As to which, however, on consideration don’t I see myself catch a bright betterment by not at all making him use a latch-key?...  No, no—­no latch-key—­but a rat-tat-tat, on his own part, at the big brass knocker.

As the writer searches for the critical action or gesture which is to betray the “abnormalism” of his hero to the 1820 world in which he moves, he cries to himself:—­

     Find it, find it; get it right, and it will be the making of the
     story.

At another stage in the story, he comments:—­

     All that is feasible and convincing; rather beautiful to do being
     what I mean.

At yet another stage:—­

     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:—­