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Acolyte, v. 3, issue 4, whole no. 12, Fall 1945
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he was losing interest in ghost story writing. Peter Fleming shrewdly remarks, "I detect in his later stories a certain leniency, a tendency to let the reader off lightly. There are signs that he finds it increasingly hard to take the creatures of his fancy seriously; like Prospero, he retures more and more into the benevolent showman." (15) This tendency is particularly evident in "After Dark in the Playing Fields", which has a quaint, fairy-tale air like that of his fascinating story for children, The Five Jars. His "benevolence" also leads him to detract from the grimness of the ending of "Wailing Well" by adding two superfluous paragraphs. Such indiscretions, however, are fortunately rare. Most aspects of James's literary style will have become evident from the discussion of his subject-matter and story structure, for in him style and subject are inextricably fussed. Because of the fantastic nature of his themes he cultivated a counteracting reticence and tact in his depiction of these abnormalities. "Reticence," he says, "may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it..." (9) And Fleming comments: His first secret is tact. I say tact rather than restraint because he can and does pile on the agony when his sense of the dramatic tells him to... It is tact, a guileless and deadly tact, that gauges so nicely the force of half-definitions, adjusting the balance between reticence and the explicit so that our imaginations are ever ready to meet his purpose halfway... Overstatement has been the besetting sin of the ghost story since the statue at Otranto began to bleed at the nose, and Dr. James will have nothing to do with it, even in its emasculated modern form, which spells thing with a capital T and has a great camp following of dots. (15) Suggestion is now well known to be the most effective technique for the raising of goose-pimples, but after the crudities of nineteenth century weird fiction it came as a pleasant surprise in the stories of James. When his ghosts and demons make their first appearance on the scene in the typical James tale, they are adumbrated with a tantalizing inconclusiveness, or the half-felt manifestations of their existence are misunderstood and misinterpreted by everyone save their alert reader. Thus these early supernatural incidents are, by suggestion, given much greater force and artistic effect than if they were described badly and uninhibitedly. Note, for example, the noises in the cathedral in "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book"; the changing positions of the pictured ghost in "The Mezzotint" seen first by persons who do not understand their significance; the prophetic Sortes taken at random from the Bible in "The Ash-Tree"; the white figure which Professor Parkins sees behind him on the sea-shore and assumes to be another boarder; the innocuous sounding messages in Latin conveyed to the teacher in "A School Story"; the supposed cries of owls in "The Rose Garden" and the enigmatically creepy voice, "Pull, pull. I'll push, you pull."; the repressed and determinedly calm diary entries of the harrassed archdeacon in "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral"; the simple, straightforward, gossipy testimony of the woman and the boy in "Martin's Close" as to the appearance of Ann Clark when "it was impossible she could have been a living person"; the limited, far-away viewpoint of the man watching the re-enactment of murder and worse than murder in "The Haunted Doll's House"; the old butler's objective, naturalistic description in "A View from a Hill" of Baxter's unwilling and jerky departure from his house one night -- 18 --
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he was losing interest in ghost story writing. Peter Fleming shrewdly remarks, "I detect in his later stories a certain leniency, a tendency to let the reader off lightly. There are signs that he finds it increasingly hard to take the creatures of his fancy seriously; like Prospero, he retures more and more into the benevolent showman." (15) This tendency is particularly evident in "After Dark in the Playing Fields", which has a quaint, fairy-tale air like that of his fascinating story for children, The Five Jars. His "benevolence" also leads him to detract from the grimness of the ending of "Wailing Well" by adding two superfluous paragraphs. Such indiscretions, however, are fortunately rare. Most aspects of James's literary style will have become evident from the discussion of his subject-matter and story structure, for in him style and subject are inextricably fussed. Because of the fantastic nature of his themes he cultivated a counteracting reticence and tact in his depiction of these abnormalities. "Reticence," he says, "may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it..." (9) And Fleming comments: His first secret is tact. I say tact rather than restraint because he can and does pile on the agony when his sense of the dramatic tells him to... It is tact, a guileless and deadly tact, that gauges so nicely the force of half-definitions, adjusting the balance between reticence and the explicit so that our imaginations are ever ready to meet his purpose halfway... Overstatement has been the besetting sin of the ghost story since the statue at Otranto began to bleed at the nose, and Dr. James will have nothing to do with it, even in its emasculated modern form, which spells thing with a capital T and has a great camp following of dots. (15) Suggestion is now well known to be the most effective technique for the raising of goose-pimples, but after the crudities of nineteenth century weird fiction it came as a pleasant surprise in the stories of James. When his ghosts and demons make their first appearance on the scene in the typical James tale, they are adumbrated with a tantalizing inconclusiveness, or the half-felt manifestations of their existence are misunderstood and misinterpreted by everyone save their alert reader. Thus these early supernatural incidents are, by suggestion, given much greater force and artistic effect than if they were described badly and uninhibitedly. Note, for example, the noises in the cathedral in "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book"; the changing positions of the pictured ghost in "The Mezzotint" seen first by persons who do not understand their significance; the prophetic Sortes taken at random from the Bible in "The Ash-Tree"; the white figure which Professor Parkins sees behind him on the sea-shore and assumes to be another boarder; the innocuous sounding messages in Latin conveyed to the teacher in "A School Story"; the supposed cries of owls in "The Rose Garden" and the enigmatically creepy voice, "Pull, pull. I'll push, you pull."; the repressed and determinedly calm diary entries of the harrassed archdeacon in "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral"; the simple, straightforward, gossipy testimony of the woman and the boy in "Martin's Close" as to the appearance of Ann Clark when "it was impossible she could have been a living person"; the limited, far-away viewpoint of the man watching the re-enactment of murder and worse than murder in "The Haunted Doll's House"; the old butler's objective, naturalistic description in "A View from a Hill" of Baxter's unwilling and jerky departure from his house one night -- 18 --
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