strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists
will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the
genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against
it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings
to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naïvely insipid
idealism which deprecates the æsthetic motive and calls for a didactic
literature to "uplift" the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism.
But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and
attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and
elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be
poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness.
The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from
the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from
everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily
routine to respond to tappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and
events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will
always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of
course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But
the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy
invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of
rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the
chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a
psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental
experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the
religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part
of our innermost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important,
though not numerically great, minority of our species.
Man's first instincts and emotions formed his response to the environment in
which he found himself. Definite feelings based on pleasure and pain grew up
around the phenomena whose causes and effects he understood, whilst around those
which he did not understand -- and the universe teemed with them in the early
days -- were naturally woven such personifications, marvelous interpretations,
and sensations of awe and fear as would be hit upon by a race having few and
simple ideas and limited experience. The unknown, being likewise the
unpredictable, became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent
source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly
extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence
whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part. The phenomenon of dreaming
likewise helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world; and in
general, all the conditions of savage dawn -- life so strongly conduced toward a
feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with
which man's very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and
superstition. That saturation must, as a matter of plain scientific fact, be
regarded as virtually permanent so far as the subconscious mind and inner
instincts are concerned; for though the area of the unknown has been steadily
contracting for thousands of years, an infinite reservoir of mystery still
engulfs most of the outer cosmos, whilst a vast residuum of powerful inherited
associations clings round all the objects and processes that were once
mysterious; however well they may now be explained. And more than this, there is
an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous tissue,
which would make them obscurely operative even were the conscious mind to be
purged of all sources of wonder.
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