The Centenary of "The Other End" by R. Ellis Roberts

January 1923 saw the publication of the only volume of fiction by the noted literary critic R. Ellis Roberts (1879-1953). It came from the London publisher Cecil Palmer, and contains three sections of three stories each, all followed by an additional interlude or commentary, making for a total of twelve. It is perhaps not coincidental that in September 1922, The Bookman published Roberts's appreciation of Arthur Machen, whom he had clearly read closely, and many Machenian ideas and themes recur in the stories of The Other End. 

Its two most reprinted tales are "The Hill" and "The Narrow Way", but various critics have selected other tales as its best.  E.F. Bleiler called "The Rabbit Road" and "The Wind" excellent (the others being "of varying quality"), while David G. Rowlands noted "The Cage" as the best. Readers of Wormwoodiana with long memories might recall that James Doig presented, back in 2012, the March 1923 review of The Other End from The Bookman (link here), which gives a fulsome consideration of the volume. Back in 1989 Mark Valentine noted in his column "The Ghost Story Gazetteer" in The Ghost Story Society Newsletter the possible real world places associated in the tales, and in the recently published Literary Hauntings: A Gazetteer of Literary Ghost Stories from Britain and Ireland (2022, co-edited by R.B. Russell, Rosalie Parker, and Mark Valentine), he repeated the conclusion (with a nice photograph) that "Colmer's Hill" near Bridport in Dorset is the setting of "The Hill" by Roberts.

Roberts had previously written only a few short stories, but they are entirely unlike those in The Other End (which apparently had no prior periodical appearances). We are left to regret that Roberts published no further fiction after this collection, but we can honor here this one volume on its centenary. 

THE OTHER END, R. ELLIS ROBERTS

Wormwoodianaites would know of R. Ellis Roberts through a couple of stories anthologised in Dorothy L. Sayers' sublime Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror series.  Surely his scarce collection, The Other End, is deserving of a reprint in these enlightened times.  Here is a contemporary review that appeared in The Bookman in March 1923.

THE OTHER END, By R. Ellis Roberts (Cecil Palmer, 1923)

There is said to be joy among authors when a critic writes a novel or a book of short stories.  “Now,” they say in their hearts, “he will give himself away.  It is easy for him to point out the flaws in our art and tell us how to do it, but he will not find it so easy to demonstrate how it ought to be done." Any such joy will, in this case, be short‑lived, for “The Other End" proves that Mr. Ellis Roberts is as well able to write stories of his own as to criticise those of others. Here, moreover, he has set his hand to a kind of story-telling that is not often practised successfully and achieved a mastery, at times, over the grim, the terrible, the eerie, the bizarre, over the fine, elusive mysteries of the spirit, that challenges comparison with Poe and Hawthorne.

For all the uncanny air that enfolds these stories, the supernatural elements in them are so quietly taken for granted, and am blended with so much of everyday circumstance that even their unrealities are made to seem curiously real. Mr. Roberts paints you a conventional, smiling English landscape, then by gradual, subtle wizardries touches it with secret, twilight terrors. He finds the gods of ancient Rome still haunting the English countryside where their alters and temples had stood; finds the altar magically re‑erected, the sacred fire burning on the lonely hill in the deep of the night, and a strange worshipper, who had seemed by day an ordinary herd‑boy, offering up sacrifice; finds the gods themselves returning to influence mysteriously, tragically, the lives of present‑day men and women.

In "The Great Mother," Hugh Flinders asks his friend: “Would it surprise you to know that the old worship goes on? That hills near here are still sacred to Apollo? That groves are still dedicated to Diana, and woods to Pan? I don't mean stupid revivals like old Taylor's: I mean survivals of the old faith among the old people ‑ people to whom Christ and the saints are less direct of access than earth-stained Pan, gross Priapus, or even Jupiter of the storm. For months now I have resisted and I can resist no longer. I am going to the grove tonight: and I should like you to come too, it you will. Will you?” The amazing happenings that night at the grove ‑ the baffling disappearance of Hugh, the rush of frenzied dancers, with nothing to be heard but the swift padding of many feet, and nothing seen but the long, rank grass beaten down as by a storm of hailstones ‑ the whole thing, with its matter-of-fact ending, which leaves the wonder unexplained, is done with an art, an imaginative cunning that is rare in modern fiction.

These occult influences of the ancient world are potent in “The Hill,” the piteous tragedy of “The Other End,” “The Wind,” “Under the Sun,” and other of the tales; but it is a different wizardry that is practised by the saintly priest, Lascelles in "The Narrow Way," another sort of spirit that haunts the high road in "The Cage." Any summary of the stories would misrepresent them; they depend so much for their effectiveness on the atmosphere in which they are steeped, on little details of character and incident that, subtly touched into them, subdue the reader to a belief in their bizarre happenings. Some are edged with a delicate irony, or have charm as well as mystery and terror; the best show a power of fantasy and a deftness of finish which seem to indicate that Mr. Ellis Roberts has too long given to criticism what was meant for imaginative literature.