'Touch the Chords of Memory'

A perfect and gratuitous Jamesian metaphor: “. . . fresh as a Christmas toy seen across the floor of a large salubrious nursery.” And on what does Henry James lavish this pretty little ornament in The American Scene (1906): the State House on Beacon Hill in Boston. James has returned to America after twenty years in Europe. The paragraph begins with a stroll in the city: 

“Why, accordingly, of December afternoons, did the restless analyst [James himself], pausing at eastward-looking corners, find on his lips the vague refrain of Tennyson’s ‘long, unlovely street’?”

 

The allusion is to Canto VII of Tennyson’s greatest poem, “In Memoriam A.H.H.”:

 

“Dark house, by which once more I stand

   Here in the long unlovely street,

   Doors, where my heart was used to beat

So quickly, waiting for a hand,

 

“A hand that can be clasp’d no more—

   Behold me, for I cannot sleep,

   And like a guilty thing I creep

At earliest morning to the door.

 

“He is not here; but far away

   The noise of life begins again,

   And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain

On the bald street breaks the blank day.”

 

Often in The American Scene, James speaks to houses and other buildings as though he were addressing ghostly familiars, perhaps childhood memories. To the brownstones on upper Fifth Avenue, in the “New York: Social Notes” chapter, he says:

 

“‘You overdo it for what you are—you overdo it still more for what you may be; and don’t pretend, above all, with the object-lesson supplied you, close at hand, by the queer case of Newport, don’t pretend, we say, not to know what we mean.’”

 

In his chapter devoted to London in English Hours, written largely thirty years earlier but collected in 1905, James writes:

 

“There is still something that recalls to me the enchantment of children – the anticipation of Christmas, the delight of a holiday walk -- in the way the shop-fronts shine into the fog. It makes each of them seem a little world of light and warmth, and I can still waste time in looking at them with dirty Bloomsbury on one side and dirtier Soho on the other. There are winter effects, not intrinsically sweet, it would appear, which somehow, in absence, touch the chords of memory and even the fount of tears . . .”