Shorter Notices
Tins survey of English "weird fiction" is apparently a pioneer work in this country. Originally a Geneva Ph.D. thesis, it bears many marks of its provenance: the wearisome apparatus of notes, the bibliography with its unpublished dissertations and "unidenti- fied newspaper clipping," the delight in classifying and tracing influences. ("Fin- ally Le Fanu was the inventor of . . . the disembodied hand.") Yet for all its painstaking air, it is avowedly far from exhaustive. Conspicuous omissions, apart from an index, are Poe and Wilde, excluded on the most inadequate grounds, and Conrad and Forster, passed silently by; while Henry James is represented only by The Turn of the Screw, which is compared, unfavourably, with de la Mare's admittedly admirable Out of the Deep. The author's own attitude to the supernatural seems to be one of scepticism tempered by an obliging willingness to suspend disbelief, though the chapter on Algernon Blackwood suggests a certain ambivalence; this is reflected elsewhere in praise of the super- natural story, both as helping to eliminate superstition, and as dealing with "realitieS deeper and more ancient than those appa- rent." The best sections are those in which, perhaps forgetting his disclaimer about trying to "explain 'literature by psycho- analysis," and drawing freely on Freud and Jung, Dr. Penzoldt illuminates the origins of various superstitions, or offers detailed interpretative analysis of individual stories. The sections on Kipling's They, Arthur Machen and de la Mare are distinctly good, and mitigate the impression of naive inepti- tude and inadequate standards left by much of the more general critical comment.
0. G. W. S.
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