Something less successful perhaps for itself, though even more
absorbing technically, is the volume containing the unfinished
fragment of another HENRY JAMES novel, to be called _The Sense of the
Past_ (COLLINS). Here especially it is the preliminary study that
furnishes the chief interest; the spectacle of this so-skilled
craftsman struggling to master an idea that might well, I think, have
been found later too unsubstantial, too subtly fantastic, for working
out. Very briefly, the theme is to treat of a young American, in whom
this "Sense of the Past" is all-powerful; whom the gift of an old
London house and its furnishings enables to transport himself bodily
into the life of 1820. More than this, he lives that life (and it
is here that one suspects the idea of becoming unmanageable) in the
person of an actual youth of that time, in whom a corresponding Sense
of the Future has been so strong that he has answered the curiosity of
his descendant by an exchange of personalities. Of course the dangers
and confusions of the plan, a kind of psychological version of one
often used in farce (except that it precisely wasn't to be any manner
of dream), are such as might well alarm any writer--and, one might
add, any reader also. It is a further misfortune that the style of
what is actually written should be in the master's most remote and
obscure manner, so much so that one is forced to wonder whether,
without the notes as guide, it would be in any sort clear what the
whole thing was about. The transition, for example, from the actual to
the supernatural event is so abrupt that it might well have left the
uninformed helplessly befogged. But this very fact again, as supposing
some further treatment only now to be guessed at, helps to make the
unique fascination of the book as revealing the difficulties and
rewards of letters.

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