Almost the chief interest of Henry James’s two posthumous novels is the fact that we are given not only the novels themselves—­or, rather, the fragments of them that the author had written—­but the “great, gossiping, eloquent letters” in which he soliloquized about them.  As a rule, these preliminary soliloquies ran to about thirty thousand words, and were destroyed as soon as the novel in hand was finished.  So delightful are they—­such thrilling revelations of the workings of an artist’s mind—­that one does not quite know whether or not to congratulate oneself on the fact that the last books have been left mere torsos.  Which would one rather have—­a complete novel or the torso of a novel with the artist’s dream of how to make it perfect?  It is not easy to decide.  What makes it all the more difficult to decide in the present instance is one’s feeling that The Sense of 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