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

Lovecraft had long been inclined to accept Spengler’s basic thesis of the successive rise and fall of civilizations as each passes through a period of youth, adulthood, and old age. He later expressed reservations, as many others did, on the degree to which this biological analogy could be pressed; but otherwise he accepted Spengler enthusiastically, coming to believe that one particular phase of Western culture was coming to an end—the agrarian and early industrial phase, from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century, that had in his view seen the greatest flowering of Western culture. Whatever the future held in store, it would no longer be a part of his culture, but some other, alien culture with which he could not possibly identify.

Lovecraft’s reading of Krutch’s The Modern Temper

made him face the situation of art and culture in the modern world. Krutch’s book is a lugubrious but chillingly compelling work that particularly addresses itself to the question of what intellectual and aesthetic possibilities remain in an age in which so many illusions—in particular the illusions of our importance in the cosmos and of the ‘sanctity’ or even validity of our emotional life—have been shattered by science. This is a theme on which Lovecraft had been expatiating since at least 1922, with ‘Lord Dunsany and His Work’. Indeed, I believe Krutch’s work was instrumental in helping Lovecraft to effect a further evolution of his aesthetic theory. He had already passed from classicism to Decadence to a sort of antiquarian regionalism. But he knew that the past—that is, prior modes of behaviour, thought, and aesthetic expression—could be preserved only up to a point. The new realities revealed by modern science had to be faced. Around this time he began some further ruminations on art and its place in society, in particular weird art; and in so doing he produced a radical change in his theory of weird fiction that would affect much of what he would subsequently write.

Frank Long was again, somehow, the catalyst for the expression of these views. Long was lamenting the rapid rate of cultural change and was advocating a return to ‘splendid and traditional ways of life’—a view Lovecraft rightly regarded as somewhat sophomoric in someone who did not know much about what these traditional ways actually were. In an immense letter written in late February 1931, Lovecraft begins by repeating Krutch’s argument that much of prior literature has ceased to be vital to us because we can no longer share, and in some cases can only remotely understand, the values that produced it; he then writes: ‘Some former art attitudes—like sentimental romance, loud heroics, ethical didacticism, &c.—are so patently hollow as to be visibly absurd & nonusable from the start.’ Some attitudes, however, may still be viable:

Fantastic literature cannot be treated as a single unit, because it is a composite resting on widely divergent bases. I really agree that ‘Yog-Sothoth’ is a basically immature conception, & unfitted for really serious literature. The fact is, I have never approached serious literature as yet … The only permanently artistic use of Yog-Sothothery, I think, is in symbolic or assocative phantasy of the frankly poetic type; in which fixed dream-patterns of the natural organism are given an embodiment & crystallisation. The reasonable permanence of this phase of poetic phantasy as a possible

art form (whether or not favoured by current fashion) seems to me a highly strong probability.

I do not know what exactly Lovecraft means by ‘Yog-Sothothery’ here. My feeling is that it may refer to Dunsany’s prodigal invention of gods in The Gods of Pegana, which we have already seen Lovecraft to have repudiated as far as his own creative expression is concerned; indeed, he says here of this type of material that ‘I hardly expect to produce anything even remotely approaching it myself’. He continues:

But there is another phase of cosmic phantasy (which may or may not include frank Yog-Sothothery) whose foundations appear to me as better grounded than those of ordinary oneiroscopy; personal limitation regarding the sense of outsideness. I refer to the aesthetic crystallisation of that burning & inextinguishable feeling of mixed wonder & oppression which the sensitive imagination experiences upon scaling itself & its restrictions against the vast & provocative abyss of the unknown. This has always been the chief emotion in my psychology; & whilst it obviously figures less in the psychology of the majority, it is clearly a well-defined & permanent factor from which very few sensitive persons are wholly free.