I pull up, too, here, in the midst of my elation--though after a
little I shall straighten everything out.
He discusses with himself the question whether Ralph Pendrel, in the
1820 world, is to repeat exactly the experience of the young man in the
portrait, and confides to himself:--
Just now, a page or two back, I lost my presence of mind, I let
myself be scared, by a momentarily-confused appearance, an
assumption, that he doesn't repeat it. I see, on recovery of my
wits, not to say of my wit, that he very exactly does.
Nowhere in the "scenario" is the artist's pleasure in his work expressed
more finely than in the passage in which Henry James describes his hero
at the crisis of his experience, when the latter begins to feel that he
is under the observation of his _alter ego_, and is being vaguely
threatened. "There must," the author tells himself--
There must be sequences here of the strongest, I make out--the
successive driving in of the successive silver-headed nails at the
very points and under the very tops that I reserve for them. That's
it, the silver nail, the recurrence of it in the right place, the
perfection of the salience of each, and the trick is played.
"Trick," he says, but Henry James resorted little to tricks, in the
ordinary meaning of the word. He scorns the easy and the obvious, as in
preparing for the return of the young hero to the modern world--a
return made possible by a noble act of self-sacrifice on the part of a
second 1820 girl who sends him from her, yet "without an excess of the
kind of romanticism I don't want." There is another woman--the modern
woman whom Ralph had loved in America--who might help the machinery of
the story (as the author thinks) if he brought her on the scene at a
certain stage. But he thinks of the device only to exclaim against it:--
Can't possibly do anything so artistically base.
The notes for _The Ivory Tower_ are equally alluring, though _The Ivory
Tower_ is not itself so good as _The Sense of the Past_. It is a story
of contemporary American life, and we are told that the author laid it
aside at the beginning of the war, feeling that "he could no longer work
upon a fiction supposed to represent contemporary or recent life."
Especially interesting is the "scenario," because of the way in which we
find Henry James trying--poor man, he was always an amateur at
names!--to get the right names for his characters. He ponders, for
instance, on the name of his heroine:--
I want her name ... her Christian one, to be Moyra, and must have
some bright combination with that; the essence of which is a
surname of two syllables and ending in a consonant--also beginning
with one. I am thinking of Moyra Grabham, the latter excellent
thing was in _The Times_ of two or three days ago; the only fault
is a little too much meaning.
Consciousness in artistry can seldom have descended to minuter details
with a larger gesture. One would not have missed these games of genius
with syllables and consonants for worlds. Is it all an exquisite farce
or is it splendidly heroic? Are we here spectators of the incongruous
heroism of an artist who puts a hero's earnestness into getting the last
perfection of shine on to a boot or the last fine shade of meaning into
the manner in which he says, "No, thank you, no sugar"? No, it is
something more than that. It is the heroism of a man who lived at every
turn and trifle for his craft--who seems to have had almost no life
outside it. In the temple of his art, he found the very dust of the
sanctuary holy. He had the perfect piety of the artist in the least as
well as in the greatest things.