the Past_, had it been
completed, would have been very nearly a masterpiece. In it Henry James
hoped to get what he called a "kind of quasi-turn-of-screw effect."
Here, as in _The Turn of the Screw_, he was dealing with a sort of
ghosts--whether subjective or objective in their reality does not
matter. His hero is a young American who had never been to Europe till
he was about thirty, and yet was possessed by that almost sensual sense
of the past which made Henry James, as a small boy, put his nose into
English books and try to sniff in and smell from their pages the older
world from which they came. The inheritance of an old house in a London
square--a house in which the clocks had stopped, as it were, in
1820--brings the young man over to England, though the lady with whom he
is in love seeks to keep him in America and watch him developing as a
new species--a rich, sensitive, and civilized American, untouched and
unsubdued by Europe. This young man's emotions in London, amid old
things in an atmosphere that also somehow seemed mellow and old, may, I
fancy, be taken as a record of the author's own spiritual experiences as
he drew in long breaths of appreciation during his almost lifelong
wanderings in this hemisphere. For it is important to remember that
Henry James never ceased to be a foreigner. He was enchanted by England
as by a strange land. He saw it always, like the hero of _The Sense of
the Past_, under the charm ... of the queer, incomparable London
light--unless one frankly loved it rather as London shade--which he had
repeatedly noted as so strange as to be at its finest sinister."

However else this air might have been described it was signally not
the light of freshness, and suggested as little as possible the
element in which the first children of nature might have begun to
take notice. Ages, generations, inventions, corruptions, had
produced it, and it seemed, wherever it rested, to be filtered
through the bed of history. It made the objects about show for the
time as in something "turned on"--something highly successful that
he might have seen at the theatre.

Henry James saw old-world objects in exactly that sort of light. He knew
in his own nerves how Ralph Pendrel felt on going over his London house.
"There wasn't," he says, "... an old hinge or an old brass lock that he
couldn't work with love of the act." He could observe the inanimate
things of the Old Worl