Metaphor becomes a habit with writers who wish to express more emotion
than they feel, and who employ it as an ornament to statements that
should be made plainly or not at all. Used thus, it is a false
emphasis, like architectural ornaments in the wrong place. It demands
of the reader an imaginative effort where there has been no such
effort in the writer, an answering emotion where there is none to be
answered. And the reader gets the habit of refusing such effort and
such emotion; he ceases even to be aware of metaphors that are used
habitually. He may not consciously resent them; but unconsciously his
mind is wearied by them as the eye by advertisements often repeated.
By their sameness they destroy expectation so that, even if the writer
says anything in particular, it seems to be all generalities.
Here is an instance of habitual metaphor, not manufactured for this
tract, but taken from an article by a well-known writer. He is
speaking of the career of Mr. Lloyd George:
There was nothing like it in the histories of the ancient
European monarchies, hide-bound by caste and now lying on
the scrap-heaps of Switzerland and Holland. In the more
forward nations, the new republics, men have indeed risen
from humble beginnings to high station, but not generally by
constitutional means and usually only (as now in Russia) by
wading to their places through blood. The dizzy height to
which Lloyd George has attained, not as a British statesman
only but also as a world celebrity, seems to leave the
foreign nations breathless. It is a spectacle that has of
itself some of the thrill and fascination of romance.
Here are metaphors that might be used, or have been used, so as to
surprise the reader; but in this case they are stock-ornaments to a
passage that needs no ornament. If the metaphors in the first sentence
were alive to us they would be mixed; at least the transition from
monarchies hide-bound by caste to monarchies lying on scrap-heaps
would be too sudden; but we hardly notice it because we hardly notice
the metaphors. And there is an inconsistency in the notion of rising
by wading which, again, we do not notice only because we are so used
to rising and wading as metaphors that both have lost their power as
images. Mr. Lloyd George has waded to such a dizzy height that he
seems to leave foreign nations breathless; and we should be breathless
at the thought of such an impossibility if the metaphors were not
dead.
It is indeed the mark of a dead metaphor that it escapes absurdity
only by being dead. The term has been used for metaphors that have
lost all metaphorical significance; but these, perhaps, are better
called buried metaphors. I prefer to use the word _dead_ of metaphors
not yet buried but demanding burial. 'Risen from humble beginnings' is
perhaps a buried metaphor; 'wading to their places through blood' is a
dead one. It has been used so often that it jades instead of
horrifying us; it is a corpse that fails to make us think of corpses.
But in the next sentence the writer returns to the metaphor of rising
and elaborates it so that it is no longer buried, though certainly
dead. We are vaguely aware of the sense of this passage, but the
metaphors are a hindrance, not a help, to our understanding of it.
Writers fall into habitual metaphor when they fear that their thought
will seem too commonplace without ornament; and, because the motive is
unconscious, they choose metaphors familiar to themselves and their
readers. The article from which I have quoted contains many such
metaphors. Mr. Lloyd George is 'like other men only cast in bigger
mould'. He is 'clearly no plaster saint'. 'You cannot think of him in
relation to the knock-out blow except as the man who gives, not
receives, it.' 'He has never lost his head on the dizzy height to
which he has so suddenly attained. He is clearly in no danger of the
intoxicating impulse of the people who find themselves for the first
time on great eminences, to leap over. In a word, he is not spoiled.'
Here the writer, as he would put it, gives himself away. All that
metaphor means only that Mr. George is not spoiled, and the fact that
he is not spoiled would be established better by instances than by
metaphors.
Then we are told that some of Mr. George's feats 'seem to partake of
the nature of legerdemain'. 'He sways a popular assembly by waves of
almost Hebraic emotion.' 'No man has ever had his ear closer to the
ground and listened more attentively to the tramp of the oncoming
multitudes.' He 'held Great Britain's end up' at the International
conference. A 'magnificent tribute was paid to him by Earl Balfour'
but it 'did not put him alone on a pinnacle'. And then we read of the
whirligig of time, of 'clouds of misunderstanding which point to the
coming of a storm'; of how 'foreign nations suddenly became aware that
a new star had swum into the world's ken'; of how 'the situation of
this country is perilous with so much Bolshevik gunpowder moving
about', and how 'it has required a strong heart and a clear head to
keep the nation from falling either into the sloughs of despond or the
fires of revolution'.
Some of these are metaphors that were excellent in their first use and
original context; but they lose their excellence if repeated in any
context where they have not been discovered by the emotion of the
writer but are used by him to make a commonplace appear passionate.
Then they seem an unfortunate legacy from poetry to prose; and it is a
fact, I think, that our prose now suffers from the richness of our
past poetry. Even the prose writers of the Romantic movement regarded
prose as the poor relation of poetry; they did not see that prose has
its own reasons for existing, its own state of being and its own
beauties. They had the habit of writing about Shakespeare in
Shakespeare's own manner, which, in later plays such as _Antony and
Cleopatra_, is often a fading of one metaphor into another so fast
that the reader's or listener's mind cannot keep pace with it:
O sovereign mistress of true melancholy,
The poisonous damp of night disponge upon me,
That life, a very rebel to my will,
May hang no longer on me: throw my heart
Against the flint and hardness of my fault;
Which, being dried with grief, will break to powder.
And finish all foul thoughts.
The metaphors here, though instinctive rather than habitual, are
excessive even for the dying speech of Enobarbus. The style is the
worst model for prose, yet it has persisted as a mere habit in the
prose of writers who fear to be prosaic and who are prevented by that
habit from saying even what they have to say.
The principles of composition, whether verse or prose, are based on
the fact that the unit of language is not the word, or even the
phrase, but the sentence. From this it follows that every word and
every phrase gets its meaning from the sentence in which it occurs;
and so that words and phrases should be used freshly on each occasion
and, as it were, recharged with meaning by the aptness of their use.
Every sentence should, like a piece of music, establish its own
relation between the words that compose it; and in the best sentences,
whether of prose or verse, the words seem new-born; like notes in
music, they seem to be, not mere labels, but facts, because of the
manner in which the writer's thought or emotion has related them to
each other. But habitual metaphor prevents this process of relation;
it is the intrusion of ready-made matter, with its own stale
associations, into matter that should be new-made for its own
particular purpose of expression. Phrases like--The lap of luxury,
Part and parcel, A sea of troubles, Passing through the furnace,
Beyond the pale, The battle of life, The death-warrant of, Parrot
cries, The sex-war, Tottering thrones, A trail of glory, Bull-dog
tenacity, Hats off to, The narrow way, A load of sorrow, A
charnel-house, The proud prerogative, Smiling through your tears, A
straight fight, A profit and loss account, The fires of martyrdom, The
school of life--are all ready-made matter; and, if a writer yields to
the temptation of using them, he impedes his own process of
expression, saying something which is not exactly what he has to say.
He may, of course, attain to a familiar metaphor in his own process of
expression; but if he does, if it is exactly what he has to say, then
it will not seem stale to the reader. Context may give life to a
metaphor that has long seemed dead, as it gives life to the commonest
words. If an image forces itself upon a writer because it and it alone
will express his meaning, then it is his image, no matter how often it
has been used before; and in that case it will arrest the attention of
the reader. But the effect of habitual and dead metaphor is to dull
attention. When a phrase like 'the lap of luxury' catches the eye, the
mind relaxes but is not rested; for we are wearied, without exercise,
by commonplace.
Further, the use of dead metaphor weakens a writer's sense of the
connexion between mood and manner. All the metaphors which I have
quoted are fit for the expression of some kind of emotion rather than
for plain statement of fact or for lucid argument; yet they are used
commonly in statements of fact and in what passes for argument. Indeed
one of their evils is that they make a writer and his readers believe
that he is exercising his reason when he is only moving from trite
image to image. If eloquence is reason fused with emotion, writing, or
speaking, full of dead metaphors is unreason fused with sham emotion.
I add in illustration a further list of dead metaphors lately noticed:
'Branches of the same deadly Upas Tree. Turning a deaf ear to. The
flower of our manhood. Taking off the gloves. Written in letters of
fire. Stemming the tide. Big with possibilities. The end is in sight.
A place in the sun. A spark of manhood. To dry up the founts of pity.
Hunger stalking through the land. A death grip. Round pegs (or men) in
square holes. The lamp of sacrifice. The silver lining. Troubling the
waters, and poisoning the wells. The promised land. Flowing with milk
and honey. Winning all along the line. Casting in her lot with. The
fruits of victory. Backs to the wall. Bubbling over with confidence.
Bled white. The writing on the wall. The sickle of death. A ring fence
round. The crucible of. Answering the call. Grinding the faces of the
poor. The scroll of fame.'--A. CLUTTON-BROCK.