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Through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, we behold a growing mass of fugitive legendry and balladry of darksome cast; still, however, held down beneath the surface of polite and accepted literature. Chap-books of horror and weirdness multiplied, and we glimpse the eager interest of the people through fragments like DeFoe’s _Apparition of Mrs. Veal_, a homely tale of a dead woman’s spectral visit to a distant friend, written to advertise covertly a badly selling theological disquisition on death. The upper orders of society were now losing faith in the supernatural, and indulging in a period of classic rationalism. Then, beginning with the translations of Eastern tales in Queen Anne’s reign and taking definite form toward the middle of the century, comes the revival of romantic feeling—the era of new joy in Nature, and in the radiance of past times, strange scenes, bold deeds, and incredible marvels. We feel it first in the poets, whose utterances take on new qualities of wonder, strangeness, and shuddering. And finally, after the timid appearance of a few weird scenes in the novels of the day—such as Smollett’s _Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom_—the released instinct precipitates itself in the birth of a new school of writing; the “Gothic” school of horrible and fantastic prose fiction, long and short, whose literary posterity is destined to become so numerous, and in many cases so resplendent in artistic merit. It is, when one reflects upon it, genuinely remarkable that weird narration as a fixed and academically recognized literary form should have been so late of final birth. The impulse and atmosphere are as old as man, but the typical weird tale of standard literature is a child of the eighteenth century.
(Next month we will give you a much longer installment of this article, in which Mr. Lovecraft takes up the third section, “The Early Gothic Novel.”)
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You will remember that, in the closing statement in the last department of “The Boiling Point” last month, we asked you, the readers, to tell us what you think of horror stories. Is there any virtue to them? Why do people delight in being horrified?—etc. suggested by Forrest J. Ackerman. H. P. Lovecraft honors us with the first opinion, which we present to you as follows: