Modern science has, in the end, proved an enemy to art and pleasure; for by revealing to us the whole sordid and prosaic basis of our thoughts, motives, and acts, it has stripped the world of glamour, wonder, and all those illusions of heroism, nobility, and sacrifice which used to sound so impressive when romantically treated. Indeed, it is not too much to say that psychological discovery, and chemical, physical, and physiological research, have largely destroyed the element of emotion among informed and sophisticated people by resolving it into its component parts—intellectual idea and animal impulse. The so-called ‘soul’ with all its hectic and mawkish attributes of sentimentality, veneration, earnestness, devotion, and the like, has perished on analysis This is an intensely interesting utterance. In spite of Lovecraft’s claim of intellectual independence from his time, it is clear that he had absorbed enough of the Victorian belief in ‘heroism, nobility, and sacrifice’ to be shaken by the revelation, via Freud and Nietzsche, of their ‘sordid and prosaic basis’. For the moment he adopted a sort of aesthetic Decadence that might allow these illusions to be preserved after a fashion precisely by recognizing their artificiality. We cannot regain that blissful ignorance of our triviality in the cosmic scheme of things and of the hollowness of our lofty ideals which allowed prior ages to create the illusion of significance in human affairs. The solution—for now—is to ‘worship afresh the music and colour of divine language, and take an Epicurean delight in those combinations of ideas and fancies which we know to be artificial’. If there is any literary source for any of these views, it is Oscar Wilde. It is not likely that Wilde actually generated Lovecraft’s views; rather, Lovecraft found Wilde a highly articulate spokesman for the sort of views he was nebulously coming to adopt.
There are two general caveats that should be borne in mind when studying Lovecraft’s Decadent stance: first, he clearly wished to believe that his position did not commit him entirely, or at all, to the avant-garde; and second, he had no wish to follow the Decadents in the repudiation of Victorianism on the level of personal conduct. As to the first point, let me quote in full that statement from ‘In the Editor’s Study’ of July 1923 which I cited earlier:
What is art but a matter of impressions, of pictures, emotions, and symmetrical sensations? It must have poignancy and beauty, but nothing else counts. It may or may not have coherence. If concerned with large externals or simple fancies, or produced in a simple age, it is likely to be of a clear and continuous pattern; but if concerned with individual reactions to life in a complex and analytical age, as most modern art is, it tends to break up into detached transcripts of hidden sensation and offer a loosely joined fabric which demands from the spectator a discriminating duplication of the artist’s mood.
This statement—particularly the remark about ‘life in a complex and analytical age’—is remarkably similar to T. S. Eliot’s celebrated definition and justification of modernism, as expressed in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), especially the point that ‘poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult’.17 But Lovecraft pulls back at the last; perhaps aware that his amateur audience would be dumbfounded by the perception of the antiquated fossil Lovecraft becoming avant-garde, he hastily adds that he is ‘no convert to Dadaism’, concluding:
Nothing, on the contrary, seems more certain … than that the bulk of radical prose and verse represents merely the extravagant extreme of a tendency whose truly artistic application is vastly more limited. Traces of this tendency, whereby pictorial methods are used, and words and images employed without conventional connexions to excite sensations, may be found throughout literature; especially in Keats, William Blake, and the French symbolists. This broader conception of art does not outrage any eternal tradition, but honours all creations of the past or present which can shew genuine ecstatic fire and a glamour not tawdrily founded on utterly commonplace emotions.
Lovecraft is slowly carving out a place for himself between Victorian conventionality and modernist radicalism: in this way he can continue to fulminate against such things as free verse, streamof-consciousness, or the chaoticism of Eliot and Joyce as illegitimate extensions of his Decadent principles.
The second point in this entire issue—Decadence as a mode of conduct—is clarified in Lovecraft’s discussion with Frank Long in 1923–24 about the merits of Puritanism. This discussion occasionally becomes a little frivolous, and Lovecraft seems at times to be uttering hyperbole in a deliberate attempt to tease Long. After condemning ‘Bohemians’ for their ‘wild lives’,18 he goes on to say:
An intellectual Puritan is a fool—almost as much of a fool as is an anti-Puritan—but a Puritan in the conduct of life is the only kind of man one may honestly respect. I have no respect or reverence whatever for any person who does not live abstemiously and purely—I can like him and tolerate him, and admit him to be a social equal as I do Clark Ashton Smith and Mortonius and Kleiner and others like that, but in my heart I feel him to be my inferior—nearer the abysmal amoeba and the Neanderthal man—and at times cannot veil a sort of condescension and sardonic contempt for him, no matter how much my aesthetick and intellectual superior he may be.19
Of course, the various code words in this utterance (‘abstemiously’, ‘purely’) are a thin veil for restraint in sexual behaviour; the mentions of Smith and Kleiner-—both of whom were openly fond of female companionship and boasted of their conquests of various women, single or married—are also telling. Lovecraft had, therefore, sloughed off (or, in reality, never really adopted) the aesthetics of Victorianism but could not—or did not wish to—relinquish the sexual Puritanism he had no doubt gained at his mother’s knee.
And yet, Lovecraft was by no means in the modernist camp. Several intensely interesting documents of this period bear this out with much emphasis. It is certainly odd that the two great landmarks of modernism—Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land— appeared in the same year, 1922; but their fortuitously joint appearance compelled Lovecraft to address them in some fashion or other. He read The Waste Land in its first American appearance, in the Dial for November 1922 (it had appeared in England in Eliot’s magazine, the Criterion, for October). Shortly thereafter, he wrote one or both of his responses to the poem. The first is an editorial in the March 1923 Conservative headed ‘Rudis Indigestaque Moles’ (taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: ‘A rough and unfinished mass’). Lovecraft asserts: ‘The old heroics, pieties, and sentimentalities are dead amongst the sophisticated; and even some of our appreciations of natural beauty are threatened.’ The Waste Land is one result of this state of confusion and turbulence:
We here behold a practically meaningless collection of phrases, learned allusions, quotations, slang, and scraps in general; offered to the public (whether or not as a hoax) as something justified by our modern mind with its recent comprehension of its own chaotic triviality and disorganisation. And we behold th[e] public, or a considerable part of it, receiving this hilarious melange as something vital and typical; as ‘a poem of profound significance,’ to quote its sponsors.