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

We have already seen Lovecraft’s prejudice against blacks manifest so early as the age of fourteen; whence did these ideas of Teutonic superiority arise? The above passage itself suggests one source: Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley’s work is too complex and nuanced to be branded as racist, and he was very circumspect when it came to notions of racial superiority or inferiority; but in ‘The Crime of the Century’ Lovecraft has made explicit reference to two essays by Huxley, ‘On the Methods and Results of Ethnology’ (1865) and ‘On the Aryan Question’ (1890), both included in Man’s Place in Nature and Other Anthropological Essays (1894). In the former essay Huxley coins the term ‘Xanthochroi’ (races that are yellowhaired and pale in complexion), applying it to the inhabitants of northern Europe, ultimate descendants of the ‘Nordic’ barbarians. Along with the Melanochroi (pale-complexioned but dark-haired) who occupy the Mediterranean lands and the Middle East, the Xanthochroi were and are the pinnacle of civilization: ‘It is needless to remark upon the civilization of these two great stocks. With them has originated everything that is highest in science, in art, in law, in politics, and in mechanical inventions. In their hands, at the present moment, lies the order of the social world, and to them its progress is committed.’¹⁰

Although Lovecraft’s statements make it evident that he was appealing to evolutionary theories in his vaunting of the Teuton, it had been fashionable for nearly a century to praise Teutons, AngloSaxons, Nordics, or Aryans (all these terms being extremely nebulous and frequently interchangeable in their application) as the summit of civilization. English and American historians in particular—beginning with Sir Francis Palgrave’s Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth (1832), and continuing on through such distinguished scholars as Edward A. Freeman, J. R. Green, Francis Parkman, William H. Prescott, and John Fiske—became enamoured of the idea that the virtues of the English (hence the American) and German political systems owed their existence to the Teuton or Anglo-Saxon. Lovecraft read many of these writers and had their books in his library. With authorities like these, it is not surprising that he would echo their racial theories, even if in a particularly strident and pompous manner.

L. Sprague de Camp has maintained¹¹ that Lovecraft was significantly influenced by Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published in German in 1899 and translated into English in 1911. But there is not a single reference to Chamberlain in any documents by Lovecraft that I have seen; and even a cursory examination of the specific tenets of Chamberlain’s racism shows that Lovecraft’s beliefs are very different. Chamberlain, according to one scholar, ‘set himself to reconcile Christianity, the religion of humility and forgiveness, with aggressive German nationalism’,¹² something Lovecraft never concerned himself about; indeed, Lovecraft’s anti-Christianity only gained force as he encountered Nietzsche around 1918. Chamberlain also praised the Teutonic barbarians who overthrow Rome, as being the bearers of ‘true Christianity’ (i.e., a ‘strong’ Christianity shorn of its elements of pity and tolerance), a view Lovecraft could never adopt given the belief he maintained to the end of his life that ‘To me the Roman Empire will always seem the central incident of human history’.¹³ In these and other ways did Lovecraft’s racism differ fundamentally from Chamberlain’s, so that any influence of the latter seems remote, especially given the total absence of documentary evidence that Lovecraft was even familiar with Chamberlain.

Later in 1915 the issue of blacks was raised again. We have already seen how Lovecraft attacked Charles D. Isaacson’s championing of Walt Whitman in his amateur paper In a Minor Key. The bulk of Isaacson’s paper, however, was a plea for racial tolerance, especially for blacks. He is particularly harsh on D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, asserting that it presented a false view of the relations between blacks and whites after the Civil War and that it incited racial hatred.