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Voice of the Imagination, whole no. 50, July 1947
Page 5
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invented a sixth sense, the sense of wonder, to enjoy her in her most mysterious moods. 'Next, when you are describing A shape, or sound, or tint; Don't state the matter plainly, But put it in a hint; And learn to look at all things With a sort of mental squint.' "The flash of lightning over a graveyard, the typhoon at sea, the owl hooting by the ruined seat of greatness--all these gave extreme pleasure to the senses, and the most refined sensibility collected new types of sense experience as 18th-century earls collected antique marbles and as present-day monarchs collect stamps. "The love of cruelty and torture, the excitement over exotic loves, the passion for the new in exploration & adventure were in part an expression of the desire for new tracts of territory in which the sense could be exercised. 'I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts,' says Ishmael in MOBY DICK.... The Gothic castle by twilight became the symbol of the fantasies of the horror novelists. Hoffmann, Mrs. Radcliffe, Edgar Allan Poe are the heirophants of a cult. "The romantic loved solitude. Wordsworth retreated to the Lake District. Hatteras (Captain Hatteras, of Verne's "The English at the North Pole") fled to the shaggy north like Frankenstein pursuing his monster... "The sea, the ivory tower, the desert island, the wind, artificial man, the poles, the doppelganger, the noble savage, the secret city of a lost civilization, the ghost ship, the journey through space to the moon or one of the planets, broken machinery, the Wandering Jew--these are a few common romantic symbols to which an almost sacramental mystery was attached...." Adjacent to JULES VERNE I see another stranger: to me, i.e.: Speer's monumental FANCYCLOPEDIA. Only recently did I get my first view of it--I hadn't dared have it, sent out to me abroad lest it be lost, as so much else was. A perfect example of the wit & industry of American fandom. This leads me to compare mentally American & British fandom, which broadens into a general view of the respective fantasy-stf-doms. Who has done more for this "romanticism"--Americans or British? On the surface, the States: they produced a once enormous, and now still large, flood of magazines, against which the British produced only two, now both defunct (admittedly not because they failed to prosper, but because of DYKTAWO) and once again there are two: New Worlds & Fantasy. But then the American public is magazine conscious: it buys comparitively few books. Whereas you can't keep the British out of their bookshops & libraries, and they have no great interest in the ephemeral magazine. Again, having a population going on 3 times the size of Britain's, naturally the Americans would produce more mags. Yet, nearer literature, Britain has produced more of the better class writers. Glancing along the backs of these books of mine I see the names Wells, Stapledon, Rider, Haggard, Conan Doyle, M.P Shiel, J.D. Beresford, M.R. James, Aldous Huxley, S. Fowler Wright, Arthur Machen, Victor MacClure, James Hilton, Lord Dunsany, G.K. Chesterton, Bram Stoker, Walter de la Mare, J.B. Priestley, William Hope Hodgson, Neil Bell, George Griffiths, Sax Rohmer, Eden Phillpott's, Algernon Blackwood. What American book authors can we place beside these? Bierce, Burroughs, Poe, Merritt, Jack London, Lovecraft, Thorne Smith, John Taine. I'll gladly admit Weinbaum. But are the Heinleins & Campbells human enough to stand on their own with the public outside the covers of ASTOUNDING? I don't think so. You've got to be an old hand with plenty of technical knowledge before you can fully appreciate the very real merits of their work. They might arouse John Doe's sense of wonder all right, but he'll only wonder what the hell they're driving at. And here, of course, is where we do hand it to the Yanks: all the latest experimental work in, and development of, stf. has been wrought in the States: thought variants & mutants & the super-terrifics hammered put i the ESSmithery, and refinement upon refinement (until in some cases the wonder has been refined out of it altogether). Still, I maintain, the poets were in the vanguard--"Locksley Hall," "Ozymandias," "The Golden Road to Samarkand," "Kubla Khan," "The Music Makers," "Omar Khayyam," and so on. There's the font of our romanticism, the primary source of stf & fantasy. Very British, you might notice. Line your poets up against Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Browning, Byron, Shelley, Keats,
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invented a sixth sense, the sense of wonder, to enjoy her in her most mysterious moods. 'Next, when you are describing A shape, or sound, or tint; Don't state the matter plainly, But put it in a hint; And learn to look at all things With a sort of mental squint.' "The flash of lightning over a graveyard, the typhoon at sea, the owl hooting by the ruined seat of greatness--all these gave extreme pleasure to the senses, and the most refined sensibility collected new types of sense experience as 18th-century earls collected antique marbles and as present-day monarchs collect stamps. "The love of cruelty and torture, the excitement over exotic loves, the passion for the new in exploration & adventure were in part an expression of the desire for new tracts of territory in which the sense could be exercised. 'I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts,' says Ishmael in MOBY DICK.... The Gothic castle by twilight became the symbol of the fantasies of the horror novelists. Hoffmann, Mrs. Radcliffe, Edgar Allan Poe are the heirophants of a cult. "The romantic loved solitude. Wordsworth retreated to the Lake District. Hatteras (Captain Hatteras, of Verne's "The English at the North Pole") fled to the shaggy north like Frankenstein pursuing his monster... "The sea, the ivory tower, the desert island, the wind, artificial man, the poles, the doppelganger, the noble savage, the secret city of a lost civilization, the ghost ship, the journey through space to the moon or one of the planets, broken machinery, the Wandering Jew--these are a few common romantic symbols to which an almost sacramental mystery was attached...." Adjacent to JULES VERNE I see another stranger: to me, i.e.: Speer's monumental FANCYCLOPEDIA. Only recently did I get my first view of it--I hadn't dared have it, sent out to me abroad lest it be lost, as so much else was. A perfect example of the wit & industry of American fandom. This leads me to compare mentally American & British fandom, which broadens into a general view of the respective fantasy-stf-doms. Who has done more for this "romanticism"--Americans or British? On the surface, the States: they produced a once enormous, and now still large, flood of magazines, against which the British produced only two, now both defunct (admittedly not because they failed to prosper, but because of DYKTAWO) and once again there are two: New Worlds & Fantasy. But then the American public is magazine conscious: it buys comparitively few books. Whereas you can't keep the British out of their bookshops & libraries, and they have no great interest in the ephemeral magazine. Again, having a population going on 3 times the size of Britain's, naturally the Americans would produce more mags. Yet, nearer literature, Britain has produced more of the better class writers. Glancing along the backs of these books of mine I see the names Wells, Stapledon, Rider, Haggard, Conan Doyle, M.P Shiel, J.D. Beresford, M.R. James, Aldous Huxley, S. Fowler Wright, Arthur Machen, Victor MacClure, James Hilton, Lord Dunsany, G.K. Chesterton, Bram Stoker, Walter de la Mare, J.B. Priestley, William Hope Hodgson, Neil Bell, George Griffiths, Sax Rohmer, Eden Phillpott's, Algernon Blackwood. What American book authors can we place beside these? Bierce, Burroughs, Poe, Merritt, Jack London, Lovecraft, Thorne Smith, John Taine. I'll gladly admit Weinbaum. But are the Heinleins & Campbells human enough to stand on their own with the public outside the covers of ASTOUNDING? I don't think so. You've got to be an old hand with plenty of technical knowledge before you can fully appreciate the very real merits of their work. They might arouse John Doe's sense of wonder all right, but he'll only wonder what the hell they're driving at. And here, of course, is where we do hand it to the Yanks: all the latest experimental work in, and development of, stf. has been wrought in the States: thought variants & mutants & the super-terrifics hammered put i the ESSmithery, and refinement upon refinement (until in some cases the wonder has been refined out of it altogether). Still, I maintain, the poets were in the vanguard--"Locksley Hall," "Ozymandias," "The Golden Road to Samarkand," "Kubla Khan," "The Music Makers," "Omar Khayyam," and so on. There's the font of our romanticism, the primary source of stf & fantasy. Very British, you might notice. Line your poets up against Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Browning, Byron, Shelley, Keats,
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