Our sense of the past, in fact, may illude us. And that reminds me of Henry James’s solitary _pastiche_, his posthumous (and fragmentary) “Sense of the Past.” The “past” he deals with is, roughly, the Jane Austen period, and I think his language would very much have astonished Jane Austen. For one thing, they didn’t colloquially emphasize in her day as Henry James makes them do. I take a page at random:—“He mustn’t be _too_ terribly clever for us, certainly! We enjoy immensely your being so extraordinary; but I’m sure you’ll take it in good part if I remind you that there _is_ a limit.” Is this our ultra-modern Mrs. Brookenham speaking? No, it is Mrs. Midmore, somewhere about 1820. To be more exact, it is Henry James speaking with the emphasis that always abounded in his novels and his letters and his talk. Again: “I can’t keep off that strangeness of my momentary lapse.” That doesn’t sound to my ear a bit like 1820. Again: “It must have been one of your pale passions, as you call ’em, truly—so that even if her ghost does hover I shan’t be afraid of so very thin a shade.” Note the “’em,” the author’s timid little speck of antique colour, but note also how the speaker carries on the “ghost” figure—in a way that is signed “Henry James, 19—” all over. The fact is, Henry James, with his marked, individual, curiously “modern” style, was the last man to express himself in an alien style, particularly the more simple style of an earlier age. To write a pure _pastiche_ you must begin by surrendering, putting clean away your own personality—how otherwise are you to take on another’s? I have no illusions about the essays in _pastiche_ to be found in the earlier of the following papers. If they do not always fall below parody, they never rise above it. Occasional fragments of authentic text will be recognized at a glance. “These Things are but Toyes.” AN ARISTOTELIAN FRAGMENT In the neighbourhood of Wardour Street, where the princes of the film hold their Court, a legislative code for film-making, a “Poetics” of the film, by some _maestro di color che sanno_, has long been yearned for. If only, they say, if only the _maestro_ himself, the great Aristotle, had been alive to write it! After all, kinematograph is Greek, isn’t it? It seems to cry aloud, somehow, for its code by the great Greek authority. Well, they little knew what luck was in store for them!