A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) is a much different proposition. Weird writing represents a quite small proportion of his writing, and was indeed merely a diversion from his work as educator, authority on medieval manuscripts, and Biblical scholar. His edition of the Apocryphal New Testament (1924) long remained standard. James took to telling ghost stories while at Cambridge, and his first tales were recited at a meeting of the Chitchat Society in 1893. He later became Provost of Eton and began telling his tales to his young charges at Christmas. They were eventually collected in four volumes: Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary (1904); More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911);

A Thin Ghost and Others (1919); and A Warning to the Curious (1925). This relatively slim body of work is none the less a landmark in weird literature. If nothing else, it represents the ultimate refinement of the conventional ghost story. James was a master at short story construction; he also was one of the few who could write in a chatty, whimsical, and bantering style without destroying the potency of his horrors. Like Lovecraft and Machen, James has attracted a somewhat fanatical cadre of devotees. But in all honesty, much of James’s work is thin and insubstantial: he had no vision of the world to put across, as Machen, Dunsany, Blackwood, and Lovecraft did, and many of his tales seem like academic exercises in shudder-mongering. Lovecraft seems first to have read James in mid-December 1925. Although his enthusiasm for him was high at the time, it would later cool off. In ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ he would rank James as a ‘modern master’, but by 1932 he declared that ‘he isn’t really in the Machen, Blackwood, & Dunsany class. He is the earthiest member of the “big four”’.²⁹

There was not much criticism of weird fiction up to this time upon which Lovecraft could draw for his treatise. He read Edith Birkhead’s The Tale of Terror (1921), a landmark study of Gothic fiction, in late November; it is quite clear that he borrowed heavily from this treatise in his chapters (II–V) on the Gothics, both in the structure of his analysis and in some points of evaluation. Eino Railo’s The Haunted Castle (1927) came out just about the time of Lovecraft’s own essay; it is a very penetrating historical and thematic study that Lovecraft later read with appreciation. Conversely, the only exhaustive study of

modern weird fiction was Dorothy Scarborough’s The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917), which Lovecraft would not read until 1932; but, when he did so, he rightly criticized it as being overly schematic in its thematic analyses and hampered by an amusing squeamishness in the face of the explicit horrors of Stoker, Machen, and others.

Lovecraft’s essay, accordingly, gains its greatest originality as an historical study in its final six chapters. His lengthy chapter on Poe is, I think, one of the most perceptive short analyses ever written, in spite of a certain flamboyancy in its diction. Lovecraft could not summon up much enthusiasm for the later Victorians in England, but his lengthy discussions of Hawthorne and Bierce in Chapter VIII are illuminating. And his greatest achievement, perhaps, was to designate Machen, Dunsany, Blackwood, and M. R. James as the four ‘modern masters’ of the weird tale; a judgment that has been justified by subsequent scholarship. Indeed, the only ‘master’ lacking from this list is Lovecraft himself.

Lovecraft admitted that the writing of this essay produced two good effects; first: ‘It’s good preparation for composing a new series of weird tales of my own’;³⁰ and second: ‘This course of reading & writing I am going through for the Cook article is excellent mental discipline, & a fine gesture of demarcation betwixt my aimless, lost existence of the past year or two & the resumed Providence-like hermitage amidst which I hope to grind out some tales worth writing.’³¹ The second effect is one more in a succession of resolutions to cease his all-day and all-night gallivanting with the gang and get down to real work; how successful this was, it is difficult to say, in the absence of a diary for 1926. As for the first effect, it came to fruition in late February, when ‘Cool Air’ was apparently written.