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

How, then, does an individual who professed himself, for the first thirty years of his life, more comfortable in the periwig and smallclothes of the eighteenth century suddenly adopt an attitude of ‘revolt, florid colour, and emotional extravagance or intensity’? How does someone who, in 1919, maintained that ‘The literary genius of Greece and Rome … may fairly be said to have completed the art and science of expression’ come to write, in 1923: ‘What is art but a matter of impressions, of pictures, emotions, and symmetrical sensations? It must have poignancy and beauty, but nothing else counts. It may or may not have coherence’?¹⁶

The shift may seem radical, but there are many points of contact between the older and the newer view; and in many ways the change of perspective occurring in Lovecraft’s mind was a mirror of the change occurring in Anglo-American aesthetics in general. Much as he might have found the idea surprising or even repellent, Lovecraft was becoming contemporary; he was starting to live, intellectually, in the twentieth, not the eighteenth, century.

I do not wish to underestimate the extent and significance of the shift in Lovecraft’s aesthetic; clearly he himself thought that something revolutionary was occurring. No longer was he concerned with antiquated notions of ‘metrical regularity’ or the ‘allowable rhyme’; broader, deeper questions were now involved. Specifically, Lovecraft was attempting to come to terms with certain findings in the sciences that might have grave effects upon artistic creation, in particular the work of Sigmund Freud. Consider a revealing statement in ‘The Defence Reopens!’ (January 1921):

Certainly, they [Freud’s doctrines] reduce man’s boasted nobility to a hollowness woeful to contemplate … we are forced to admit that the Freudians have in most respects excelled their predecessors, and that while many of Freud’s most important details may be erroneous … he has nevertheless opened up a new path in psychology, devising a system whose doctrines more nearly approximate the real workings of the mind than any heretofore entertained.

Although Lovecraft rejects Freud’s central notion of the libido as the principal motivating factor in human psychology—something he would have found difficult to comprehend, since his own libido seems to have been so sluggish—he nevertheless accepts the view that many of our beliefs and mental processes are the result not of disinterested rationalism, but of aggression (Nietzsche’s will to power), ego-assertion, and in some cases pure irrationalism. Under the placid-seeming façade of civilized bourgeois life teem powerful emotional forces that social restraints are ill-equipped to control. The effect on art will necessarily be telling. Lovecraft expounds his view in ‘Lord Dunsany and His Work’ (1922):

Modern science has, in the end, proved an enemy to art and pleasure; for by revealing to us the whole sordid and prosaic basis of our thoughts, motives, and acts, it has stripped the world of glamour, wonder, and all those illusions of heroism, nobility, and sacrifice which used to sound so impressive when romantically treated. Indeed, it is not too much to say that psychological discovery, and chemical, physical, and physiological research, have largely destroyed the element of emotion among informed and sophisticated people by resolving it into its component parts—intellectual idea and animal impulse. The so-called ‘soul’ with all its hectic and mawkish attributes of sentimentality, veneration, earnestness, devotion, and the like, has perished on analysis This is an intensely interesting utterance. In spite of Lovecraft’s claim of intellectual independence from his time, it is clear that he had absorbed enough of the Victorian belief in ‘heroism, nobility, and sacrifice’ to be shaken by the revelation, via Freud and Nietzsche, of their ‘sordid and prosaic basis’. For the moment he adopted a sort of aesthetic Decadence that might allow these illusions to be preserved after a fashion precisely by recognizing their artificiality. We cannot regain that blissful ignorance of our triviality in the cosmic scheme of things and of the hollowness of our lofty ideals which allowed prior ages to create the illusion of significance in human affairs. The solution—for now—is to ‘worship afresh the music and colour of divine language, and take an Epicurean delight in those combinations of ideas and fancies which we know to be artificial’. If there is any literary source for any of these views, it is Oscar Wilde. It is not likely that Wilde actually generated Lovecraft’s views; rather, Lovecraft found Wilde a highly articulate spokesman for the sort of views he was nebulously coming to adopt.