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

Meanwhile Lovecraft had simultaneously been hammering out a theory of the weird tale that would, with some modifications, serve him his entire life. This theory is, like his aesthetics in general, an intimate outgrowth of his entire philosophical thought, especially his metaphysics and ethics. The central document here is the In Defence of Dagon essays—a series of three articles he wrote to an Anglo-American correspondence group, the Transatlantic Circulator, in defence of his philosophical and aesthetic views. He begins by dividing fiction, somewhat unorthodoxly, into three divisions— romantic, realistic, and imaginative. The first ‘is for those who value action and emotion for their own sake; who are interested in striking events which conform to a preconceived artificial pattern’. The second ‘is for those who are intellectual and analytical rather than poetical or emotional … It has the virtue of being close to life, but has the disadvantage of sinking into the commonplace and the unpleasant at times.’ Lovecraft does not provide an explicit definition of imaginative fiction, but implies that it draws upon the best features of both the other two: like romanticism, imaginative fiction bases its appeal on emotions (the emotions of fear, wonder, and terror); from realism it derives the important principle of truth—not truth to fact, as in realism, but truth to human feeling. As a result, Lovecraft comes up with the somewhat startling deduction that ‘The imaginative writer devotes himself to art in its most essential sense.’

The attack on what Lovecraft called ‘romanticism’ is one he never relinquished. The term must not be understood here in any historical sense—Lovecraft had great respect and fondness for such Romantic poets as Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge—but purely theoretically, as embodying an approach not only to literature but to life generally:

The one form of literary appeal which I consider absolutely unsound, charlatanic, and valueless—frivolous, insincere, irrelevant, and meaningless—is that mode of handling human events and values and motivations known as romanticism. Dumas, Scott, Stevenson—my gawd! Here is sheer puerility— the concoction of false glamours and enthusiasms and events out of an addled and distorted background which has no relation to anything in the genuine thoughts, feelings, and experiences of evolved and adult mankind.²²

This remark, although made in 1930, makes clear that his enemy here is his whipping-boy of 1923, Victorianism. It was this approach—the instilling of ‘glamour’ or significance into certain phases of human activity (notably love)—that Lovecraft believed to be most invalidated by the findings of modern science. And yet, his vehemence on this issue may stem from another cause as well: the possibility that his very different brand of weird fiction might conceivably be confused with (or be considered an aspect of) romanticism. Lovecraft knew that the weird tale had emerged in the course of the romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, so that, in the eyes of many, weird fiction itself was a phase of Romanticism and might be thought to have ‘no relation to anything in the genuine thoughts, feelings, and experiences of evolved and adult mankind’.

Accordingly, Lovecraft always strove to ally weird fiction with realism, which he knew to be the dominant mode of contemporary expression. This realism extended not merely to technique (‘a tale should be plausible—even a bizarre tale except for the single element where supernaturalism is involved’, he says in a letter of 1921

²³), but in terms of philosophical orientation. Of course, it cannot be realistic in terms of events, so it must be realistic in terms of human emotions

. Lovecraft again contrasts romanticism (an ‘overcoloured representation of what purports to be real life’) with fantasy: ‘But fantasy is something altogether different. Here we have an art based on the imaginative life of the human mind, frankly recognised as such; and in its way as natural and scientific—as truly related to natural (even if uncommon and delicate) psychological processes as the starkest of photographic realism.’²⁴

When asked by A. H. Brown, a Canadian member of the Transatlantic Circulator, why he didn’t write more about ‘ordinary people’, since this might increase the audience for his work, Lovecraft replied with towering scorn: