Читать книгу Seven Gothic Tales онлайн

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"Oh, I am a Nat-og-Dag," said Miss Malin modestly.

"But are you not," asked the Cardinal, "a little...?"

"Mad?" asked the old lady. "I thought you were aware of that, my lord." Now if you don't know what the general spirit animating the book is, I can't tell you.

But there is a great deal more to an author than the spirit that animates him, let that be as curious and rare as it will. There is his style. And I don't know how to tell you what the style of the book is, any more definitely than what the spirit of it is, because the style too is very new to me, and will be to you, I think.

You will probably read it as I did, laying it down from time to time, to look up at the ceiling, pondering, "Is it of Cervantes' leisurely, by-path-following style that it reminds me? Or perhaps just R. L. Stevenson's more mannered--no, no, it is more like a Romantic School German narrator's way of telling a story. Or is that only because the grotesque and occasionally gruesome touches remind one of Hoffman? Perhaps it is because a foreigner, writing English, often falls as it were by accident on inimitably fresh ways of using our battered old words. Perhaps, quite simply, the style seems so original and strange because the personality using it is original and strange." And having come to no conclusion at all, you will turn back to read until you are again stopped by some passage for which you can't find a comparison in the writing you know. Like this one, in "The Supper at Elsinore" at the end of the party. The two middle-aged but still brilliant sisters "were happy to get rid of their guests; but a little silent bitter minute accompanied the pleasure. For they could still make people fall in love with them; they had the radiance in them which could refract little rainbow effects on the atmosphere of Copenhagen existence. But who could make them feel in love? At this moment, the tristesse of the eternal hostess stiffened them a little."