'A Large Salubrious Nursey'

Here is a beautiful and unlikely Jamesian metaphor, just in time for Christmas. You’ll find it in Chap. VII, “Boston,” in The American Scene (1906). James is describing the gilded dome of the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill: “. . . fresh as a Christmas toy seen across the floor of a large salubrious nursery.” 

Some metaphors work because they seem inevitable. Even when overused, they sound right. Others work because they are almost wrong. They arrive unexpectedly and suggest a thought: “No one has ever made that connection before.” Such metaphors can spur a new way of seeing and shake us out of sensory complacency. They defamiliarize the familiar, always a welcome feat. James, on every page in The American Scene, in his self-chosen role as the “restless analyst,” discovers landmarks new even to natives.

 

In “An English New Year” (1879), collected in English Hours (1905), James visits an orphanage on Christmas Eve. It reminds him of the early pages of Oliver Twist. The miserable children (“a certain number of them were idiotic”) march past him, each given a “little offering” from their “benefactress”:

 

“The scene was a picture I shall not forget, with its curious mixture of poetry and sordid prose—the dying wintry light in the big bare, stale room; the beautiful ‘Lady Bountiful,’ standing in the twinkling glory of the Christmas tree; the little multitude of staring and wondering, yet perfectly expressionless, faces.”