M. R. James: supernaturalism, Christianity and moral accountability

M. R. James:
supernaturalism, Christianity, and moral accountability

Ralph Harrington
BA (Lond.), MSt (Oxon.), DPhil (Oxon.)

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‘SI TU NON VENERIS ad me, ego veniam ad te’: ‘If you don’t come to me, I’ll come to you’.[1] Such is the enigmatic warning conveyed to the unfortunate Mr Sampson in A School Story, one of the ghost stories of the master of English supernatural fiction, Montague Rhodes James. The recipient ignores the warning, and a grim retribution does indeed come to him – and in this respect, he is far from alone among M. R. James’s characters. James’s beautifully written and immaculately constructed narratives are full of people meddling with things that do not concern them, being led astray by curiosity, greed or hubris, ignoring warnings and sound advice, and receiving the just desserts for their foolish or wicked acts. Seventy years after his death (he died on 15 June 1936, in his seventy-third year) it is worth looking again at those celebrated stories of the supernatural: they reveal a profound Christian morality, a deeply ethical commitment to scholarship, a wide and humane learning, and, not least, a knowledgeable and sympathetic respect for Catholicism.

Many writers on M. R. James have remarked upon the seeming contradiction between the respectable orthodox Anglicanism of his life and the dark currents of the demonic and the occult that swirl through such stories as ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ and Casting the Runes, while others have seen his ghost stories as devoid of moral content, representing the supernatural ‘not as a force grounded in coherent theology, but as an unaccountably destructive force which makes its own rules and chooses its own victims’.[2] In fact, although James himself made no claims for his ghost stories as anything other than entertainment (‘I am told that they have given pleasure of a certain sort to my readers: if so, my whole object in writing them has been attained’[3]), he is both a more coherent and a more moralistic writer than these viewpoints allow. The supernatural world as depicted by M. R. James is not capricious and arbitrary but reflects its creator’s conviction that human beings have a duty to act morally, and that they will be held to ultimate account for their actions. Inherent to this moral structure is James’s conception of scholarship, the scholar’s duty to truth, and the necessity for the quest for knowledge to be constrained by a moral framework. It is these elements that serve as the keys to a full appreciation of his ghost stories.

The origin of this moral foundation lies in M. R. James’s childhood. His father, Herbert James, was an evangelical Anglican clergyman who imbued his son with a deep Christian faith and a concept of Christian morality which never left him. This upbringing also left its mark in the form of intellectual conservatism; as James’s biographer Michael Cox has written, James ‘tended to distrust intellectual inquiry that was not rooted in sensitive respect for tradition and orthodoxy’.[4] Throughout his life, however, this potentially narrowing influence was counterbalanced by his commitment to scholarship. The scholar’s duty to sources and evidence, and to correctly understanding the individuals and societies who had left later generations the traces of their beliefs and practices, assumed fundamental importance in M. R. James’s life and work, expressing itself in a conviction that the scholar was bound not to speculate or, in drawing conclusions, to go beyond what the evidence would bear. Given James’s commitment to this code of moral scholarship, it is unsurprising that the consequences of ill-governed curiosity are a potent theme in many of his ghost stories.

Several of James’s most successful stories revolve around this issue. Frequently the trigger for the appearance of the supernatural agency is an act of disturbance motivated by foolish or greedy curiosity, as in The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, A Warning to the Curious and ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’. The demonic or ghostly force, once it – or, to be more precise, whatever it was set to guard – is disturbed, acts remorselessly to exact retribution and reset, as it were, the pre-existing balance. The example of ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ is particularly interesting in this respect. The main figure in the story, Parkins, is a Cambridge professor who combines many characteristics that James found unamenable. In addition to being self-important, finicky, humourless and – very deplorably, in James’s view – a golfer, he is dismissive of antiquarian pursuits and is an uncompromising scientific rationalist: ‘I am’ he declares, ‘a convinced disbeliever in what is called the “supernatural.”’[5] He finds an ancient whistle, upon which the words quis est iste qui venit are engraved (‘who is this who is coming’) and, impervious to the warning, blows it – and his orderly, rational world is shattered for ever.

Parkins’s sin was ultimately one of hubris; he believed that his rationalistic understanding of the world provided a total and all-encompassing explanation of the workings of the universe. In that sense the point of the story is more than just a foolish individual being taught a lesson. For James, moral conduct is a matter of duty. Duty can be undermined by weakness; whether it is hubris, curiosity, cupidity or complacency, such weakness leads to a lack of vigilance about one’s own moral condition. Mr Wraxall, in Count Magnus, allows the glamour of the Count’s evil so to work upon his mind that he loses all sense of where he is going, both literally and spiritually: ‘I had entirely failed to notice where I was going … when I suddenly, as it were, awoke to consciousness, and found myself … singing or chanting some such words as “Are you awake, Count Magnus? Are you asleep, Count Magnus?” and then something more which I have failed to recollect’.[6] The consequence of this lack of vigilance is that Magnus does, indeed, awake, with fatal consequences for the man who had so thoughtlessly summoned him from the grave. The smug Mr Dillett, in The Haunted Dolls’ House, congratulates himself complacently on acquiring the item after which the story is named: ‘this is my day and no mistake … It almost makes one afraid something’ll happen to counter it’. Something does indeed happen, something that leaves him ‘in a disquieting state of nerves’.[7] And then there is poor Mr Paxton in A Warning to the Curious, whose curiosity and satisfaction in his own cleverness leads to him digging up a Saxon Crown and bringing upon himself the wrath of its supernatural guardian: ‘if I hadn’t been the wretched fool that I am, I should have put the thing back and left it. But I didn’t … And even if I do get it put back, he won’t forgive me: I can tell that’.[8] In the most extreme cases the act is one of murder, as in A School Story and The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral. In the latter story, Archdeacon Haynes, impatient to succeed the aged and inefficient Archdeacon Pulteney, brings about Pulteney’s death, an act against which the very fabric of his cathedral rebels. He is called to account by demonic agents of retribution of a singularly dreadful kind, and his belief that he ‘acted for the best’ avails him nothing.[9] And nor could it: no moral framework informed by Christian principles could ever endorse the view that ends justify means.

In some of the stories it is the ghosts themselves who have acted immorally or wickedly in their past lives, and are doomed to haunt the scene of their misdeeds. The Lady Ivy, in A Neighbour’s Landmark, haunts the property she stole by moving the item referred to in the story’s title; in Number 13 one Nicolas Francken, who practised Satanism and sold his soul to the Devil, is glimpsed – and heard – dancing and singing amid spectral flames in his former house. In other cases the supernatural manifests itself as an agent of vengeance, as in the case of the spirits of the murdered children who return to destroy the evil Mr Abney in Lost Hearts, or as the deliverer of a more abstract justice, as in The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, or James’s masterly Casting the Runes. The central figure in the latter story is Mr Karswell, a pseudo-scholar and black magician who, like Parkins, believes in the universal authority of his own world-view. Unlike the professor, he uses his knowledge and skills to malevolent ends. When he believes himself slighted he takes revenge, ‘casting the runes’ upon those who have crossed him to unleash demonic forces upon them, to fatal effect. The narrative involves the means by which one such victim ‘casts the runes’ straight back at Karswell himself, inflicting upon him the doom he had unleashed on others. The wider ends of retributive justice are thus served as Karswell suffers the consequences of his own evil actions.

A profound morality thus underlies the ghost stories, a morality with its roots in James’s firm Christian faith. That faith was not a narrow one, however. James’s concern with scholarship had played its part in loosening the ties of the evangelical aspects of the Christianity within which he had been raised, and his researches in church history, ecclesiology and the history of liturgy and scripture had given him a knowledgeable respect for Christian traditions other than his own; as his biographer Richard Pfaff has put it, he developed ‘a sense of the relativity of religious expressions’.[10] He had no sense of superiority towards the faith held by people in former times. In terms of his own religious position, Stephen Gaselee, who knew him as tutor at King’s College Cambridge, described him in 1901 as ‘a devoted son of the Church of England [who] would describe himself as protestant, although he liked a grave and dignified ceremonial: he had some sympathy with the tractarians, but none with “the ritualists”’.[11] So where did he stand in relation to Catholicism?

There is no doubt that in his language there are occasional traces of the suspicion of Catholicism typical of M. R. James’s time and class. ‘Too papistical’ were the words he used as Provost of King’s when in 1909 he refused permission for Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius to be performed in the college chapel, while in 1901 he wrote a letter to The Times disputing the authenticity of some supposed bones of St Edmund ‘which the Papists are foisting upon us’;[12] and he could be dismissive of some of the sermons he heard in French churches: ‘Too often sham miracles or shoddy saints’.[13] Yet there is no trace of anti-Catholic sentiment in his reactions to St Peter’s in Rome, or any other Catholic church he visited (and there were many); while in the preface to a guide to English and Welsh abbeys, published under the enlightened patronage of the Great Western Railway in 1930, he defended pre-Reformation monasticism against its protestant detractors, writing that ‘Whatever the venal commissioners of Henry VIII may have said, the monasteries were not hotbeds of crime and luxury’.[14] During his frequent visits to France – his friend and biographer Gurney Lubbock called France his greatest love[15] – he liked to attend mass in French churches, and, whatever he may have thought of some of the sermons, he enjoyed the plainsong and the ritual along with the architecture.

As for the ghost stories, while there is sometimes a patronizing tone towards ‘lower-class’ characters such as tram conductors and hotel maids, and his depiction of the only Jewish character he created – the unscrupulous book-dealer Poschwitz, in The Uncommon Prayer-Book – is unpleasantly close to anti-Semitic caricature, there is never any hint of anti-Catholicism. Take, for example, Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book, which appeared in 1895, the first of James’s stories to be published. This story evokes the France that James loved, of lonely towns and ancient churches. The central character is a Cambridge academic called Dennistoun, who may fairly be taken to be a portrait of James himself. Dennistoun visits the tiny Pyrenean town of St Bertrand de Comminges to study and record, in photographs, drawings and notes, ‘the wonderful church that dominates the little hill of Comminges’.[16] He is accompanied by the sacristan of the church, who has ‘a curious furtive, or rather hunted and oppressed, air’ (Dennistoun very soon finds out why, but I do not intend to spoil the story by going into details here). At one point Dennistoun encounters ‘a large dark picture … one of a series illustrating the miracles of St. Bertrand’ and reacts to it with an amused disdain reminiscent of M. R. James himself commenting on the sermons in some rural French church:

Dennistoun was turning to the sacristan with a smile and a jocular remark of some sort on his lips, but he was confounded to see the old man on his knees, gazing at the picture with the eye of a suppliant in agony, his hands tightly clasped, and a rain of tears on his cheeks. Dennistoun naturally pretended to have noticed nothing, but the question would not away from him, ‘Why should a daub of this kind affect anyone so strongly?’[17]

His initial conclusion is that the sacristan is ‘a monomaniac’ – emotional Catholic devotion as a form of mental disorder – but this is precisely the kind of lazy complacency that James likes to shake out of his central characters. His own writing shows his human sympathy for the sacristan, and his moral and spiritual understanding of the sincerity and beauty of his faith:

The sacristan … hurriedly beckoned Dennistoun to the western door of the church, under the tower. It was time to ring the Angelus. A few pulls at the reluctant rope, and the great bell Bertrande, high in the tower, began to speak, and swung her voice up among the pines and down to the valleys, loud with mountain streams, calling the dwellers on those lonely hills to remember and repeat the salutation of the angel to her whom he called Blessed among Women.[18]

This lyrical evocation not only expresses respect for, and awareness of the beauty and value of, a distinctively Catholic religious practice, it also emphasizes the rootedness of religious belief, ritual and practice in time and place. Once again this is a way in which James warns against arrogance and complacency.

Recently, Peter Ackroyd has argued that James’s stories ‘bear traces of a buried but unquiet Catholic past’, and has suggested that the close identification of Catholicism with the spectres of his stories implies a suspicion, even perhaps a fear, of Catholicism in James’s work. Similarly, Peter Davidson has observed that two Catholic clerics in James’s stories, Canon Alberic and Abbot Thomas in The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, are dabblers in black magic who suffer for their unholy activities, and argued that this is evidence of a ‘suspicion of Catholic Europe’ on James’s part.[19] It is true that there is a sense in which a perception of Catholicism as itself inherently superstitious, if not actually demonic or satanic, underlies these characterizations, as it does the role of the Knights Templar in ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’. However, the Catholicism of these characters is ultimately incidental; they fall prey to evil in the way they do because they are weak – in each case, the weakness is greed – and James depicts them as unfortunate rather than wicked. The reader is meant to pity them, not despise them. The characters who are actively evil in James’s stories – Count Magnus in the story that bears his name, Mr Karswell in Casting the Runes, John Eldred in The Tractate Middoth – are not Catholic;[20] if he wished to make anti-Catholic points with them he surely could have made them so. The central point is that base motivations such as greed, cruelty and malice have allowed them to surrender, to varying degrees, to evil in the form of black magic: the topic of the ‘evil magus or black magician’, notes the folklorist Jacqueline Simpson, was one ‘to which James returned again and again, perhaps because the quest for secret knowledge represented a temptation which he as a scholar could readily understand’.[21] Once more the need for a moral framework to contain the quest for knowledge is at the heart of James’s art.

Perhaps the final word should be left to Mr Dennistoun, the central character of Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook. At the end of the story, when he himself has had a terrifying experience, and has as a consequence learned something of the horrors suffered by the sacristan and the seventeenth-century Canon Alberic before him, he pays a return visit to Comminges and has a long talk with the Vicar of St Bertrand’s church, telling the narrator as they drive away: ‘I hope it isn’t wrong: you know I am a Presbyterian – but I – I believe there will be ‘saying of Mass and singing of dirges’ for Alberic de Mauléon’s rest’.[22]

This compassionate act, an instance of what would today be seen as ecumenism, motivated by Christian humanity and a respect for the religious practice of a society other than his own, may be taken as representative of James’s own inclinations. It is this humanity, always allied to a strong sense of morality and firmly rooted in Christian faith, that counterbalances the seeming moral bleakness and savagery of M. R. James’s ghost stories, and which helps to make those stories among the most richly rewarding, as well as terrifying, works of supernatural fiction.

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Notes

1. A School Story, in M. R. James, Collected Ghost Stories (London: Edward Arnold, 1931), p. 186. Henceforward abbreviated as ‘CGS’.

2. Jack Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from LeFanu to Blackwood (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1978), p. 130.

3. M. R. James, ‘Preface’, in Collected Ghost Stories, p. vii.

4. Michael Cox, M. R. James: An Informal Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 8.

5. ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, CGS, p. 138.

6. Count Magnus, CGS, p. 114.

7. The Haunted Dolls’ House, CGS, pp. 266-7, 485.

8. A Warning to the Curious, CGS, pp. 575-6.

9. The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, CGS, p. 284.

10. Richard William Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James (London: Scolar Press, 1980), p. 90.

11. Quoted in Cox, M. R. James, p. 120.

12. Quoted in Cox, M. R. James, p. 117.

13. Sir Stephen Gaselee, Montague Rhodes James O.M. 1862-1936, from The Proceedings of the British Academy, volume XXII (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), p. 16.

14. Quoted in Cox, M. R. James, p. 216.

15. Cox, M. R. James, p. 109.

16. Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book, CGS, pp. 1-2.

17. Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book, CGS, p 4.

18. Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book, CGS, p 5.

19. Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002), pp. 372, 377; Peter Davidson, The Idea of North (London: Reaktion, 2004), p. 151. Peter Ackroyd somewhat spoils his case with a slapdash reading of some of James’s stories; he appears to think that the demon encountered by Dennistoun in Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book is ‘the spectre of a Catholic canon’ and that in Count Magnus the ‘Roman priest in a cassock’ seen by Mr Wraxall on his canal journey is a ‘spectre’ rather than the entirely innocent and very alive fellow passenger that he actually is: Ackroyd, Albion, p. 377.

20. As Peter Ackroyd points out (Albion, p. 377), Karswell is described as ‘formerly a Roman’ in an draft of Casting the Runes, but this identification was dropped for the published version of the story; if Karswell being (formerly) Catholic was of significance to James it seems reasonable to suppose that he would have left it in. See Michael Cox (ed.), Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 321.

21. Jacqueline Simpson, ‘“The rules of folklore” in the ghost stories of M. R. James’, Folklore, vol. 108 (1997), p. 14.

22. Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book, CGS, p. 18.

Bibliography

Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002)

Michael Cox, M. R. James: An Informal Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).

Peter Davidson, The Idea of North (London: Reaktion, 2004).

Stephen Gaselee, ‘Montague Rhodes James, 1862-1936’, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 22 (1936).

M. R. James, Collected Ghost Stories (London: Edward Arnold, 1931).

Richard William Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James (London: Scolar Press, 1980).

Jacqueline Simpson, ‘“The rules of folklore” in the ghost stories of M. R. James’, Folklore, vol. 108 (1997).

Jack Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares: the English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1978).