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Acolyte, v. 3, issue 4, whole no. 12, Fall 1945
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landscapes, particularly windy autumnal scenes neither bright nor gloomy but possessed of a nostalgic, disquieting, twilight sense of the impermanence of all things. The seacoasts in "A Warning to the Curious" and "Oh Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad", the "View from a Hill" seen by Fanshawe and Squire Richards, and the countryside in "The Uncommon Prayer-Book" are all examples, each sketched indelibly with only a few words. Still better is the manor in "Lost Hearts": An evening light shone on the building, making the window panes glow like so many fires. Away from the Hall in front stretched a flat park studded with oaks and fringed with firs, which stood out against the sky. The clock in the church-tower, buried in trees on the edge of the park, only its golden weathercock catching the light, was striking six, and the sound came gently beating down the wind. It was altogether a pleasant impression, though tinged with the sort of melancholy appropriate to an evening in early autumn, that was conveyed.... Also memorable is the "wet August afternoon, rather windy, rather warm" in "A Neighbor's Landmark": Outside the window great trees were stirring and weeping. Between them were stretches of green and yellow country (for the Court stands high on a hillside), and blue hills far off, veiled with rain. Up above was a very restless and hopeless movement of low clouds travelling north-west. ((And on the haunted hill:)) The sun was down behind the hill, and the light was off the fields, and when the clock bell in the Church tower struck seven, I thought no longer of kind mellow evening hours of rest, and scents of flowers and woods on evening air; and of how someone on a farm a mile or two off would be saying "How clear Belton bell sounds tonight after the rain." but instead images came to me of dusty beams and creeping spiders and savage owls up in the tower, and forgotten graves and their ugly contents below, and of flying Time and all it had taken out of my life. These paragraphs, reflecting his feeling for nature, also display James' style at its most unobtrusive and transparent--a perfect medium for the transmission of ideas, pictures and impressions--a medium so clear, so well adapted to its subject-matter, that one never thinks of it at all but merely absorbs with instand comprehension the matter conveyed. That is the true test of any style, since the function of writing is to transmit meanings clearly and accurately without interposing any noticeable obstacles between the minds of the author and the reader. James' style has a classic terseness, with simple Anglo-Saxon words and smooth, rolling sentences, reflecting perhaps his early reading of the bible and his dislike of pretentious pedantry. Such a style is easy to translate, and one can well understand the success his stories had when translated into French ("The Mezzotint" won a symposium in Paris as to which was the best tale of them all), for French is a language of transparent clarity much better suited to simple realism than extravagant romanticism. Unlike Lovecraft, James never strives to build up a weird atmosphere in his stories with prolix, turgid passages of description or intuition in the conventional manner. In a more subtle way, however, his brief, solemn representations of nature reinforce the uneasy aura of the uncanny that permeates his tales, and help to put one in the mood for spectral manifestations. In any event, they indi- -- 22 --
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landscapes, particularly windy autumnal scenes neither bright nor gloomy but possessed of a nostalgic, disquieting, twilight sense of the impermanence of all things. The seacoasts in "A Warning to the Curious" and "Oh Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad", the "View from a Hill" seen by Fanshawe and Squire Richards, and the countryside in "The Uncommon Prayer-Book" are all examples, each sketched indelibly with only a few words. Still better is the manor in "Lost Hearts": An evening light shone on the building, making the window panes glow like so many fires. Away from the Hall in front stretched a flat park studded with oaks and fringed with firs, which stood out against the sky. The clock in the church-tower, buried in trees on the edge of the park, only its golden weathercock catching the light, was striking six, and the sound came gently beating down the wind. It was altogether a pleasant impression, though tinged with the sort of melancholy appropriate to an evening in early autumn, that was conveyed.... Also memorable is the "wet August afternoon, rather windy, rather warm" in "A Neighbor's Landmark": Outside the window great trees were stirring and weeping. Between them were stretches of green and yellow country (for the Court stands high on a hillside), and blue hills far off, veiled with rain. Up above was a very restless and hopeless movement of low clouds travelling north-west. ((And on the haunted hill:)) The sun was down behind the hill, and the light was off the fields, and when the clock bell in the Church tower struck seven, I thought no longer of kind mellow evening hours of rest, and scents of flowers and woods on evening air; and of how someone on a farm a mile or two off would be saying "How clear Belton bell sounds tonight after the rain." but instead images came to me of dusty beams and creeping spiders and savage owls up in the tower, and forgotten graves and their ugly contents below, and of flying Time and all it had taken out of my life. These paragraphs, reflecting his feeling for nature, also display James' style at its most unobtrusive and transparent--a perfect medium for the transmission of ideas, pictures and impressions--a medium so clear, so well adapted to its subject-matter, that one never thinks of it at all but merely absorbs with instand comprehension the matter conveyed. That is the true test of any style, since the function of writing is to transmit meanings clearly and accurately without interposing any noticeable obstacles between the minds of the author and the reader. James' style has a classic terseness, with simple Anglo-Saxon words and smooth, rolling sentences, reflecting perhaps his early reading of the bible and his dislike of pretentious pedantry. Such a style is easy to translate, and one can well understand the success his stories had when translated into French ("The Mezzotint" won a symposium in Paris as to which was the best tale of them all), for French is a language of transparent clarity much better suited to simple realism than extravagant romanticism. Unlike Lovecraft, James never strives to build up a weird atmosphere in his stories with prolix, turgid passages of description or intuition in the conventional manner. In a more subtle way, however, his brief, solemn representations of nature reinforce the uneasy aura of the uncanny that permeates his tales, and help to put one in the mood for spectral manifestations. In any event, they indi- -- 22 --
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