The Fantasy Fan , Volume 2, Number 1, September 1934: The Fan's Own MagazineVarious
History
The Fantasy Fan , Volume 2, Number 1, September 1934: The Fan's Own Magazine
Various
Fan magazines; Fantasy fiction -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Fantasy fiction -- Periodicals
The romantic, semi-Gothic, quasi-moral tradition here represented was
carried far down the nineteenth century by such authors as Joseph
Sheridan LeFanu, Thomas Preskett with his famous "Varney, the Vampyre"
(1847), Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H. Rider Haggard, (whose "She" is
really remarkably good), Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Robert
Louis Stevenson--the latter of whom, despite an atrocious tendency
toward jaunty mannerisms, created permanent classics in Markheim,
"The Body Snatcher," and "Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde." Indeed, we may
say that this school still survives; for to it clearly belong such
of our contemporary horror tales as specialise in events rather
than atmospheric details, address the intellect rather than the
impressionistic imagination, cultivate a luminous glamour rather than
a malign tensity or psychological verisimilitude, and take a definite
stand in sympathy with mankind and its welfare. It has its undeniable
strength, and because of its "human element" commands a wider audience
than does the sheer artistic nightmare. If not quite so potent as the
latter, it is because a diluted product can never achieve the intensity
of a concentrated essence.
Quite alone both as novel and as a piece of terror-literature stands
the famous "Wuthering Heights" (1847) by Emily Bronte, with its mad
vista of bleak, windswept Yorkshire moors and the violent, distorted
lives they foster. Though primarily a tale of life, and of human
passions in agony and conflict, its epically cosmic setting affords
room for horror of the most spiritual sort. Heathcliff, the modified
Byronic villain-hero, is a strange dark waif found in the streets as
a small child and speaking only a strange gibberish till adopted by
the family he ultimately ruins. That he is in truth a diabolic spirit
rather than a human being is more than once suggested, and the unreal
is further approached in the experience of the visitor who encounters
a plaintive child-ghost at a bough-brushed upper window. Between
Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is a tie deeper and more terrible
than human love. After her death he twice disturbs her grave, and
is haunted by an impalpable presence which can be nothing less than
her spirit. The spirit enters his life more and more, and at last he
becomes confident of some imminent mystical reunion. He says he feels a
strange change approaching, and ceases to take nourishment. At night he
either walks abroad or opens the casement by his bed. When he dies the
casement is still swinging open to the pouring rain, and a queer smile
pervades the stiffened face. They bury him in a grave beside the mound
he has haunted for eighteen years, and small shepherd boys say that he
yet walks with his Catherine in the churchyard and on the moor when it
rains. Their faces, too, are sometimes seen on rainy nights behind that
upper casement at Wuthering Heights. Miss Bronte's eerie terror is no
mere Gothic echo, but a tense expression of man's shuddering reaction
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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