In "A Strange Story" (1862) Bulwer-Lytton shows a marked improvement in the creation of weird images and moods. The novel, despite enormous length, a highly artificial plot bolstered up by opportune coincidences, and an atmosphere of homiletic pseudo-science designed to please the matter-of-fact and purposeful Victorian reader, is exceedingly effective as a narrative; evoking instantaneous and unflagging interest, and furnishing many potent—if somewhat melodramatic—tableaux and climaxes. Again we have the mysterious user of life's elixir in the person of the soulless magician Margrave, whose dark exploits stand out with dramatic vividness against the modern background of a quiet English town and of the Australian bush; and again we have shadowy intimations of a vast spectral world of the unknown in the very air about us—this time handled with much greater power and vitality than in "Zanoni." One of the two great incantation passages, where the hero is driven by a luminous evil spirit to rise at night in his sleep, take a strange Egyptian wand, and invoke nameless presences in the haunted and mausoleum-facing pavillian of a famous Renaissance alchemist, truly stands among the major terror scenes of literature. Just enough is suggested, and just little enough is told. Unknown words are twice dictated to the sleep-walker, and as he repeats them the ground trembles, and all the dogs of the countryside begin to bay at half-seen amorphous shadows that stalk athwart the moonlight. When a third set of unknown words is prompted, the sleep-walker's spirit suddenly rebels at uttering them, as if the soul could recognize ultimate abysmal horrors concealed from the mind; and at last an apparition of an absent sweetheart and good angel breaks the malign spell. This fragment well illustrates how far Lord Lytton was capable of progressing beyond his usual pomp and stock romance toward that crystalline essence of artistic fear which belongs to the domain of poetry. In describing certain details of incantations, Lytton was greatly indebted to his amusingly serious occult studies, in the course of which he came in touch with that odd French scholar and cabalist Alphonse Louis Constant ("Eliphas Levi") who claimed to possess the secrets of ancient magic, and to have evoked the spectre of the old Grecian wizard Appollonius of Tyana, who lived in Nero's time.
The romantic, semi-Gothic, quasi-moral tradition here represented was carried far down the nineteenth century by such authors as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Thomas Preskett with his famous "Varney, the Vampyre" (1847), Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H. Rider Haggard, (whose "She" is really remarkably good), Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson—the latter of whom, despite an atrocious tendency toward jaunty mannerisms, created permanent classics in Markheim, "The Body Snatcher," and "Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde." Indeed, we may say that this school still survives; for to it clearly belong such of our contemporary horror tales as specialise in events rather than atmospheric details, address the intellect rather than the impressionistic imagination, cultivate a luminous glamour rather than a malign tensity or psychological verisimilitude, and take a definite stand in sympathy with mankind and its welfare. It has its undeniable strength, and because of its "human element" commands a wider audience than does the sheer artistic nightmare. If not quite so potent as the latter, it is because a diluted product can never achieve the intensity of a concentrated essence.
Quite alone both as novel and as a piece of terror-literature stands the famous "Wuthering Heights" (1847) by Emily Bronte, with its mad vista of bleak, windswept Yorkshire moors and the violent, distorted lives they foster. Though primarily a tale of life, and of human passions in agony and conflict, its epically cosmic setting affords room for horror of the most spiritual sort. Heathcliff, the modified Byronic villain-hero, is a strange dark waif found in the streets as a small child and speaking only a strange gibberish till adopted by the family he ultimately ruins. That he is in truth a diabolic spirit rather than a human being is more than once suggested, and the unreal is further approached in the experience of the visitor who encounters a plaintive child-ghost at a bough-brushed upper window. Between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is a tie deeper and more terrible than human love. After her death he twice disturbs her grave, and is haunted by an impalpable presence which can be nothing less than her spirit. The spirit enters his life more and more, and at last he becomes confident of some imminent mystical reunion. He says he feels a strange change approaching, and ceases to take nourishment. At night he either walks abroad or opens the casement by his bed. When he dies the casement is still swinging open to the pouring rain, and a queer smile pervades the stiffened face. They bury him in a grave beside the mound he has haunted for eighteen years, and small shepherd boys say that he yet walks with his Catherine in the churchyard and on the moor when it rains. Their faces, too, are sometimes seen on rainy nights behind that upper casement at Wuthering Heights. Miss Bronte's eerie terror is no mere Gothic echo, but a tense expression of man's shuddering reaction to the unknown. In this respect, "Wuthering Heights" becomes the symbol of a literary transition, and marks the growth of a new and sounder school.
(Next month Mr. Lovecraft takes up "Spectral Literature of the Continent")
SUPERSTITION—A. D. 1934
by Lester Anderson
Why the dearth of readers for that class of literature known as the weird or fantastic? Why the cynicism in most circles regarding this branch of writing? Many answers have been given to these queries, the most common one being that of "lack of imagination." May I offer a startling contradiction to this, namely—TOO MUCH IMAGINATION? Precisely that.
A study of superstitions in America is being made by Dr. Otis Caldwell of Columbia University, who announces that 98 people out of 100 are superstitious. Let that sink in—98 out of 100. He further states that women are more superstitious than men, and superstition is more prevalent in the country than in the city.
Now, the person who goes around whistling in the dark, avidly studies Dream Books (also known variously as "Success in 5 Lessons" and "Would You DARE Join a Nudist Camp?"), avoids ladders, and keeps his weather eye peeled for stray black cats—albeit he laughs it off outwardly—isn't likely to pick up a copy of "The Slithering Shadow" no matter in what state of dishabille the shapely lady might be in. (At this point, let me briefly interrupt by stating that I have absolutely no objections to the so-called "naked" covers gracing most issues of Weird Tales—if the circulation is increased thereby). I venture to say that the average reader of weird fantasy is remarkably free from the superstitions which beset the run-of-the-mill literate, and if encountered by an ultra-mundane manifestation would be the first to be skeptical—and investigate.