by Clark Ashton Smith
The four books of short stories written by Montague Rhodes James,
Provost of Eton College, have been collected in a single but not
overly bulky volume under the imprint of Longmans, Green & Co. One can
heartily recommend the acquisition of this volume to all lovers of the
weird and supernatural who are not already familiar with its contents.
James is perhaps unsurpassed in originality by any living writer; and
he has made a salient contribution to the technique of his genre as
well as to the enriching of its treasury of permanent masterpiece. His
work is marked by rare intellectual skill and ingenuity, by power
rising at times above the reaches of mere intellection, and by a sheer
finesse of writing that will bear almost endless study. It has a
peculiar savour, wholly different from the diabolic grimness of
Bierce, or the accumulative atmospheric terror and rounded classicism
of Machen. Here there is nothing of the feverish but logical
hallucinations, the macabre and exotic beauty achieved by Poe; nor is
there any kinship to the fine poetic weavings and character _nuances_
of Walter de la Mare, or the far-searching, penetrative psychism of
Blackwood, or the frightful antiquities and ultra-terrene menaces of
Lovecraft.
The style of these stories is rather casual and succinct. The rhythms
of the prose are brisk and pedestrian, and the phrasing is notable for
clearness and incisiveness rather than for those vague, reverberative
overtones which beguile one's inner ear in the prose of
fiction-writers who are also poets. Usually there is a more or less
homely setting, often with a background of folklore and long-past
happenings whose dim archaism provides a depth of shadow from which,
as from a recessed cavern, the central horror emerges into the
noontide of the present. Things and occurrences, sometimes without
obvious off-hand relationship, are grouped cunningly, forcing the
reader unaware to some frightful deduction; or there is an artful
linkage of events seemingly harmless in themselves, that leave him
confronted at a sudden turn with some ghoulish specter or night-demon.
The minutiae of modern life, humor, character-drawing, scenic and
archaeological description, are used as a foil to heighten the
abnormal, but are never allowed to usurp a disproportionate interest.
Always there is an element of supernatural menace, whose value is
never impaired by scientific or spiritualistic explanation. Sometimes
it is brought forth at the climax into full light; and sometimes, even
then, it is merely half-revealed, is left undefined but perhaps all
the more alarming. In any case, the presence of some unnatural but
objective reality is assumed and established.
The goblins and phantoms devised by James are truly creative and are
presented through images often so keen and vivid as to evoke an actual
physical shock. Sight, smell, hearing, taction, all are played upon
with well nigh surgical sureness, by impressions calculated to touch
the shuddering quick of horror.
Some of the images or similes employed are most extraordinary, and
spring surely from the demonic inspiration of the highest genius. For
instance, take the unnameable thing in _The Uncommon Prayer Book_,
which resembles "a great roll of old, shabby, white flannel," with a
kind of face in the upper end, and which falls forward on a man's
shoulder and hides this face in his neck like a ferret attacking a
rabbit. Then, in _Mr. Humphreys and his Inheritance_ (one of subtler
and more inferential tales) there is the form "with a burnt human
face" and "black arms", that emerges from an inexplicable hole in the
paper plan of a garden maze "with the odious writhings of a wasp
creeping out of a rotten apple." In _The Tractate Middoth_ one meets
an apparition with thick cobwebs over its eyes--the lich or specter
of a man who, obedient to his own rather eccentric instructions, had
been buried sitting at a table in an underground room. And who,
upon reading _The Diary of Mr. Poynter_, can fail to share Denton's
revulsion when he reaches out, thinking that a dog is beside his
chair, and touches a crawling figure covered with long, wavy,
Absolom-like tresses? Who, too, can shake off the horror of
Dennistoun, in _Canon Alberic's Scrap Book_, when a demon's hand
appears from beneath on the table, suggesting momentarily a pen wiper,
a rat, and a large spider?
Reading and re-reading these tales, one notes a predilection for
certain milieus and motifs. Backgrounds of scholastic or ecclesiastic
life are frequent and some of the best tales are laid in cathedral
towns; in many of the supernatural entities, there recurs insistently
the character of extreme and repulsive _hairiness_. Often the
apparition is connected with, or evoked by, some material object, such
as the bronze whistle from the ruins of a Templars' preceptory in _Oh,
Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad_; the old drawing of King Solomon
and the night demon in _Canon Alberic's Scrap Book_; the silver
Anglo-Saxon crown from an immemorial barrow in _A Warning to the
Curious_; and the strange curtain-pattern in _The Diary of Mr.
Poynter_ which had "a subtlety in its drawing."
In several stories there are hints of bygone Satanism and wizardry
whose malign wraiths or conjured spirits linger obscurely in modern
time; and in at least one tale, _Casting the Runes_, the warlock
is a living figure. In other tales, the forgetful and vanishing
phantasms of old crimes cry out their mindless pain, or peer for an
instant from familiar pools and shrubberies. The personnel of James'
_Pandemonium_ is far from monotonous: one finds a satyr dwelling
in a cathedral tomb; a carven cat-like monster that comes to life when
touched by a murderer's hand; a mouldy smelling sack-like object in an
unlit well, which suddenly puts its arms around the neck of a
treasure-seeker; a cloaked and hooded shape with a tentacle in lieu of
arms; a lean, hideously taloned terror, with a jaw "shallow as that of
a beast;" dolls that repeat crime and tragedy; creatures that are
dog-like but not dogs; a saw fly tall as a man, met in a dim room full
of rustling insects; and even a weak, ancient thing, which, being
wholly bodiless and insubstantial, makes for itself a body out of
crumpled bed-linen.
The peculiar genius of M. R. James, and his greatest power, lies in
the convincing evocation of weird, malignant and preternatural
phenomena such as I have instanced. It is safe to say that few
writers, dead or living, have equalled him in his formidable
necromancy; and perhaps no one has excelled him.