid and unaccountable fœtor, I seized the paper and tried to read it in the light from the doorway.

It was only afterward that I read the last half of this paper, for I had fainted at the end of the third paragraph. I fainted again when I saw and smelled what cluttered up the threshold where the warm air had struck it. The messenger would not move or have consciousness any more.

The butler, tougher-fibred than I, did not faint at what met him in the hall in the morning. Instead, he telephoned the police. When they came I had been taken upstairs to bed, but the—other mass—lay where it had collapsed in the night. The men put handkerchiefs to their noses.

What they finally found inside Edward's oddly-assorted clothes was mostly liquescent horror. There were bones, too—and a crushed-in skull. Some dental work positively identified the skull as Asenath's.¹⁷

But this is Lovecraft at his worst, for at times he exaggerated even more shamelessly than the lesser authors of horror tales. Yet when the details are not too ridiculous one cannot but praise his precision. There are no traces of nineteenth-century reticence left in his work. Though he sometimes speaks of ‘unnamable’ horrors, he always does his best, and perhaps even too much, to describe them. Even if he sometimes overshoots the mark, one may say at least that no author combined so much stark realism of detail, and preternatural atmosphere, in one tale.

It is strange how Lovecraft uses material details even if he is describing purely supernatural entities. He is unable to evoke the glorious spectral and half-material shapes we find in Blackwood's tales. A presence felt, rather than perceived by the senses, is beyond his inventive powers. It is characteristic that he does not even mention Oliver Onions and Robert Hichens in his critical study; he would not have been able to appreciate such masterpieces of subtly suggested terror as ‘The Beckoning Fair One,’ or ‘How Love Came to Professor Guildea.’ Nor was he able to make use of Dr. James' indirect method of describing an apparition, with metaphors chosen from reality, but devoid of words directly alluding to horror. He would never have begun a climax with ‘It seems as if.’¹⁸ Lovecraft's monsters are usually ridiculous compounds of elephant feet and trunks, human faces, tentacles, gleaming eyes and bat wings, not to mention, of course, the indescribable fœtor that usually accompanies their presence. The reader is often amused rather than frightened by the author's extraordinary surgical talents. Wells' Dr. Moreau could hardly have done better.

‘Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face—that haff face on top of it … that face with the red eyes an' crinkly albino hair, an' no chin, like the Whateleys … It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing, but they was a haff-shaped man's face on top of it, an' it looked like Wizard Whateley's, only it was yards an' yards acrost …’¹⁹

Though often slightly too long, Lovecraft's tales are nearly always perfect in structure. Suspense increases from the first page until the well-placed climax at the end is reached; only his exaggerated display of horrible details sometimes threatens to tire the reader before the end.

I do not pretend to have done justice to an author like Lovecraft in a few pages. The chief reason for discussing him here in some detail is that no study on the pure tale of horror would be complete without mention of him. It also seemed necessary that a voice should be raised in warning against too uncritical an admiration for this excellent but certainly not faultless author. [This applies less to Derleth's excellent ‘H. P. L.’ than to a general tendency among the new generation of Lovecraft fans.] Literary history has known queer and sudden changes in posthumous fame. Convinced admirers often challenge passionate detractors and it would be a great loss to American letters if Lovecraft were to vanish from the libraries as suddenly as he has come.

As it is, these are merely a few reflections on a subject which August Derleth has already thoroughly treated, and though I cannot fully share in his approval of the ‘modern Poe,’ his book remains the authority one would first consult.

One can reject or accept the whole group of pure horror tales, but one must admit that within the limits of the genre there exists a certain hierarchy of lesser and greater as in any other art. In my opinion, the pure tale of horror has the highest literary standing when it is no longer a mere outlet for neurotic tendencies but has become a sort of intellectual game. The objection may be made that a pronounced taste for horror always denotes a certain perversion. This cannot be denied, but the artistic result may be a conscious or unconscious creation. The author may, or may not, be aware of the symbolism he is using. His symbols may find no echo in his own subconscious; they may not be symbols at all, but merely skillfully calculated effects, as are some of Lovecraft's. This latter technique is usually a failure when applied to most types of short ghost story. The horror tale is different. A fully conscious approach to the theme is likely to leave the reader with a less painful impression than a shameless display of unconscious and mostly hideous neurotic tendencies. At least one does not feel the author to be hopelessly in the grip of psychic disease. His tales are not necessarily filled with the oppressive atmosphere of a lunatic asylum. …

But it is in the climax rather than in the exposition that the style of the horror tale differs from that of the ordinary ghost story. The difference lies in the number and quality of words or metaphors directly describing horror.

Such single words or metaphors I shall call ‘descriptives.’ The invention of such a noun may be justified on the grounds that because grammatically the descriptives do not belong to the same order—they can be nouns, adjectives or whole phrases—there is no single word that will serve my purpose.

I propose to divide them into four or more distinct groups, (A), (B), (C) and (D).

(A) will consist of all descriptions containing words which, taken separately, have no especially terrible significance. For example, something may be soft, wet and cold, such as a frog, but if a soft, wet and cold hand touches you in the dark, the three adjectives become part of a phrase evoking horror. Descriptives of the type (A) can be defined as phrases describing horror but containing only words which would not suggest it when taken separately.

In contrast to these are descriptives of the type (B). Take for instance the following sentence from the climax of Machen's ‘The Novel of the White Powder’:

There upon the floor was a dark and putrid mass seething with corruption and hideous rottenness …

Each of the words ‘putrid,’ ‘corruption,’ ‘hideous’ and ‘rottenness,’ be it adjective or noun, denotes something horrible, even when taken from its context. Naturally such words need not stand alone, but may be combined with others that carry less unpleasant associations. For example, ‘dark and putrid mass’ contains ‘dark,’ and ‘mass,’ neither of which taken alone suggests horror. I shall call a descriptive of type (B) any word that expresses horror when isolated, and any phrase or sentence that contains such a word or words. These descriptives are likely to be found in more primitive stories than type (A).

Type (C) is more closely related to (A) than to (B). But while (A) actually describes something horrible, (C) only suggests it. Type (C) descriptives necessarily consist of a whole sentence, or at least an entire phrase, for instance:

… it seems as if Sir Richard were moving his head rapidly to and fro with only the slightest possible sound.²⁰

Here the reader guesses that Sir Richard's head is really a cluster of enormous spiders, but they are suggested by something far less horrible. James gives us the onlooker's optical illusion in place of a detailed description. ‘… moving his head rapidly to and fro …’ is the descriptive. A whole climax may contain only this type of descriptive, but its successful use demands a more highly developed technique than is required for (A) and (B).

To elucidate this point, I will try to depict the same scene, firstly using only descriptives of type (A) and secondly using descriptives of type (B).

Type (A) would run something like this:

On Sir Richard's pillow some creatures like enormous spiders were rapidly moving to and fro …

Type (B) would use every adjective to make the scene as gruesome as possible.

I shall try to use words that often appear in the pure tale of horror:

It now became clear that the filthy abominations on Sir Richard's bed were in reality some horrible spiders crawling with venomous hairy legs … etc., etc.

A long description of the spiders such as only a Crawford or a Lovecraft could have imagined would naturally follow.

The fourth group of descriptives—(D)—is almost exclusively found in Lovecraft's tales. They are really no longer words at all, but are rather the phonetic transcriptions of hideous idiotic cries. Their origin appears to be a curious one. Lovecraft's great admiration for Arthur Machen is well known. Their common interest in the idea of cosmic fear and their predilection for crude physical horror is obvious. Lovecraft finds no praise too great for Machen in his Supernatural Horror in Literature, and even mentions him in his stories, for example in ‘The Whisperer in the Darkness.’

Now Machen, through the environment of his youth, was strongly influenced by Welsh folklore. This is manifest in certain details of his work as well as in his choice of themes. He seemed to regard the Welsh countryside as having a particularly mysterious atmosphere, and liked to allude to the mysteries in his tales with one or two sentences in Welsh, which he knew well. In ‘The Great Return,’ the priest celebrating the arrival of the terrible ‘red saints’ begins the Mass of the Sangraal as follows:

‘Ffeiriadwyr Melcisidec! Ffeiriadwyr Melcisidec!’ shouted the old Calvinistic Methodist deacon with the grey beard, ‘Priesthood of Melchizedek! Priesthood of Melchizedek!’

And he went on:

‘The Bell that is like y glwys yr angel ym mharadwys—the joy of the angels in paradise—is returned.’

To those who do not know Welsh these words seem like some barbaric archaic language full of mystery, and Machen is careful to translate only part of the text, so that the rest gives one the impression of some weird runic incantation. Lovecraft probably did not know much Welsh, but he was conscious of the effect this ‘barbaric’ language makes in a tale of horror. He therefore at times used the Gaelic tongue, at times invented his own ‘Welsh.’ Usually he begins with a few comprehensible words in English or Latin and then continues with horrid exclamations of his own invention, which finally end in a series of syllabic cries.

‘Curse you, Thornton, I'll teach you to faint at what my family do! … Sblood, thou stinkard, I'll learn ye how to gust … wolde ye swynke me thilke wys? … Magna Mater! Magna Mater! … Atys … Dia ad aghaidh's ad aodaun … agus bas dunach ort! Dhonas's dholas ort, agus leat-sa! … Ungl … ungl. rrlh … chchch …

Ygnaiih … ygnaiih … thflthkh'ngha … Yog-Sototh …’ rang the hideous croaking out of space. ‘Y'bthnk … h'ehye—n'grkdl'lh.’…

‘Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah—e'yayayayaaaa … ngh,aaaaa … ngh'aaa … h'yuh … h'yuh … HELP! HELP! … ff-ff-ff-FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH! …’²¹

Nobody could have described the effect these words or cries produce on the reader or on the actors with whom the reader will identify himself better than Lovecraft did. The following paragraph is the prelude to the phonetic transcription quoted above. It is important to reproduce it here lest the reader should imagine that such descriptives are ridiculous. On the contrary, these meaningless words that seem to come from the mouth of an idiot and are yet supposed to allude to supernatural realities are capable of suggesting the most appalling horror when they are skillfully introduced, and appear in the climax of a perfectly constructed tale.

Without warning came those deep, cracked, raucous vocal sounds which will never leave the memory of the stricken group who heard them. Not from any human throat were they born, for the organs of man can yield no such acoustic perversions. Rather would one have said they came from the pit itself, had not their source been so unmistakably the altar-stone on the peak. It is almost erroneous to call them sounds at all, since so much of their ghastly, infra-bass timbre spoke to dim seats of consciousness and terror far subtler than the ear; yet one must do so, since their form was indisputably though vaguely that of half-articulate words. They were loud—loud as the rumblings and the thunder above which they echoed—yet did they come from no visible being. And because imagination might suggest a conjectural source in the world of non-visible beings, the huddled crowd at the mountain's base huddled still closer, and winced as if in expectation of a blow.²²

The use of a certain type of descriptive usually involves a particular technique, but the different types appear alone as well as in manifold combinations so that the descriptive and the technique are not identical.

It is difficult to determine the exact limits of the descriptives. As they correspond to grammatical unity it is hard to say where they begin and end, especially if several occur in succession. I should say that they are complete only if, when standing alone, they still signify something horrible—provided, of course, that one knows out of what kind of story they have been taken. In other words, they are delineated by their meaning. Thus ‘rottenness’ is a descriptive of type (B). But only the whole sentence: ‘A soft, wet, cold hand touched me’ is a descriptive of the type (A). Type (C) also is almost invariably a whole sentence. But if one knows the source of the descriptive it may be complete with a participle, an adverb, and a noun like ‘rapidly moving head,’ or any other grammatical combination that does not form a complete sentence. A single word is sufficient for type (D). In Lovecraft's ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ the rotting carcass emits a ‘semi-liquid sound’ of ‘glub, glub.’ Knowing what it implies, the reader finds this simple sound one of the most effective descriptives in the history of the horror tale.

Let us now revert to the climax of F. M. Crawford's ‘The Dead Smile.’ This only contains descriptives of types (A) and (B), the larger proportion being (B). This situation is typical of the pure tale of horror. Crawford is as direct as possible, he makes no use of suggestion. In fact the only metaphorical expression (a descriptive of type (A)) he invents is ‘toad eyes’ and even this is not unusual: the rest of his climax is exceedingly conventional. One feels that the author is deliberately trying not to surprise the reader with any stylistic inventions. The horror lies entirely in the scene described, and on this the reader is expected to concentrate his attention. If he should stumble over any unaccustomed word, or be distracted by some peculiarity of style, the fascination might cease and he might realise the absurdity of what had hitherto held him spellbound. In a pure tale of supernatural horror the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ is hard to achieve, and demands a great effort of imagination. The more incredible a story is, the more the reader has to cooperate if the spell is to work. If the style is too individual and demands additional intellectual effort, the reading may become difficult and unpleasant. One should also remember that most of those who read horror tales are not refined æsthetes or intellectuals.

In the climax of ‘The Novel of the White Powder,’ already quoted, there are only descriptives of types (A) and (B), but the proportion is less in favour of (B). Take, for instance, the first sentence. ‘There upon the floor was a dark putrid mass, seething with corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting and changing before our eyes, bubbling with unctuous oily bubbles like boiling pitch.’ Up to the word ‘rottenness’ only descriptives of type (B) occur, but the rest of the quotation consists mostly of type (A), and this is the case throughout the rest of the climax.²³ The result is a more colourful and less conventional, though still not particularly inventive style.

Let us now consider the climax of H. P. Lovecraft's ‘The Rats in the Walls.’ Here at least three types of descriptives are employed.

My searchlight expired, but still I ran. I heard voices, and yowls, and echoes, but above all there gently rose that impious, insidious scurrying; gently rising, rising, as a stiff bloated corpse gently rises above an oily river that flows under endless onyx bridges to a black, putrid sea.

Something bumped into me—something soft and plump. It must have been the rats; the viscous, gelatinous, ravenous army that feast on the dead and the living … Why shouldn't rats eat a de la Poer as a de la Poer eats forbidden things? … The war ate my boy, damn them all … and the Yanks ate Carfax with flames and burnt Grandsire Delapore and the secret … No, no, I tell you, I am not that dæmon swineherd in the twilit grotto! It was not Edward Norrys' fat face on that flabby fungous thing! Who says I am a de la Poer? He lived but my boy died! … Shall a Norrys hold the lands of a de la Poer? … It's voodoo, I tell you … that spotted snake … Curse you, Thornton, I'll teach you to faint at what my family do! … 'Sblood, thou stinkard, I'll learn ye how to gust … wolde ye swynke me thilke wys? … Magna Mater! Magna Mater! … Atys … Dia ad aghaidh's ad aodaun … agus bas dunach ort! Dhonas's dholas ort, agus leat-sa! … Ungl … ungl … rrlh … chchch …

That is what they say I said when they found me in the blackness after three hours—found me crouching in the blackness over the plump, half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys, with my own cat leaping and tearing at my throat.²⁴

There are many descriptives of type (B) as in every pure tale of horror. (A) is almost entirely absent, which is curious. Of course, the sentence ‘Something bumped into me—something soft and plump’ might be considered as one or two descriptives of type (A), because it is revealed immediately afterwards that the soft plump things ‘must have been the rats.’ But on reading the whole paragraph we learn that it is really something quite different and far more horrible: the man whom the maniac will kill and eat. The descriptives suggest the horribly mangled body just as Dr. James' ‘moving head’ suggests the spiders. It is thus a descriptive of type (C), rather than (A). In the same way such sentences as ‘He lived, but my boy died!,’ etc., suggest the growing fury of the madman and prepare for the crazy cries of type (D). Yet why is type (A) missing? There are at least some traces of it: for example ‘… oily river that flows under endless onyx bridges. …’ This phrase might be regarded as a descriptive of type (A), instead of (B), though ‘oily’ hardly ever describes anything agreeable. Onyx, on the other hand, though it is used in ornaments, is the stone usually seen on the more expensive monuments in cemeteries. This analysis clearly reveals Lovecraft's strong preference for words that describe horror directly.²⁵

His exceptionally rich vocabulary, which reflects his scientific interest in language, as well as his extraordinary verbal imagination, allowed him to use type (B) in a much less conventional manner than Crawford. At the same time it shows that even in his horror fiction he was not ready to sacrifice his literary ideals to commercial advantages. Such sentences as ‘… whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the Titan thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus,’ or ‘There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet's tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by the cachinnating chorus of the distorted hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus’²⁶ are powerful for all their artificiality, and could hardly have come from any other pen. But they can only be appreciated by a more cultured public.

Thus, though his lavish employment of descriptives of type (B) marks Lovecraft's stories as pure tales of horror, his use of every possible word or metaphor describing horror shows how more interesting these tales are than those of his predecessors.

In the light of the above discussion, it seems likely that there was some development between Crawford and Lovecraft, but caution is necessary, for the pure tale of horror is a genre à part, a very well defined type of literature leaving no great scope for a highly personal interpretation, nor consequently for any great development. There is no doubt that, as I have said, Lovecraft with his use of all four types of descriptives, is more modern than Crawford and Machen, and Machen's style is more colourful than Crawford's. But if one compares the development of the pure tale of horror with that of any other kind of literature, it can be seen to be almost non-existent.²⁷

Horror, though it is becoming increasingly linked with the crime story, is still to a large public a necessary feature of weird fiction. Certain authors seem to value it as a possible means of sublimating unpleasant neurotic tendencies. There will always be readers who welcome such an expression in literature of their hidden aggressiveness, or who need such reading to assure themselves that their nervous dreads correspond with little more than fictional realities.

Sometimes the pure tale of horror is shaped by the hands of a real artist, but even then it is often merely the unpleasant product of unconscious perversity and a basic crudity is noticeable even in the style. One could imagine a perfect horror tale based on true symbolism, like the best psychological ghost stories, and written in appropriate language by an author who kept a critical distance from his work. Hartley, and sometimes Lovecraft, came very close to this ideal, but did they actually reach it? Would their tales still have been pure tales of horror if they had? As it is, Forrest Reid's statement if applied to horror fiction, is still the best verdict on the genre:

It is not the highest, but only the pedant and the prig will deny that he enjoys being thrilled, and our superior attitude towards sensational fiction is adopted largely because the blatant and crude fail to produce this effect.

Notes

1. The disgust and indifference towards all ghost stories that many people experience after reading a horror tale was explained by Sir Walter Scott in these words:

   On s'aperçut aussi que le merveilleux dans les fictions, demandait à être employé avec une grande délicatesse à mesure que la critique commençait à prendre l'éveil. L'intérêt que le merveilleux excite est, il est vrai, un ressort puissant, mais il est plus sujet qu'un autre à s'user par un trop fréquent usage: l'imagination doit être stimulée sans jamais être complètement satisfaite; si, une fois, comme Macbeth, ‘Nous nous rassasions d'horreur,’ notre goû s'émousse, et le frémissement de terreur, que nous causait un simple cri au milieu de la nuit, se perd dans cette espèce d'indifference avec laquelle le meurtrier de Ducan parvint à apprendre les plus cruelles catastrophes qui accablèrent sa famille'.

   Walter Scott—‘Du Merveilleux dans le Roman.’ Revue de Paris 2ème edition. Tome premier. Demengeot et Goodman, Bruxelles, 1829, pp. 23–24. Cf. also Boris Karloff's opinions as quoted in the introduction.

2. Letter from Mr. Blackwood to the author. March 1949.

3. Cf. e.g. Freud's study on Jensen's novel Gradiva, where the hero unconsciously cures himself through the methods of psychoanalysis.

4. It will be observed that in my studies on Crawford and Machen I take it for granted that the neurosis (or independent complexes) expressed in the tales analysed are part of the author's own case history. This is indeed most probable; but it would be scientifically false to make no reserve on this point. The reader is thus begged to keep in mind that Crawford and Machen may have described psychological problems that were not their own. Even in this case the psychological interpretation of the texts remains correct, because it is based more on the underlying texts than on biographical references. Anyhow, the problem expressed in these tales remains the same if it was the author's own or not.

5. Some might have started by discussing the Gothic novel, but this is a study on the short story, and not the novel of the supernatural.

6. With the exception of the Marquis de Sade and Restiff de la Bretonne, who are obviously two quite individual cases of neurosis.

7. When Lovecraft died in 1937 he had only two privately-published volumes to his credit: The Shunned House 1937, and The Shadow over Innsmouth 1936—the rest of his tales were first published in magazines. Since his death numerous volumes of collected tales have been edited.

8. Cf. especially August Derleth, H. P. L., A Memoir.

9. Copyright 1926.

10. Copyright 1928.

11. H. P. Lovecraft, Best Supernatural Stories, ‘Pickman's Model,’ The World Publishing Company, Cleveland and New York, 1946, p. 19.

12. E. A. Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ Nelson and Sons Ltd., London, p. 296.

13. August Derleth's introduction to The Best Supernatural Stories, by H. P. Lovecraft, p. 8.

14. Incidentally August Derleth named his famous publishing Company ‘The Arkham House’ after the haunted New England town ‘Arkham,’ which appears in several of Lovecraft's tales.

15. H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature, Ben Abramson, New York, 1945, Chapter 9, p. 82.

16. Cf. such works as ‘Urwelt, Sage und Menschheit’ and ‘Das Verlorene Paradies.’

17. H. P. Lovecraft, Best Supernatural Stories, ‘The Thing on the Doorstep,’ The World Publishing Company, Cleveland and New York, 1946, pp. 305, 306–307.

18. Cf. Dr. James' climax of ‘The Ashtree.’

19. H. P. Lovecraft, Best Supernatural Stories, ‘The Dunwich Horror.’

20. Climax to ‘The Ashtree,’ by M. R. James.

21. H. P. Lovecraft Best Supernatural Stories, The World Publishing Company, Cleveland and New York, 1946. ‘The Rats in the Walls,’ p. 52, ‘The Dunwich Horror,’ p. 200.

22. Ibid. p. 200.

    Cf. chapter on Dr. James and Blackwood. The words of a foreign language used by these authors always has a definite meaning which is disclosed to the reader. Only Machen does not always translate his Welsh.

23. One might call ‘burning points’ (a little later in the climax) a descriptive of the type (C), but the comparison between eyes and burning points' seems too highly conventional for one to speak of real suggestion as in James' story.

24. Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. Edited by Herbert A. Wise and Phyllis Fraser, ‘The Rats in the Walls,’ by H. P. Lovecraft, Hammond, Hammond & Co. Ltd., London, 1947, p. 798.

25. Cf. the following passage from ‘The Outsider,’ pp. 57, 58, in Best Supernatural Stories, by H. P. Lovecraft.

    ‘… it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and dissolution; the putrid dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation, the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide.’

26. Both examples quoted from Best Supernatural Stories, by H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Call of Cthulhu,’ pp. 157 and 158.

27. A study of the style of the ghost story in general could not be made by the method I have employed above. The pure tale of horror is a very narrow genre and demands a certain style. Taken as a whole the short story of the supernatural is a much wider field, and every author treats it in his individual manner. Mr. Blackwood's style, for example, is more typical of its author than of the ghost story as such. Though there are certain other common features, there are only traces of such a thing as the style of the short story of the supernatural. I have mentioned this style at the beginning of this sub-chapter, and discuss it in my chapter on Kipling.