Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 4 (1926-04).djvu/135



THER magazines put up the bars against stories that wander very far from the experiences of the life about us, and thus inevitably they publish much that is humdrum, much that is commonplace. This very conservatism robs them of some of the most brilliant stories that are written. And it has until recently been the fashion to belittle the bizarre stories, the stark school of realism insisting that true literature must be tied to the sordid experiences of everyday life. has answered these "realists" by printing bizarre and outré stories that are among the finest gems of imaginative literature. Many of our stories are mere pleasant entertainment for an idle hour, which take the reader away from the humdrum commonplaceness of the life about him into a deathless country of imagination and fancy; but others are a very high type of literature. Such, for instance, is Frank Owen's exquisite and fantastic Chinese tale of sweetness and light, The Wind That Tramps the World (April issue, 1925); such are the gripping and superbly written orientales of E. Hoffmann Price, whose forthcoming story, The Dreamer of Atlanaat, is woven from the same gorgeous tissue as his recent stories: The Sultan's Jest, The Rajah's Gift, and The Stranger From Kurdistan.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating: if you do not believe that bizarre tales offer opportunity for the highest artistry to the literary genius who is endowed with imagination, then read H. P. Lovecraft's story' The Outsider, on page 449 of this issue. Where in the whole realm of literature will you find a more original conception, or more consummate artistry in the workmanship, than in this story? Its every sentence bears the mark of the master literary craftsman; it is a sheer triumph of bizarrerie and outré invention. Not even Poe in his wildest flights of fancy has surpassed the winged beauty of this imaginative weird tale. Truly, when such geniuses as Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood and H. P. Lovccraft achieve their best and most artistic results through the medium of the weird tale, then the literary merit of this type of fiction is established beyond dispute or cavil.

E. Hoffmann Price, in a letter to the editor, thus sums up the genius of Lovecraft: "To paraphrase the Moslem: There is but one Lovecraft, and the unnamable is his God. In his utter unreality and impossibility, he is like a non-Euclidean geometer who, though working on physically impossible axioms, reasons truly from them and produces theorems, and subsequent Q. E. D.'s, which are as true as if they actually were true; or aa one who