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Acolyte, v. 3, issue 4, whole no. 12, Fall 1945
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repetitious dream of Professor Perkins in "'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'" about a creature in fluttering draperies pursuing a man along the seashore; the archaic minatory verse dreamt one night in 1699 by the woodcarver who made the demonic statues for "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral"; and the rather pointless though chilling dreams of disembodied hands by characters in "The Residence at Whitminster" and "A View from a Hill." In "Wailing Well" one of the fearful skeleton-ghosts diverts a would-be rescuer of the doomed boy by evidently switching his vision of the scene around at right angles to its real position so that he strides off in the wrong direction; a boy watching sees the air shimmer down there and feels a bit of the mental confusion being given off by the specter. These instances all illustrage a greater or lesser degree of submective control over or infiltration into the human mind on the part of various ghosts, though it is not always easy to tell whether the influence is exerted deliberately or is merely an accidental and subliminal psychic perturbation. Two stories contain curious instances of what is apparently the demoniacal possession of insects: in "An Evening's Entertainment" the lane where blood has spilled from the mangled corpse of a Druid-worshipping warlock is haunted by poisonous flies that fed on the blood and moved off in cluds; and in "The Residence at Whitminster" a deserted room containing the effects of a demonolatrous youth of the previous century is infested with great numbers of harmless sawflies, and the father is attacked there at night by an enormous ghostly sawfly the size of a man. Evidently anyone who has carried on demonological activities of any sort of has ever been just an evil and wicked person is likely to live on after death, haunting the site of his r her misdeeds or easily roused by associations with them, or at least to leave behind some sort of residue of psychic unrest causing disturbances for innocent bystanders. In both "The Mezzotint" and "The Haunted Doll's House" the haunting takes the form of a periodic enactment in a picture or model of the fated house of the revenge years ago of an activated copse-ghost on his murderer by making away with his offspring; James apologized for the repetition of the plot, which he was evidently unaware of when he wrote "The Haunted Doll's House". The most original bit of sorcery in these stories is the curiously heavy pair of field glasses made by the unscrupulous antiquary, Mr. Baxter, in "A View from a Hill," which were "filled and sealed" with a noisome liquid made by boiling the bones of men who had been hanged on Gallows Hill centuries ago, and which therefore, when looked through, showed things as they were when those men were alive. These invaluable binoculars unfortunately are ruined when the unsuspecting hero takes them into a church--- one of the only two instances in James when religion serves as a foil to the powers of evil, the other being the effective use of a crucifix against the demon in "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book." James, the son of a rector, was devoutly religious, but apparently disliked to place any curb on the powers of his ghosts and demons. As an antiquary, he was naturally tolerant towards the Church of Rome (he satirized an anti-Papist in"'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'"), though in one of the better plots in "Stories I Have Tried to Write" a Roman priest was evidently to have been one of the villains---a situation which would not have found much favor with the Rev. Montague Summers, who claimed James as a friend. James's religious beliefs did not, however, lead him to believe in ghosts, despite his fondness for writing about them; his attitude toward the psyching in real life remained one of complete skepticism. Even toward the end of his life the most he would say on the subject is, "I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me." Evidently it never did. In his disbelief he resembled H. P. Love- -- 11 --
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repetitious dream of Professor Perkins in "'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'" about a creature in fluttering draperies pursuing a man along the seashore; the archaic minatory verse dreamt one night in 1699 by the woodcarver who made the demonic statues for "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral"; and the rather pointless though chilling dreams of disembodied hands by characters in "The Residence at Whitminster" and "A View from a Hill." In "Wailing Well" one of the fearful skeleton-ghosts diverts a would-be rescuer of the doomed boy by evidently switching his vision of the scene around at right angles to its real position so that he strides off in the wrong direction; a boy watching sees the air shimmer down there and feels a bit of the mental confusion being given off by the specter. These instances all illustrage a greater or lesser degree of submective control over or infiltration into the human mind on the part of various ghosts, though it is not always easy to tell whether the influence is exerted deliberately or is merely an accidental and subliminal psychic perturbation. Two stories contain curious instances of what is apparently the demoniacal possession of insects: in "An Evening's Entertainment" the lane where blood has spilled from the mangled corpse of a Druid-worshipping warlock is haunted by poisonous flies that fed on the blood and moved off in cluds; and in "The Residence at Whitminster" a deserted room containing the effects of a demonolatrous youth of the previous century is infested with great numbers of harmless sawflies, and the father is attacked there at night by an enormous ghostly sawfly the size of a man. Evidently anyone who has carried on demonological activities of any sort of has ever been just an evil and wicked person is likely to live on after death, haunting the site of his r her misdeeds or easily roused by associations with them, or at least to leave behind some sort of residue of psychic unrest causing disturbances for innocent bystanders. In both "The Mezzotint" and "The Haunted Doll's House" the haunting takes the form of a periodic enactment in a picture or model of the fated house of the revenge years ago of an activated copse-ghost on his murderer by making away with his offspring; James apologized for the repetition of the plot, which he was evidently unaware of when he wrote "The Haunted Doll's House". The most original bit of sorcery in these stories is the curiously heavy pair of field glasses made by the unscrupulous antiquary, Mr. Baxter, in "A View from a Hill," which were "filled and sealed" with a noisome liquid made by boiling the bones of men who had been hanged on Gallows Hill centuries ago, and which therefore, when looked through, showed things as they were when those men were alive. These invaluable binoculars unfortunately are ruined when the unsuspecting hero takes them into a church--- one of the only two instances in James when religion serves as a foil to the powers of evil, the other being the effective use of a crucifix against the demon in "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book." James, the son of a rector, was devoutly religious, but apparently disliked to place any curb on the powers of his ghosts and demons. As an antiquary, he was naturally tolerant towards the Church of Rome (he satirized an anti-Papist in"'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'"), though in one of the better plots in "Stories I Have Tried to Write" a Roman priest was evidently to have been one of the villains---a situation which would not have found much favor with the Rev. Montague Summers, who claimed James as a friend. James's religious beliefs did not, however, lead him to believe in ghosts, despite his fondness for writing about them; his attitude toward the psyching in real life remained one of complete skepticism. Even toward the end of his life the most he would say on the subject is, "I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me." Evidently it never did. In his disbelief he resembled H. P. Love- -- 11 --
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