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Fantasy Fan, v. 2, issue 5, whole no. 17, January 1935
Page 68
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68 THE FANTASY FAN, January, 1935 SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE by H. P. Lovecraft Part Sixteen (copyright 1927 by W. Paul Cook) VIII The Weird Tradition in America The public for whom Poe wrote, though grossly unappreciative of his art, was by no means unaccustomed to the horrors with which he dealt. America, besides inheriting the usual dark folklore of Europe, had an addi-tional fund of weird associations to draw upon; so that spectral legends had already been recognized as fruit-ful subject-matter for literature. Charles Brockden Brown had acheiv-ed phenomenal fame with his Radclif-fian romances, and Washington Ir-ving's lighter treatment of eerie themes had quickly become a classic. This ad-ditional fund proceeded, as Paul Elmer Moore has pointed out, from the keen spiritual and theological interests of the first colonists plus the strange and for-bidding nature of the scene into which they were plunged, the vast and gloomy virgin forest whose perpetual in whose perpetual twi-light all terrors might well lurk; the hordes of coppery Indians whose strange, saturnine visages and violent customs hinted strongly at traces of infernal origin; the free rein given under he influence of Puritan theocracy to all manner of notions respecting man's relation to the stern and vengeful God of the Calvinists, and to the sulphureous Adversary of that God, about whom so much was thundered in the pulpits each Sunday; and the morbid introspection developed by an isolated backwoods life devoid of nor-mal amusements and of the recreation-al mood, haressed by commands for theological self-examination, keyed to unnatural emotional repression, and forming above all a mere grim struggle for survival--all these things conspired to produce an environment in which the black whisperings of sinister grand-ams were heard far beyond the chim-mey corner, and in which tales of witchcraft and unbelievable secret monstrosities lingered long after the dread days of the Salem nightmare. Poe represents the newer, more dis-illusioned, and more technically fin-ished of the weird schools that rose out of the propitious milieu. Another school--the tradition of moral values, gentle restraint, and mild, leisurely phantasy tinged more or less with the whimsical--was represented by anoth-er famous, misunderstood, and lonely figure in American letters--the shy and sensitive Nathaniel Hawthorne, scion of antique Salem and great-gradson of the one of the bloodiest of the old witchcraft judges. In Hawthorne we have none of the violence, the daring, the high colouring, the intense dram-atic sense, the cosmic malignity, and the undivided and impersonal artistry of Poe. Here, instead, is a gentle soul cramped by the Puritanism of early New England; shadowed and wistful, and grieved at an unmoral un-inverse which everywhere transcends the conventional patterns thought by our forefathers to represent divine and
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68 THE FANTASY FAN, January, 1935 SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE by H. P. Lovecraft Part Sixteen (copyright 1927 by W. Paul Cook) VIII The Weird Tradition in America The public for whom Poe wrote, though grossly unappreciative of his art, was by no means unaccustomed to the horrors with which he dealt. America, besides inheriting the usual dark folklore of Europe, had an addi-tional fund of weird associations to draw upon; so that spectral legends had already been recognized as fruit-ful subject-matter for literature. Charles Brockden Brown had acheiv-ed phenomenal fame with his Radclif-fian romances, and Washington Ir-ving's lighter treatment of eerie themes had quickly become a classic. This ad-ditional fund proceeded, as Paul Elmer Moore has pointed out, from the keen spiritual and theological interests of the first colonists plus the strange and for-bidding nature of the scene into which they were plunged, the vast and gloomy virgin forest whose perpetual in whose perpetual twi-light all terrors might well lurk; the hordes of coppery Indians whose strange, saturnine visages and violent customs hinted strongly at traces of infernal origin; the free rein given under he influence of Puritan theocracy to all manner of notions respecting man's relation to the stern and vengeful God of the Calvinists, and to the sulphureous Adversary of that God, about whom so much was thundered in the pulpits each Sunday; and the morbid introspection developed by an isolated backwoods life devoid of nor-mal amusements and of the recreation-al mood, haressed by commands for theological self-examination, keyed to unnatural emotional repression, and forming above all a mere grim struggle for survival--all these things conspired to produce an environment in which the black whisperings of sinister grand-ams were heard far beyond the chim-mey corner, and in which tales of witchcraft and unbelievable secret monstrosities lingered long after the dread days of the Salem nightmare. Poe represents the newer, more dis-illusioned, and more technically fin-ished of the weird schools that rose out of the propitious milieu. Another school--the tradition of moral values, gentle restraint, and mild, leisurely phantasy tinged more or less with the whimsical--was represented by anoth-er famous, misunderstood, and lonely figure in American letters--the shy and sensitive Nathaniel Hawthorne, scion of antique Salem and great-gradson of the one of the bloodiest of the old witchcraft judges. In Hawthorne we have none of the violence, the daring, the high colouring, the intense dram-atic sense, the cosmic malignity, and the undivided and impersonal artistry of Poe. Here, instead, is a gentle soul cramped by the Puritanism of early New England; shadowed and wistful, and grieved at an unmoral un-inverse which everywhere transcends the conventional patterns thought by our forefathers to represent divine and
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