Collected Ghost Stories

by M. R. James

  Setting or environment, then, is to me a principal point, and the more readily appreciable the setting is to the ordinary reader the better. The other essential is that our ghost should make himself felt by gradual stirrings diffusing an atmosphere of uneasiness before the final flash or stab of horror.

  Must there be horror? you ask. I think so. There are but two really good ghost stories I know in the language wherein the elements of beauty and pity dominate terror. They are Lanoe Falconer’s* ‘Cecilia de Noel’ and Mrs. Oliphant’s ‘The Open Door.’ In both there are moments of horror; but in both we end by saying with Hamlet: ‘Alas, poor ghost!’ Perhaps my limit of two stories is overstrict; but that these two are by very much the best of their kind I do not doubt.

  On the whole, then, I say you must have horror and also malevolence. Not less necessary, however, is reticence. There is a series of books I have read, I think American in origin, called Not at Night (and with other like titles), which sin glaringly against this law. They have no other aim than that of Mr. Wardle’s Fat Boy.*

  Of course, all writers of ghost stories do desire to make their readers’ flesh creep; but these are shameless in their attempts. They are unbelievably crude and sudden, and they wallow in corruption. And if there is a theme that ought to be kept out of the ghost story, it is that of the charnel house. That and sex, wherein I do not say that these Not at Night books deal, but certainly other recent writers do, and in so doing spoil the whole business.

  To return from the faults of ghost stories to their excellence. Who, do I think, has best realized their possibilities? I have no hesitation in saying that it is Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. In the volume called In a Glass Darkly are four stories of paramount excellence, ‘Green Tea,’ ‘The Familiar,’ ‘Mr Justice Harbottle,’ and ‘Carmilla.’ All of these conform to my requirements: the settings are quite different, but all seen by the writer; the approaches of the supernatural nicely graduated; the climax adequate. Le Fanu was a scholar and poet, and these tales show him as such. It is true that he died as long ago as 1873, but there is wonderfully little that is obsolete in his manner.

  Of living writers I have some hesitation in speaking, but on any list that I was forced to compile the names of E. F. Benson, Blackwood, Burrage, De la Mare* and Wakefield would find a place.

  But, although the subject has its fascinations, I see no use in being pontifical about it. These stories are meant to please and amuse us. If they do so, well; but, if not, let us relegate them to the top shelf and say no more about it.

  Preface to The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1931)

  In accordance with a fashion which has recently become common, I am issuing my four volumes of ghost stories under one cover, and appending to them some matter of the same kind.

  I am told they have given pleasure of a certain sort to my readers: if so, my whole object in writing them has been attained, and there does not seem to be much reason for prefacing them by a disquisition upon how I came to write them. Still, a preface is demanded by my publishers, and it may as well be devoted to answering questions which I have been asked.

  First, whether the stories are based on my own experience? To this the answer is No: except in one case, specified in the text, where a dream furnished a suggestion. Or again, whether they are versions of other people’s experiences? No. Or suggested by books? This is more difficult to answer concisely. Other people have written of dreadful spiders—for instance, Erckmann-Chatrian in an admirable story called L’Araignée Crabe*—and of pictures which came alive: the State Trials give the language of Judge Jeffreys and the courts at the end of the seventeenth century: and so on. Places have been more prolific in suggestion: if anyone is curious about my local settings, let it be recorded that S. Bertrand de Comminges and Viborg are real places: that in Oh, Whistle, and I’ll come to you, I had Felixstowe in mind; in A School Story, Temple Grove, East Sheen; in The Tractate Middoth, Cambridge University Library; in Martin’s Close, Sampford Courtenay in Devon: that the cathedrals of Barchester and Southminster were blends of Canterbury, Salisbury, and Hereford: that Herefordshire was the imagined scene of A View from a Hill, and Seaburgh in A Warning to the Curious is Aldeburgh in Suffolk.

  I am not conscious of other obligations to literature or local legend, written or oral, except in so far as I have tried to make my ghosts act in ways not inconsistent with the rules of folklore. As for the fragments of ostensible erudition which are scattered about my pages, hardly anything in them is not pure invention; there never was, naturally, any such book as that which I quote in the Treasure of Abbot Thomas.

  Other questioners ask if I have any theories as to the writing of ghost stories. None that are worthy of the name or need to be repeated here: some thoughts on the subject are in a preface to Ghosts and Marvels. [The World’s Classics, Oxford, 1924.] There is no receipt for success in this form of fiction more than in any other. The public, as Dr. Johnson said, are the ultimate judges: if they are pleased, it is well; if not, it is no use to tell them why they ought to have been pleased.

  Supplementary questions are: Do I believe in ghosts? To which I answer that I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me. And lastly, Am I going to write any more ghost stories? To which I fear I must answer, Probably not.

  Since we are nothing if not bibliographical nowadays, I add a paragraph or two setting forth the facts about the several collections and their contents.

  ‘Ghost Stories of an Antiquary’ was published (like the rest) by Messrs. Arnold in 1904. The first issue had four illustrations by the late James McBryde. In this volume Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book was written in 1894 and printed soon after in the National Review: Lost Hearts appeared in the Pall Mall Magazine. Of the next five stories, most of which were read to friends at Christmas-time at King’s College, Cambridge, I only recollect that I wrote Number 13 in 1899, while The Treasure of Abbot Thomas was composed in summer 1904.

  The second volume, ‘More Ghost Stories,’ appeared in 1911. The first six of the seven tales it contains were Christmas productions, the very first (A School Story) having been made up for the benefit of the King’s College Choir School. The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral was printed in the Contemporary Review: Mr. Humphreys and his Inheritance was written to fill up the volume.

  ‘A Thin Ghost and Others’ was the third collection, containing five stories and published in 1919. In it, An Episode of Cathedral History and The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance were contributed to the Cambridge Review.

  Of six stories in ‘A Warning to the Curious,’ published in 1925, the first, The Haunted Dolls’ House, was written for the library of Her Majesty the Queen’s Dolls’ House, and subsequently appeared in the Empire Review. The Uncommon Prayer-book saw the light in the Atlantic Monthly, the title-story in the London Mercury, and another, I think A Neighbour’s Landmark, in an ephemeral called The Eton Chronic. Similar ephemerals were responsible for all but one of the appended pieces (not all of them strictly stories), whereof one, Rats, composed for At Random, was included by Lady Cynthia Asquith in a collection entitled Shudders. The exception, Wailing Well, was written for the Eton College troop of Boy Scouts, and read at their camp-fire at Worbarrow Bay in August, 1927. It was then printed by itself in a limited edition by Robert Gathorne Hardy and Kyrle Leng at the Mill House Press, Stanford Dingley.

  Four or five of the stories have appeared in collections of such things in recent years, and a Norse version of four from my first volume, by Ragnhild Undset, was issued in 1919 under the title of Aander og Trolddom.*

  EXPLANATORY NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS

  CGS

  Collected Ghost Stories (1931)

  Cox I

  Michael Cox, M. R. James: An Informal Portrait (1986)

  Cox II

  Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, ed. Michael Cox (1987)

  E&K

  Eton and King’s (1926)

  EB

  Encyclopaedia
Britannica

  GSA

  Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904)

  Joshi I

  Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (2005)

  Joshi II

  The Haunted Doll’s House and Other Ghost Stories (2006)

  KCL

  King’s College Library, Cambridge

  LTF

  Montague Rhodes James: Letters to a Friend, ed. Gwendolen McBryde (1956)

  Lubbock

  S. G. Lubbock, Montague Rhodes James (1939)

  MGSA

  More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911)

  Pfaff

  R. W. Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James (1980)

  PT

  A Pleasing Terror, ed. Christopher and Barbara Roden (2001)

  S&N

  Suffolk and Norfolk (1930)

  SOED

  Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

  TG

  A Thin Ghost and Others (1919)

  WTC

  A Warning to the Curious (1925)

  Quotations from the Bible are from the King James Version, unless otherwise stated, and quotations from Shakespeare are from the Riverside edition.

  CANON ALBERIC’S SCRAP-BOOK

  Written between spring 1892, when MRJ first visited St Bertrand de Comminges, and October 1893, when it was read, with ‘Lost Hearts’, to the Chitchat Society at Cambridge. Originally entitled ‘A Curious Story’, though MRJ’s handwritten manuscript is untitled. Renamed ‘The Scrap-book of Canon Alberic’ for its first publication in The National Review, 25 (March 1895), 132–41. Modified to its current form for GSA, reprinted in CGS. Manuscript in KCL, MS MRJ:A/1.

  3 ST. BERTRAND DE COMMINGES: a tiny habitation (population 237 in 1999) in the Haute-Garonne region of southern France, very near the Spanish border. Once a way-station for pilgrims on the route to Santiago de Compostela, St Bertrand is spectacularly situated, perched high in the foothills of the Pyrenees. The town is dominated by the enormous Romanesque cathedral of St Bertrand, dating from the twelfth century, when Bertrand de l’Isle was ordained as the first bishop of the Comminges. Bertrand was canonized in 1309 by his successor as bishop of Comminges, Bertrand de Got, later Pope Clement V. MRJ first visited St Bertrand in 1892, along with Armitage Robinson and Arthur Shipley (Cox I, 106), and wrote an account of the cathedral, including a sketch which records the position of the stuffed crocodile, which he sent to his parents:

  S. Bertrand de Comminges … is a tiny walled town on a steep hill. But the snow which was some inches deep prevented our walking round it. We could only examine the cathedral: it is a splendid church, without aisles and short. You see the whole length from the door. There is no proper nave. The stalls which are like those at Auch form a separate enclosure inside the church into which you can’t see. In the corner of the nave is a splendid organ case of XVI cent with nearly all the inside gone. A splendid 14th century cope of English work in the treasury with all sorts of scenes on it. Beautiful cloisters and altogether a sweet place. (PT, 15)

  He revisited the Comminges in 1899 and again in 1901, as part of his annual bicycling holiday, in which he attempted to visit all the cathedrals of France (he saw all but four). Pfaff (p. 114) speculates that MRJ may have visited St Bertrand as early as 1887.

  3 verger or sacristan: SOED defines verger as ‘one whose duty it is to take care of the interior of a church, and to act as attendant’, and sacristan as ‘the sexton of a parish church’, that is, an attendant and a gravedigger.

  4 Dennistoun: originally ‘Anderson’ in both MS and National Review, though changed to Dennistoun for GSA. Dennistoun makes a cameo reappearance in ‘The Mezzotint’, while Mr Anderson is the protagonist of ‘Number 13’.

  St. Bertrand’s ivory crozier … the dusty stuffed crocodile: both still on display in the cathedral. The crozier is made from a narwhal tusk, and the crocodile is a souvenir brought back by a returning crusader.

  the stalls, the enormous dilapidated organ, the choir-screen of Bishop John de Mauléon: Jean de Mauléon, bishop of Comminges from 1523 to 1551, oversaw the construction of these, the most distinctive features of the cathedral’s interior. The stalls, sixty-seven in all, are magnificently carved, and culminate in a wonderfully intricate depiction of the Tree of Jesse. The organ is no longer dilapidated—it was completely restored to its spectacular Renaissance glory in 1974. The huge choir-screen completely bisects the cathedral’s nave and aisles.

  How St. Bertrand delivered a man whom the Devil long sought to strangle: this specific painting is fictional, though the tomb of St Bertrand is behind the altar, and it is adorned by a series of paintings depicting the saint’s miracles.

  5 Angelus: ‘A devotional exercise commemorating the Incarnation, in which the Angelic Salutation is thrice repeated, said by Roman Catholics, at morning, noon, and sunset, at the sound of a bell’ (SOED).

  amateur des vieux livres: ‘lover of old books’.

  6 a stupid missal of Plantin’s printing, about 1580: a missal is a book containing the mass. Christoph Plantin (c. 1520–89) was a French printer and typographical pioneer, based in Antwerp from 1549. Publisher of numerous Bibles and other ecclesiastical works; best known for the Biblia Polyglotta (Polyglot Bible), 1569–72. MRJ visited the Musée Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp in April 1891, and examined ‘an early illuminated Sedalius 10th century’ (Cox II, 301). Joshi I (p. 260) asserts that Plantin was ‘a secret member of a heretical mystical sect’, whose works he published privately.

  Alberic de Mauléon: fictional, though characteristically embedded in layers of genuine factual information.

  7 antiphoner: a book containing antiphons, that is, ‘A versicle or sentence sung by one choir in response to another’ (SOED).

  late in the seventeenth century: ‘early in the xviiith century’ in MS.

  Psalter: a copy of the Psalms, for liturgical use.

  uncial writing: early Latin and Greek manuscript writing, comprised of large, rounded letters, not joined together.

  Papias ‘On the Words of Our Lord’: Papias (second century) was bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia, Asia Minor (near modern Erzurum, Turkey). On the Words of Our Lord (often translated as Explanation of the Sayings of the Lord) now exists only in fragments, excerpted in the writings of Irenaeus and Eusebius (a severe critic), but is nevertheless considered an important account of the beginnings of the Church. In The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts (London: SPCK, 1919), MRJ writes: ‘It is almost a relief that catalogues [of ancient English libraries] do not tell us of supremely desirable things, such as Papias on the Oracles of the Lord or the complete Histories and Annals of Tacitus’ (p. 76).

  8 in the north-west angle of the cloister was a cross drawn in gold paint: the cloisters contain the tombs of many of the canons of St Bertrand. Intriguingly, the tomb at the north-west angle of the cloister is broken open.

  Mr. Minor-Canon Quatremain in “Old St. Paul’s”: a novel of 1841 by William Harrison Ainsworth, set during the London plague and fire of 1665–6. Minor Canon Thomas Quatremain believes he has discovered the location of buried treasure in Old St Paul’s Cathedral (destroyed by fire in 1666) by use of astrological divination.

  a Biblical scene: Cox suggests that the picture may echo Raphael’s cartoon The Death of Ananias, which is in the Victoria and Albert Museum (called the South Kensington Museum in the 1890s) (Cox II, 301). Julia Briggs (Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London, 1977), 130) speculates that the demon may be based on a crouching figure in Breughel’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels.

  8 King Solomon: according to the Testament of Solomon (written between the fifth and first centuries BCE), Solomon commanded a number of demons, including some obstructing the building of the Temple in Jerusalem, by means of a ring given to him by the archangel Michael. The Testament established Solomon’s reputation as a mage and an exorcist.

  9 lecturer on morphology: morphology is the science of biological form. This may be an oblique reference to Arthur
Shipley, who had accompanied MRJ to St Bertrand in 1892, and was university lecturer on the advanced morphology of invertebrata at Cambridge from 1894 to 1908 (Cox II, 302).

  10 Gehazi: see 2 Kings 5. The prophet Elisha cures Naaman, captain of the Syrian host, of leprosy, and declines any payment for this. Gehazi, Elisha’s servant, follows after Naaman, to ‘take somewhat of him’, and is given two silver talents and two changes of garment. When Elisha discovers this, he curses Gehazi: ‘The leprosy therefore of Naaman shall cleave unto thee, and unto they seed forever. And he went out from his presence a leper as white as snow.’

  12 ‘Deux fois je l’ai vu; mille fois je l’ai senti’: ‘Two times I have seen it; a thousand times I have felt it.’

  13 Ecclesiasticus: Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 39: 28: ‘There are winds that have been created for vengeance, and in their anger they scourge heavily’ (Revised Standard Version).