Page:Weird Tales Volume 4 Number 2 (1924-05-07).djvu/4

 beyond, and the infinity of Universes that may, for all we know, lie still further on, are as accessible as his own garden. He flies to them in the ship of his imagination in less time than it takes a bee to flit from one flower to another on die same spike of a delphinium.

Some of the stories now being published in will live forever. Men, in the progressive ages to come, will wonder how it was possible that writers of the crude and uncivilized age known as the twentieth century could have had foreknowledge of the things that will have, by that time, come to pass. They will marvel, as they marvel even now, at the writings of Poe and Verne.

It has always been die human desire to experience new emotions and sensations without actual danger. A tale of horror is told for its own sake, and becomes an end in itself. It is appreciated most by those who are secure from peril.

Using the term in a wide sense, horror stories probably began with the magnificent story of the Writing on the Wall at Belshazzar's Feast. Following this were the Book of Job, the legends of the Deluge and the Tower of Babel, and Saul's Visit to the Woman of Endor. Byron once said the latter was the best ghost story ever written.

The ancient Hebrews used the element of fear in their writings to spur their heroes to superhuman power or to instill a moral truth. The sun stands still in the heavens that Joshua may prevail over his enemies.

The beginning of the English novel during the middle of the eighteenth century brought to light Fielding, Smollett, Sterne and several others. Since this time terror has never ceased to be used as a motive in fiction. This period marked the end of the Gothic Romance whose primary appeal was to women readers. Situations fraught with terror are frequent in Jane Eyre. The Brontes, however, never used the supernatural element to increase tension. Theirs are the terrors of actual life. Wilkie Collins wove elaborate plots of hair-raising events. Bram Stoker, Richard Marsh and Sax Rohmer do likewise. Conan Doyle realized that darkness and loneliness place us at the mercy of terror and he worked artfully on our fear of the unknown. The works of Rider Haggard combine strangeness, wonder, mystery and horror, as do those of Verne, Hitchens, Blackwood, Conrad, and others.

Charles Brockden Brown was the first American novelist to introduce supernatural occurrences and then trace them to natural causes. Like Mrs. Radcliffe, he was at the mercy of a conscience which forbade him to introduce spectres which he himself did not believe. Brown was deeply interested in morbid psychology and he took delight in tracing the working of the brain in times of emotional distress. His best works are Edgar Huntly, Wieland and Ormond.

The group of "Strange Stories by a Nervous Gentleman" in Tales of a Traveler, prove that Washington Irving was well versed in ghostly lore. He was wont to summon ghosts and spirits at will but could not refrain from receiving them in a jocose, irreverent mood. However, in the Story of the German Student he strikes a note of real horror.

Hawthorne was not a man of morose and gloomy temper. An irresistible impulse drove him toward the sombre and gloomy. In his Notebook he says: "I used to think that I could imagine all the passions, all the feelings and states of the heart and mind, but how little did I know! Indeed, we are but shadows, we are not endowed with real life, but all that seems most real about us is but die thinnest shadow of a dream—till the heart be touched."

The weird story of The Hollow of the Three Hills, the gloomy legend of Ethan Brand and the ghostly White Old Maid are typical of Hawthorne's mastery of the bizarre. His introduction of witches into The Scarlet Letter, and of mesmerism into The Blithedale Romance show that he was preoccupied with the terrors of magic and of the invisible world.

Hawthorne was concerned with mournful reflections, not frightful events. The mystery of death, not its terror, fascinated him. He never startled you with physical horror save possibly in The House of the Seven Gables. In the chapter, Judge Jaffery Pyncheon, Hawthorne, with grim and bitter irony, mocks and taunts the dead body of the judge until the ghostly pageantry of the dead Pyncheons—including at last Judge Jaffery himself with the fatal crimson stain on his neckcloth—fades away with the coming of daylight.

Edgar Allan Poe was penetrating the trackless regions of terror while Hawthorne was toying with spectral forms and "dark ideas." Where Hawthorne would have shrunk back, repelled and disgusted, Poe, wildly exhilarated by the anticipation of a new and excruciating thrill, forced his way onward. Both Poe and Hawthorne were fascinated by the thought of death. The hemlock and cypress overshadowed Poe night and day and he describes death accompanied by its direst physical and mental agonies. Hawthorne wrote with finished perfection, unerringly choosing the right word; Poe experimented with language, painfully acquiring a studied form of expression which was remarkably effective at times. In his Masque of the Red Death we are forcibly impressed with the skilful arrangement of words, the alternation of long and short sentences, the use of repetition, and the deliberate choice of epithets.

But enough of Poe. His works are immortal and stand today as the most widely read of any American author. The publishers of hope they will be instrumental in discovering or uncovering some American writer who will leave to posterity what Poe and Hawthorne have bequeathed to the present generation. Perhaps in the last year we have been instrumental in furnishing an outlet to writers whose works would not find a ready market in the usual channels. The reception accorded us has been cordial and we feel that we will survive. We dislike to predict the future of the horror story. We believe its powers are not yet exhausted. The advance of science proves this. It will lead us into unexplored labyrinths of terror and the human desire to experience new emotions will always be with us.

Dr. Frank Crane says: "What I write is my tombstone." And again—"As for me, let my bones and flesh be burned, and the ashes dropped in the moving waters, and if my name shall live at all, let it be found among Books, the only garden of forget-me-nots, the only human device for perpetuating this personality."

So has, from its inception, and will in the future, endeavor to find and publish those stories that will make their writers immortal. It will play its humble but necessary part in perpetuating those personalities that are worthy to be crowned as immortals.