A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

Bourgeois capitalism gave artistic excellence and sincerity a death-blow by enthroning cheap amusement-value at the expense of that intrinsic excellence which only cultivated, nonacquisitive persons of assumed position can enjoy. The determinant market for written … and other heretofore aesthetic material ceased to be a small circle of truly educated persons, but became a substantially larger … crcle of mixed origin numerically dominated by crude, half-educated clods whose systematically perverted ideals … prevented them from ever achieving the tastes and perspectives of the gentlefolk whose dress and speech and external manners they so assiduously mimicked. This herd of acquisitive boors brought up from the shop and the counting-house a complete set of artificial attitudes, oversimplifications, and mawkish sentimentalities which no sincere art or literature could gratify—and they so outnumbered the remaining educated gentlefolk that most of the purveying agencies became at once reoriented to them. Literature and art lost most of their market; and writing, painting, drama, etc. became engulfed more and more in the domain of amusement enterprises.¹⁶ The principal foe, again, is capitalism, in that it inculcates values that are actively hostile to artistic creation:

in the past did capitalism award its highest benefits to such admittedly superior persons as Poe, Spinoza, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Keats, and so on? Or is it just possible that the real beneficiaries of capitalism are not the truly superior, but merely those who choose to devote their superiority to the single process of personal acquisition rather than to social service or to creative intellectual or aesthetic effort … those, and the lucky parasites who share or inherit the fruits of their narrowly canalised superiority?¹⁷

But what then is to be done? Even if economic reform is effected, how does one change a society’s attitude in regard to the relative value of money as opposed to the development of personality? The solution was simple: education. The shorter working hours proposed in Lovecraft’s economic scheme would allow for a radically increased leisure time for all citizens, which could be utilized profitably in education and aesthetic appreciation. As he states in ‘Some Repetitions on the Times’: ‘Education … will require amplification in order to meet the needs of a radically increased leisure among all classes of society. It is probable that the number of persons possessing a sound general culture will be greatly increased, with correspondingly good results to the civilisation.’ This was a common proposal—or dream—among the more idealistic social reformers and intellectuals. Did Lovecraft really fancy that such a utopia of a broadly educated populace that was willing or able to enjoy the aesthetic fruits of civilization would actually come about? It certainly seems so; and yet, we cannot hold Lovecraft responsible for failing to predict either the spectacular recrudescence of capitalism in the generations following his own or the equally spectacular collapse of education that has produced a mass audience whose highest aesthetic experiences are pornography, television miniseries, and sporting events.

The interesting thing about Lovecraft’s speculations of the 1930s is that they gradually enter into his fiction as well as his letters and essays. We have seen that ‘The Mound’ (1929–30) contains searching parallels between the political and cultural state of the underground mound denizens and Western civilization; and in At the Mountains of Madness (1931) there is a fleeting mention that the government of the Old Ones was probably socialistic. These tentative political discussions reach their culmination with ‘The Shadow out of Time’. The Great Race is a true utopia, and in his description of its political and economic framework Lovecraft is manifestly offering his view as to the future of mankind:

The Great Race seemed to form a single, loosely knit nation or league, with major institutions in common, though there were four definite divisions. The political and economic system of each unit was a sort of fascistic socialism, with major resources rationally distributed, and power delegrated to a small governing board elected by the votes of all able to pass certain educational and psychological tests …

Industry, highly mechanised, demanded but little time from each citizen; and the abundant leisure was filled with intellectual and aesthetic activities of various sorts.