The Picture in the House / Оригинал текста

Напи­са­но 12 Декаб­ря, 1920
Опуб­ли­ко­ва­но в Июле 1919^* в The National Amateur, 41, No. 6, 246–49.

---

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais,¹ and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles,² and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands.³ But the true epicure in the terrible,⁴ to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled ways, usually squatted upon some damp, grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock. Two hundred years and more they have leaned or squatted there, while vines have crawled and the trees have swelled and spread. They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows⁵ still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things.

In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the world has ever seen. Seized with a gloomy and fanatical belief which exiled them from their kind, their ancestors sought the wilderness for freedom. There the scions of a conquering race indeed flourished free from the restrictions of their fellows, but cowered in an appall-ing slavery to the dismal phantasms of their own minds. Divorced from the enlightenment of civilisation, the strength of these Puritans⁶ turned into singular channels; and in their isolation, morbid self-repression, and struggle for life with relentless Nature, there came to them dark furtive traits from the prehistoric depths of their cold Northern heritage. By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not beautiful in their sins. Erring as all mortals must, they were forced by their rigid code to seek concealment above all else; so that they came to use less and less taste in what they concealed⁷. Only the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden since the early days; and they are not communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness which helps them forget. Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.

It was to a time-battered edifice of this description that I was driven one afternoon in November, 1896, by a rain of such chilling copiousness that any shelter was preferable to exposure. I had been travelling for some time amongst the people of the Miskatonic Valley⁸ in quest of certain genealogical data; and from the remote, devious, and problematical nature of my course, had deemed it convenient to employ a bicycle despite the lateness of the season⁹. Now I found myself upon an apparently abandoned road which I had chosen as the shortest cut to Arkham;¹⁰ overtaken by the storm at a point far from any town, and confronted with no refuge save the antique and repellent wooden building which blinked with bleared windows from between two huge leafless elms near the foot of a rocky hill. Distant though it was from the remnant of a road, the house none the less impressed me unfavourably the very moment I espied it. Honest, wholesome structures do not stare at travellers so slyly and hauntingly, and in my genealogical researches I had encountered legends of a century before which biassed me against places of this kind. Yet the force of the elements was such as to overcome my scruples, and I did not hesitate to wheel my machine up the weedy rise to the closed door which seemed at once so suggestive and secretive.

I had somehow taken it for granted that the house was abandoned, yet as I approached it I was not so sure; for though the walks were indeed overgrown with weeds, they seemed to retain their nature a little too well to argue complete desertion. Therefore instead of trying the door I knocked, feeling as I did so a trepidation I could scarcely explain. As I waited on the rough, mossy rock which served as a doorstep, I glanced at the neighbouring windows and the panes of the transom above me, and noticed that although old, rattling, and almost opaque with dirt, they were not broken. The building, then, must still be inhabited, despite its isolation and general neglect. How-ever, my rapping evoked no response, so after repeating the summons I tried the rusty latch and found the door unfastened. Inside was a little vestibule with walls from which the plaster was falling, and through the doorway came a faint but peculiarly hateful odour. I entered, carrying my bicycle, and closed the door behind me. Ahead rose a narrow staircase, flanked by a small door probably leading to the cellar, while to the left and right were closed doors leading to rooms on the ground floor.

Leaning my cycle against the wall I opened the door at the left, and crossed into a small low-ceiled chamber but dimly lighted by its two dusty windows and furnished in the barest and most primitive possible way. It appeared to be a kind of sitting-room, for it had a table and several chairs, and an immense fireplace above which ticked an antique clock on a mantel. Books and papers were very few, and in the prevailing gloom I could not readily discern the titles. What interested me was the uniform air of archaism as displayed in every visible detail. Most of the houses in this region I had found rich in relics of the past, but here the antiquity was curiously complete; for in all the room I could not discover a single article of definitely post-revolutionary date. Had the furnishings been less humble, the place would have been a collector’s paradise.

As I surveyed this quaint apartment, I felt an increase in that aversion first excited by the bleak exterior of the house. Just what it was that I feared or loathed, I could by no means define; but something in the whole atmosphere seemed redolent of unhallowed age, of unpleasant crudeness, and of secrets which should be forgotten. I felt disinclined to sit down, and wandered about examining the various articles which I had noticed. The first object of my curiosity was a book of medium size¹¹ lying upon the table and presenting such an antediluvian aspect that I marvelled at beholding it outside a museum or library. It was bound in leather with metal fittings, and was in an excellent state of preservation; being altogether an unusual sort of volume to encounter in an abode so lowly. When I opened it to the title page my wonder grew even greater, for it proved to be nothing less rare than Pigafetta’s account of the Congo region¹² written in Latin from the notes of the sailor Lopez and printed at Frankfort in 1598¹³. I had often heard of this work, with its curious illustrations by the brothers De Bry,¹⁴ hence for a moment forgot my uneasiness in my desire to turn the pages before me. The engravings were indeed interesting, drawn wholly from imagination and careless descriptions, and represented negroes with white skins and Caucasian features¹⁵; nor would I soon have closed the book had not an exceedingly trivial circumstance upset my tired nerves and revived my sensation of disquiet. What annoyed me was merely the persistent way in which the volume tended to fall open of itself at Plate XII which represented in gruesome detail a butcher’s shop of the cannibal Anziques.¹⁶ I experienced some shame at my susceptibility to so slight a thing, but the drawing nevertheless disturbed me, especially in connexion with some adjacent passages descriptive of Anzique gastronomy.

I had turned to a neighbouring shelf and was examining its meagre literary contents — an eighteenth-century Bible, a Pilgrim’s Progress¹⁷ of like period, illustrated with grotesque woodcuts and printed by the almanack-maker Isaiah Thomas,¹⁸ the rotting bulk of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana,¹⁹ and a few other books of evidently equal age — when my attention was aroused by the unmistakable sound of walking in the room overhead. At first astonished and startled, considering the lack of response to my recent knocking at the door, I immediately afterward concluded that the walker had just awakened from a sound sleep; and listened with less surprise as the footsteps sounded on the creaking stairs. The tread was heavy, yet seemed to contain a curious quality of cautiousness; a quality which I disliked the more because the tread was heavy. When I had entered the room I had shut the door behind me. Now, after a moment of silence during which the walker may have been inspecting my bicycle in the hall, I heard a fumbling at the latch and saw the panelled portal swing open again.

In the doorway stood a person of such singular appearance that I should have exclaimed aloud but for the restraints of good breeding. Old, white-bearded, and ragged, my host possessed a countenance and physique which inspired equal wonder and respect. His height could not have been less than six feet, and despite a general air of age and poverty he was stout and powerful in proportion. His face, almost hidden by a long beard which grew high on the cheeks, seemed abnormally ruddy and less wrinkled than one might expect; while over a high forehead fell a shock of white hair little thinned by the years. His blue eyes, though a trifle bloodshot, seemed inexplicably keen and burning. But for his horrible unkemptness the man would have been as distinguished-looking as he was impressive. This unkemptness, however, made him offensive despite his face and figure. Of what his clothing consisted I could hardly tell, for it seemed to me no more than a mass of tatters surmounting a pair of high, heavy boots; and his lack of cleanliness surpassed description.²⁰

The appearance of this man, and the instinctive fear he inspired, prepared me for something like enmity; so that I almost shuddered through surprise and a sense of uncanny incongruity when he motioned me to a chair and addressed me in a thin, weak voice full of fawning respect and ingratiating hospitality. His speech was very curious, an extreme form of Yankee dialect I had thought long extinct; and I studied it closely as he sat down opposite me for conversation.

“Ketched in the rain, be ye?“²¹ he greeted. “Glad ye was nigh the haouse en’ hed the sense ta come right in. I calc-‘late I was asleep, else I’d a heerd ye‑I ain’t as young as I uster be, an’ I need a paowerful sight o’ naps naowadays. Trav’lin’ fur? I hain’t seed many folks long this rud sence they tuk off the Arkham stage.”

I replied that I was going to Arkham, and apologised for my rude entry into his domicile, whereupon he continued.

“Glad ta see ye, young Sir-new faces is scurce arount here, an’ I hain’t got much ta cheer me up these days. Guess yew hail from Bosting,²² don’t ye? I never ben thar, but I kin tell a taown man when I see ‘im-we hed one fer deestrick schoolmaster in ‘eighty-four, but he quit suddent an’ no one never heerd on ‘im sence-” Here the old man lapsed into a kind of chuckle, and made no explanation when I questioned him. He seemed to be in an aboundingly good humour, yet to possess those eccentricities which one might guess from his grooming. For some time he rambled on with an almost feverish geniality, when it struck me to ask him how he came by so rare a book as Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo. The effect of this volume had not left me, and I felt a certain hesitancy in speaking of it; but curiosity overmastered all the vague fears which had steadily accumulated since my first glimpse of the house. To my relief, the question did not seem an awkward one,- for the old man answered freely and volubly.

“Oh, thet Afriky book? Cap’n Ebenezer Holt traded me thet in ‘sixty-eight-him as was kilt in the war.” Something about the name of Ebenezer Holt caused me to look up sharply. I had encountered it in my genealogical work, but not in any record since the Revolution. I wondered if my host could help me in the task at which I was labouring, and resolved to ask him about it later on. He continued.

“Ebenezer was on a Salem merchantman for years, an’ picked up a sight o’ queer stuff in every port. He got this in London, I guess-he uster like ter buy things at the shops. I was up ta his haouse onct, on the hill, tradin’ hosses, when I see this book. I relished the picters, so he give it in on a swap. Tis a queer book-here, leave me git on my spectacles-” The old man fumbled among his rags, producing a pair of dirty and amazingly antique glasses with small octagonal lenses and steel bows. Donning these, he reached for the volume on the table and turned the pages lovingly.

“Ebenezer cud read a leetle o’ this-’tis Latin-but I can’t. I bed two er three schoolmasters read me a bit, and Passon Clark,²³ him they say got draownded in the pond- kin yew make anything outen it?” I told him that I could, and translated for his benefit a paragraph near the beginning. If I erred, he was not scholar enough to correct me; for he seemed childishly pleased at my English version. His proximity was becoming obnoxious, yet I saw no way to escape without offending him. I was amused at the childish fondness of this ignorant old man for the pictures in a book he could not read, and wondered how much better he could read the few books in English which adorned his room. This revelation of simplicity removed much of the ill-defined apprehension I had felt, and I smiled as my host rambled on:

“Queer haow picters kin set a body thinkin’. Take this un here near the front. Hev yew ever seed trees like thet, with big leaves a‑floppin’ over an’ daown? And them men — them can’t be niggers — they dew beat all. Kinder like Injuns, I guess, even ef they be in Afriky. Some o’ these here critters looks like monkeys, or half monkeys an’ half men, but I never heerd o’ nothing like this un.” Here he pointed to a fabulous creature of the artist, which one might describe as a sort of dragon with the head of an alligator.²⁴

“But naow I’ll shew ye the best un — over here nigh the middle-” The old man’s speech grew a trifle thicker and his eyes assumed a brighter glow; but his fumbling hands, though seemingly clumsier than before, were entirely adequate to their mission. The book fell open, almost of its own accord and as if from frequent consultation at this place, to the repellent twelfth plate shewing a butcher’s shop amongst the Anzique cannibals. My sense of restlessness returned, though I did not exhibit it. The especially bizarre thing was that the artist had made his Africans look like white men-the limbs and quarters hanging about the walls of the shop were ghastly, while the butcher with his axe was hideously incongruous. But my host seemed to relish the view as much as I disliked it.

“What d’ye think o’ this — ain’t never see the like hereabouts, eh? When I see this I telled Eb Holt, Thar’s suthin’ ta stir ye up an’ make yer blood tickle!’ When I read the Scripter about slayin’ — like them Midianites²⁵ was slew — I kinder think things, but I ain’t got no picter of it. Here a body kin see all they is to it — I s’pose ’tis sinful, but ain’t we all born an’ livin’ in sin? — Thet feller bein’ chopped up gives me a tickle every time I look at ‘im‑I hev ta keep lookin’ at ‘im-see whar the butcher cut off his feet? Thar’s his head on thet bench, with one arm side of it, an’ t’other arm’s on the graound side o’ the meat block.”

As the man mumbled on in his shocking ecstasy the expression on his hairy, spectacled face became indescribable, but his voice sank rather than mounted. My own sensations can scarcely be recorded. All the terror I had dimly felt before rushed upon me actively and vividly, and I knew that I loathed the ancient and abhorrent creature so near me with an infinite intensity. His madness, or at least his partial perversion, seemed beyond dispute. He was almost whispering now, with a huskiness more terrible than a scream, and I trembled as I listened.

“As I says, ’tis queer haow picters sets ye thinkin’. D’ye know, young Sir, I’m right sot on this un here. Arter I got the book off Eb I uster look at it a lot, especial when I’d heerd Passon Clark rant o’ Sundays in his big wig.²⁶ Onct I tried suthin’ funny — here, young Sir, don’t git skeert — all I done was ter look at the picter afore I kilt the sheep for market — killin’ sheep was kinder more fun arter lookin’ at it-” The tone of the old man now sank very low, sometimes becoming so faint that his words were hardly audible. I listened to the rain, and to the rattling of the bleared, small-paned windows, and marked a rumbling of approaching thunder quite unusual for the season. Once a terrific flash and peal shook the frail house to its foundations, but the whisperer seemed not to notice.

“Killin’ sheep was kinder more fun-but d’ye know, ‘twan’t quite satisfyin’. Queer haow a cravin’ gits a holt on ye — As ye love the Almighty, young man, don’t tell nobody, but I swar ter Gawd thet picter begun ta make me hungry fer victuals I couldn’t raise nor buy — here, set still, what’s ailin’ ye? — I didn’t do nothin’, only I wondered haow ‘twud be ef I did — They say meat makes blood an’ flesh, an’ gives ye new life, so I wondered if ‘twudn’t make a man live longer an’ longer ef ’twas more the same-” But the whisperer never continued. The interruption was not produced by my fright, nor by the rapidly increasing storm amidst whose fury I was presently to open my eyes on a smoky solitude of blackened ruins. It was produced by a very simple through somewhat unusual happening.

The open book lay flat between us, with the picture staring repulsively upward. As the old man whispered the words “more the same” a tiny spattering impact was heard, and something shewed on the yellowed paper of the upturned volume. I thought of the rain and of a leaky roof, but rain is not red. On the butcher’s shop of the Anzique cannibals a small red spattering glistened picturesquely, lending vividness to the horror of the engraving. The old man saw it, and stopped whispering even before my expression of horror made it necessary; saw it and glanced quickly toward the floor of the room he had left an hour before. I followed his glance, and beheld just above us on the loose plaster of the ancient ceiling a large irregular spot of wet crimson which seemed to spread even as I viewed it. I did not shriek or move, but merely shut my eyes. A moment later came the titanic thunderbolt of thunderbolts; blasting that accursed house of unutterable secrets and bringing the oblivion which alone saved my mind.²⁷

---

Explanatory Notes:

^*“The Picture in the House” was written on December 12, 1920. It first appeared in the National Amateur dated July 1919, but that issue actually appeared in the summer of 1921. Its first professional appearance was in Weird Tales for January 1924.

This is the first of Lovecraft’s tales not merely to utilize an authentic New England setting but to draw upon what Lovecraft himself clearly felt to be the weird heritage of New England history, specifically the history of Massachusetts. As a Rhode Islander, Lovecraft could look upon the “Puritan theocracy” of Massachusetts with suitably abstract horror and even a certain condescension; in the story he somewhat flamboyantly portrays the lurking hideousness of the repressed colonial tradition.

The use of the backwoods New England dialect by the old man calls for some comment. The fact that the narrator believes it to have been “long extinct” not merely is a hint that the man is preternaturally aged as a result of his cannibalism, but may perhaps be a clue to its literary inspiration. Jason C. Eckhardt has plausibly suggested that the dialect derives from James Russell Lowell’s Biglow Papers (1848–62). Lowell presents a similar version of this dialect, stating that it was itself no longer current in his time.

Lovecraft’s citation of Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo has excited the attention of many readers. This is an actual volume, but Lovecraft has made a number of errors in describing it, because he derived all his information about it from an essay in Thomas Henry Huxley’s Mans Place in Nature and Other Anthropological Essays (1894). Lovecraft once chided Рое for his “second-hand erudition”, but has here fallen into the same error himself.

1. catacombs of Ptolemais: Ptolemais was a coastal city in Cyrenaica (now Libya) and was given its name by Ptolemy III (Euergetes) of Egypt (r. 247–222 ВСЕ), who united Cyrenaica with Egypt. There do not appear to be any catacombs there; but a modern traveler makes note of “the huge Hellenistic tower-tomb, placed high on a cube of solid rock jutting up in isolation above the city’s largest ancient quarry, the building stone has been hacked away to leave it free on its pinnacle. The tomb stands over forty feet high, a pink monolith, and was constructed for multiple burial; but no one is clear for whom.” Anthony Thwaite, The Deserts of Hesperides: An Experience of Libya (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1969), p. 73.
2. Rhine castles: The Rhine river with its spectacular scenery and background of legendary lore was a common setting for early Gothic novels.
3. sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands: Possibly an oblique reference to the mysterious stone heads carved out of volcanic rock on Easter Island, a small island in the South Pacific that belongs to Chile.
4. epicure in the terrible: An epicure is a person who appreciates the finer things of life; derived from Epicurus (341–270 B.C.), a Greek philosopher who believed that pleasure is the end of all morality and that real pleasure is achieved through a life of prudence, honor, and justice. A major collection of Lovecraft criticism takes its title from this phrase: An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft, edited by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (1991).
5. small-paned windows: Houses in colonial America were typically built with windows divided into multiple sections because glass was expensive. It was cheaper and easier to replace smaller panes when they broke.
6. Puritans: The earliest European settlers of Massachusetts, who first arrived at Plymouth in 1620. They were religious dissenters who believed man was sinful by nature and could attain virtue through hard work. In the popular imagination they have been stereotyped as stern, grim folk. Perhaps the most distinguished American author to give the Puritans fictional treatment is Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), who was an influence on Lovecraft. “It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre ‘kick’. Here is material for a really profound study in group-neuroticism; for certainly, no one can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination”.
7. In less hyperbolic language, Lovecraft repeats many of these points in his discussion of the historical background of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s weird tales in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927): “… the free rein given under the influence of Puritan theocracy to all manner of notions respecting man’s relation to the stern and vengeful God of the Calvinists, and to the sulphureous Adversary of that God, about whom so much was thundered in the pulpits each Sunday; and the morbid introspection developed by an isolated backwoods life devoid of normal amusements and of the recreational mood, harassed by commands for theological self-examination, keyed to unnatural emotional repression, and forming above all a mere grim struggle for survival-all these things conspired to produce an environment in which the black whisperings of sinister grandams were heard far beyond the chimney corner, and in which tales of witchcraft and unbelievable secret monstrosities lingered long after the dread days of the Salem nightmare”.
8. Miskatonic Valley: The first mention of the “Miskatonic” region in the Lovecraft canon, here referring to a river valley. Its exact location in this story is unclear. The term probably is an adaptation of Housatonic (a river in western Massachusetts and Connecticut) and other Indian names.
9. Lovecraft reports that in his youth he was a “veritable bike-centaur”, but he reluctantly gave up bicycle riding because it was not considered appropriate for adults.
10. Arkham: The first mention of Lovecraft’s preeminent fictional town, which he would identify in later years as loosely corresponding to Salem, Massachusetts. At this point there is no evidence Lovecraft envisioned a series of tales set in or near this or any other fictional New England towns. In his article “Arkham Country: In Rescue of the Lost Searchers” (Lovecraft Studies 39, [summer 1998]: 1–20), Robert D. Marten makes a persuasive case that Lovecraft derived the uncommon prefix Ark- from the town of Arkwright, Rhode Island, now assimilated into Fiskville, Rhode Island. Sir Richard Arkwright invented the “spinning frame” which revolutionized the manufacture of cloth. In the 1780s, a mill-worker named Samuel Slater brought the process from England to the United States, where he established, with the financial backing of Moses Brown, the first successful textile factory at Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Thus Lovecraft came up with Arkham as a typical name for a New England factory town. Given Salem’s development into an industrial center in the nineteenth century, the link with Arkham is all the more appropriate. Will Murray has conjectured that the name was derived from the central Massachusetts town of Oakham.
11. a book of medium size: Actually the book (Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo, for which see the following note) is only 60 pages in the Latin edition of 1598.
12. Pigafetta’s account of the Congo region: An actual book, by Filippo Pigafetta (1533–1604). As S. T. Joshi points out in H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996), since Lovecraft derived his information for the Regnum Congo (to use its Latin title) from Thomas Henry Huxley’s essay “On the History of the Man-like Apes,” he erred in a number of respects. The book was first published in Italian in 1591 and subsequently in English (1597) and German (1597) prior to its Latin translation in 1598. Lovecraft never consulted the De Bry plates themselves, only a partial and rather inaccurate reproduction in the appendix to Huxley’s essay.
13. Lovecraft, who derived his knowledge of Pigafetta exclusively from an appendix to Thomas Henry Huxley’s “On the Methods and Results of Ethnology” (in Man’s Place in Nature and Other Anthropological Essays [1894]), has committed several errors here in his account of the book. Filippo Pigafetta (1533–1604) wrote a work in Italian entitled Relatione del reame di Congo et delle cironvicine comrade (1591), an account of the travels in the Congo of a sailor, Duarte Lopes. It was translated into Dutch in 1596, into English and German in 1597, and into Latin (by A. C. Reinius) as Regnum Congo in 1598.
14. the brothers De Bry: Johann Theodor De Bry (1561–1623) and Johann Israel De Bry (1570–1611) illustrated a number of books in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The plates by the brothers De Bry first appeared in the German edition of 1597.
15. If Lovecraft had consulted the actual plates of Regnum Congo, he would not have made this remark, for there the Africans appear properly negroid. The “Caucasian” features Lovecraft detects were the result of an inaccurate redrawing of the De Bry plates by W. H. Wesley, who illustrated Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature.
16. Anziques: Natives of the Kingdom of Anziku, an historic African state in the vicinity of the Congo River.
17. Pilgrim’s Progress: Christian allegory by the Englishman John Bunyan (1628–88). In its day the most common book to be found in people’s homes after the Bible. Lovecraft was an ardent collector of New England almanacs.
18. Isaiah Thomas: Isaiah Thomas (1749–1831) was a radical anti-British printer and journalist, founder of the Massachusetts Spy, which carried the first reports of the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775.
19. Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana: Cotton Mather (1663–1728), clergyman and author, was a leading figure in colonial Massachusetts. His Mag-nalia Christi Americana (1702} is an ecclesiastical history of New England, showing the working of God’s will in the history of Massachusetts. Lovecraft owned an ancestral copy of the first edition of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana.
20. In the first printing of this story (National Amateur, “July 1919”) Lovecraft disastrously telegraphs the climax by adding here: “On a beard which might have been patriarchal were unsightly stains, some of them disgustingly suggestive of blood.” He removed the sentence in subsequent appearances.
21. “Ketched in the rain, be ye!”: The first use of (archaic) New England dialect in Lovecraft’s fiction-and the start of the first notable monologue in Lovecraft, who avoided dialogue as such because he felt he had no aptitude for it. Jason Eckhardt in his article “The Cosmic Yankee,” included in An Epicure in the Terrible, has suggested that Lovecraft derived it largely from James Russell Lowell’s Biglow Papers (1848–62). Lovecraft owned Lowell’s poems and was clearly familiar with much of his work. It should also be noted that, at the period Lovecraft was writing, representing dialect phonetically to the point of unintelli-gibility was common. Modern writers tend to be more sparing in their use of dialect.This old-fashioned speech fits a character who is a survival of the eighteenth century. Old men-both beyond and within a normal life span-often appear in Lovecraft’s fiction, the first example being the title character of “The Terrible Old Man” (1920). For more on this topic, see Peter Cannon’s “Lovecraft’s Old Men” in his “Sunset Terrace Imagery in Lovecraft” and Other Essays (1990).
22. Bosting: Boston. The largest town in colonial Massachusetts. This reference suggests that Arkham is in the vicinity of Boston, and hence unlikely to be very far inland. See note 8 on Arkham above.
23. Passon Clark: Dialect for Parson Clark. A parson is a Protestant clergyman.
24. This account is derived entirely from Huxley’s verbal description ot the De Bry plate (“It may be that these apes are as much figments ot the imagination of the ingenious brothers as the winged, two-legged, crocodile-headed dragon which adorns the same plate”), since this part of the plate was not copied by Huxley’s illustrator, W. H. Wesley.
25. Midianites: A nomadic people who were enemies of the Israelites. The specific passage of Scripture here referred to may be Judges 7:25: “And they took the two princes of Midian, Oreb and Zeeb; they killed Oreb at the rock of Oreb, and Zeeb they killed at the wine press of Zeeb, as they pursued Midian; and they brought the heads of Oreb and Zeeb to Gideon beyond the Jordan.”
26. big wig: Wigs were fashionable among the upper classes in the eighteenth century. They went out of fashion at the time of the French Revolution (1789), when many aristocrats lost their heads (and their wigs) to the guillotine. In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Dr. Willett is disturbed because Ward knows “so much about the way the fat sherriff’s wig fell off” at a play put on at a Providence theatre in 1762. Lovecraft was delighted by the pen-and-ink sketch his artist friend Virgil Finlay (1914–71) did showing him dressed as an eighteenth-century gentleman, complete with periwig.
27. alone saved my mind: This deus ex machine ending may well have been inspired by the conclusion to Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in which the narrator survives to tell his tale only because the House of Usher literally collapses.