velopments of any theme
before embarking upon its treatment in detail. I get the phrase "test
and explore," than which there could be no better, from the brief
preface to the volume now before me, _The Ivory Tower_ (COLLINS). It
exactly suggests the method of this preliminary study, doubly precious
now, both as supplying the key by which we can understand the fragment
that has been worked out, and as in itself giving us a glimpse,
wonderfully fascinating, of its evolution. _The Ivory Tower_ (called
so characteristically after an object whose bearing upon the intrigue
is of the slightest) is a study of wealth in its effect upon the
mutual relations of a small group of persons belonging to the
plutocracy of pre-war America. Its special motive was to be a
development of situation as between a young legatee, in whom the
business instinct is entirely wanting, and his friend and adviser,
whom he was presently to detect in dishonest dealing, yet refrain from
any act of challenge that would mean exposure. "Refrain"--does this
not give you in one word the whole secret of what would have been a
study in character and emotion obviously to the taste of the writer?
For itself, and still more for the glimpse of what it was to become,
_The Ivory Tower_ must have a place in every collection where the
unmatchable wit of HENRY JAMES is honoured as it should be.

* * * * *

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