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 World almost as if they were living things.  No naturalist spying for patient hours upon birds in the hope of discovering their secrets could have had a more curious, more hopeful, and more loitering eye.  He found even fairly common things in Europe, as Pendrel found the things in the house he inherited, “all smoothed with service and charged with accumulated messages.”

     He was like the worshipper in a Spanish church, who watches for the
     tear on the cheek or the blood-drop from the wound of some
     wonder-working effigy of Mother and Son.

In The Sense of the Past, Henry James conceived a fantastic romance, in which his hero steps not only into the inheritance of an old house, but into 1820, exchanging personalities with a young man in one of the family portraits, and even wooing the young man’s betrothed.  It is a story of “queer” happenings, like the story of a dream or a delusion in which the ruling passion has reached the point of mania.  It is the kind of story that has often been written in a gross, mechanical way.  Here it is all delicate—­a study of nuances and subtle relationships.  For Ralph, though perfect in the 1820 manner, has something of the changeling about him—­something that gradually makes people think him “queer,” and in the end arouses in him the dim beginnings of nostalgia for his own time.  It is a fascinating theme as Henry James works it out—­doubly fascinating as he talks about it to himself in the “scenario” that is published along with the story.  In the latter we see the author groping for his story, almost like a medium in a trance.  Like a medium, he one moment hesitates and is vague, and the next, as he himself would say, fairly pounces on a certainty.  No artist ever cried with louder joy at the sight of things coming absolutely right under his hand.  Thus, at one moment, the author announces:—­

The more I get into my drama the more magnificent upon my word I seem to see it and feel it; with such a tremendous lot of possibilities in it that I positively quake in dread of the muchness with which they threaten me.

At a moment of less illumination he writes:—­

There glimmers and then floats shyly back to me from afar, the sense of something like this, a bit difficult to put, though entirely expressible with patience, and as I catch hold of the tip of the tail of it yet again strikes me as adding to my action but another admirable twist.

He continually sees himself catching by the tip of the tail the things that solve his difficulties.  And what tiny little animals he sometimes manages to catch by the tip of the tail in some of his trances of inspiration!  Thus, at one point, he breaks off excitedly about his hero with:—­