By H. P. Lovecraft: My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature. I choose weird Lovecraft is one of the most significant American writers of modern supernatural and fantastical fiction. Many of his works, comprising some sixty short stories, were published in the magazine Such essays as “Idealism and Materialism—A Reflection” and the In Defence of Dagon essays outline the essentials of Lovecraft’s philosophical thought, including such issues as free will, the improbability of theism, and cosmic pessimism. In his later years, the problems of politics and economics came to the forefront of his attention
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Lovecraft I. Introduction The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, hp lovecraft essays, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown, hp lovecraft essays. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form.
Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naively insipid idealism which deprecates the aesthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to uplift the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant hp lovecraft essays permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness, hp lovecraft essays.
The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, hp lovecraft essays, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, hp lovecraft essays, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience.
But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our inmost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically hp lovecraft essays, minority of our species.
Definite feelings based on pleasure and pain grew up around the phenomena whose causes and effects he understood, whilst around those which he did not understand—and the universe teemed with them in the early days—were naturally woven such personifications, marvellous interpretations, and sensations of awe and fear as would be hit upon by a race having few and simple ideas and limited experience.
The unknown, being likewise the unpredictable, became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon hp lovecraft essays for cryptic and wholly extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part.
That saturation must, as a matter of plain scientific fact, be regarded as virtually permanent so hp lovecraft essays as the subconscious mind and inner instincts are concerned; for though the area of the unknown has been steadily contracting for thousands of years, an infinite reservoir of mystery still engulfs most of the outer cosmos, whilst a vast residuum of powerful inherited associations clings around all the objects and processes that were once mysterious, however well they may now be explained.
And more than this, there is an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous tissue, which would make them obscurely operative even were the conscious mind to be purged of all sources of wonder.
Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore. This tendency, too, is naturally enhanced by the fact that uncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities, hp lovecraft essays.
When to this sense of fear and evil the inevitable fascination of wonder and curiosity is superadded, there is born a composite body of keen emotion and imaginative provocation whose vitality must of necessity endure as long as the human race itself. Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, hp lovecraft essays, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.
With this foundation, no one need wonder at the existence of a literature of cosmic fear, hp lovecraft essays. It has always existed, and always will exist; and no better evidence of its tenacious vigour can be cited than the impulse which now and then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands at it in isolated tales, as if to discharge from their minds certain phantasmal shapes which would otherwise haunt them.
Holmes, the subtle novel Elsie Venner; F. This type of fear-literature must not be confounded with a type externally similar but psychologically widely different; the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome. The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule.
A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults hp lovecraft essays chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.
Naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to hp lovecraft essays theoretical model. Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots. Moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast, hp lovecraft essays.
Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation, hp lovecraft essays. We may say, as a general thing, that a weird story whose intent is to teach or produce a social effect, hp lovecraft essays one in which the horrors are hp lovecraft essays explained away by natural means, is not a genuine tale of cosmic fear; but it remains a fact that such narratives often possess, hp lovecraft essays isolated sections, atmospheric touches which fulfil every condition of hp lovecraft essays supernatural horror-literature.
And of course, the more completely and unifiedly a story conveys this atmosphere, the better it is as a work of art in the given medium, hp lovecraft essays. The Dawn of the Horror-Tale As may naturally be expected of a form so closely connected with primal emotion, the horror-tale is as old as human thought and speech themselves. Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races, and is crystallised in the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and sacred writings.
It was, indeed, a prominent feature of the elaborate ceremonial magic, with its rituals for the evocation of daemons and spectres, which flourished from prehistoric times, and which reached its highest development in Egypt and the Semitic nations. Fragments like the Book of Enoch and the Claviculae of Solomon well illustrate the power of the weird over the ancient Eastern mind, and upon such things were based enduring systems and traditions whose echoes extend obscurely even to the present time.
Touches of this transcendental fear are seen in classic literature, and hp lovecraft essays is evidence of its still greater emphasis in a ballad literature which paralleled the classic stream but vanished for lack of a written medium. The Middle Ages, steeped in fanciful darkness, hp lovecraft essays, gave it an enormous impulse toward expression; and East and West alike were busy preserving and amplifying the dark heritage, both of random folklore and of academically formulated magic and cabbalism, hp lovecraft essays, which had descended to hp lovecraft essays. Witch, hp lovecraft essays, werewolf, vampire, and ghoul brooded ominously on the lips of bard and grandam, and needed but little encouragement to take the final step across the boundary that divides the chanted tale or song from the formal literary composition.
In the Orient, the weird tale tended to assume a gorgeous hp lovecraft essays and sprightliness which almost transmuted it into sheer phantasy, hp lovecraft essays. In the West, where the mystical Teuton had come down from his black Boreal forests and the Celt remembered strange sacrifices in Druidic groves, it assumed a terrible intensity and convincing seriousness of atmosphere which doubled the force of its half-told, half-hinted horrors.
Much of the power of Western horror-lore was undoubtedly due to the hidden but often suspected presence of a hideous cult of nocturnal worshippers whose strange customs—descended from pre-Aryan and pre-agricultural times when a squat race of Mongoloids roved over Europe with their flocks and herds—were rooted in the most revolting fertility-rites of immemorial hp lovecraft essays. The prevalence and depth of the mediaeval horror-spirit in Europe, intensified by the dark hp lovecraft essays which waves of pestilence brought, may be fairly gauged by the grotesque carvings slyly introduced into much of the finest later Gothic ecclesiastical work of the time; the daemoniac gargoyles of Notre Dame and Mont St, hp lovecraft essays.
Michel being among the most famous specimens. And throughout the period, it must be remembered, there existed amongst educated and hp lovecraft essays alike a most unquestioning faith in every form of the supernatural; from the gentlest of Christian doctrines to the most monstrous morbidities of witchcraft and black magic.
It was from no empty background that the Renaissance magicians and alchemists—Nostradamus, Trithemius, Dr. John Dee, Robert Fludd, and the like—were born. In this fertile soil were nourished types and characters of sombre myth and legend which persist in weird literature to this day, hp lovecraft essays, more or less disguised or altered by modern technique.
The shade which appears and demands the burial of its bones, hp lovecraft essays, the daemon lover who comes to bear away his still living bride, the death-fiend or psychopomp riding the night-wind, the man-wolf, the sealed chamber, the deathless sorcerer—all these may be found in that curious body of mediaeval lore which the late Mr, hp lovecraft essays. Baring-Gould so effectively assembled in book form. Wherever the mystic Northern blood was strongest, the atmosphere of the popular tales became most intense; for in the Latin races there is a touch of basic rationality which denies to even their strangest superstitions many of the overtones of glamour so characteristic of our own forest-born and ice-fostered whisperings.
Just as all fiction first found extensive embodiment in poetry, so is it in poetry that we first encounter hp lovecraft essays permanent entry of the weird into standard literature. 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, hp lovecraft essays.
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, hp lovecraft essays. In Elizabethan drama, with its Dr. Hp lovecraft essays, the witches in Macbeth, the ghost in Hamlet, and the horrible gruesomeness of Webster, hp lovecraft essays, 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 wildest 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 line of treatises on witchcraft and daemonology which aid in exciting the imagination of the reading world. 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.
The upper orders of society were now losing faith in the supernatural, and indulging in a period of classic rationalism.
We feel it first in the poets, whose utterances take on hp lovecraft essays qualities of wonder, hp lovecraft essays, strangeness, and shuddering. It is, when one reflects upon it, hp lovecraft essays remarkable that weird narration as a fixed and academically recognised 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.
But it remained for a very sprightly and worldly Englishman—none other than Horace Walpole himself—to give the growing impulse definite shape and become the actual founder hp lovecraft essays the literary horror-story as a permanent form. The story—tedious, artificial, hp lovecraft essays, and melodramatic—is further impaired by a brisk and prosaic style whose urbane sprightliness nowhere permits the creation of a truly weird atmosphere.
Shortly thereafter supernatural phenomena assail the castle in divers ways; fragments of gigantic armour being hp lovecraft essays here and there, a portrait walking out of its frame, a thunderclap destroying the edifice, and a colossal armoured spectre of Alfonso rising out of the ruins to ascend through parting clouds to the bosom of St, hp lovecraft essays.
Such is the tale; flat, hp lovecraft essays, stilted, and altogether devoid of the true cosmic horror which makes weird literature. Yet such was the thirst of the age for those touches of strangeness and spectral antiquity which it reflects, that it was seriously received by the soundest readers and raised in spite of its intrinsic ineptness to a pedestal of lofty hp lovecraft essays in literary history. What it did above all hp lovecraft essays was to create a novel type of scene, puppet-characters, and incidents; which, handled to better advantage by writers more naturally adapted to weird creation, stimulated the growth of an imitative Gothic school which in turn inspired the real weavers of cosmic terror—the line of actual artists beginning with Poe.
This novel dramatic paraphernalia consisted first of all of the Gothic castle, with its awesome antiquity, vast distances and ramblings, deserted or ruined wings, damp corridors, unwholesome hidden catacombs, hp lovecraft essays, and galaxy of ghosts and appalling legends, as a nucleus of suspense and daemoniac fright.
All this paraphernalia reappears with amusing sameness, yet sometimes with tremendous effect, throughout the history of the Gothic novel; and is by no means extinct even today, though subtler technique now forces it to assume a less naive and obvious form. An harmonious milieu for a new school had been found, and the writing world was not slow to grasp the opportunity.
German romance at once responded to the Walpole influence, and soon became a byword for the weird and ghastly. In England one of the first imitators was the celebrated Mrs. A coffin with a dead lady, whom Hp lovecraft essays Bertrand kisses, is finally reached; and upon the kiss the scene dissolves to give place to a splendid apartment where the lady, restored to life, holds a banquet in honour of her rescuer.
Walpole admired this tale, though he accorded less respect to an even more prominent offspring of his Otranto — The Old English Baron, by Clara Reeve, published in Truly enough, this tale lacks the real vibration to the note of outer darkness and mystery which distinguishes Mrs. Here again we have the virtuous heir to the castle disguised as a peasant and restored to his heritage through the ghost of his father; and here again we have a case of wide popularity leading to many editions, dramatisation, and ultimate translation into French, hp lovecraft essays.
Miss Reeve wrote another weird novel, hp lovecraft essays, unfortunately unpublished and lost. The Gothic hp lovecraft essays was now settled as a literary form, and instances multiply bewilderingly as the eighteenth century draws toward its close. The Recess, written in by Mrs. Sophia Lee, has the historic element, revolving round the twin daughters of Mary, Queen of Scots; and though devoid of the supernatural, employs the Walpole scenery and mechanism with great dexterity, hp lovecraft essays.
Five years later, and all existing lamps are paled by the rising of a fresh luminary of wholly superior order—Mrs. Ann Radcliffe —whose famous novels made terror and suspense a fashion, and who set new and higher standards in the domain of macabre and fear-inspiring atmosphere despite a provoking custom of destroying her own phantoms at the last through laboured mechanical explanations.
To the familiar Gothic trappings of her predecessors Mrs. Radcliffe added a genuine sense of the unearthly in scene and incident which closely approached genius; every touch of setting and action contributing artistically to the impression of illimitable frightfulness which she wished to convey, hp lovecraft essays. A few sinister details like a track of blood on castle stairs, a groan from a distant vault, or a weird song in a nocturnal forest can with her conjure up the most powerful images of imminent horror; surpassing by far the extravagant and toilsome elaborations of others.
Nor are these images in themselves any the less potent because they are explained away before the end of the novel. Her prime weaknesses, aside from the habit of prosaic disillusionment, are a tendency toward erroneous geography and history and a fatal predilection for bestrewing her novels with insipid little poems, attributed to one or another of the characters.
Radcliffe wrote six novels; The Castles of Athlin and DunbayneA Sicilian RomanceThe Romance of the ForestThe Mysteries of UdolphoThe Italianhp lovecraft essays, and Gaston de Blondeville, composed in but first published posthumously in Of these Udolpho is by far the most famous, and may be taken as a type of the early Gothic tale at its best. It is the hp lovecraft essays of Emily, a young Frenchwoman transplanted to an ancient and portentous castle in the Apennines through the death of her parents and the marriage of her aunt to the lord of the castle—the scheming nobleman Montoni.
Mysterious sounds, hp lovecraft essays, opened doors, frightful legends, and a nameless horror in a niche behind a black veil all operate in quick succession to unnerve the heroine and her faithful attendant Annette; but finally, after the death of her aunt, she escapes with the hp lovecraft essays of a fellow-prisoner whom she has discovered.
On the way home she stops at a chateau filled with fresh horrors—the abandoned wing where the departed chatelaine dwelt, and the bed of death with the black hp lovecraft essays is finally restored to security and happiness with her lover Valancourt, after the clearing-up of a secret which seemed for a time to involve her birth in mystery. Clearly, this is only the familiar material re-worked; but it is so well re-worked that Udolpho will always be a classic.
And in atmospheric creation she stands preëminent among those of her time. Of Mrs. Like her, he injured his creations by natural explanations; but also like her, he had an uncanny atmospheric power which gives his horrors a frightful vitality as long as they remain unexplained.
He differed from her in contemptuously discarding the external Gothic paraphernalia and properties and choosing modern American scenes for his mysteries; but this repudiation did not extend to the Gothic spirit and type of incident. Edgar Huntly starts with a sleep-walker digging a grave, but is later impaired by touches of Godwinian didacticism.
Ormond involves a member of a sinister secret brotherhood. That and Arthur Mervyn both describe the plague of yellow fever, which the author had witnessed in Philadelphia and New York, hp lovecraft essays.
Why Cosmic Horror is Hard To Make
, time: 7:59"Supernatural Horror in Literature" by H. P. Lovecraft
1 Lovecraft wrote chiefly for a white male audience in the s and s. Since then, social attitudes and norms have changed to the point that, if his stories were published for the first time today, the views expressed or implied in some of them would be extremely blogger.comted Reading Time: 4 mins 'Cats and Dogs' by H. P. Lovecraft. Being told of the cat-and-dog fight about to occur in the Blue Pencil Club—a new thing for your circle, perhaps, though not unfamiliar to amateurdom as a whole—I cannot resist contributing a few Thomasic yowls and sibilants upon my side of the dispute, though conscious that the word of a venerable ex-member can scarcely have much weight against the · Lovecraft was always fascinated with the unknown and he himself stated in his long essay that “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” (H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature) In the times of writing “At the Mountains of Madness” a significant part of Antarctica was yet to be discovered and that part was Estimated Reading Time: 11 mins
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