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.