universe of materialistic belief.
And Nyarlathotep, the crawling chaos, is his messenger—not mindless like his master, but evilly intelligent, pictured in “The Dream-Quest” in the form of a suave pharaoh. The Nyarlathotep legend is one of Lovecraft’s most interesting creations. It appears both in the prose poem and in the sonnet of that name. In a time of widespread social upheaval and nervous tension, one looking like a pharaoh appears out of Egypt. He is worshipped by the fellahin, “wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.” He visits many lands and gives lectures with queer pseudo-scientific demonstrations, obtaining a great following—rather like Cagliostro or some similarcharlatan. A progressive disintegration of man’s mind and world follows. There are purposeless panics and wanderings. Nature breaks loose. There are earthquakes, weedy cities are revealed by receding seas, an ultimate putrescence and disintegration sets in. Earth ends.
Just what does Nyarlathotep “mean”? That is, what meanings can most suitably be read into him, granting that, by him, Lovecraft may not consciously have “meant” anything. One possibility is that the pharaoh-charlatan expresses the mockery of a universe man can never understand or master. Another is that he symbolizes the blatantly commercial, self-advertising, acquisitive world that Lovecraft loathed (Nyarlathotep always has that aura of the salesman, that brash contemptuousness). Yet a third possibility is that Nyarlathotep stands for man’s self-destructive intellectuality, his awful ability to see the universe for what it is and thereby kill in himself all naive and beautiful dreams.
In this connection it is to be noted that Lovecraft, to his last month a tireless scholar and questioner, was the embodiment of the one noble feeling scientific materialism grants man: intellectual curiosity. He also expressed this passion in his supernatural tales. His protagonists are often drawn to the unknown as much as they dread it. Quaking at the horrors that may lurk there, they yet cannot resist the urge to peer beyond the rim of space. “The Whisperer in Darkness,” perhaps his greatest story, is remarkable for the way in which the horror and fascination of the alien are equally maintained until almost the very end.
3.
Lovecraft’s matured method of telling a horror story was a natural consequence of the importance of the new universe of’ science in his writings, for it was the method of scientific realism, approaching in some of his last tales (“At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Shadow Out of Time”) the precision, objectivity, and attention to detail of a report in a scientific journal. Most of his stories are purported documents and necessarily written in the first person. This device is common in weird literature, as witness Poe’s “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” Haggard’s She, Stoker’s Dracula, and many others, but few writers have taken it quite as seriously as did Lovecraft.
He set great store by the narrator having some vitally pressing motive for recounting his experiences, and was ingenious at devising such motives: justificatory confession in “The Thing on the Doorstep” and “The Statement of Randolph Carter”; warning, in “The Whisperer in Darkness” and “At the Mountains of Madness”; attempt by the narrator to clarify his own ideas and come to a decision, in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”; scholarly summing up a weird series of events, in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and “The Haunter of the Dark.”
The scientifically realistic element in Lovecraft’s style was a thing of slow growth in a writer early inclined to a sonorous and poetic prose with an almost Byzantine use of adjectives. The transition was never wholly completed, and like all advances, it was attended by losses and limitations. Disappointingly to some readers, who may also experience impatience at the growing length of the stories (inevitable in scientific reports), there is notably less witchery of words in, say, “The Shadow Out of Time” than in “The Dunwich Horror,” though the former story has greater unity and technical perfection. And Lovecraft’s own restricted and scholarly life hardly fitted him to be an all-over realist. He always observed a gentlemanly reserve in his writings and depicted best those types of characters which he understood and respected, such as scholars, New England farmers and townsmen, and sincere and lonely artists; while showing less sympathy (consider “He”) and penetration in the presentation of business men, intellectuals, factory workers, “toughs,” and other admittedly brash, uninhibited, and often crude denizens of our modern cities.
There were three important elements in Lovecraft’s style which he was able to use effectively in both his earlier poetic period and later, more objective style.
The first is the device of confirmation rather than revelation. (I am indebted to Henry Kuttner for this neat phrase.) In other words, the story-ending does not come as a surprise but as a final, long-anticipated “convincer.” The reader knows, and is supposed to know, what is coming, but this only prepares and adds to his shivers when the narrator supplies the last and incontrovertible piece of evidence. In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward the reader knows from almost the first page that Ward has been supplanted by Joseph Curwen, yet the narrator does not state this unequivocally until the last sentence of the book. This does not mean that Lovecraft never wrote the revelatory type of story, with its surprise ending. On the contrary, he used it in “The Lurking Fear” and handled it most effectively in “The Outsider.” But he did come more and more to favor the less startling but sometimes more impressive confirmatory type.
So closely related to his use of confirmation as to be only another aspect of it, is Lovecraft’s employment of the terminal climax—that is, the story in which the high point and the final sentence coincide. Who can forget the supreme chill of: “But by God, Eliot, it was a photograph from life,” or “It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did,” or “They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language in my own handwriting,” or “…the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley?” Use of the terminal climax made it necessary for Lovecraft to develop a special type of story-telling, in which the explanatory and return-to-equilibrium material is all deftly inserted before the finish and while the tension is still mounting. It also necessitated a very careful structure, with everything building from the first word to the last.
Lovecraft reinforced this structure with what may be called orchestrated prose—sentences that are repeated with a constant addition of more potent adjectives, adverbs, and phrases, just as in a symphony a melody introduced by a single woodwind is at last thundered by the whole orchestra. “The Statement of Randolph Carter” provides one of the simplest examples. In it, in order, the following phrases occur concerning the moon: “…waning crescent moon…wan, waning crescent moon…pallid, peering crescent moon…accursed waning moon…” Subtler and more complex examples can be found in the longer stories.
Not only sentences, but whole sections, are sometimes repeated, with a growing cloud of atmosphere and detail∙ The story may first be briefly sketched, then told in part with some reservations, then related more fully as the narrator finally conquers his disinclination or repugnance toward stating the exact details of the horror he experienced.
All these stylistic elements naturally worked to make Lovecraft’s stories longer and longer, with a growing complexity in the sources of horror. In “Dreams in the Witch House” the sources of horror are multiple: “…Fever—wild dreams—somnambulism—illusions of sounds—a pull toward a point in the sky—and now a suspicion of insane sleepwalking…” “while in “At the Mountains of Madness” there is a transition whereby the feared entities become the fearing; the author shows us horrors and then pulls back the curtain a little farther, letting us glimpse the horrors of which even the horrors are afraid!
An urge to increase the length and complexity of tales is not uncommon among the writers of horror stories. It can be compared to the drug addict’s craving for larger and larger doses—and this comparison is not fanciful, since the chief purpose of the supernatural tale is to arouse the single feeling of spectral terror in the reader rather than to delineate character or comment on life. Devotees of this genre of literature are at times able to take doses which might exhaust or sicken the average person. Each reader must decide for himself just how long a story he can stand without his sense of terror flagging. For me, all of Lovecraft,