The King in Yellow

By Robert W. Chambers

First published in 1895, “The King in Yellow” is a collection of short stories by Robert W. Chambers for which the author is best known. The title of the collection refers to a fictional forbidden play referenced in the first four of the stories of the collection which induces its readers to madness. The remainder of the stories of this volume have a less eerie tone and are written in the romantic fiction style common to Chambers’ later work. “The King in Yellow” is a prominent example of the type of weird fiction which would become increasingly popular near the end of 19th and first part of the 20th century. It is specifically cited as a prominent influence on the work of H. P. Lovecraft. The ten stories which comprise this volume are as follows: “The Repairer of Reputations”, “The Mask”, “In the Court of the Dragon”, “The Yellow Sign”, “The Demoiselle d’Ys”, “The Prophets’ Paradise”, “The Street of the Four Winds”, “The Street of the First Shell”, “The Street of Our Lady of the Fields” and “Rue Barrée”. This edition includes a foreword by Rupert Hughes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
• Release date: Jan 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781420972412

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THE KING IN YELLOW

By ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

Foreword by RUPERT HUGHES

The King in Yellow

By Robert W. Chambers

Foreword by Rupert Hughes

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7241-2

This edition copyright © 2021. Digireads.com Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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CONTENTS

Foreword

The Repairer of Reputations

The Mask

The Yellow Sign

The Demoiselle d’Ys

The Prophets’ Paradise

The Street of the Four Winds

The Street of the First Shell

The Street of Our Lady of the Fields

Rue Barrée

TO

MY BROTHER

Foreword

I Envy those who will read for the first time this ever-young story that I read in my youth. Yet on re-reading it, I find that it has lost none of its original savor or poignancy in its forty-three years of published existence.

Its revival seems to be a sign of the times, and of better times, in literature; a breath of spring after a winter of discontent. For we have been going through a prolonged era of intentionally bad art in every form, whether of writing, painting, sculpture, music—what not? And The King in Yellow harks back to a day when polished English was expected of a writer, along with a sense of form, of progress, suspense, and climax.

Even when an artist does his utmost best, he has done none too well and is at least as apt as Homer was to nod. But when he is contemptuous of grammar, structure, grace, he is facing the wrong way, and the farther he flies the farther he is from a desirable goal.

In all periods of the history of all arts there have been three kinds of endeavor: archaic affectations of the very sophisticated primitive; grotesque ugliness and shapelessness; and a consecrated effort at beauty, power, and form. The three strata are sometimes mixed together; sometimes one or another has almost a monopoly.

For years now we have been more or less submerged in a rage for slipshod techniques, almost exclusively devoted to making beauty ugly and ugliness uglier. In drawing, painting, and sculpture, much of the output resembles that of the nursery or the insane asylum. In music we have had oblique harmony, which means, of course, unbroken discord. Strange magazines and books have tempted both laughter and pity by their extraordinary experiments in language that nobody even pretends to understand.

Since critics have to live on what fresh meat the market affords, they have gone along for the ride, and hailed butchers as masters.

There is always bad English and always form that is either too conspicuous or badly concatenated; but between preciosity and perversity, the sincere struggler for vivid expression of emotion has been more or less in disgrace of late.

All schools of art, the Grecian no less than the rest, have gone Gothic at times and made the gargoyle and the wilderness their ideal. But they always swing back to sanity or at least to the divine insanity of the seeker after beauty, even in its most tragic, terrifying, or heartbreaking forms.

The writings of Robert William Chambers bracket the interval of bad art for bad art’s sake. He began to publish before the disease set in, and he was hailed then as a genius. He continued to persist in his ideals, and so became a byword of critical disfavor. Now after his death, this work of his youth comes back into its own, and I sincerely believe that his name will be regarded with high respect when many of the most touted pets of today, or of yesterday, will be forgotten or derided.

The head and front of Chambers’ offense was that he wrote beautiful English about beautiful women and handsome men in beautiful surroundings. All of these have been anathema to the realists, though there are vast numbers of good-looking people and vast stretches of gorgeous scenery; and no end of drama, pathos, and frustration among them. And there is quite as much true realism in describing them as in sticking to homely people in shabbiness and squalor, to whom nothing interesting or too much depressing happens.

I myself love poor, illiterate, and unlucky people; but I do not love poor, illiterate, and unlucky writing. The world would be appallingly the poorer if we threw out all the artists who confined themselves to the rich, and to splendor and charm. We should lose the Watteaus, the Goujons, the Chopins, the Robert Herricks, the Henry Fieldings. I could never see why high art must necessarily ignore high life.

The King in Yellow was published in 1895. The central idea is magnificent. In the story, The King in Yellow is a fatal book whose very words are poisonous. Critics hailed the author as a rival of Edgar Allen Poe.

Of course, we are still suffering from the critical school that despises Poe and belittles even Shakespeare. Only this season a New York dramatic critic ridiculed As You Like It in words that resemble the contempt Pepys expressed for Romeo and Juliet. When The King in Yellow first appeared it was the fashion to rave over it. One read in the reviews such tributes as this:

The author is a genius without a living equal in his peculiar field. It is a masterpiece. . . . I have read many portions several times, captivated by the unapproachable tints of the painting. None but a genius of the highest order could do such work.

Another critic exclaimed:

The short prose tale . . . was the art of Edgar Poe; it is the art of Mr. Chambers. . . . It is the most notable contribution to literature which has come from an American publisher for many years.

A third spoke of it as subtly fascinating . . . a wealth of strange imaginative force.

The King in Yellow was Chambers’ second book following by only a few months his first novel, In the Quarter, a study of the Bohemian life in Paris that he knew so well; for his first ambition was to be a painter.

Born in Brooklyn, he made his preliminary studies at the Art Students’ League. A classmate of his was the famous master of pen and ink, Charles Dana Gibson. Chambers told me once that, as young students, he and C. D. G. went together to the office of Life to submit their first drawings. The editor accepted the picture by Chambers and rejected Gibson’s. Gibson remained in New York and became immensely successful in the field in which he received his first rebuff.

Chambers went to France, studied at the Julien Academy for seven years. After three he had his first painting accepted by the Paris Salon, but he finally decided to chuck his brushes overboard and commence author.

He had, however, learned in France that fine clarity of expression, that sure feeling for form, which make his English so clear, so lithe, and his stories so definitely stories.

Also, he learned the French landscape. After the Battle of the Marne had given that narrow stream immortal fame, he told me once: I whipped that little river almost from end to end with a fishing rod. It depressed him horribly to picture the banks of that pretty meanderer piled high with dead and its water choked with corpses.

Some of the short stories included in this volume and many of his first novels were concerned with French life and character, and they inspired some of his most charming writings, triumphs of sheer style.

For a period, his interest turned to early American history, and his Cardigan won and holds a high place in historical fiction. He wrote with such smooth flow and such exciting incident that few understood what a scholar he was in research. He documented his fiction as carefully as the most serious historian verifies his least facts at their sources. He was incidentally a keen naturalist with an amazing and perhaps characteristic interest in butterflies.

Many of his fictional characters were butterflies, and I cannot see why a fluttering, sunlit butterfly is not as legitimate and important a subject as a bedbug, a spider, or a toad.

After a cycle of historical novels, Chambers turned to the chronicling of the contemporary rich and the gaudier people of New York society. Two things alienated his most friendly reviewers and infuriated his rivals: his stories concerned wealthy people and could not therefore be artistic; also, they had enormous success, which completed the insult.

Critics are human in that they tire easily, and nothing wearies them like the persistent success of a writer year after year for years on years.

His highest achievement in the field of American wealth was The Fighting Chance. As a serial it had enormous success in the Saturday Evening Post, and its success as a book was even greater. The demand for it was so huge that the advance printing order was gradually increased until no less than one hundred thousand copies made up the first edition. That is one reason why Bob Chambers’ novels are not often found in the collections of the devotees of rare books. Yet, by coincidence, just as I undertook to write this preface, I received a catalogue of the sale of a great library, and found among the items, this:

Chambers, Robert, The King in Yellow. 16 mo., original decorated green doth, gilt top. First Edition, in the First Binding, with the dust jacket. Rare in this State. An Immaculate Copy.

And now the book comes out in a new form, and it is a joy to read, for the subtle terrors inspired by The King in Yellow; for the warm charm and sweetness of other stories in the book, such as the perfectly delicious Demoiselle d’Ys; and for the power and charm of other stories.

Bob Chambers was, for all his fame and success, the shyest, simplest author I ever knew. He was modest, lovable, devoted to his beautiful and devoted wife, and he died slowly in heroic patience. He had his ideals and lived up to them. He strove for charm, action, character, and was faithful to beauty. He was a teller of stories, and to tell a good story well is a high and a difficult art. Take away from our literature the works of Robert Chambers and a great and brilliant life would be left without presentation; a swarm of men and women as typical of our time as any other groups, and living our life to the full, would be entirely omitted from the literary parade.

For these reasons and because his work was beautiful, much of it deserves to survive, and will, unless posterity shall be too deeply involved in its own problems to care for ours.

RUPERT HUGHES.

1938.

The Repairer of Reputations

"Along the shore the cloud waves break,

The twin suns sink beneath the lake,

The shadows lengthen

In Carcosa.

"Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies

But stranger still is

Lost Carcosa.

"Songs that the Hyades shall sing,

Where flap the tatters of the King,

Must die unheard in

Dim Carcosa.

"Song of my soul, my voice is dead;

Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed

Shall dry and die in

Lost Carcosa."

—Cassilda’s Song in The King in Yellow, Act i, Scene 2.

THE REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS

I

Ne raillons pas les fous; leur folie dure plus longtemps que la nôtre.... Voila toute la différence.

Toward the end of the year 1920 the Government of the United States had practically completed the programme, adopted during the last months of President Winthrop’s administration. The country was apparently tranquil. Everybody knows how the Tariff and Labor questions were settled. The war with Germany, incident on that country’s seizure of the Samoan Islands, had left no visible scars upon the republic, and the temporary occupation of Norfolk by the invading army had been forgotten in the joy over repeated naval victories, and the subsequent ridiculous plight of General Von Gartenlaube’s forces in the State of New Jersey. The Cuban and Hawaiian investments had paid one hundred per cent and the territory of Samoa was well worth its cost as a coaling station. The country was in a superb state of defence. Every coast city had been well supplied with land fortifications; the army under the parental eye of the General Staff, organized according to the Prussian system, had been increased to three hundred thousand men, with a territorial reserve of a million; and six magnificent squadrons of cruisers and battle-ships patrolled the six stations of the navigable seas, leaving a steam reserve amply fitted to control home waters. The gentlemen from the West had at last been constrained to acknowledge that a college for the training of diplomats was as necessary as law schools are for the training of barristers; consequently we were no longer represented abroad by incompetent patriots. The nation was prosperous; Chicago, for a moment paralyzed after a second great fire, had risen from its ruins, white and imperial, and more beautiful than the white city which had been built for its plaything in 1893. Everywhere good architecture was replacing bad, and even in New York, a sudden craving for decency had swept away a great portion of the existing horrors. Streets had been widened, properly paved and lighted, trees had been planted, squares laid out, elevated structures demolished and underground roads built to replace them. The new government buildings and barracks were fine bits of architecture, and the long system of stone quays which completely surrounded the island had been turned into parks which proved a god-send to the population. The subsidizing of the state theatre and state opera brought its own reward. The United States National Academy of Design was much like European institutions of the same kind. Nobody envied the Secretary of Fine Arts, either his cabinet position or his portfolio. The Secretary of Forestry and Game Preservation had a much easier time, thanks to the new system of National Mounted Police. We had profited well by the latest treaties with France and England; the exclusion of foreign-born Jews as a measure of self-preservation, the settlement of the new independent negro state of Suanee, the checking of immigration, the new laws concerning naturalization, and the gradual centralization of power in the executive all contributed to national calm and prosperity. When the Government solved the Indian problem and squadrons of Indian cavalry scouts in native costume were substituted for the pitiable organizations tacked on to the tail of skeletonized regiments by a former Secretary of War, the nation drew a long sigh of relief. When, after the colossal Congress of Religions, bigotry and intolerance were laid in their graves and kindness and charity began to draw warring sects together, many thought the millennium had arrived, at least in the new world which after all is a world by itself.

But self-preservation is the first law, and the United States had to look on in helpless sorrow as Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium writhed in the throes of Anarchy, while Russia, watching from the Caucasus, stooped and bound them one by one.

In the city of New York the summer of 1899 was signalized by the dismantling of the Elevated Railroads. The summer of 1900 will live in the memories of New York people for many a cycle; the Dodge Statue was removed in that year. In the following winter began that agitation for the repeal of the laws prohibiting suicide which bore its final fruit in the month of April, 1920, when the first Government Lethal Chamber was opened on Washington Square.

I had walked down that day from Dr. Archer’s house on Madison Avenue, where I had been as a mere formality. Ever since that fall from my horse, four years before, I had been troubled at times with pains in the back of my head and neck, but now for months they had been absent, and the doctor sent me away that day saying there was nothing more to be cured in me. It was hardly worth his fee to be told that; I knew it myself. Still I did not grudge him the money. What I minded was the mistake which he made at first. When they picked me up from the pavement where I lay unconscious, and somebody had mercifully sent a bullet through my horse’s head, I was carried to Dr. Archer, and he, pronouncing my brain affected, placed me in his private asylum where I was obliged to endure treatment for insanity. At last he decided that I was well, and I, knowing that my mind had always been as sound as his, if not sounder, paid my tuition as he jokingly called it, and left. I told him, smiling, that I would get even with him for his mistake, and he laughed heartily, and asked me to call once in a while. I did so, hoping for a chance to even up accounts, but he gave me none, and I told him I would wait.

The fall from my horse had fortunately left no evil results; on the contrary it had changed my whole character for the better. From a lazy young man about town, I had become active, energetic, temperate, and above all—oh, above all else—ambitious. There was only one thing which troubled me, I laughed at my own uneasiness, and yet it troubled me.

During my convalescence I had bought and read for the first time, The King in Yellow. I remember after finishing the first act that it occurred to me that I had better stop. I started up and flung the book into the fireplace; the volume struck the barred grate and fell open on the hearth in the firelight. If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped to pick it up, my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every nerve, I snatched the thing out of the coals and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet. This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow. When the French Government seized the translated copies which had just arrived in Paris, London, of course, became eager to read it. It is well known how the book spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by Press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists. No definite principles had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in The King in Yellow, all felt that human nature could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked. The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect.

It was, I remember, the 13th day of April, 1920, that the first Government Lethal Chamber was established on the south side of Washington Square, between Wooster Street and South Fifth Avenue. The block which had formerly consisted of a lot of shabby old buildings, used as cafés and restaurants for foreigners, had been acquired by the Government in the winter of 1898. The French and Italian cafés and restaurants were torn down; the whole block was enclosed by a gilded iron railing, and converted into a lovely garden with lawns, flowers and fountains. In the centre of the garden stood a small, white building, severely classical in architecture, and surrounded by thickets of flowers. Six Ionic columns supported the roof, and the single door was of bronze. A splendid marble group of the Fates stood before the door,