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.

* * * * *

Whatever Mr. ERNEST THOMPSON SETON cares to write I am glad to read, but there were moments in The Preacher of Cedar Mountain (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) when the great moral lesson of the story was as much as I could bear.  The tale reveals the spiritual and moral development of Jim Hartigan.  The author assures us that most of the characters are drawn from life, and that some of the main events are historical.  All which I can easily believe, for Mr. SETON’S blunt method of describing Jim Hartigan’s evolution from an unhallowed stable-boy to a muscular Christian continually suggests reality.  It is not a stylish method, but it gets home, and in a tale of this kind that is the main, if not the only, matter of importance. Jim’s besetting weaknesses were drink and an overwhelming love for horses.  The former he conquered fairly soon, but the latter tripped him up more than once, and if he had not been guided by the wisest woman who ever came from the West his end would have been chaotic.  The races at Fort Ryan are excellently described, and as a picture of the West of America some forty years ago you will find this story of Jim’s conversion both instructive and intriguing.  All the same Mr. SETON has so often delighted me by his tales of the animal world that I hope this excursion is merely a holiday from the work for which he has a real genius.