the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of

perfection; founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose

appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and

permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness.

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it

demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for

detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the

spell of the daily routine to respond to tappings from outside, and tales

of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of

such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the

majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up

the greater part of human experience. But the sensitive are always with

us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of

the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or

Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper

or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or

tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other

pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and

closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our

innermost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important,

though not numerically great, minority of our species.

Man's first instincts and emotions formed his response to the environment