Style- the Art of Writing Well
Page 22
There are also ways in which metaphor can prove dangerous. It does not do to adore this sort of image with one’s eyes shut. The writer who informs us that ‘there is no life in standing water’, or that ‘meaning is an arrow that reaches its mark when least encumbered with feathers’, simply appears never to have seen a duckpond or shot an arrow. Or take the following sentences from Robert Byron’s [228] The Byzantine Achievement.
‘But not only are we poised on the footboard of the encyclopaedic civilisation now being launched; in addition, we are gathered to the brow of infinity by the initial achievement of the scientific revolution.’
(Of Constantinople.) ‘It was here at this thwarted kiss of two continents, that the trade between the richest extremities of Europe, Asia and Africa, was sucked and spewed at the lips of the Golden Horn.’
Ships with footboards? Humanity as a swarm of midges deposited on the noble forehead of infinity? Asia and Europe trying to kiss like Hero and Leander, in the intervals of vomiting? Horns with lips? Imagery is not for those who cannot use, and control, their imaginations.
The mixed metaphor comes simply from failure to visualize. There seems no harm, whatever some may suppose, in a rapid succession of metaphors. These need not trouble any mind of ordinary quickness. And by this means Shakespeare has produced some of his most tumultuously brilliant passages. The objection is only to any coupling of ideas that breeds monstrous hybrids. The orator who cries ‘we will burn our ships and … steer boldly out into the ocean of freedom’, the journalist who urges the government to ‘iron out vicious circles of bottlenecks’, are ludicrous merely because they have not seen what they are talking about, and therefore amuse, or irritate, readers who do.
Yet such lapses are surprisingly common. One can only conclude that many imaginations are strangely blind. Sir Herbert Grierson cites an extraordinary instance from Mark Pattison: ‘Even at this day a country squire or rector, on landing with his cub under his wing’ (a sort of lion of St. Mark?) ‘at Oxford, finds himself at sea.’ Then there is that enthusiastic vision I once encountered in a book on the Oxford Group: ‘the University atmosphere is stabbed with praying giants’. And here are two examples from Saintsbury:
But brevity has the Scylla and Charybdis of obscurity and baldness ever waiting for it; and balance those of monotonous clock-beat and tedious parallelism. The ship is safe through all these in such things as the exquisite symmetry of the Absolution. [229]
(A truly strange voyage of vessels manned by Brevity and Balance through seas perilous with obscurity and baldness, clock-beats and parallels. Besides, Scylla and Charybdis were alternative dangers: whereas there is, unfortunately, nothing to prevent a writer from being both bald and obscure, both monotonous in rhythm and tedious in antithesis. On the contrary, such faults can easily be combined.)
Similarly Saintsbury writes of Ruskin:
Whether he shows any influence from the older prose harmonists who had begun to write, as it were, like fairy parents over his cradle, I must leave to some industrious person to expiscate or rummage out; for the haystack of Ruskinian autobiography is not only mighty in bulk but scattered rather forbiddingly.
(An equally odd vision of prose-musicians as fairy godparents scribbling, like a posse of reporters, above an infant’s cradle; of angling; and of haystacks scattered before being built.)
When a man as clever as Saintsbury can produce such absurdities, all of us may well be on our guard. The trouble comes partly from employing hackneyed imagery like fairy godparents, or Scylla and Charybdis, which have done such long service that they might now be allowed a rest. Their very familiarity is apt to blur the image that a living metaphor should present; and the writer allows these half-dead metaphors to collide with other metaphors less dead.
It must, of course, be owned that very distinguished authors have written things as queer. There are plenty of examples in Shakespeare. There is that phrase of Milton’s which, when pointed out by Rogers to Coleridge, is said to have given him a sleepless night:
Sight so deform what heart of rock could long
Dry-eyed behold?
There is Cromwell’s – ‘God has kindled a seed in this nation.’ There is De Quincey’s – ‘The very recognition of these or any of these by the jurisprudence of a nation is a mortal wound to the very keystone upon which the whole vast arch of morality reposes.’ But whoever may have written so, I still feel they would have done better not to. In any case they are hardly for imitation; especially in prose.
Really dead metaphors, like really dead nettles, cannot sting; but often the metaphors are only half dead; and these need careful handling. It may, of course, be argued that some mixed metaphors bother none but readers with too vivid imaginations. Yet I doubt if readers can have too vivid imaginations. At all events you will find, I think, that you lose esteem with many readers if they come to feel that you have a less vivid imagination than they have themselves. A main purpose of imagery is to make a style more concrete and definite; and it is interesting to note how much that imagery itself may gain by being made still more concrete and still more definite, as when Webster borrows images from Sidney or Montaigne.
She was like them that could not sleepe, when they were softly layd.
– Sidney, Arcadia
You are like some, cannot sleepe in feather-beds,
But must have blockes for their pillowes.
– Duchess of Malfi
See whether any cage can please a bird. Or whether a dogge grow not fiercer with tying.
– Sidney, Arcadia
Like English Mastiffes, that grow fierce with tying.
– Duchess of Malfi
The opinion of wisedome is the plague of man.
– Montaigne
Oh Sir, the opinion of wisedome is a foule tettor, that runs all over a mans body.
– Duchess of Malfi
Never, it seems to me, was theft better justified – the plagiarist here is far more praiseworthy than his victims; simply because in each case the picture becomes much more precisely visualized. ‘A dogge’ is vague beside ‘English Mastiffes’; a ‘plague’ is feeble compared to ‘a foule terror’. Here, as with other kinds of clarity, preferences may indeed differ according to taste and temperament; there are doubtless times when, here too, writing gains by half-lights, mists, and shadows; but I own that I love particularly in prose, keen vision; sharp focus; and clearest air.
Imagery, however, is also exposed to other dangers. It can become too far-fetched. Aeschylus is magnificent when he speaks of
the jaw of Salmydessus,
Sour host to sailors, stepmother of ships;
but many of us smile when we come upon things so fantastic as ‘the thirsty dust, twin-sister unto mud’. On this point, indeed, at least in prose, ancient taste tended to be far more cautious than ours. Thus Aristotle objects to the image of Alcidamas that ‘the Odyssey is a lovely mirror of human life’; ‘Longinus’, to Plato’s phrase in The Laws about allowing the walls of his ideal city to sleep beneath the earth (that is, to remain unbuilt). Yet it is not easy to see why these should be blamed; especially when Pericles is praised for calling hostile Aegina ‘the eyesore of Peiraeus’, or for saying over the young Athenians fallen in the Samian War that ‘the spring had been taken out of the year’. Some, however, will agree that many Elizabethan conceits and much bad Metaphysical poetry are based on comparisons too hyperbolical. Similarly with some oriental imagery (for ‘Metaphysical’ poetry is far older than some of us realize).
Night black as pitch [230] she bids bright day [231] bestride;
Two sugar-plums [232] stars two-and-thirty [233] hide;
O’er the red rose [234] a musky scorpion [235] strays.
For which she keeps two antidotes [236] well-tried.
– Abul-Quasim Al-Bakharzi, d. A.D. 1075
And here is a strange modern specimen of metaphors both mixed and forced.
To t
he Giorgione in the Cathedral at Castel Franco a man must come should the dry biscuit of the desert have stuck in his throat or should the subtlety of life have bent his sleep. Here is the certain rejoinder to the intricacy of bitterness, here the sane assumption that is not keyed to mark the loaded hiss that whistles a drugging breath through the undergrowth of a Catholic dispensation. [237]
– Adrian Stokes, Sunrise in the West
Again, imagery may lapse into grossness and crudity, like Robert Byron’s spewing Constantinople (p. 173), or the already quoted French-Revolutionary orator who cried to his adversary, ‘There is not a louse on your body but has a right to spit in your face.’ Or again imagery can become precious and affected as in Euphues: which also illustrates yet another danger – that metaphor and simile, instead of being used as a means to clearer meaning, may be abused as ends in themselves. When Sir Thomas Browne trots out his ‘Bivious Theorems and Janus-faced Doctrines’ and his negroes ‘in the black Jaundice’; when he bids us not to look ‘for Whales in the Euxine Sea, or expect great matters where they are not to be found’; then it becomes clear that he is more concerned with his art than with his matter, with beauties and quaintnesses than with truth. In lesser men such things became a fashion frivolous and futile; and they were bound to provoke revolt in practical minds. Even at the beginning of the seventeenth century, ‘it was’, Aubrey records, ‘a shrewd and severe animadversion of a Scotish lord, who, when King James asked him how he liked Bishop A’s sermon, said that he was learned, but he did play with his Text, as a Jack-an-apes does who takes up a thing and tosses and playes with it, and then he takes up another, and playes a little with it. Here’s a pretty thing, and there’s a pretty thing.’ [238]
Again, Bishop Samuel Parker (1640–88) would have liked preachers prohibited by Act of Parliament from using ‘fulsome and lushious Metaphors’. And Hobbes, no favourite of bishops, was at least in agreement here – ‘metaphors … are like ignes fatui’. [239]
It is, too, familiar enough how, as the seventeenth century drew towards its close, the men of the Royal Society reacted still more drastically against this ‘luxury and redundance of speech’. But it is worth quoting a little more fully from the tirades of their historian, Sprat. ‘Who can behold, without Indignation, how many mists and uncertainties their specious Tropes and Figures have brought in our knowledge? … Of all the Studies of men, nothing may be sooner obtain’d, than this vicious abundance of Phrase, this trick of Metaphors, this volubility of Tongue which makes so great a noise in the World. … And indeed, in most other parts of Learning, I look on it as a thing almost utterly desperate in its cure; and I think, it may be plac’d among those general mischiefs; such as the dissention of Christian Princes, the want of practice in Religion, and the like; which have been so long spoken against, that men are become insensible about them.’ Hence, he says, the Royal Society formed ‘a constant Resolution to reject all amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things almost in an equal number of words.’
Never, surely, was verbal imagery subject to so tremendous an anathema. ‘The dissention of Christian Princes’ – ‘the want of practice in Religion’ – one may wonder if the iconoclastic Sprat was himself being very scientific, or (for a future bishop) very religious. [240] Naturally no serious scientist could be expected to have much patience with minds still fancifully medieval like Sir Thomas Browne, who is capable of beginning a chapter on lampreys: ‘Whether Lampries have nine eyes, we durst refer it unto Polyphemus, who had but one, to judge it. An error concerning eyes, occasioned by the error of eyes. … ’ But even the scientist who wishes to persuade the world may find metaphor and simile far from valueless. Montesquieu, I suppose, may claim to be called a political scientist. And not the least part of his greatness is that, as Sainte-Beuve has said (with an admirable metaphor), ‘Dans la pensée de Montesquieu, au moment où l’on s’y attend le moins, tout d’un coup la cime se dore.’ [241]
For example:
Le peuple a toujours trop d’action ou trop peu. Quelquefois avec cent mille bras il renverse tout; quelquefois avec cent mille pieds il ne va que comme les insectes.
L’Espagne a fait comme ce roi insensé qui demanda que tout ce qu’il toucheroit se convertît en or.
L’Angleterre est agitée par des vents qui ne sont pas faits pour submerger, mais pour conduire au port.
(Of relativity.) Il est l’éponge de tous les préjugés. [242]
And, to take one more scientific example among many, has not Einstein excellently said (though of course for a popular audience) that it is hard to split atoms because it is like shooting birds in the dark, in a country where there are few birds?
But our concern is not, after all, with science but with literature, and with ordinary writing (and speech). Here, great as are the dangers of imagery, its gifts can be greater still. Metaphor, above all, can give strength, clarity, and speed; it can add wit, humour, individuality, poetry. After all, the one unpardonable fault in an author – and perhaps the commonest – is tediousness. It is easy for a monologue in conversation to become a bore; easier still for speech; easiest of all for a book. But against boredom there are no better antidotes than these qualities that vivid metaphor can often bring.
Consider, first, the gain in energy and clarity of impression. Hundreds of thousands have groaned in the bitterness of homeless banishment; but their lamentations have been stifled in the silence of the years, while we still remember that double metaphor in which Dante cried how bitterly salt was the bread of exile, and how steep for him its stairs. [243] Many an actor or dramatist must have suffered from the sense of prostituting his own soul to amuse an audience; but could any direct form of utterance have been as moving as Shakespeare’s simile ‘my nature is subdu’d, To what it workes in, like the Dyers hand’, or the metaphor of Hugo, telling how, as the curtain rose for the first night of Hernani, ‘Je voyais se lever la jupe de mon âme’? (‘I saw lifted up the skirt of my soul.’)
Many an observer of human life has groaned at the fickle brevity of human grief. Abstractly, it could hardly be put with finer eloquence than Chateaubriand’s – ‘Croyez-moi, mon fils, les douleurs ne sont point éternelles; il faut tôt ou tard qu’elles finissent, parce que le coeur de l’homme est fini; c’est une de nos grandes misères; nous ne sommes pas même capables d’être longtemps malheureux’ – ‘Believe me, my son, griefs are not eternal; sooner or later they must finish, because man’s heart is finite; this is one of the most miserable things about us; we are not even capable of being long unhappy.’ But, for one who remembers this, there are a thousand who never forget the more concrete vision that Shakespeare has created with the homely aid of a dish and a pair of shoes.
Thrift, thrift, Horatio: the Funerall Bakt-meats
Did coldly furnish forth the Marriage Tables.
A little Month, or ere those shooes were old,
With which she followed my poore Fathers body
Like Niobe, all teares.
Without metaphor could misogyny have found such barbed invectives against women as Pope’s phrase about ‘the moving toyshop of their heart’, or Balzac’s savage ‘des poêles à dessus de marbre’ – ‘stoves with outsides of marble’? Metternich, I think, was right: ‘In politics calm clarity is the only true eloquence; but, to be sure, this clarity can at times be best gained by an image.’ [244]
Next, speed. I know no better example of the power of metaphor to crowd the maximum of ideas into every minute than Ulysses’ famous speech in Troilus and Cressida.
Time hath (my Lord) a wallet at his backe,
Wherein he puts almes for oblivion:
A great-siz’d monster of ingratitudes:
Those scraps are good deedes past,
Which are devour’d as fast as they are made,
Forgot as soone as done: perseverance, deere my Lord,
&
nbsp; Keepes honor bright, to have done, is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rustie mail,
In monumentall mockrie: take the instant way,
For honour travels in a straight so narrow,
Where one but goes abreast, keepe then the path:
For Emulation hath a thousand Sonnes,
That one by one pursue; if you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,
Like to an entred Tyde, they all rush by,
And leave you hindmost:
Or like a gallant Horse falne in first ranke,
Lye there for pavement to the abject rear,
Ore-run and trampled on: then what they doe in present,
Though lesse then yours in past, must ore-top yours:
For Time is like a fashionable Hoste,
That slightly shakes his parting Guest by th’ hand;
And with his armes out-stretcht, as he would flye,
Graspes in the commer: the welcome ever smiles,
And farewell goes out sighing: O let not vertue seeke
Remuneration for the thing it was:
For beautie, wit,
High birth, vigor of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating Time:
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin:
That all with one consent praise new-borne gaudes,
Though they are made and moulded of things past,
And give to dust, that is a little gilt,
More laud then gilt oredusted.