THE LAST PHASE OF HENRr JAMES
reveries.The actual appearances of things become suddenly vivid
again. In the novels which preceded
The Ivory Tower,
the carefully
selected and charming old-world settings had been steadily fading
out; but now, to our amazement, there starts into relief the America
of the millionaires, at its crudest, corruptest and phoniest: the im-
mensesummer mansions full of equipment which no one ever seems
to have selected or used, the old men of the Rockefeller-Frick genera-
tion, landed, with no tastes and no interests, amidst an unlimited
magnificencewhich dwarfs them, the silly or clumsy young people of
the second generation with their off-color relationships, their enor-
mousmeaningless parties, their touching longings and resolute striv-
ings for an elegance and cultivation they cannot manage. The ap-
parition in
The Jolly Corner
came upon the Europeanized American
"quite as one of those expanding fantastic images projected by the
magic lantern of childhood"; and in the same way, for the reader of
James, with the opening of
The Ivory Tower,
there emerges the
picture of old Abner Gaw sitting and rocking his foot and looking out
on the sparkling Atlantic while he waits for his partner to die.
The Ivory Tower
is immensely comic, deeply human and bril-
liantly observed-and it is poetic in the highest sense, like all these
later novels: in the sense that its characters and images, individualized
though they are, shine out with the incandescence which shows them
as symbols of phases through which the human soul has passed.
The moral of the book-which seems quite plain from the
scenario left by James-is also of particular interest. The ivory tower
itself, a fine piece of Chinese carving, figures the spiritual isolation,
the cultivation of sensations and the literary activity which are to be
made possible for the young American, returned from Europe, who
has inherited his uncle's fortune; but it contains, also, the fatal letter
in which the vindictive Mr. Gaw has revealed all the swindles and
perfidies by which the fortune has been created. So that the young
man (he has always had a
little
money) is to come finally to be glad
enough to give up the ivory tower with the fortune.
James dropped
The Ivory Tower
when the War broke out in
1914, because it. seemed to him too remote from the present. The
War seems to have presented itself to him as simply a struggle be-
tween, on the one hand, French and English civilization and, on the
other, German barbarism. He had believed in, and had been writing
rather vaguely about, the possible salutary effect on human affairs
of a sort of international elite such as he tended to depict in his novels;
and now he spoke of the past as "the age of the mistake," the time
when people had thought that things would be all right. He now be-
came violently nationalistic, or at least violently pro-Ally, and took
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