SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE

by H. P. Lovecraft

Part Thirteen

VI. Spectral Literature on the Continent

On the continent literary horror fared well. The celebrated short tales and novels of Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (1776-1822) are a byword for mellowness of background and maturity of form, though they incline to levity and extravagance, and lack the exalted moments of stark, breathless terror which a less sophisticated writer might have achieved. Generally they convey the grotesque rather than the terrible. Most artistic of all the continental weird tales is the German classic Undine, (1814) by Friedrich Hein-Karl, Baron de la Motte Fouque. In this story of a water-spirit who married a mortal and gained a human soul there is a delicate fineness of craftsmanship which makes it notable in any department of literature, and an easy naturalness which places it close to the genuine folk-myth. It is, in fact, derived from a tale told by the Renaissance physician and alchemist Paracleus in his Treatise on Elemental Sprites.

Undine, daughter of a powerful water-prince, was exchanged by her father as a small child for a fisherman's daughter, in order that she might acquire a soul by wedding a human being. Meeting the noble youth Huldbrand at the cottage of her foster-father by the sea at the edge of a haunted wood, she soon marries him, and accompanies him to his ancestral castle of Ringstetten. Huldbrand, however, eventually wearies of his wife's supernatural affiliations, and especially of the appearances of her uncle, the malicious woodland waterfall-spirit Kugleborn; a weariness increased by his growing affection for Bertalda, who turns out to be the fisherman's child for whom Undine was exchanged. At length, on a voyage down the Danube, he is provoked by some innocent act of his devoted wife to utter the angry words which consign her back to her supernatural element; from which she can, by the laws of her species, return only once—to kill him, whether she will no, if ever he prove unfaithful to her memory. Later, when Huldbrand is about to be married to Bertalda, Undine returns for her sad duty, and bears his life away in tears. When he is buried among his fathers in the village churchyard a veiled, snow-white female figure appears among the mourners, but after the prayer is seen no more. In her place is a little silver spring, which murmurs its way almost completely around the new grave and empties into a neighbouring lake. The villagers show it to this day, and say that Undine and her Huldbrand are thus united in death. Many passages and atmospheric touches in this tale reveal Fouque as an accomplished artist in the field of the macabre; especially the descriptions of the haunted wood with its gigantic snow-white man and various unnamed terrors, which occur early in the narrative.

Not so well known as Undine, but remarkable for its convincing realism and freedom from Gothic stock devices, is the Amber Witch of Wilhelm Meinhold, another product of the German fantastic genius of the earlier nineteenth century. This tale, which is laid in the time of the Thirty Years' War, purports to be a clergyman's manuscript found in an old church at Coserow, and centres round the writer's daughter, Maria Schweidler, who is wrongly accused of witchcraft. She has found a deposit of amber which she keeps secret for various reasons, and the unexplained wealth obtained from this lends colour to the accusation; an accusation instigated by the malice of the wolf-hunting nobleman Wittich Appelmann, who has vainly pursued her with ignoble designs. The deeds of a real witch, who afterward comes to a horrible supernatural end in prison, are glibly imputed to the hapless Maria; and after a typical witchcraft trial with forced confessions under torture she is about to be burned at the stake when saved just in time by her lover, a noble youth from a neighbouring district. Meinhold's great strength is in his air of casual and realistic verisimilitude, which intensifies our suspense and sense of the unseen by half persuading us that the menacing events must somehow be either the truth or very close to the truth. Indeed, so thorough is this realism that a popular magazine once published the main points of The Amber Witch as an actual occurrence of the seventeenth century!

In the present generation German horror-fiction is most notably represented by Hanns Heinz Ewers who brings to bear on his dark conceptions an effective knowledge of modern psychology. Novels like The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Alranae, and short stories like The Spider contain distinctive qualities which raise them to a classic level.

But France as well as Germany has been active in the realm of weirdness. Victor Hugo, in such tales as Hans of Iceland, and Balzac, in The Wild Ass's Skin, Seraphita, and Louis Lambert, both employ supernaturalism to a great or less extent; though generally only as a means to some more human end, and without the sincere and daemonic intensity which characterises the born artist in shadows. It is in Theopile Gautier that we first seem to find an authentic French sense of the unreal world, and here there appears a spectral mastery which, though not continuously used, is recognisable at once as something alike genuine and profound. Short tales like Atavar, The Foot of the Mummy, and Clarimonde display glimpses of forbidden vistas that allure, tantalise, and sometimes horrify; whilst the Egyptian visions evoked in One of Cleopatra's Nights are of the keenest and most expressive potency. Gautier captured the inmost soul of aeon-weighted Egypt, with its cryptic life and Cyclopean architecture, and uttered once and for all the eternal horror of its nether world of catacombs, where to the end of time millions of stiff, spiced corpses will stare up in the blackness with glassy eyes, awaiting some awesome and unrelatable summons. Gustave Flaubert ably continued the tradition of Gautier in orgies of poetic phantasy like The Temptation of St. Anthony, and but for a strong realistic bias might have been an arch-weaver of tapestried terrors. Later on we see the stream divide, producing strange poets and fantasists of the symbolist and decadent schools whose dark interests really centre more in abnormalities of human thought and instinct than in the actual supernatural, and subtle story-tellers whose thrills are quite directly derived from the night-black wells of cosmic unreality. Of the former class of "artists in sin" the illustrious poet Baudelaire, influenced vastly by Poe, is the supreme type; whilst the psychological novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, a true child of the eighteen nineties, is at once the summation and finale. The latter and purely narrative class is continued by Prosper Merimee, whose Venus of Ille presents in terse and convincing prose the same ancient statue-bride theme which Thomas Moore cast in ballad form in The Ring.

The horror-tales of the powerful and cynical Guy de Maupassant, written as his final madness gradually over-took him, presents individualities of their own; being rather the morbid outpourings of a realistic mind in a pathological state than the healthily imaginative product of a vision naturally disposed toward phantasy and sensitive to the normal illusions of the unseen. Nevertheless they are of the keenest interest and poignancy; suggesting with marvelous force the imminence of nameless terrors, and the relentless dogging of an ill-starred individual by hideous and menacing representatives of the outer blackness. Of these stories The Horla is generally regarded as the masterpiece. Relating the advent to France of an invisible being who lives on water and milk, sways the minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extra-terrestrial organisms arrived on earth to subjugate and overwhelm mankind, this tense narrative is perhaps without a peer in its particular department; notwithstanding its indebtedness to a tale by the American Fitz-James O'Brien for details in describing the actual presence of the unseen monster. Other potently dark creations of de Maupassant are Who Knows?, The Spectre, He, The Diary of a Madman, The White Wolf, On the River, and the grisly verse entitled Horror.

(Continued Next Month)

THE FAVORITE WEIRD STORIES OF H. P. LOVECRAFT
(Courtesy of H. Koenig)

"The Willows" A. Blackwood, "The White Powder," "The White People," "The Black Seal" A. Machen, "The Fall of the House of Usher" E. A. Poe, "The House of Sounds" M. P. Shiel, "The Yellow Sign" R. W. Chambers, "Count Magnus" M. R. James, "The Death of Halpin Frayser" A. Bierce, "The Moon Pool" (original novelette) A. Merritt.

The first nine titles were in Mr. Lovecraft's original list published in "The Side Show." You will notice that he stipulates the original novelette version of "The Moon Pool" as the tenth selection. This of course eliminates the story as it was published in book form, including the sequel.

WEIRD WHISPERINGS
by Schwartz and Weisinger

Rumor had it that for several years Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, was writing stories and poems under the pseudonym of Francis Hard. When we asked for permission to "break" the story, Wright said that "since the secret is already out that poems and stories published under the name Francis Hard were in fact written by me, of course I have no further objection to its being known. I have written nothing new since I became editor of Weird Tales in 1924, but I wrote stories for Weird Tales previous to that, when it was edited by Edwin Baird. When I became editor one of my stories was already in type for the next issue (A story called "The Great Panjandrum"). I thought it looked rather phony for an editor to use his own stories in his magazine, even though the story had been accepted by a previous editor; so I used the pen name Francis Hard as the author of that story (Hard was my maternal grandmother's name). Feeling that an editor is a bad judge of his own stuff, I submitted some stories that I had written several years ago, to Otis Adelbert Kline, whose literary judgement I value highly, and used the two that he liked—one in Oriental Stories, and the other in its successor, The Magic Carpet. Two other stories, which Kline considered rotten, I quickly canned—may they rest in peace."

Frank Belknap Long, Jr., is now trying to invade the detective story market.... Here's hoping he matches the stride set by his pal, Donald Wandrei.... New York fans would do well to tune in on Alonzo Deen Cole's weird broadcasts, "The Witch's Tale," over WOR, and to "Tales of Terror," over WINS.... S. Gordon Gurwitt besides turning out weird stories, also writes detective yarns, and bears an amazing resemblance to Eddie Cantor.... Farnsworth Wright has never yet rejected a story on the grounds that it was too juvenile.... A. Merritt claims he sits down to write "only after I have exhausted myself of all possible excuses".... Arthur Sarsfield Ward, when asked why he used the pseudonym of Sax Rohmer for his writings, responded: "The reason why I use the name Sax Rohmer is as much a mystery to me as it is to you."

Some Seabury Quinnformation: Seabury Quinn's next Jules de Grandin story will be published in the January, 1935, issue of Weird Tales, and is entitled "Hands of the Dead." It deals with post-mortem hypnotism.... Quinn (known to Weird Tales fans as the Old Marster—not "Master") is working on a series introducing a new character, Thomas Eldridge Carter, a twenty-six year old investigator for the Grand Central Life Assurance Company. The series will deal with Carter's adventures in ferreting out the whys and wherefores of the deaths and disappearances of persons heavily insured by the company. Like all of Quinn's stories, these will have elements of weirdness, but will not contain supernatural elements.