New Directions in Supernatural Horror

Literature: The Critical Influence of H. P.

Lovecraft Sean Moreland
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/new-directions-in-supernatural-horror-literature-the-cri
tical-influence-of-h-p-lovecraft-sean-moreland/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Teaching Stephen King: Horror, The Supernatural, And

New Approaches To Literature 1st Edition A. Burger

https://textbookfull.com/product/teaching-stephen-king-horror-
the-supernatural-and-new-approaches-to-literature-1st-edition-a-
burger/

New directions in law and literature 1st Edition Anker

https://textbookfull.com/product/new-directions-in-law-and-
literature-1st-edition-anker/

New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies 1st

Edition Stephanie M. Hilger (Eds.)

https://textbookfull.com/product/new-directions-in-literature-
and-medicine-studies-1st-edition-stephanie-m-hilger-eds/

Understanding Education Studies : Critical Issues and

New Directions 1st Edition Mark Pulsford

https://textbookfull.com/product/understanding-education-studies-
critical-issues-and-new-directions-1st-edition-mark-pulsford/
Philosophy Made Slightly Less Difficult 2nd Edition
Garrett J. Deweese & J. P. Moreland

https://textbookfull.com/product/philosophy-made-slightly-less-
difficult-2nd-edition-garrett-j-deweese-j-p-moreland/

Finding Favour in the Sight of God A Theology of Wisdom

Literature New Studies in Biblical Theology 46 1st
Edition Richard P. Belcher Jr.

https://textbookfull.com/product/finding-favour-in-the-sight-of-
god-a-theology-of-wisdom-literature-new-studies-in-biblical-
theology-46-1st-edition-richard-p-belcher-jr/

The Legal Environment of Business, a Managerial

Approach: Theory to Practice Sean P Melvin

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-legal-environment-of-
business-a-managerial-approach-theory-to-practice-sean-p-melvin/

Adaptation Studies New Challenges New Directions Jørgen

Bruhn

https://textbookfull.com/product/adaptation-studies-new-
challenges-new-directions-jorgen-bruhn/

Business Law and Strategy 1st Edition Sean P. Melvin

https://textbookfull.com/product/business-law-and-strategy-1st-
edition-sean-p-melvin/
 Edit ED B Y
s ea n m o rel a nd

The Critical
Influence of
H. P. Lovecraft
New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature
 Sean Moreland
Editor

New Directions
in Supernatural
Horror Literature
The Critical Influence of H. P. Lovecraft
Editor
Sean Moreland
University of Ottawa
Ottawa, ON, Canada

ISBN 978-3-319-95476-9    ISBN 978-3-319-95477-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95477-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954728

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: zhengzaishuru / iStock / Getty Images

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
This book is dedicated to Caitlín R. Kiernan and Thomas Ligotti, who have
opened holes in the world that can never be closed, and to the late, greatly
lamented David G. Hartwell, whose editorial vision helped shape the course
of horror literature in the late twentieth century and who did so much to
promote and refine it.
 Acknowledgments

The impetus for this collection came from conversations with many friends
and colleagues, some of whose critical works can be found in the pages
that follow. Others, whose work doesn’t appear between these covers, also
deserve thanks for their inspiration of, suggestions for, or help with this
volume: these include Aalya Ahmad, S. J. Bagley, Rajiv Bhola, Matt
Cardin, Bobby Derie, Robert D’Errico, Derek Newman-Stille, David
Nickle, Lydia Peever, Dennis Quinn, and Ranylt Richildis. This book also
came about in part due to work presented in the Horror Literature
Division of the ever-generative International Conference on the Fantastic
in the Arts. My thanks go to the conference organizers and to Rhonda
Brock-Servais, former Division Head and perpetual High Priestess of
Horror. Thanks are also due to the Association of part-time professors at
the University of Ottawa, for helping fund my annual participation in the
conference.
Most importantly, my boundless gratitude belongs to my wife,
Madeleine, who makes everything possible, including playing the dancing
clown machine.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction: The Critical (After)Life of Supernatural

Horror in Literature   1
Sean Moreland

Section I “The Oldest and Strongest Emotion”: The

Psychology of Cosmic Horror  11

2 The Birth of Cosmic Horror from the S(ub)lime of

Lucretius  13
Sean Moreland

3 The Evolution of Horror: A Neo-­Lovecraftian Poetics  43

Mathias Clasen

4 Ansky’s The Dybbuk, Freud’s Future of an Illusion,

Watson’s “Little Albert,” and Supernatural Horror
in Literature  61
Sharon Packer

5 Gazing Upon “The Daemons of Unplumbed Space” with

H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King: Theorizing Horror
and Cosmic Terror  77
Alissa Burger

ix
x Contents

Section II “A Literature of Cosmic Fear”: Lovecraft,

Criticism, and Literary History  99

6 “Lothly Thinges Thai Weren Alle”: Imagining Horror in

the Late Middle Ages 101
Helen Marshall

7 Lovecraft’s Debt to Dandyism 127

Vivian Ralickas

8 Lovecraft and the Titans: A Critical Legacy 155

S. T. Joshi

9 Reception Claims in Supernatural Horror in Literature

and the Course of Weird Fiction 171
John Glover

Section III “The True Weird”: (Re)Defining the Weird 189

10 Bizarre Epistemology, Bizarre Subject: A Definition of

Weird Fiction 191
Michael Cisco

11 Speaking the Unspeakable: Women, Sex, and the

Dismorphmythic in Lovecraft, Angela Carter, Caitlín
R. Kiernan, and Beyond 209
Gina Wisker

12 Weird Cinema and the Aesthetics of Dread 235

Brian R. Hauser

13 Paranoia, Panic, and the Queer Weird 253

Brian Johnson

Index 279
 Notes on Contributors

Alissa Burger is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing

Across the Curriculum at Culver-Stockton College. She teaches courses in
research, writing, and literature, including a single-author seminar
on Stephen King. She is the author of Teaching Stephen King: Horror,
The Supernatural, and New Approaches to Literature (Palgrave, 2016)
and The Wizard of Oz as American Myth: A Critical Study of Six Versions
of the Story, 1900–2007 (2012) and editor of the collection Teaching
Graphic Novels in the English Classroom: Pedagogical Possibilities of
Multimodal Literacy Engagement (Palgrave, 2017).
Michael Cisco is the author of the novels The Divinity Student, The
Tyrant, The San Veneficio Canon, The Traitor, The Narrator, The Great
Lover, Celebrant, and MEMBER, and a short story collection, Secret
Hours. His fiction has appeared in The Weird, Lovecraft Unbound, and
Black Wings (among others). His scholarly work has appeared in Lovecraft
Studies, The Weird Fiction Review, Iranian Studies, Lovecraft and Influence,
and The Lovecraftian Poe. He teaches in CUNY Hostos, New York City.
Mathias Clasen is Assistant Professor of Literature and Media at Aarhus
University, Denmark. He specializes in supernatural horror in literature
and film, particularly modern American horror, and he has published
works on zombies, vampires, Richard Matheson, Dan Simmons, and
Bram Stoker. His work aims at explaining the functions and forms of hor-
rifying entertainment by situating the study of the genre within a frame-
work informed by evolutionary and cognitive psychology as well as

xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

neuroscience. His monograph Why Horror Seduces (2018) investigates

modern American horror in film, literature, and video gaming within a
scientific framework.
John Glover is the Humanities Research Librarian at Virginia
Commonwealth University, where he supports students and faculty in their
research and instruction, pursues various outreach programs, and directs
Digital Pragmata, a digital arts and humanities initiative. In 2015 he pre-
sented “Node, Edge, or Tentacle: Data and the Lovecraftian Literary
Network” at the 36th International Conference on the Fantastic in the
Arts. His research interests include humanities librarianship, digital human-
ities, literary horror, and the research practices of creative writers. He speaks
regularly on research for creative writers, and in spring 2015, he co-taught
“Writing Researched Fiction” in VCU’s Department of English. As “J. T.
Glover,” he writes fiction and non-fiction, and his work has appeared in The
Children of Old Leech, The Lovecraft eZine, and New Myths, among others.
Brian R. Hauser is Assistant Professor of Film at Clarkson University in
Potsdam, New York. He has published essays on The X-Files and its rela-
tion to the vanishing Americans in James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, a
rhetorical narrative theory approach to cinematic adaptation, and the
importance of DIY-independent cinema. He is also a filmmaker and
screenwriter, who won the 2010 H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival Screenwriting
Competition with his feature-length script Cult Flick. He is completing a
monograph on weird cinema.
Brian Johnson is Associate Professor and Graduate Chair of English at
Carleton University where he teaches theory, genre fiction, and Canadian
literature. Recent publications include essays on serial killing in Canadian
crime fiction, the pedagogy of horror, libidinal ecology in Swamp Thing,
and alien genesis in H. P. Lovecraft and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. His
research focuses on weird fiction, superheroes, and sexuality.
S. T. Joshi is a freelance writer and editor. He has prepared comprehensive
editions of Lovecraft’s collected fiction, essays, and poetry. He is also the
author of The Weird Tale (1990), The Modern Weird Tale (2001), and
Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). His award-
winning biography H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996) was later expanded as I
Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010). He has also
prepared Penguin Classics editions of the work of Arthur Machen, Lord
Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, and Clark Ashton Smith, as
well as the anthology American Supernatural Tales (2007).
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
   xiii

Helen Marshall is a critically acclaimed author, editor, and medievalist.

After receiving a PhD from the prestigious Centre for Medieval Studies at
the University of Toronto, she spent two years completing a postdoctoral
fellowship at the University of Oxford, investigating literature written dur-
ing the time of the Black Death. She was recently appointed Lecturer of
Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge,
England.
Sean Moreland His essays, primarily focused on Gothic, horror and
weird fiction in its literary, cinematic, and sequential art guises, have
appeared in many collections, encyclopaedic volumes, and journals, most
recently Lovecraftian Proceedings 2 and The Oxford Handbook of Edgar
Allan Poe. He recently edited The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence,
Reception, Interpretation and Transformation (2017). He is in the midst
of a monograph, tentatively titled Repulsive Influences: A Historical Poetics
of Atomic Horror, which examines how horror literature since the early
eighteenth century has interwoven with the reception of Lucretius’s De
Rerum Natura in shaping popular anxieties about materialism and mor-
tality. He teaches in the English Department at the University of Ottawa
and occasionally conducts interviews, writes reviews, and blogs about
weirdness at Postscripts to Darkness (www.pstdarkness.com).
Sharon Packer is a psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist in private
practice and Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Icahn School of
Medicine at Mount Sinai. She is also an author and a prolific writer whose
most recent book is Neuroscience in Science Fiction (2015).
Vivian Ralickas holds her PhD in Comparative Literature from the
University of Toronto. Her published works include art criticism, transla-
tions, and two essays on Lovecraft: “Art, Cosmic Horror, and the
Fetishizing Gaze in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft” (2008) and “‘Cosmic
Horror’ and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft” (2007). She
teaches English Composition and Literature, including courses on horror
fiction and Dandyism, at Marianopolis College in Montreal.
Gina Wisker is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Higher
Education. Her principal teaching, PhD supervision, and research ­interests
lie in contemporary women’s writing, Gothic, horror, and postcolonial
writing. Her published works include Margaret Atwood, an Introduction
to Critical Views of Her Fiction (2012), Key Concepts in Postcolonial
Writing (2007), Horror Fiction (2005), and Postcolonial and African
American Women’s Writing (2000).
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Critical (After)Life

of Supernatural Horror in Literature

Sean Moreland

In 1925, writer and publisher W. Paul Cook (1881–1948) invited his

friend and fellow amateur journalist H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) to write
a historical and critical survey of supernatural literature. Already an avid
reader, and increasingly an accomplished writer, of such fiction, Lovecraft
committed to this task with an ambitious course of reading including
acknowledged classics, less well-known historical works, and many con-
temporary fictions of the strange and supernatural, most of them by British
and American writers. His research and preparation was such that it took
Lovecraft nearly two years to submit the manuscript to Cook for
publication.1
The initial, and only partial, first publication of the essay occurred in
1927, in what turned out to be the sole volume of Cook’s journal, The
Recluse. Lovecraft’s most ambitious and influential critical work,
Supernatural Horror in Literature (hereafter SHL) would reach only a
handful of readers at this time. Nevertheless, by the end of the twentieth
century, SHL was widely recognized as exerting an unparalleled influence
over the development and reception of Anglophone supernatural, horrific,
and weird literature. The essay’s core critical concepts continued to evolve

S. Moreland (*)
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

© The Author(s) 2018 1

S. Moreland (ed.), New Directions in Supernatural Horror
Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95477-6_1
2 S. MORELAND

in Lovecraft’s later career; one trajectory of this development, Lovecraft’s

changing assessment of the “titans” of early twentieth-century weird
­fiction, is detailed by S. T. Joshi’s chapter in this volume. During Lovecraft’s
lifetime these critical concepts would reach a wider audience than the essay
itself due to their embodiment in his fictions and exposition via his volu-
minous letters, many of them to an epistolary circle of writers who adopted
and adapted his critical framework through their own writings, as John
Glover’s chapter elaborates.
SHL itself would posthumously reach a wider audience with its publica-
tion by Arkham House, first as part of The Outsider and Others (1939) and
then as part of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (1965). Even at that point,
few could have predicted how its critical and popular influence would con-
tinue to grow, with Dover publishing an inexpensive paperback edition in
1973 to a greatly expanded readership. SHL’s public profile rose with the
onset of the mass market “Horror Boom” of the late 1970s and 1980s. In
1981, it received a belated endorsement in Stephen King’s biographically
inflected survey of horror, Danse Macabre, which suggested, “If you’d like
to pursue the subject [of earlier supernatural fiction] further, may I recom-
mend H. P. Lovecraft’s long essay Supernatural Horror in Literature? It is
available in a cheap but handsome and durable Dover paperback edition.”
King’s immensely popular writings, as Alissa Burger’s chapter explores,
did much to renew public interest in Lovecraft’s work in general.2
In 1987, influential editor and anthologist David G. Hartwell more
forcefully emphasized SHL’s importance to the development of modern
horror. His seminal anthology The Dark Descent: The Evolution of Horror
describes Lovecraft as “the most important American writer of horror fic-
tion in the first half of” the twentieth century, as well as “the theoretician
and critic who most carefully described the literature” with SHL, which
provides “the keystone upon which any architecture of horror must be
built: atmosphere.”3 Hartwell rightly singles out atmosphere as SHL’s
most important idea, as expressed in one of the most widely cited state-
ments in the essay. Atmosphere, Lovecraft insists, is the “all-important
thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot,
but the creation of a given sensation” (23). The “true weird tale” (22)
creates an “atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer,
unknown forces,” with “a hint, expressed with a seriousness and porten-
tousness becoming its subject,” of “a malign and particular suspension or
defeat” of the laws of nature (23).4
 INTRODUCTION: THE CRITICAL (AFTER)LIFE OF SUPERNATURAL… 3

Because of its insistence on atmosphere, Hartwell claims SHL is “the

most important essay on horror literature.”5 This assessment has been
echoed many times since. In More Things than Are Dreamt of: Masterpieces
of Supernatural Horror (1994), James Ursini and Alain Silver state,
“Lovecraft’s fame rests almost as heavily on his work as a scholar as that of
a writer of fiction,” due to his “now classic” survey of the field. They
locate SHL’s importance in its “expansive analysis of supernatural horror
and fantasy contrasted with the condescending tone of earlier essayists.”6
Cumulatively, such estimates reinforce S. T. Joshi’s claim, in the preface to
his annotated edition of SHL, that it is “widely acknowledged as the finest
historical treatment of the field.”7
Lovecraft took supernatural fiction very seriously, and was among the
first critics or theoreticians to do so consistently. He saw it as a crucial liter-
ary tradition with significant cultural value, deeply rooted in the evolved
nature of humanity and tied to the state of society, and therefore emi-
nently worthy of close study and focused aesthetic appreciation.
SHL reflects its author’s historical and cultural moment, his enthusi-
asms, prejudices, and anxieties, as much as his insights and capacity for
rigorous thought. It is Lovecraft’s most sustained attempt to reconcile
what a 1927 letter describes as his own “parallel natures”:

The world and all its inhabitants impress me as immeasurably insignificant,

so that I always crave intimations of larger and subtler symmetries than these
which concern mankind. All this, however, is purely aesthetic and not at all
intellectual. I have a parallel nature or phase devoted to science and logic,
and do not believe in the supernatural at all – my philosophical position
being that of a mechanistic materialist of the line of Leucippus, Democritus,
Epicurus and Lucretius – and in modern times, Nietzsche and Haeckel.8

Hardly a disinterested survey, SHL is Lovecraft’s attempt to think

through feeling, situating his “purely aesthetic” cravings intellectually by
providing a historical account of a literary form defined through an objec-
tification of affect. Both descriptive history and prescriptive canonization,
it opens with the resounding statement, “the oldest and strongest emo-
tion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of
the unknown,” (21) and then proposes that its ability to evoke this emo-
tion is the standard whereby the “literature of cosmic fear” should be
judged (23). SHL explains the appeal of supernatural and weird fiction
across history and cultures by presenting Lovecraft’s “intimations of larger
4 S. MORELAND

and subtler symmetries” as an elementary, “if not always universal” (21),

aspect of human psychology. The appeal of supernatural fiction is linked to
what Lovecraft elsewhere calls “the most ineradicable urge in the human
personality,” which is the desire “for ultimate reality.” This desire is “the
basis of every real religion” and philosophy, and “anything which enhances
our sense of success in this quest, be it art or religion, is the source of a
pricelessly rich emotional experience—and the more we lose this experi-
ence in religion, the more we need to get it in something else.”9 Lovecraft
sees supernatural literature’s chief value as its provision of such a rich emo-
tional experience in the form of “atmosphere.”
Lovecraft also took atmosphere very seriously. Like the notion of a
“structural emotion” or dominant tone developed by T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition
and the Individual Talent” (1919), Lovecraft’s atmosphere derives to a
large extent from Poe’s aesthetic criterion, the “Unity of Effect.”
Atmosphere offers a sense of expansion, a “feeling of magnification in the
cosmos—of having approached the universal a trifle more closely, and ban-
ished a little of our inevitable insignificance.”10 However, atmosphere also
takes on, in William F. Touponce’s words, “the primary meaning of histori-
cal authenticity in Lovecraft’s aesthetics.”11 Atmosphere is Lovecraft’s
refuge against the culture-corrosive maelstrom of modernity, offering an
eminently Eliotic “sensation of a sort of identification with our whole
civilization.”12
Lovecraft took civilization very seriously, too. In the same letter, he
claims to care not about individual human beings, but only about civiliza-
tion, by which he means “the state of development and organisation which
is capable of gratifying the complex mental-emotional-aesthetic needs of
highly evolved and acutely sensitive men.”13 Such men are SHL’s ideal
readers, with “minds of the requisite sensitiveness” to appreciate the seri-
ous atmosphere of the true weird tale (20). Despite the universality of
some of SHL’s insights and the expansive audience it has found since its
first publication, it is evident that Lovecraft envisioned his audience of
“acutely sensitive,” and sufficiently serious, readers as defined along gen-
der, class, and racial lines, as many of the contributions to this volume
examine.
The racial politics of Lovecraft’s atmosphere are prominent in SHL’s
typological approach to the supernatural literature of different cultures.
While justifying Lovecraft’s claim that the “literature of cosmic fear” (22)
is a trans-cultural, almost universal, human phenomenon stemming from
a “profound and elementary principle” (21), his brief discussions of non-­
 INTRODUCTION: THE CRITICAL (AFTER)LIFE OF SUPERNATURAL… 5

Anglo-­Saxon examples emphasize their insufficient seriousness and cosmi-

cism. For example, “In the Orient, the weird tale tended to assume a
gorgeous colouration and sprightliness which almost transmuted it into
sheer phantasy. In the West, where the mystical Teuton had come down
from his black Boreal forests and the Celt remembered strange sacrifices in
Druidic groves, it assumed a terrible intensity and convincing seriousness
of atmosphere which doubled the force of its half-told, half-hinted hor-
rors” (24).
This contrast suggests the close kinship between “atmosphere” and
what would have been called, by the Gothic writers of the previous two
centuries, the sublime, a kinship this volume’s first chapter develops in
detail. Indeed, Lovecraft’s contrast re-stages the Burkean distinction
between powerful, masculine sublimity and delicate, feminine beauty. It
aligns the former with the Western cultural imagination, with its Teutonic
seriousness, and the latter with its Oriental counterpart, sheer, sprightly,
and not so serious. This is a ubiquitous trope of late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Orientalism, and hardly unique to Lovecraft. Yet here it
reveals a hierarchy of literary form, establishing that the seriousness, inten-
sity, and atmosphere of the “true” weird, with its cosmic orientation, ele-
vates it above the merely decorative diversions of “sheer phantasy.”
It also suggests the belief in racialized cultural incompatibility that leads
to Lovecraft’s elsewhere-stated desire to “get rid of the non-English
hordes whose heritages and deepest instincts clash so disastrously with”
those of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans—especially the more
serious and sensitive among them.14
The criterion of atmosphere becomes in this and related passages a
means of suggesting the superiority of the “mystical Teuton” in the realm
of literary supernaturalism. Passed over quietly by most of the plaudits
above, this aspect of SHL must be reckoned with by writers and scholars
who admit the importance of Lovecraft’s critical legacy. The need to do so
is especially important in light of how Lovecraft’s critical legacy continues
to influence the course and conception of horror, weird, and supernatural
fiction in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
Ann and Jeff VanderMeer do so, at least to a degree, in the introduc-
tion to their epic compendium The Weird (2011). Important for its inter-
national scope and commitment to going beyond the work of Lovecraft
and the Anglo-American pulp tradition, The Weird is nevertheless
grounded in SHL’s definition of weird fiction:
6 S. MORELAND

A “weird tale,” as defined by H. P. Lovecraft in his nonfiction writings and

given early sanctuary within the pages of magazines like Weird Tales (est.
1923) is a story that has a supernatural element but does not fall into the
category of traditional ghost story or Gothic tale, both popular in the 1800s.
As Lovecraft wrote in 1927, the weird tale “has something more than secret
murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains.” Instead, it repre-
sents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable
understanding of the world beyond the mundane—a “certain atmosphere of
breathless and unexplainable dread” or “malign and particular suspension or
defeat of … fixed laws of Nature”—through fiction that comes from the
more unsettling, shadowy side of the fantastical tradition.15

This suggests the difficulty, or perhaps impossibility, of working with the

weird as a historically informed mode of expression without wrestling with
Lovecraft’s critical legacy. An awareness of this is evident in the
VanderMeer’s claim that “the Weird is the story of the refinement (and
destabilization) of supernatural fiction within an established framework,”
a framework that SHL did much to establish. However, they also oppose
the Weird to this (or to any) singular tradition: it involves “the welcome
contamination of that fiction by the influence of other traditions.”16 The
phrase “welcome contamination” is a quiet critical rejoinder to SHL’s cul-
tural politics of racial exclusivity.
Despite the widespread acknowledgment of SHL’s importance, and the
problems its influence poses, the essay has not received much in the way of
sustained critical attention. In S. T. Joshi’s words, scholars of both Lovecraft
and weird fiction broadly “have not made as full use” of Lovecraft’s essay
as they could.17 The chapters in this volume begin to rectify this, variously
deepening and broadening the critical dialogue surrounding SHL by
examining its achievements, limitations, and influences. They do so using
a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches and, in some cases,
by pushing SHL’s critical concepts in directions Lovecraft could not have
foreseen and would not have approved.
The essays in the first section, “‘The Oldest and Strongest Emotion’:
The Psychology and Philosophy of Horror” explore SHL’s conceptions of
fear, horror, and the cosmic. My chapter, “The Birth of Cosmic Horror
from the S(ub)lime of Lucretius,” turns to the vexed question of cosmic
horror’s relationship with the sublime. Focusing on the adjective “cos-
mic,” I argue that the classical materialist poetics of first-century BCE
Roman poet Lucretius are a major source for Lovecraft’s modernist muta-
 INTRODUCTION: THE CRITICAL (AFTER)LIFE OF SUPERNATURAL… 7

tion of the sublime into SHL’s cosmic horror and his later ideal of a “non-­
supernatural cosmic art.” Mathias Clasen turns to evolutionary psychology
to examine SHL’s achievement with “The Evolution of Horror: A
­Neo-­Lovecraftian Poetics.” Clasen analyzes SHL’s attempt to produce a
naturalistic account of both the emotion of horror and the seductive
appeal of supernatural horror fiction, demonstrating that many of
Lovecraft’s claims for the psychobiological basis of horror are eminently
compatible with contemporary social scientific models of human nature
and culture. Sharon Packer’s chapter, “Ansky’s The Dybbuk, Freud’s
Future of an Illusion, Watson’s Little Albert and Supernatural Horror in
Literature,” engages with the history of psychology, considering the influ-
ence of Freudian psychoanalysis and the behaviorist experiments of John
B. Watson on Lovecraft’s conception of fear and horror. Packer also criti-
cally considers Lovecraft’s appreciation for aspects of Jewish mystical lit-
erature, and particularly SHL’s praise of Ansky’s The Dybbuk, despite his
infamously anti-­Semitic views. Rounding out this section while anticipat-
ing the concern of the essays in the second is Alissa Burger’s “Gazing
Upon ‘The Daemons of Unplumbed Space’ with H.P. Lovecraft and
Stephen King: Theorizing Horror and Cosmic Terror.” Burger looks back
on Lovecraft’s concept of cosmic horror and its relationship to hierarchies
of affect through its reception and adaptation by the most popular living
writer of supernatural horror, Stephen King. King’s Danse Macabre builds
on Lovecraft, while casting a long shadow of its own over late twentieth-
and early twenty-­first-­century horror and supernatural fiction, and Burger
charts Lovecraft’s critical influence not only in a number of King’s stories,
but also in their cinematic adaptations.
The essays in the second section, “‘A Literature of Cosmic Fear’:
Lovecraft, Criticism and Literary History,” focus on SHL’s historical and
critical claims. Helen Marshall moves back beyond the eighteenth-century
Gothic, examining SHL’s elliptical treatment of horror in the Medieval
period. Despite Lovecraft’s evident disdain for and relative ignorance of
the culture of the late Middle Ages, Marshall finds his essay useful for re-­
framing the penitential poem The Prick of Conscience as an early example
of the “literature of cosmic fear.” Vivian Ralickas turns to the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, via Lovecraft’s interest in the philosophical and
aesthetic movement of Dandyism. Examining Lovecraft’s relationship
with Epicureanism and Dandyism as modes of aestheticized, elitistic mas-
culinity, Ralickas provides a detailed account of how these movements
framed SHL’s engagement with writers including Baudelaire, Gauthier,
8 S. MORELAND

and Wilde. S. T. Joshi’s “Lovecraft and the Titans: A Critical Legacy”

focuses on Lovecraft’s prescience as literary critic, re-examining his assess-
ment of five of the early twentieth century’s most important writers of
weird fiction, M. R. James, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur
Machen, and Walter de la Mare. Joshi closely traces Lovecraft’s shifting
critical views of these writers, focusing particularly on how his developing
conception of cosmicism affected his estimation of their respective achieve-
ments. John Glover’s “Reception Claims in Supernatural Horror in
Literature and the Course of Weird Fiction” provides a detailed analysis of
both Lovecraft’s own critical writings and those of his early champions,
many of whom were also his epistolary interlocutors and friends. Glover
concludes by examining Lovecraft’s relationship with the shifting defini-
tions of “horror” and “weird” fiction over the last quarter century, open-
ing the field that will be further explored by the essays in the third and
final section.
The essays in “‘The True Weird’: (Re)defining the Weird” work with
and through SHL’s often nebulous and even contradictory conception of
the weird in a variety of ways. Returning to some of the concerns raised by
the essays in the first section, but from a very different perspective, Michael
Cisco’s “Bizarre Epistemology, Bizarre Subject: A Definition of Weird
Fiction” reads Lovecraft’s philosophy of horror in resistant and creative
ways via Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze. Cisco uses SHL and
related writings as philosophical instruments in order to work out an origi-
nal, experiential theory of the bizarre. With “Women, Sex and the
Dismorphmythic: Lovecraft, Carter, Kiernan and Beyond,” Gina Wisker
provides both a feminist critique of Lovecraft’s essay and an examination
of how a number of important contemporary women writers of weird fic-
tion have adapted and transformed elements of Lovecraft’s writings. To
this end, she examines short fiction by Angela Carter, Caitlín R. Kiernan,
and a number of contemporary writers whose work is featured in Silvia
Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles’s groundbreaking anthology She Walks
in Shadows (2015, released in the US as Cthulhu’s Daughters.)
Brian R. Hauser turns to Lovecraft’s influence and critical relevance for
film studies with “Weird Cinema and the Aesthetics of Dread.” Hauser
explores the applicability of the adjective “Lovecraftian” to a number of
contemporary films, while examining the reflections these films offer of
Lovecraft’s aesthetic and critical principles, by drawing on contemporary
studies including Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie (2016.) Finally,
Brian Johnson’s chapter, “Paranoia, Panic, and the Queer Weird,” brings
 INTRODUCTION: THE CRITICAL (AFTER)LIFE OF SUPERNATURAL… 9

this volume full circle with a return to the psychology of horror via a his-
toricized account of Lovecraft’s Freudian intertexts, which become part of
a wide-ranging examination of the relationship between the shifting
­connotations of the words “queer” and “weird” through the twentieth
century. Johnson’s penetrating analysis of the ways homophobia shaped
Lovecraft’s cultural context provides a deeper understanding not just of
his writings, but also his troubling exemplarity in twentieth-century sexual
politics.

Notes
1. Readers interested in a more detailed account of the essay’s biographical
context and publication history should consult S.T. Joshi’s “Introduction”
to The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature (New York:
Hippocampus Press, 2000), 9–20.
2. Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York: Berkeley Books, 1983).
3. David G. Hartwell, The Dark Descent (New York: Tor Books, 1987), 5.
4. For a cogent discussion of the significance of this conception, its roots in
Lovecraft’s reading of Poe, and its evolution in his later critical writings,
see S.T. Joshi, “Poe, Lovecraft and the Revolution in Weird Fiction,”
(paper presented at the Ninth Annual Commemoration Program of the
Poe Society, October 7, 2012), http://www.eapoe.org/papers/psblctrs/
pl20121.html
5. Hartwell, The Dark Descent, 85.
6. James Ursini and Alain Silver, More Things than Are Dreamt of: Masterpieces
of Supernatural Horror (Limelight, 1994), 61.
7. S.T. Joshi, “Preface,” The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature,
edited by S.T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000), 7.
8. Lovecraft, Selected Letters II, 160.
9. Lovecraft, Selected Letters II, 301.
10. Lovecraft, Selected Letters II, 300.
11. Touponce, 59.
12. Lovecraft, Selected Letters II, 300.
13. H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Volume II (Sauk City: Arkham House,
1971), 290.
14. Lovecraft, Selected Letters II, 292.
15. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, “Introduction,” The Weird (New York: Tor
Books, 2011), xv.
16. The Weird, xvi.
17. S.T. Joshi, “Preface,” The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature,
edited by S.T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000), 7.
 SECTION I

“The Oldest and Strongest Emotion”:

The Psychology of Cosmic Horror
 CHAPTER 2

The Birth of Cosmic Horror

from the S(ub)lime of Lucretius

Sean Moreland

Cosmic Horror: A Terrible Sublime

             …vapour chill
The ascendance gains when fear the frame pervades,
And ruthless HORROR, shivering every limb …
Lucretius1

In an exchange with scholar Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, China Miéville

locates Lovecraft within a “visionary and ecstatic tradition,” part of a
“break” in that tradition contemporaneous with the First World War.
This break is the shattering of representation that gave rise to modernist
literature, “a kind of terrible, terrible sublime.”2 This chapter contrasts
what Supernatural Horror in Literature (SHL) calls cosmic horror with
earlier uses of the term, examining the pre-modern aesthetic sources
Lovecraft synthesized with early twentieth-century anxieties in expressing
this terrible sublime. Lovecraft identified with the first-century BCE
Roman poet Lucretius,3 whose epic poem De Rerum Natura (DRN) was
crucial to his subversion of the theological and sentimental humanist

S. Moreland (*)
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

© The Author(s) 2018 13

S. Moreland (ed.), New Directions in Supernatural Horror
Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95477-6_2
14 S. MORELAND

foundations of the Enlightenment, Romantic, and Victorian discourse on

the sublime. Lovecraft read the Roman writer through his own racialized
sexual and political anxieties in ways that continue to shape modern weird
and horror fiction and contemporary philosophical appropriations of his
writings alike.

Ghosts and Goulds: Cosmic Horror

Before Lovecraft
Can I not fling this horror off me again,
Seeing with how great ease Nature can smile,
Balmier and nobler from her bath of storm,
At random ravage?
   Tennyson, “Lucretius”

As Brian Stableford notes, “the notion of ‘cosmic horror’ is closely associ-

ated with Lovecraft.”4 However, although Lovecraft’s writing, and SHL in
particular, popularized and re-defined cosmic horror, which would become
almost exclusively associated with him by the late twentieth century,
Lovecraft did not invent the phrase, already in circulation nearly a decade
before his birth, nor was he the first to conceive of the affective concept it
described. Horror writer Thomas Ligotti looks back to the writings of
French scientist and Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal for an early mod-
ern, and contrapuntal, conception. Pascal

wrote of his a sense of being ‘engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces

whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me; I am terrified.
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread’ (Pensées,
1670). Pascal’s is not an unnatural reaction for those phobic to infinite
spaces that know nothing of them.5

The Enlightenment saw a proliferation of writings about the affective

intensity evoked by the scalar abysses of the world viewed through the
complementary lenses of the microscope and telescope. Consider this pas-
sage from The Book of Nature, a collection of lectures by British physician,
philosopher, natural theologian, and the Romantic period’s most influen-
tial translator of Lucretius, John Mason Good:
 THE BIRTH OF COSMIC HORROR FROM THE S(UB)LIME OF LUCRETIUS 15

What is the aggregate opinion, or the aggregate importance of the whole

human race! We call our selves lords of the visible creation: nor ought we at
any time, with affected abjection, to degrade or despise the high gift of a
rational and immortal existence.—Yet, what is the visible creation? By whom
peopled? And where are its entrances and outgoings? Turn wherever we will,
we are equally confounded and overpowered: the little and the great alike
are beyond our comprehension. If we take the microscope, it unfolds to us
[…] living beings, probably endowed with as complex and perfect a struc-
ture as the whale or the elephant, so minute that a million millions of them
do not occupy a bulk larger than a common grain of sand. If we exchange
the microscope for the telescope, we behold man himself reduced to a com-
parative scale of almost infinitely smaller dimension, fixed to a minute planet
that is scarcely perceptible throughout the vast extent of the solar system;
while this system itself forms but an insensible point in the multitudinous
marshallings of groups of worlds upon groups of worlds, above, below, and
on every side of us, that spread through all the immensity of space.6

Published in 1826, Good’s description of cosmicism resembles Lovecraft’s

a century later, but for its emphasis on “creation,” and the concluding
sentence this word anticipates: “and in sublime, though silent harmony
declare the glory of God, and show forth his handy work.”7 Good spent
much of his intellectual life desperately attempting to reconcile Christianity
with both Lucretius’s atomic materialist vision and that emerging with
nineteenth-century scientific developments. Throughout his writings, the
word “sublime” reminds readers of the presence of a divine creator, and
the unique relationship this creator has with humanity. His tendentious
translation of Lucretius interjects the word sublime frequently in order to
reinstate the divine significance of the human figure, in effect subverting
the Roman poet’s depiction of humanity as merely one among countless
species of perishable material phenomena, emerging via a procession of
undirected collisions at the atomic level.
Good’s description is but one dramatic example of the “turn” charac-
terizing most accounts of the sublime from the early Enlightenment
through the late Victorian era. In this turn, horror, a paralyzing affect
marked by a freezing sensation, one often occasioned by the vastness and
unknowability of the universe, is melted into a sensation of awesome ele-
vation, usually by a theistic intimation of our privileged position within
that universe. It is within this discourse of affective theology that “cosmic
horror” existed prior to Lovecraft.
16 S. MORELAND

The earliest use I’ve found of the phrase itself is part of a journalistic
description of the period leading up to the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883:
“We could feel that some cosmic horror was impending long before the
catastrophe took place, and I fancy that other sensations of a like nature
are in store. We hear from one part of Asia of atmospheric phenomena
which disturb numerous and delicate people.”8 From its first recorded
appearance, nearly a half-century before Lovecraft adapted it, the term
“cosmic horror” was associated with an atmosphere, in the most literal
sense, one that “delicate” people were especially responsive to, and one
involving a disturbing intimation of threatening immensity. This usage
derives from the idea of “cosmic emotion” developed by English mathe-
matician and philosopher, William Kingdon Clifford, who in turn derived
it from English utilitarian philosopher, Henry Sidgwick.9 Clifford defines
what he means by the term in his 1877 essay, “The Cosmic Emotion”:

By a cosmic emotion—the phrase is Mr. Henry Sidgwick’s—I mean an emo-

tion which is felt in regard to the universe or sum of things, viewed as a
cosmos or order. There are two kinds of cosmic emotion—one having refer-
ence to the Macrocosm or universe surrounding and containing us, the
other relating to the Microcosm or universe of our own souls. When we try
to put together the most general conceptions that we can form about the
great aggregate of events that are always going on, to strike a sort of balance
among the feelings which these events produce in us, and to add to these the
feeling of vastness associated with an attempt to represent the whole of exis-
tence, then we experience a cosmic emotion of the first kind. It may have the
character of awe, veneration, resignation, submission; or it may be an over-
powering stimulus to action.10

Clifford points out the admirable synthesis of these two forms in a sen-
tence by Immanuel Kant, which has been “perfectly translated by Lord
Houghton”:

The two things I contemplate with ceaseless awe:

The stars of heaven, and man’s sense of law.11

Clifford’s cosmic emotion is a version of the Kantian sublime influenced

by Herbert Spencer’s progressivist evolutionary views. Clifford calls it
“the cosmic emotion,” rather than specifying what emotion it is, because
“the character of the emotion with which men contemplate the world, the
temper in which they stand in the presence of the immensities and the
 THE BIRTH OF COSMIC HORROR FROM THE S(UB)LIME OF LUCRETIUS 17

eternities, must depend first of all on what they think the world is.”12 In
other words, whether the cosmic emotion is awe or terror depends on
how “the world,” reality, is understood, an understanding that changes
drastically with historical and cultural context and the development of sci-
entific knowledge: “Whatever conception, then, we can form of the exter-
nal cosmos must be regarded as only provisional and not final, as waiting
revision when we shall have pushed the bounds of our knowledge further
away in time and space.”13 Clifford’s cosmic emotion influenced William
James, whose The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) presents it as a
natural legitimation of religious belief. Ligotti notes the contrast between
James and Lovecraft in this regard: “In both his creative writings and his
letters, Lovecraft’s expression of the feelings James describes form an
exception to the philosopher-psychologist’s argument, since Lovecraft
experienced such cosmic wonder in the absence of religious belief.”14
Clifford’s ambiguous “cosmic emotion” was resolved by American lexi-
cographer, physician, and natural theologian George M. Gould into “cos-
mic horror.” Gould’s formulation was popular in medical, philosophical,
and theological literature from the mid-1890s through to about 1910,
first occurring in 1893: “I have learned that many another sensitive
despairing soul, in the face of the glib creeds and the loneliness of subjec-
tivity, has also and often felt the same clutching spasm of cosmic horror,
the very heart of life stifled and stilled with an infinite fear and sense of
lostness.”15 Gould continued to refer to cosmic horror in his later writ-
ings, associating it with a supposed pathological inability to recognize
divinity in nature. His 1904 essay “The Infinite Presence” states: “Only
for a short instant, at best, will most persons consent to look open-eyed at
any clear image of fate or of infinity,” since “the freezing of the heart that
follows, the appalling shudder at the dread contemplation of infinity,
which may be called cosmic horror, is more than can be endured. If those
stars are absolutely and positively infinite, then there is no up or down,
and they knew no beginning, will have no ending. With any such staring
gorgon of fatalism the surcharged attention is shaken.”16
However, Gould asks, “Why may not this cosmic horror be turned to
cosmic pleasure? It is at best not bravery or athletic prowess, and at worst
it is a psychic want of equilibrium, a morbid metaphysics.”17 Gould con-
cludes that those who exercise a moral intuition of the infinite experience
cosmic horror as the first stage on a journey to ecstatic elevation: “The
horror is from disuse of the innate power, and the sublimest pleasure may
be found in excursions into the infinite.”18 For Gould, cosmic horror is
18 S. MORELAND

only a base material that “man’s sense of law” sublimates by affective

alchemy into an elevated “ceaseless awe,” the inability to reach such
“sublime pleasure” he equates with “a morbid metaphysics.” This is a
medico-­theological recapitulation of the Kantian sublime that Lovecraft
turns on its head.

A Morbid Metaphysics: Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror

I have encountered no evidence that Lovecraft had firsthand knowledge of
Gould’s writings, which he would have scorned. Yet Lovecraft’s concep-
tion of cosmic horror can be best understood in contrast to Gould’s.
Where Gould’s cosmic horror exemplifies what Miéville calls “the nos-
trums of a kind of late Victorian bourgeois culture,” Lovecraft’s concep-
tion becomes, also in Miéville’s words, “the most pure and vivid expression
of that moment” when such nostrums become “unsustainable.”19
While the primary inspirations of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror are works
of supernatural literature, including those by Poe, Arthur Machen,
Algernon Blackwood, and William Hope Hodgson, their work is demon-
strably shaped by Romantic and Victorian natural theology. Good’s Book
of Nature was an important source for Poe’s cosmic tales and philo-
sophical ruminations. SHL places Hodgson “perhaps second only to
Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality,” with House
on the Borderland called “perhaps the greatest” of his works (59; see
S. T. Joshi’s chapter for an account of the evolution of Lovecraft’s cos-
micism as criterion). This novel describes an affect that as clearly echoes
Addison’s account of the sublime (described below) as it anticipates
Lovecraft’s cosmic horror:

There was no need to be afraid of the creature; the bars were strong, and
there was little danger of its being able to move them. And then, suddenly,
in spite of the knowledge that the brute could not reach to harm me, I had
a return of the horrible sensation of fear, that had assailed me on that night,
a week previously. It was the same feeling of helpless, shuddering fright.

The most direct and detailed literary source of SHL’s conception of cos-
mic horror is Blackwood’s “The Willows,” described as the “foremost” of
his fictions for the “impression of lasting poignancy” it evokes (66.) “The
Willows” details “a singular emotion” closely related to, but distinct
 THE BIRTH OF COSMIC HORROR FROM THE S(UB)LIME OF LUCRETIUS 19

from, natural sublimity, in which “delight of the wild beauty” mingles

with “a curious feeling of disquietude, almost of alarm” that “lay deeper
far than the emotions of awe or wonder,” and “had to do with my realiza-
tion of our utter insignificance before this unrestrained power of the ele-
ments about me.”20 The only difference between this description and
Gould’s cosmic horror is that Blackwood’s affect involves a simultaneous
commingling of horror and awe, rather than the resolution of the former
into the latter by a sublime turn. Lovecraft consistently follows Blackwood
in presenting cosmic horror as a “sense of awe” “touched somewhere by
vague terror.”21
The simultaneous fusion of Lovecraft’s version of cosmic horror and
the sequential fission of Gould’s are reflected in their respective diction.
Where Gould is consistent in using the phrase “cosmic horror” through-
out his writings, Lovecraft’s phrasing varies widely. In SHL alone, Lovecraft
refers, seemingly interchangeably, to “cosmic panic,” “cosmic terror,”
“cosmic horror,” and “cosmic fear.”22 As Stableford notes, “Lovecraft’s
fascination with the adjective ‘cosmic’ is clearly evident” in SHL, but the
adjective is “used there in a sense that is rather different from the connota-
tions eventually acquired by ‘cosmic horror.’”23 Like Clifford’s deliber-
ately unspecified “cosmic emotion,” SHL’s recurring use of “cosmic”
modifies a variety of emotions, a vacillation more revealing than termino-
logical consistency could be. These verbal compounds serve three closely
related functions in Lovecraft’s writings, and especially in SHL.
First, they distinguish between Lovecraft’s use of “cosmic” and the tra-
ditional teleological and providential connotations cosmos carried over
from Greek philosophy. Lovecraft’s compounds move from the lofty or
mystical connotations of “cosmic” in its Stoic or neo-Platonic uses to what
he called “cosmic indifferentism.” This philosophy is grounded, as
S.T. Joshi explains, in

mechanistic materialism. The term postulates two ontological hypotheses:

1) the universe is a “mechanism” governed by fixed laws (although these
may not all be known to human beings) where all entity is inextricably con-
nected causally; there can be no such thing as chance (hence no free will but
instead an absolute determinism), since every incident is the inevitable out-
come of countless ancillary and contributory events reaching back into
infinity; 2) all entity is material, and there can be no other essence, whether
it be “soul” or “spirit” or any other non-material substance.24
20 S. MORELAND

For Lovecraft, the cosmic follows a dynamics of descent, back to the body
and its physiological states. Mathias Clasen notes that Lovecraft was
among the first theorists of horror to consistently apply “a natural basis for
the appeal of horror stories” by recognizing that “people are biologically
susceptible to superstitious fear.”25 The accuracy of this recognition is
explored in more detail by Clasen’s chapter.
Second, Lovecraft’s phrasal compounds differentiate between the emo-
tion they signify and its “mere” physiological equivalent, a distinction
more fully explored by Michael Cisco’s chapter. The latter emotions are
the provenance of the “externally similar but psychologically widely differ-
ent” literature of “mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome,” and
this is not SHL’s domain (22). Where “fear” is a simple, instinctive response
to a perceived threat, “cosmic” suggests a component of cognitive disrup-
tion, an epistemic shock, the intrusion of “the unknown.”
Third, Lovecraft’s insistent vacillation between terror, horror, panic,
dread and fear ambiguates these emotions, unsettling the hierarchized dif-
ferentiation of terror from horror first popularized by Gothic novelist Ann
Radcliffe, building on philosopher Edmund Burke, toward the end of the
eighteenth century. Radcliffe claimed that horror paralyzed and froze the
faculties, a description echoed by Gould’s account of cosmic horror a cen-
tury later. Terror, on the other hand, stimulated the imagination, awak-
ened the senses, and involved the sublime. This aspect of Radcliffe’s
distinction anticipated Kant’s account of the sublimation of terror via the
intuition of moral reason, an account reframed by Gould’s formulation,
one that has maintained a centuries-long influence. It is, for example,
echoed by Stephen King’s Danse Macabre (1981), as Alissa Burger’s chap-
ter details. Yet the collapse of Radcliffe’s Burkean hierarchy, part of the
rhetorical work done by SHL’s lexical transitions, was a crucial part of
Lovecraft’s break from his Romantic and Victorian precursors.

“To Resuscitate the Dead Art”: Howard

Lovecraft, Re-animator!
For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”
In the old sense. Wrong from the start—
    Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” (1920)
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
honor. The offence which provoked this assault is not even hinted at,
though it may have arisen from the troubled state of public affairs.
Captain Praa was a man of influence and dignity in the community,
an exiled Huguenot, of remarkable skill in horsemanship and arms.
In spite of all this, it appears probable that the sentiment of the
community was in sympathy with the two turbulent assaulters and
batterers, for they were fined only six shillings and three pounds
respectively. They threw themselves on the mercy of the Court, and
certainly were treated with mercy.
There are, however, few women-criminals named in the old Dutch
and early English records, and these few were not prosecuted for
any very great crimes or viciousness; the chief number were brought
up for defamation of character and slander, though men-slanderers
were more plentiful than women. The close intimacy, the ideal
neighborliness of the Dutch communities of New York made the
settlers deeply abhor all violations of the law of social kindness. To
preserve this state of amity, they believed with Chaucer “the first
vertue is to restraine and kepen wel thine tonge.”
The magistrates knew how vast a flame might be kindled by a
petty spark; and therefore promptly quenched the odious slander in
its beginning; petty quarrels were adjusted by arbitration ere they
grew to great breaches. As sung the chorus of Batavian women in
Van der Vondel’s great poem:—

“If e’er dispute or discord dared intrude,

’Twas soon by wisdom’s voice subdued.”

In spite, however, of all wariness and watchfulness and patience,

the inevitable fretfulness engendered in petty natures by a narrow
and confined life showed in neighborhood disputes and suits for
defamation of character, few of them of great seriousness and most
of them easily adjusted by the phlegmatic and somewhat dictatorial
Dutch magistrates. In a community so given to nicknaming it seems
strange to find such extreme touchiness about being called names.
Suits for defamation were frequent, through opprobrious name-
calling, and on very slight though irritating grounds. It would certainly
seem a rather disproportionate amount of trouble to bring a lawsuit
simply because you were called a “black pudding,” or a verklickker,
or tale-bearer, or even a “Turk;” though, of course, no one would
stand being called a “horned beast” or a “hay thief.” Nor was “Thou
swine” an offensive term too petty to be passed over in silence. The
terrible epithets, spitter-baard and “Dutch dough-face,” seem to
make a climax of opprobriousness; but the word moff was worse, for
it was the despised term applied in Holland to the Germans, and it
led to a quarrel with knives.
I wish to note in passing that though the Dutch called each other
these disagreeable and even degrading names, they did not swear
at each other. Profanity was seldom punished in New Amsterdam,
for practically it did not exist, as was remarked by travellers.
Chaplain Wolley told of “the usual oath” of one Dutch colonist,—the
word “sacrament.”
The colonists were impatient of insulting actions as well as words.
Sampson said in “Romeo and Juliet,” “I will bite my thumb at them,
which is a disgrace to them if they bear it;” so “finger-sticking” was a
disgrace in colonial times if unresented, and it was actionable in the
courts. The man or woman who pointed the finger of scorn at a
neighbor was pretty sure to have the finger of the law pointed at him.
The curious practice of the Dutch settlers alluded to—the giving of
nicknames—may be partly explained by the fact that in some cases
the persons named had no surname, and the nickname was really a
distinguishing name. These nicknames appear not only in the
records of criminal cases, but in official documents such as the
patents for towns, transfers of estates, civil contracts, etc. In Albany,
in 1655 and 1657, we find Jan the Jester, Huybert the Rogue,
Jacobus or Cobus the Looper, squint-eyed Harmen, the wicked
Domine. On Long Island were John the Swede, Hans the Boor,
Tunis the Fisher. In Harlem was Jan Archer the Koop-all (or buy-all).
In New York, in English days, in 1691, we find Long Mary, Old Bush,
Top-knot Betty, Scarebouch. These names conveyed no offence,
and seem to have been universally adopted and responded to.
 It would appear to a casual observer glancing over the court-
records of those early years of New York life under Dutch
supremacy, that the greater number of the cases brought before the
magistrates were these slander and libel cases. We could believe
that no other court-room ever rang with such petty personal suits; to
use Tennyson’s words, “it bubbled o’er with gossip and scandal and
spite.” But in truth slander was severely punished in all the colonies,
in New England, Virginia, Pennsylvania; and it is not to the detriment
of the citizens of New Netherland that they were more sharp in the
punishment of such offences, for it is well known, as Swift says, that
the worthiest people are those most injured by slander.
The slander cases of colonial times seem most trivial and even
absurd when seen through the mist of years. They could scarce
reach the dignity of Piers Plowman’s definition of slanders:—

“To bakbyten, and to bosten, and to bere fals witnesse

To scornie and to scolde, sclaundres to make.”

To show their character, let me give those recorded in which

Thomas Applegate of Gravesend, Long Island, took an accused part.
In 1650, he was brought up before the Gravesend court for saying of
a fellow-towns-man that “he thought if his debts were paid he would
have little left.” For this incautious but not very heinous speech he
paid a fine of forty guilders. The next year we find him prosecuted for
saying of a neighbor that “he had not half a wife.” Though he at first
denied this speech, he was ordered “to make publick
acknowledgement of error; to stand at the publick post with a paper
on his breast mentioning the reason, that he is a notorious,
scandalous person.” This brought him to his senses, and he
confessed his guilt, desired the slandered “half a wife” to “pass it by
and remit it, which she freely did and he gave her thanks.” Next
Mistress Applegate was brought up for saying that a neighbor’s wife
milked the Applegate cows. She escaped punishment by proving
that Penelope Prince told her so. As a climax, Thomas Applegate
said to a friend that he believed that the Governor took bribes. The
schout in his decision on this grave offence said Applegate “did
deserve to have his tongue bored through with a hot iron;” but this
fierce punishment was not awarded him, nor was he banished.
When the tailor of New Amsterdam said disrespectful words of the
Governor, his sentence was that he “stand before the Governor’s
door with uncovered head, after the ringing of the bell, and to declare
that he falsely and scandalously issued such words and then to ask
God’s pardon.”
The magistrates were very touchy of their dignity. Poor Widow
Piertje Jans had her house sold on an execution; and, exasperated
by the proceeding, and apparently also at the price obtained, she
said bitterly to the officers, “Ye despoilers, ye bloodsuckers, ye have
not sold but given away my house.” Instead of treating these as the
heated words of a disappointed and unhappy woman, the officers
promptly ran tattling to the Stadt Huys and whiningly complained to
the Court that her words were “a sting which could not be endured.”
Piertje was in turn called shameful; her words were termed “foul,
villanous, injurious, nay, infamous words,” and also called a
blasphemy, insult, affront, and reproach. She was accused of
insulting, defaming, affronting, and reproaching the Court, and that
she was in the highest degree reprimanded, particularly corrected,
and severely punished; and after being forbidden to indulge in any
more such blasphemies, she was released,—“bethumped with
words,” as Shakespeare said,—doubtless well scared at the
enormity of her offence, as well as at the enormity of the magistrate’s
phraseology.
The notary Walewyn van der Veen was frequently in trouble,
usually for contempt of court. And I doubt not “the little bench of
justices” was sometimes rather trying in its ways to a notary who
knew anything about law. On one occasion, when a case relating to
a bill of exchange had been decided against him, Van der Veen
spoke of their High Mightinesses the magistrates as “simpletons and
blockheads.” This was the scathing sentence of his punishment:—
“That Walewyn Van der Veen, for his committed insult, shall
here beg forgiveness, with uncovered head, of God, Justice,
 and the Worshipful Court, and moreover pay as a fine 190
guilders.”
This fine must have consumed all his fees for many a weary
month thereafter, if we can judge by the meagre lawyers’ bills which
have come down to us.
Another time the contumacious Van der Veen called the Secretary
a rascal. Thereat, the latter, much aggrieved, demanded “honorable
and profitable reparation” for the insult. The schout judged this
epithet to be a slander and an affront to the Secretary, which
“affected his honor, being tender,” and the honor of the Court as well,
since it was to a member of the Court, and he demanded that the
notary should pay a fine of fifty guilders as an example to other
slanderers, “who for trifles have constantly in their mouths curses
and abuses of other honorable people.”
Another well-known notary and practitioner and pleader in the
busy little Court held in the Stadt Huys was Solomon La Chair. His
manuscript volume of nearly three hundred pages, containing
detailed accounts of all the business he transacted in Manhattan, is
now in the County Clerk’s Office in New York, and proves valuable
material for the historiographer. He had much business, for he could
speak and write both English and Dutch; and he was a faithful,
painstaking, intelligent worker. He not only conducted lawsuits for
others, but he seems to have been in constant legal hot water
himself on his own account. He was sued for drinking and not paying
for a can of sugared wine; and also for a half-aam of costly French
wine; and he was sued for the balance of payment for a house he
had purchased; he pleaded for more time, and with the ingenuous
guilelessness peculiar to the law said in explanation that he had had
the money gathered at one time for payment, but it had somehow
dropped through his fingers. “The Court condemned to pay at
once,”—not being taken in by any such simplicity as that. He had to
pay a fine of twelve guilders for affronting both fire inspector and
court messenger. He first insulted the brandt-meester who came to
inspect his chimney, and was fined, then he called the bode who
came to collect the fine “a little cock booted and spurred.” The Court
in sentence said with dignity, “It is not meet that men should mock
and scoff at persons appointed to any office, yea a necessary office.”
He won one important suit for the town of Gravesend, by which the
right of that town to the entire region of Coney Island was
established; and he received in payment for his legal services
therein, the munificent sum of twenty-four florins (ten dollars) paid in
gray pease. He kept a tavern and was complained of for tapping
after nine o’clock; and he was sued by his landlord for rent; and he
had a yacht, “The Pear Tree,” which ran on trading trips to Albany,
and there were two or three lawsuits in regard to that. He was also a
farmer of the excise on slaughtered cattle; but, in spite of all his
energy and variety of employment, he died insolvent in 1664. The
last lawsuit in which Lawyer Solomon had any share was through a
posthumous connection,—the burgher who furnished an anker of
French wine for the notary’s funeral claimed a position as preferred
creditor to the estate.
A very aggravated case of scorn and resistance of authority was
that of Abel Hardenbrock against the schout de Mill. And this case
shows equally the popular horror of violations of the law and the
confiding trust of the justices that the word of the law was enough
without any visible restraining force. Hardenbrock, who was a
troublesome fellow, had behaved most vilely, shoving the schout on
the breast, and wickedly “wishing the devil might break his neck,”
simply because the schout went to Hardenbrock’s house to warn his
wife not to annoy further Burgomaster De Peyster by unwelcome
visits. Hardenbrock was accordingly seized and made a prisoner at
the Stadt Huys “in the chamber of Pieter Schaefbanck, where he
carried on and made a racket like one possessed and mad,
notwithstanding the efforts of Heer Burgomaster Van Brught, running
up to the Court room and going away next morning as if he had not
been imprisoned.” It was said with amusing simplicity that this cool
walking out of prison was “contrary to the customs of the law,” and a
fine of twenty-five florins was imposed.
For serious words against the government, which could be
regarded as treasonable, the decreed punishment was death. One
Claerbout van ter Goes used such words (unfortunately they are not
given in the indictment), and a judgment was recorded from each
burgomaster and schepen as to what punishment would be proper.
He was branded, whipped on a half-gallows, and banished, and
escaped hanging only by one vote.
All classes in the community were parties in these petty slander
suits; schoolmasters and parsons appear to have been specially
active. Domine Bogardus and Domine Schaets had many a slander
suit. The most famous and amusing of all these clerical suits is the
one brought by Domine Bogardus and his wife, the posthumously
famous Anneke Jans, against Grietje von Salee, a woman of very
dingy reputation, who told in New Amsterdam that the domine’s wife,
Mistress Anneke, had lifted her petticoats in unseemly and extreme
fashion when crossing a muddy street. This was proved to be false,
and the evidence adduced was so destructive of Grietje’s character
that she stands disgraced forever in history as the worst woman in
New Netherland.
Not only were slanderers punished, but they were disgraced with
terrible names. William Bakker was called “a blasphemer, a street
schold, a murderer as far as his intentions are concerned, a defamer,
a disturber of public peace,”—the concentration of which must have
made William Bakker hang his head in the place of his banishment.
They were also rebuked from the pulpit, and admonished in private.
Perhaps the best rebuke given, as well as a unique one, was the
one adopted by Domine Frelinghuysen, who had suffered somewhat
from slander himself. He had this rhyme painted in large letters on
the back of his sleigh, that he who followed might read:—

“Niemands tong; nog neimands pen,

Maakt my anders dan ik ben.
Spreek quaad-spreekers: spreek vonder end,
Niemand en word van u geschend.”

Which, translated into English, reads:—

 “No one’s tongue, and no one’s pen
Makes me other than I am.
Speak, evil-speakers, speak without end,
No one heeds a word you say.”

The original Court of the colony was composed of a Director and

his Council. In 1656, in answer to complaints from the colonists, the
States-General ordered the election of a board of magistrates, in
name and function like those of the Fatherland; namely, a schout,
two burgomasters, and five schepens. The duties of the
burgomasters and schepens were twofold: they regulated municipal
affairs like a board of aldermen, and they sat as a court of justice
both in civil and criminal cases. The annual salary of a burgomaster
was fixed at one hundred and forty dollars, and of a schepen at one
hundred dollars; but as these salaries were to come out of the
municipal chest, which was chronically empty, they never were paid.
When funds did come in from the excise on taverns, on slaughtered
cattle, the tax on land, the fees on transfers, etc., it always had to be
paid out in other ways,—for repairs for the school-room, the Graft,
the watch-room, the Stadt Huys. It never entered the minds of those
guileless civic rulers, two centuries ago, to pay themselves and let
the other creditors go without. The early city schout was also schout-
fiskaal till 1660; but the proper duties of this functionary were really a
combination of those pertaining now to the mayor, sheriff, and
district-attorney. In the little town one man could readily perform all
these duties. He also presided in Court. An offender could thus be
arrested, prosecuted, and judged, by one and the same person,
which seems to us scarcely judicious; but the bench of magistrates
had one useful power, that of mitigating and altering the sentence
demanded by the schout. Often a fine of one hundred guilders would
be reduced to twenty-five; often the order for whipping would be set
aside, and the command of branding as well.
Sometimes justice in New York was tempered with mercy, and
sorely it needed it when fierce English rule and law came in force.
Felons were few, but these few were severely punished. A record of
a trial in 1676 reveals a curious scene in Court, as well as an
astonishing celerity in the execution of the law under English rule
and in the English army. Three soldiers stole a couple of iron pots,
two hoes, a pair of shears, and half a firkin of soap. They were tried
in the morning, confessed, cast into “the Hole” in the afternoon, and
in the evening “the Governor ordered some persons to go to the
prisoners and advise them to prepare for another world, for that one
of them should dye the next day.” On the gloomy morrow, on
Saturday, the three terror-stricken souls drew lots, and the fatal lot
fell to one Thomas Weale. The court of aldermen interceded for him
and finally secured his reprieve till Monday. The peaceful Dutch
Sunday, darkened and shocked by this impending death, saw a
strange and touching sight.
“In the evening a company of the chiefe women of the City,
both English and Dutch, made earnest suite to the Governor
for the Condemned man’s life. Monday in the morning the
same women who came the last night with many others of the
better sort, and a greater number of the ordinary Dutch
women, did again very much importune the Governor to spare
him.”
These tender-hearted colonists were indorsed and supplemented
by the petition of Weale’s fellow-soldiers in the garrison, who
pleaded the prisoner’s youth and his past usefulness, and who
promised if he were pardoned never to steal nor to conceal theft. As
a result of all this intercession, the Governor “graciously” granted
pardon.
This promise and pardon seem to have accomplished much in
army discipline, for thereafter arrests for crime among the soldiery
were rare. Five years later a soldier was accused of pilfering.
“The Court Marshall doth adjudge that the said Melchoir
Classen shall run the Gantlope once, the length of the fort:
where according to the custome of that punishment, the
souldiers shall have switches delivered to them, with which
they shall strike him as he passes between them stript to the
waist, and at the Fort-gate the Marshall is to receive him, and
there to kick him out of the Garrison as a cashiered person,
 when he is no more to returne, and if any pay is due him it is
to be forfeited.”
And that was the end of Melchoir Classen.
Gantlope was the earlier and more correct form of the word now
commonly called gantlet. Running the gantlope was a military
punishment in universal use.
Another common punishment for soldiers (usually for rioting or
drinking) was riding the wooden horse. In New Amsterdam the
wooden horse stood between Paerel Street and the Fort, and was
twelve feet high. Garret Segersen, for stealing chickens, rode the
wooden horse for three days from two o’clock to close of parade with
a fifty-pound weight tied to each foot. At other times a musket was
tied to each foot of the disgraced man. One culprit rode with an
empty scabbard in one hand and a pitcher in the other to show his
inordinate love for John Barleycorn. Jan Alleman, a Dutch officer,
challenged Jan de Fries, who was bedridden; for this cruel and
meaningless insult he too rode the wooden horse. In Revolutionary
days we still find the soldiers of the Continental Army punished by
riding the wooden horse, or, as it was sometimes called, “the timber
mare;” but it was probably a modification of the cruel punishment of
the seventeenth century.
A sailor, for drawing a knife on a companion, was dropped three
times from the yard-arm and received a kick from every sailor on the
ship,—a form of running the gantlope. And we read of a woman who
enlisted as a seaman, and whose sex was detected, being dropped
three times from the yard-arm and tarred and feathered.
These women petitioners for Soldier Weale of whom I have told,
were not the only tender-hearted New Yorkers to petition for “mercy,
that herb of grace, to flower.” During Stuyvesant’s rule his sister,
Madam Bayard, successfully interceded for the release, and thereby
saved the life, of an imprisoned Quaker; and in September, 1713,
two counterfeiters were saved from the death penalty by the
intervention of New York dames. We read, “Most of the gentlewomen
of the city waited on the Governor, and addressed him earnestly with
prayers and tears for the lives of the culprits, who were accordingly
pardoned.” When two sailors rioted through the town demanding
food and drink, and used Carel Van Brugh so roughly that his face
was cut, they were sentenced to be fastened to the whipping-post,
and scourged, and have gashes cut in their faces; the wife of Van
Brugh and her friends petitioned that the sentence should not be
carried out, or at any rate executed within a room. Doubtless other
examples could be found.
The laws of New Netherland were naturally based upon the laws
and customs of the Fatherland, which in turn were formed by the
rules of the College of XIX. from the Imperial Statutes of Charles V.
and the Roman civil law.
The punishments were the ordinary ones of the times, neither
more nor less severe than those of the Fatherland or the other
colonies. In 1691 it was ordered that a ducking-stool be erected in
New York on the wharf in front of the City Hall. The following year an
order was passed that a pillory, cage, and ducking-stool be built.
Though scolds were punished, I have never seen any sentence to
show that this ducking-stool was ever built, or that one was ever
used in New York; while instances of the use of a ducking-stool are
comparatively plentiful in the Southern colonies. The ducking-stool
was an English “engine” of punishment, not a Dutch.
The colonists were astonishingly honest. Thieves were surprisingly
few; they were punished under Dutch rule by scourging with rods,
and usually by banishment,—a very convenient way of shifting
responsibility. Assaults were punished by imprisonment and
subjection to prison fare, consisting only of bread and water or small
beer; and sometimes temporary banishment. There was at first no
prison, so men were often imprisoned in their own houses, which
does not seem very disgraceful. In the case of François de Bruyn,
tried for insulting and striking the court messenger, he was fined two
hundred guilders, and answered that he would rot in prison before he
would pay. He was then ordered to be imprisoned in a respectable
tavern, which sentence seems to have some possibility of mitigating
accompaniments.
 In 1692 it was ordered in Kings County that a good pair of stocks
and a pound be made in every bound within Kings County, and kept
in sufficient repair. In repair and in use were they kept till this century.
Pillories too were employed in punishment till within the memory of
persons now living. The whipping-post was really a public blessing,
—in constant use, and apparently of constant benefit, though the
publicity of its employment seems shocking to us to-day. The public
whipper received a large salary. In 1751, we learn from an
advertisement, it was twenty pounds annually.
Some of the punishments were really almost picturesque in their
ingenious inventions of mortification and degradation. Truly it was a
striking sight when “Jan of Leyden”—a foul-mouthed rogue, a true
blather-schuyten—was fastened to a stake in front of the townhouse,
with a bridle in his mouth and a bundle of rods tied under each arm,
and a placard on his breast bearing the inscription, “Lampoon-riter,
false accuser, defamer of magistrates.” Though he was banished, I
am sure he never was forgotten by the children who saw him
standing thus garnished and branded on that spring day in 1664. In
the same place a thief was punished by being forced to stand all day
under a gallows, a gallows-rope around his neck and empty sword-
scabbard in his hand, a memorable figure.
And could any who saw it ever forget the punishment of Mesaack
Martens, who stole six cabbages from his neighbor, and confessed
and stood for days in the pillory with cabbages on his head, that “the
punishment might fit the crime;” to us also memorable because the
prisoner was bootlessly examined by torture to force confession of
stealing fowls, butter, turkeys, etc.
He was not the only poor creature who suffered torture in New
Amsterdam. It was frequently threatened and several times
executed. The mate of a ship was accused of assaulting a sheriff’s
officer, who could not identify positively his assailant. The poor mate
was put to torture, and he was innocent of the offence. The assailant
was proved to be another man from whom the officer had seized a
keg of brandy. Still none in New Amsterdam were tortured or pressed
to death. The blood of no Giles Corey stains the honor of New
Netherland.
 Sometimes the execution of justice seemed to “set a thief to catch
a thief.” A letter written by an English officer from Fort James on
Manhattan Island to Captain Silvester Salisbury in Fort Albany in
1672 contains this sentence:—
“We had like to have lost our Hang-man Ben Johnson, for
he being taken in Divers Thefts and Robbings convicted and
found guilty, escaped his neck through want of another
Hangman to truss him up, soe that all the punishment that he
received for his Three Years’ Roguery in thieving and stealing
(which was never found out till now) was only 39 stripes at the
Whipping Post, loss of an Ear and Banishment.”
We have the records of an attempt at capital punishment in 1641;
and Mr. Gerard’s account of it in his paper “The Old Stadt-Huys” is
so graphic, I wish to give it in full:—
“The court proceedings before the Council, urged by the
Fiscal, were against Jan of Fort Orange, Manuel Gerrit the
Giant, Anthony Portugese, Simon Congo, and five others, all
negroes belonging to the Company, for killing Jan Premero,
another negro. The prisoners having pleaded guilty, and it
being rather a costly operation to hang nine able-bodied
negroes belonging to the Company, the sentence was that
they were to draw lots to determine ‘who should be punished
with the cord until death, praying the Almighty God, the
Creator of Heaven and Earth, to direct that the lot may fall on
the guiltiest, whereupon’ the record reads, ‘the lot fell by
God’s Providence on Manuel Gerrit, the Giant, who was
accordingly sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead as
an example to all such malefactors.’ Four days after the trial,
and on the day of the sentence, all Nieuw Amsterdam left its
accustomed work to gaze on the unwonted spectacle. Various
Indians also gathered, wondering, to the scene. The giant
negro is brought out by the black hangman, and placed on the
ladder against the fort with two strong halters around his
neck. After an exhortation from Domine Bogardus during
which the negro chaunts barbaric invocations to his favorite
Fetich, he is duly turned off the ladder into the air. Under the
 violent struggles and weight of the giant, however, both
halters break. He falls to the ground. He utters piteous cries.
Now on his knees, now twisting and groveling on the earth.
The women shriek. The men join in his prayers for mercy to
the stern Director. He is no trifler and the law must have its
course. The hangman prepares a stronger rope. Finally the
cry for mercy is so general that the Director relents, and the
fortunate giant is led off the ground by his swarthy friends,
somewhat disturbed in his intellect by his near view of the
grim King of Terrors.”
Up to February 21, 1788, benefit of clergy existed; that is, the plea
in capital felonies of being able to read. This was a monkish privilege
first extended only to priestly persons. In England it was not
abolished till 1827. The minutes of the Court of General Quarter
Sessions in New York bear records of criminals who pleaded “the
benefit” and were branded on the brawn of the left thumb with “T” in
open court and then discharged.
As the punishments accorded for crimes were not severe for the
notions of the times, it is almost amusing to read some fierce
ordinances,—though there is no record of any executions in
accordance with them. For instance, in January, 1659, by the
Director-General and Council with the advice of the burgomasters
and schepens it was enacted that “No person shall strip the fences
of posts or rails under penalty for the first offence of being whipped
and branded, and for the second, of punishment with the cord until
death ensues.” It is really astonishing to think of these kindly Dutch
gentlemen calmly ordering hanging for stealing fence-rails, though of
course the matter reached further than at first appeared: there was
danger of a scarcity of grain; and if the fences were stolen, the cattle
would trample down and destroy the grain. Later orders as to fences
were given which appear eminently calculated to be mischief-
making. “Persons thinking their neighbors’ fences not good, first to
request them to repair; failing which to report to the overseers.” In
1674 all persons were forbidden to leave the city except by city-gate,
under penalty of death; this was of course when war threatened.
 The crime of suicide was not without punishment. Suicides were
denied ordinary burial rites. In Dutch days when one Smitt of New
York committed suicide, the schout asked that his body be drawn on
a hurdle and buried with a stake in his heart. This order was not
executed; he was buried at night and his estates confiscated. When
Sir Danvers Osborne—the Governor for a day—was found dead by
his own act, he was “decently interred in Trinity churchyard.”
Women in New York sometimes made their appearance in New
York courts, as in those of other colonies, in another rôle than that of
witness or criminal; they sometimes sat on juries. In the year 1701,
six good Albany wives served on a jury: Tryntje Roseboom, Catheren
Gysbertse, Angeneutt Jacobse, Marritje Dirkse, Elsje Lansing, and
Susanna Bratt. They were, of course, empanelled for a special duty,
not to serve on the entire evidence of the case for which they were
engaged.
Many old records are found which employ quaint metaphors or
legal expressions; I give one which refers to a custom which seems
at one time to have been literally performed. It occurs in a
commission granted to the trustees of an estate of which the debts
exceeded the assets. Any widow in Holland or New Netherland could
be relieved of all demands or claims of her husband’s creditors by
relinquishing all right of inheritance. This widow took this privilege; it
is recorded thus:—
“Whereas, Harman Jacobsen Bamboes has been lately
shot dead, murdered by the Indians, and whereas the estate
left by him has been kicked away with the foot by his wife who
has laid the key on the coffin, it is therefore necessary to
authorize and qualify some persons to regulate the same.”
There was a well-known Dutch saying which referred to this
privilege, Den Sleutel op het graf leggen, and simply meant not to
pay the debts of the deceased.
This legal term and custom is of ancient origin. In Davies’ “History
of Holland” we read of a similar form being gone through with in
Holland in 1404, according to the law of Rhynland. The widow of a
great nobleman immediately after his death desired to renounce all
claim on his estate and responsibility for his debts. She chose a
guardian, and, advancing with him to the door of the Court (where
the body of the dead Count had been placed on a bier), announced
that she was dressed wholly in borrowed clothing; she then formally
gave a straw to her guardian, who threw it on the dead body, saying
he renounced for her all right of dower, and abjured all debts. This
was derived from a still more ancient custom of the Franks, who
renounced all alliances by the symbolic breaking and throwing away
a straw.
In other states of the Netherlands the widow gave up dower and
debts by laying a key and purse on the coffin. This immunity was
claimed by persons in high rank, one being the widow of the Count
of Flanders.
In New England (as I have told at length in my book, “Customs
and Fashions in Old New England,”) the widow who wished to
renounce her husband’s debts was married in her shift, often at the
cross-roads, at midnight. These shift-marriages took place in
Massachusetts as late as 1836; I have a copy of a court record of
that date.
I know of but one instance of the odious and degrading English
custom of wife-trading taking place in New York. Laurens Duyts, an
agent for Anneke Jans in some of her business transactions, was in
the year 1663 sentenced to be flogged and have his right ear cut off
for selling his wife, Mistress Duyts, to one Jansen. Possibly the
severity of the punishment may have prevented the recurrence of the
crime.
After a somewhat extended study and comparison of the early
court and church records of New England with those of New York, I
cannot fail to draw the conclusion—if it is just to judge from such
comparisons—that the state of social morals was higher in the Dutch
colonies than in the English. Perhaps the settlers of Boston and
Plymouth were more severe towards suspicion of immorality, as they
were infinitely more severe towards suspicion of irreligion, than were
their Dutch neighbors. And they may have given more publicity and
punishment to deviations from the path of rectitude and uprightness;
but certainly from their own records no fair-minded person can fail to
deem them more frail, more erring, more wicked, than the Dutch.
The circumstances of immigration and the tendencies of
temperament were diverse, and perhaps it was natural that a
reaction tending to sin and vice should come to the intense and
overwrought religionist rather than to the phlegmatic and prosperous
trader. In Virginia and Maryland the presence of many convict-
emigrants would form a reasonable basis for the existence of the
crime and law-breaking which certainly was in those colonies far in
excess of the crime in New Netherland and New York.
I know that Rev. Mr. Miller, the English clergyman, did not give the
settlement a very good name at the last of the seventeenth century;
but even his strictures cannot force me to believe the colonists so
unbearably wicked.
It should also be emphasized that New Netherland was far more
tolerant, more generous than New England to all of differing religious
faiths. Under Stuyvesant, however, Quakers were interdicted from
preaching, were banished, and one Friend was treated with great
cruelty. The Dutch clergymen opposed the establishment of a
Lutheran church, and were rebuked by the Directors in Holland, who
said that in the future they would send out clergymen “not tainted
with any needless preciseness;” and Stuyvesant was also rebuked
for issuing an ordinance imposing a penalty for holding conventicles
not in accordance with the Synod of Dort. Many Christians not in
accordance in belief with that synod settled in New Netherland.
Quakers, Lutherans, Church of England folk, Anabaptists,
Huguenots, Waldenses, Walloons. The Jews were protected and
admitted to the rights of citizenship. Director Kieft, with heavy
ransoms, rescued the captive Jesuits, Father Jogues and Father
Bressani, from the Indians and tenderly cared for them. No witches
suffered death in New York, and no statute law existed against
witchcraft. There is record of but one witchcraft trial under the
English governor, Nicholls, who speedily joined with the Dutch in
setting aside all that nonsense.
 CHAPTER XIII
CHURCH AND SUNDAY IN OLD NEW YORK

Sunday was not observed in New Netherland with any such rigidity
as in New England. The followers of Cocceius would not willingly
include Saturday night, and not even all of the Sabbath day, in their
holy time. Madam Knight, writing in 1704 of a visit to New York,
noted: “The Dutch aren’t strict in keeping the Sabbath as in Boston
and other places where I have been.” This was, of course, in times of
English rule in New York. Still, much respect to the day was required,
especially under the governing hand of the rigid Calvinist
Stuyvesant. He specially enjoined and enforced strict regard for
seemly quiet during service time. The records of Stuyvesant’s
government are full of injunctions and laws prohibiting “tavern-
tapping” during the hours of church service. He would not tolerate
fishing, gathering of berries or nuts, playing in the street, nor gaming
at ball or bowls during church time. At a little later date the time of
prohibition of noise and tapping and gaming was extended to include
the entire Sabbath day, and the schout was ordered to be active in
searching out and punishing such offenders.
Occasionally his vigilance did discover some Sabbath disorders.
He found the first Jew trader who came to the island of Manhattan
serenely keeping open shop on Sunday, and selling during sermon
time, knowing naught of any Sunday laws of New Amsterdam.
And Albert the Trumpeter was seen on the Sabbath in suspicious
guise, with an axe on his shoulder,—but he was only going to cut a
bat for his little son; and as for his neighbor who did cut wood, it was
only kindling, since his children were cold.
And one Sunday evening in 1660 the schout triumphantly found
three sailors round a tap-house table with a lighted candle and a
backgammon-board thereon; and he surely had a right to draw an
inference of gaming therefrom.
And in another public-house ninepins were visible, and a can and
glass, during preaching-time. The landlady had her excuse,—some
came to her house and said church was out, and one chanced to
have a bowl in his hand and another a pin, but there was no playing
at bowls.
Still, though he snooped and fined, in 1656 the burgomasters
learned “by daily and painful experience” that the profanation of “the
Lord’s day of Rest by the dangerous, Yes, damnable Sale or Dealing
out of Wines Beers and Brandy-Waters” still went on; and fresh
Sunday Laws were issued forbidding “the ordinary and customary
Labors of callings, such as Sowing, Mowing, Building, Sawing wood,
Smithing, Bleeching, Hunting, Fishing.” All idle sports were banned
and named: “Dancing, Card-playing, Tick-tacking, Playing at ball, at
bowls, at ninepins; taking Jaunts in Boats, Wagons, or Carriages.”
In 1673, again, the magistrates “experienced to our great grief”
that rolling ninepins was more in vogue on Sunday than on any other
day. And we learn that there were social clubs that “Set on the
Sabbath,” which must speedily be put an end to. Thirty men were
found by the schout in one tap-huys; but as they were playing
ninepins and backgammon two hours after the church-doors had
closed, prosecution was most reluctantly abandoned.
Of course scores of “tappers” were prosecuted, both in taverns
and private houses. Piety and regard for an orderly Sabbath were
not the only guiding thoughts in the burgomasters’ minds in framing
these Sunday liquor laws and enforcing them; for some tapsters had
“tapped beer during divine service and used a small kind of measure
which is in contempt of our religion and must ruin our state,”—and
the state was sacred. In the country, as for instance on Long Island,
the carting of grain, travelling for pleasure, and shooting of wild-fowl
on Sunday were duly punished in the local courts.
I do not think that children were as rigid church attendants in New
York as in New England. In 1696, in Albany, we find this injunction:
“ye Constables in eache warde to take thought in attending at ye
church to hender such children as Profane ye Sabbath;” and we
know that Albany boys and girls were complained of for coasting
down hill on Sunday,—which enormity would have been simply
impossible in New England, except in an isolated outburst of Adamic
depravity. In another New York town the “Athoatys” complained of
the violation of the Sabbath by “the Younger Sort of people in
Discourssing of Vane things and Running of Raesses.” As for the city
of New York, even at Revolutionary times a cage was set up on City
Hall Park in which to confine wicked New York boys who profaned
the Sabbath. I do not find so full provisions made for seating children
in Dutch Reformed churches as in Puritan meeting-houses. A wise
saying of Martin Luther’s was “Public sermons do very little edify
children”—perhaps the Dutch agreed with him. As the children were
taught the Bible and the catechism every day in the week, their
spiritual and religious schooling was sufficient without the Sunday
sermon,—but, of course, if they were not in the church during
services, they would “talk of vane Things and run Raesses.”
Before the arrival of any Dutch preacher in the new settlement in
the new world, the spiritual care of the little company was provided
for by men appointed to a benign and beautiful old Dutch office, and
called krankebesoeckers or zeikentroosters,—“comforters of the
Sick,”—who not only tenderly comforted the sick and weary of heart,
but “read to the Commonalty on Sundays from texts of Scripture with
the Comments.” These pious men were assigned to this godly work
in Fort Orange and in New Amsterdam and Breuckelen. In Esopus
they had meetings every Sunday, “and one among us read
something for a postille.” Often special books of sermons were read
to the congregations.
In Fort Orange they had a domine before they had a church. The
patroon instructed Van Curler to build a church in 1642; but it was
not until 1646 that the little wooden edifice was really put up. It was
furnished at a cost of about thirty-two dollars by carpenter
Fredricksen, with a predickstoel, or pulpit, a seat for the magistrates,
—de Heerebanke,—one for the deacons, nine benches and several
corner-seats.