THE SENSE OF THE PAST BY HENRY JAMES NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNERS’S SONS 1917 PREFACE The Sense of the Past, the second of the two novels which Henry James left unfinished, had been planned and begun some years before he died. The two first books and a part of the third had been written, and it appears that the idea had been abandoned for accidental reasons, not because he was himself dissatisfied with it. He went back to it again during the first winter of the war, having found that in the conditions he could not then go on with The Ivory Tower and hoping that he might be able to work upon a story of remote and phantasmal life. He re- dictated, with slight modifications, the chapters already written, and continued the book at intervals until the autumn of 1915. He was then engaged for a time on other work — the introduction to the Letters from America of Rupert Brooke. He had just finished this and was preparing to return immediately to The Sense of the Past when on December 2 he was attacked by his last illness. The later chapters of the novel, as they stand, had not been finally revised by him; but it was never his habit to make more than verbal changes at that stage. The notes on the course which the book was to follow were dictated when he reached the point where the original draft broke off. These notes are given in full; their part in Henry James’s method of work is indicated in the preface to The Ivory Tower. PERCY LUBBOCK. CONTENTS Page The Sense of the Past Book First [1] Book Second [38] Book Third [89] Book Fourth I [116] II [142] III [220] IV [277] Notes for the Sense of the Past --- [292] [the page numbers above refer to the original 1917 pagination] BOOK FIRST They occurred very much at the same hour and together, the two main things that — exclusive of the death of his mother, recent and deeply felt by him — had yet befallen Ralph Pendrel, who, at thirty, had known fewer turns of fortune than many men of his age. But as these matters were quite distinct I take them for clearness in their order. He had up to this time perforce encountered life mainly in the form of loss and of sacrifice — inevitabilities these, however, such as scarce represented a chequered career. He had been left without his father in childhood; he had then seen two sisters die; he had in his twentieth year parted by the same law with his elder and only brother; and he had finally known the rupture of the strongest tie of all, an affection for which, as a living claim, he had had to give up much else. Among these latter things, none the less, he had not as yet had to reckon Mrs. Stent Coyne, and this even though the thought of such a peril was on the eve of his crisis fairly present to him. The peril hung before him in fact, though the first note of the crisis had by that time already sounded, from a different quarter, in the guise of a positive stroke of luck. It appeared that what destiny [1] might call on him for this time would not be just another relinquishment. A letter from a friend in England, a fellow-countryman spending a few months in London and having friends of his own there — had mentioned to him the rumoured grave illness and imminent extinction, at a great age, of the last person in that country bearing Ralph's family name, a person of a distant cousinship with whom he had been indifferently aware. His indifference was not a little enlivened by a remark of his correspondent. ‘Surely when he does die you'll come in for something!’ ‘Surely’ was a good deal to say and the whole hint fantastic — it took so much for granted; yet the words had an effect. This effect was that Ralph determined to mention the matter on the same occasion as something else the revolving months had charged him with, something he had at last really straightened himself to say to the woman he loved. He had had his fears, and in addition to other hindrances, infelicities of circumstance, imperfections of opportunity, had long deterred him, and he was now disposed to throw himself upon anything that could figure as a help. It might support him to be able to tell her there was a chance for him of a property — probably of some wonderful old house — in England: though less, properly speaking, as an improvement to his state of fortune, which might sufficiently pass, than as a bribe to her sense of the romantic. [2] That faculty had originally been strong in her and what could be more depended on at any time in New York, in Park Avenue, to show as inordinate, as fetching, by the vulgar term, than so possibly to ‘come in’ for something strange and storied ancient and alien? Aurora Coyne was magnificent; that was where his interest in her and her effect upon him were strongest. Beautiful, different, proud, she had a congruity with things that were not as the things surrounding her, and these usual objects, in whatever abundance, were not the bribe to offer. He was glad, at this hour, that his name, by common consent — above all, always, it was true, in Park Avenue — cast a fine sharp traceable shadow, or in other words that his race had something of a backward, as well as of a not too sprawling lateral reach. He knew how little his possession of more mere money would help him, and also that it would have been in his interest to be personally quite of another type; but that his cleverness could on occasion please her he struck himself as in a position to remember, and he at present, turning the whole case over, found aid in the faith that she might at the worst marry him for curiosity. He was for that matter himself just now inflamed with a curiosity that might prove communicable. The element of uncertainty at all events, such as it was, came largely from the late changes in her own condition; so far as it was not likewise [3] distinguishably riper fruit of the impression in him, rather heavy from the first, of something that he could only call to himself her greater knowledge of life. He had already more than once had to take into account that of the two she had seen, as people said, much the most of the world; and she had not at present seen less of it for returning to America, after her husband's death in the south of Europe and on the admonition of still other circumstances that he divined as beyond his measure, with something of the large air of a public policy. Her departures, absences, returns, returns as for the purpose of intensifying fresh disappearances, these things were what had somehow caused her to glare at him, to dazzle and almost to blind him, as by a wider initiation. He had seen her thus only at certain points of her sustained revolution; had been ignorant of many things with which the cup of her own knowledge overflowed; had been in short indebted for the extent of his privilege to the mere drops and lapses in the general time, as he termed it, that she so insolently kept. Sharing continuously as a child, and then as a growing girl, the life led by her parents in other countries, she had had behind her, at their first meeting, on their twentieth birthday — for in respect of age they marched well enough together — if not fifty years of Europe at least something that already caused him to view his untraveled state as a cycle of Cathay. [4] The time immediately following had been her longest period at home, as well as that of his happiest opportunity — an opportunity not so enjoyed, however, as to have forestalled her marriage with so different a person and so selected a suitor as Townsend Coyne, which event had in its turn been rich in consequences. Some of these, like the immediate migration to Europe of the happy couple, as the pair were prefigured, had been of the sort essentially indicated; such others as Coyne's early failure of health during a journey to the East had been unexpected and lamentable. He had reappeared with his wife, after a year or two, in America, where the air of home so reinforced him at first as to make the presumption of their settling for some stay natural; and then, disappointed and threatened afresh, had a second time taken flight with her to spend another term, wearily enough, in consultations and climates. The issue at last, indeed too promptly, had been Coyne's death, foreseen for some months, at Pisa, a place he liked and had been removed to from Florence, choosing it, as he said, in view of the end. Stricken and childless, his young widow had once more crossed the sea and, announcing her purpose of an indefinite rest, had spent in New York another winter, in the course of which Ralph Pendrel, held fast there by his dose care of his mother, at this time more of a charge than ever and steadily failing, had [5] repeatedly seen her; all of which, none the less, had not prevented, on Mrs. Coyne's part, the perversity of yet another departure, a step sudden and inconsequent, surprising and even disconcerting to our young man, possessed as he definitely was by that time of the length he would have gone had he been able a little longer to avert it.