Style- the Art of Writing Well
Page 21
Indeed, I suspect it was from the oratorical Burke that Macaulay may have got his idea about Alboin and Attila. If so, he vastly improved what he took by being trenchantly brief where Burke grows long-winded: ‘Would it be wise to estimate what the world of Europe, as well as the world of Asia, had to dread from Jinghiz Khan, upon a contemplation of the resources of the cold and barren spot in the remotest Tartary, from whence first issued that scourge of the human race? Ought we to judge from the excise and stamp duties of the rocks, or from the paper circulation of the sands of Arabia, the power by which Mahomet and his tribes laid hold at once on the two most powerful empires of the world … ?’ [222]
Again, Macaulay will make some generalization vivid by the lively particularity, not of proper names, but of trenchantly precise examples; as when he denounces the whimsical tyranny of some literary conventions. ‘We do not see why we should not make a few more rules of the same kind; why we should not enact that the number of scenes in every act should be three or some multiple of three, that the number of lines in each scene should be an exact square, that the dramatis personae should never be more or fewer than sixteen, and that, in heroic rhymes, every thirty-sixth line should have twelve syllables.’
But of all methods of obtaining this essential concreteness, and the vitality that concreteness alone can give, none, I think, is so important as simile and metaphor. That, however, is so large a question as to demand a chapter to itself.
Endnotes
194 ‘One would need to be possessed by the devil to attain this tone you want me to take.’ – ‘Yes, indeed, to be possessed by the devil is just what is wanted for excellence in all the arts.’ [return to text]
195 ‘There the King battled long with the said Messire Eustache, and Messire Eustache with him, so that it was an extreme delight to watch them.’ [return to text]
196 ‘Rest assured that so absorbing was the sight, so delightful its contemplation, that even a man with fevers, or toothache, would have been cured.’ (Froissart is describing the vast French preparations at l’Écluse for invading England.) [return to text]
197 ‘Smash that pulpit to fragments and fly out of it.’ [return to text]
198 ‘I make no secret of it that the finest and most delightful day of my life would be that on which it should be vouchsafed me by divine justice to crush him to marmalade, and trample with both feet on his belly.’ [return to text]
199 ‘I was dying with delight; I had reached such a point that I feared I should faint; my heart swelled so inordinately that it had no more room to expand. The violence I did myself to betray nothing of my feelings was infinite; and yet this very torment was delicious. … I was triumphant, I was having my revenge, I was swimming in my vengeance; I was enjoying the full accomplishment of the most inveterate desires of my whole life.’ [return to text]
200 ‘Little matter what it is for, it is at least a passion.’ [return to text]
201 ‘The further I leave my youth behind, the more regard – I might almost say, respect – I feel for the passions. I love them when they are good, and am by no means sure of detesting them, even when bad. Passion is force; and any force, no matter where it is found, shows to advantage amid the universal feebleness that now surrounds us.’ [return to text]
202 ‘The tube that images the thunder.’ [return to text]
203 ‘There the liquid metal of the antique Hermes’ (Mercury) ‘rises or falls as the air grows dryer or moister; here a tube with its coloured fluid marks the degree of temperature.’ [return to text]
204 At last a plain sentence. Unfortunately it is plainly false. Yet happy age that could believe it! [return to text]
205 ‘He is a tousled bully in embryo, eager to swallow the earth itself before he is twelve years old.’ – ‘I know no fit match left for the fellow except the Empress of Russia’ – ‘He is a fire-ship, a faggot for burning, a firework, a mere shadow, a maniac – noise, wind, a mere blast of air. He is the magpie of the wits, the jackdaw of the cross-roads … a mere vapour, Ixion copulating with the cloud.’ – ‘I have nothing to modify in your plans; but why are you sending me your son – am I to have him boiled or roasted?’ [return to text]
206 ‘Here are sixty letters or orders for the disposal of members of the Mirabeau family. They need a special Secretary of State all to themselves.’ [return to text]
207 It is curious that this hypersensitivity does not always go with a very sensitive style. ‘Waymarsh, who had had letters yesterday, had had them again today’; the use of personal pronouns is sometimes sluttish; and James, to some minds, can be overfond of that makeshift ‘the latter’, which Johnson so curtly (and rightly, I think) condemned. It is curious, too, how part of a writer’s character can come out in a single epithet: ‘The balconied inn stood on the very neck of the sweetest pass in the Oberland.’ Would any other writer in history have called Alpine passes ‘sweet’? [return to text]
208 Cf. Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare: ‘Nothing can please many and please long but just representations of general nature. Particular manners can be known to few, and therefore few only can judge how nearly they are copied.’ [return to text]
209 ‘Homer describes whatever strikes the vision’ – ‘the French who have hardly begun to bring great poetry to perfection, except in the theatre, have been able, and therefore bound, to describe only those things that can move the soul.’ [return to text]
210 Perhaps in the then state of medical science the loss of a limb would mean bleeding to death – as Aeschylus’ brother died when his hands were cut off at Marathon, seizing a Persian ship. But even then not all mutilations could be fatal. [return to text]
211 ‘Dante accustomed the Italians to saying absolutely anything.’ [return to text]
212 ‘Towards us there they peered with sharpened glance, As an old tailor at his needle’s eye.’
[return to text]
213 Cf., in Balzac, the wen on Grandet’s nose which changes colour as his anger rises. [return to text]
214 R. Glaber, Historiae, V, i, 2. (The original is, of course, in Latin.) [return to text]
215 i.e. three to three and a half inches long, without the tail. Note the beautiful precision. ‘Small as mice’ would be less definite, and so less scientifically convincing. [return to text]
216 Johnson might have retorted that here the poet uses the general term – ‘flower’; but I do not see that it would have done any harm, had he been as specific as Wordsworth with his lesser celandine. [return to text]
217 ‘One might say that on silences there follow (deeper) silences.’ [return to text]
218 ‘For several minutes the silence was so profound that there could be heard far away the murmur of the sea.’ [return to text]
219 Quoted in A. Albalat, L’Art d’Ecrire (1899), pp. 242–3. [return to text]
220 Quoted in J. M. Murry, The Problem of Style (1922), p. 78. [return to text]
221 Compare: Una ingens Amiterna cohors priscique Quirites,
Ereti manus omnis oliviferaeque Mutuscae;
Qui Nomentum urbem, qui Rosea rura Velini,
Qui Tetricae horrentis rupes montemque Severum
Casperiamque colunt Forulosque et flumen Himellae,
Qui Tiberim Fabarimque bibunt, quos frigida misit
Nursia, et Ortinae classes populique Latini,
Quosque secans infaustum interluit Allia nomen.
– Virgil
Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles! –
Usumcasane and Theridamas,
Is it not passing brave to be a king,
And ride in triumph through Persepolis?
– Marlowe
Though all the giant brood
Of Phlegra with th’ Heroic Race were joyn’d
That fought at Theb’s and Ilium, on each side
Mixt with auxiliar Gods; and what resounds
In Fable or Romance of Uthers Son
Begirt with British and Armoric Knights;
And all who since, Baptiz’d or Infidel,
Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban,
Damasco or Marocco, or Trebisond,
Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore
When Charlemain with all his Peerage fell
By Fontarabbia.
– Milton
Qui sont-ils ces nouveaux auteurs? Ce sont des gens bien habiles et bien célèbres, me dit-il. C’est Villalobos, Coninck, Llamas, Achokier, Dealkozer, Dellacrux, Veracruz, Ugolin, Tambourin, Fernandez, Martinez, Suarez, Henriquez, Vasquez, Lopez, Gomez, Sanchez, de Vechis, de Grassis, de Grassalis, de Pitigianis, de Graphaeis, Squilanti, Bizozeri, Barcola, de Bobadilla, Simancha, Perez de Lara, Aldretta, Lorca, de Scarcia, Quaranta, Scophra, Pedrezza, Cabrezza, Bisbe, Dias, de Clavasio, Villagut, Adam à Manden, Iribarne, Binsfeld, Volfangi à Vorberg, Vostbery, Strevesdorf. O mon père! lui dis-je tout effrayé, tous ces gens-là étoient-ils chrétiens?
– Pascal
(‘Who are they, these new authors? Men, he replied, of great ability and great repute – Villalobos, (etc.) Oh, Father, said I, aghast, all these people – were they Christians?’)
These barbarous names of Jesuit casuists, so cunningly arranged by the merciless art of Pascal to suggest, rather, a catalogue of names of devils, were probably more damaging by their ludicrous grotesqueness than pages of argued controversy. Who, indeed, could believe in the Christian orthodoxy of an Achokier, a Dealkozer, or a Volfangi à Vorberg? Les souffles de la nuit flottaient sur Galgala. …
Tout reposait dans Ur et dans Jérimadeth.
– Hugo
(‘The gusts of the night-wind floated over Galgala … all lay at rest in Ur and Jérimadeth.’)
What do we know of Galgala, Ur, or Jérimadeth? Yet they become words as blessed as the old lady’s ‘Mesopotamia’.
[return to text]
222 Letters on a Regicide Peace (Works (1792), IV, p. 491). [return to text]
CHAPTER 9: Simile and Metaphor
‘AS PROSE IS essentially the art of analytical description, it would seem that metaphor is of no particular relevance to it; for poetry it is perhaps a more necessary mode of expression. … But whatever we may say of it, and however great and inclusive the function we assign to it, essentially it belongs to the sphere of poetry. Poetry alone is creative. The art of prose is not creative, but constructive or logical.’ [223]
Such is the austere view of Sir Herbert Read. [224] Aristotle, on the other hand, thought more highly of metaphor. After discussing the value of unusual and poetic words, he continues: ‘But far the greatest thing is a gift for metaphor. For this alone cannot be learnt from others and is a sign of inborn power.’ (Poetics, xxii.)
Sir Herbert, citing this passage, pleads that Aristotle is here writing only of poetry. But Aristotle – more wisely, I think – did not fix this gulf between poetry and prose; Isocrates, indeed, had done so; but Aristotle’s Rhetoric (III, 2) explicitly stresses the value of metaphor for prose oratory as well: ‘In conversation all of us use metaphors and ordinary, current words. Evidently by a proper combination of these one may attain a style that will remain clear, yet unobtrusively avoid the commonplace. … In prose there is all the more need to take pains with this because prose has fewer resources than verse.’
Here, then, are two flatly opposite views on the value of metaphor in prose. Which of them we adopt, remains ultimately a matter of personal preference. Taste is relative. But you will soon see, if you read the enduring prose-work of the past, that most men, in many ages and nations, have felt with Aristotle. Childish of them, maybe, or meretricious; but, for myself, I will own at once that a style without metaphor and simile is to me like a day without sun, or a woodland without birds.
Living metaphor is a kind of two-headed Janus, looking two ways at once and making us see two things almost simultaneously.
Ah would that from earth and Heaven all strife were for ever flung,
And wrath, that makes even a wise man mad! Upon the tongue
Its taste is sweeter than honey, that drips from the comb – but then
Like a smother of blinding smoke it mounts in the hearts of men.
So cries Homer’s Achilles in his remorse above Patroclus; and the likeness of wrath and honey is even more vividly concentrated in the metaphor than the likeness of blinding anger and blinding smoke in the simile. The simile sets two ideas side by side; in the metaphor they become superimposed. It would seem natural to think that simile, being simpler, is older. Indeed, it might be thought that this is why the prehistoric Homer, whose similes are so lovely, should be less remarkable for metaphor; whereas in Aeschylus and Pindar, some four or five centuries later, simile is overshadowed by a bold skill in metaphor such as poetry has never since surpassed.
But this explanation will hardly work. Of the not very numerous metaphors in Homer, many seem already old traditional formulae (such as ‘wingéd words’, ‘paths of the fishes’, and so on), not new inventions. [225] Similarly Old English and Scandinavian poetry, more primitive than Iliad or Odyssey, abounds in metaphorical kennings already stereotyped.
The truth seems that metaphor too is older than any literature – an immemorial human impulse perhaps as much utilitarian as literary. For there appears little ground for assigning poetic motives to the first man who called the hole in a needle its ‘eye’, or the projections on a saw its ‘teeth’. In fine, metaphor is an inveterate human tendency, as ancient perhaps as the days of the mammoth, yet vigorous still in the days of the helicopter. [226] Why then should it be banned from prose?
It is, indeed, astonishing how much ordinary language is built of dead metaphors; as a coral-reef is formed of the skeletons of dead madrepores and constantly increased by those of their living brethren. In the words of Professor Weekley, [227] ‘Every expression that we employ, apart from those that are connected with the most rudimentary objects and actions, is a metaphor, though the original meaning is dulled by constant use.’ Consider the words of that very sentence: an ‘expression’ is something squeezed out; to ‘employ’ something is to wind it in (implicare); to ‘connect’ is to tie together (conectere); ‘rudimentary’ comes from the root RAD, ‘root, sprout’; and ‘object’ is something thrown in the way; an ‘action’ something driven or conducted; ‘original’ means ‘rising up’, like a plant or spring or heavenly body; ‘constant’ is ‘standing firm’. ‘Metaphor’ itself is a metaphor, meaning the ‘carrying across’ of a term or expression from its normal usage to another.
Even in so humdrum a phrase as ‘well off’ there is said to have lurked once the metaphor of a ship well away from the perils of a lee shore. Even a seemingly simple word like ‘zest’ has gained its meaning metaphorically; from its literal sense of ‘orange or lemon peel’ (Fr. zeste) it came to be used for ‘flavour, relish’, and thence for ‘a feeling of relish’. Even our most ideal terms are metaphors with material roots; an ‘idea’ is merely a ‘shape’; ‘πνεῦμα’, ‘anima’, ‘spirit’ meant once no more than ‘breath’.
If languages are so largely built of dead metaphors, this is no doubt partly for reasons of obvious convenience; picture-thinking is as natural at a primitive stage as picture-writing; but it shows also, I think, how deeply innate is the human pleasure in simile and metaphor themselves, quite apart from their utility. ‘A good saying well spit out is a Christmas fire to my withered heart.’
Why? Partly, I suppose, because imagery pleases the simpler side of us, as pictures please children. And again it is a relief and a reassurance to descend from the clouds of the abstract to the solid world of things tangible, visible, or audible. Concepts are enlivened and illumined by percepts. But it is only the dream-interpretation of modern psychology that has fully revealed what a persistent and fundamental part is played in our less conscious thinking by symbols – how much our dream-life is devoted to disguise and masquerade; so that, for example, a man who is afraid of being carried away by some passion will dream, without ever having
heard of the chariot of the soul in Plato’s Phaedrus, that he is endangered by some uncontrollable horse. The visions of our sleep are often a fancy-dress ball of symbolic figures.
Is it Murder whets his blade?
No! – a woodman, axe in hand,
(That, for sure, ’s an honest trade.)
What, Priapus? There you stand?
Veil you in our masquerade
As a churchtower old and grey,
Primly pointing Heaven’s way.
Aphrodite brazen there,
Bare in beauty? – quickly mask it!
Though Pandemos otherwhere,
Seem you here a simple casket.
Rhadamanthus, Minos, sleep!
Blameless revels here we keep.
But whatever the reasons and origins, anyone who troubles to look will, I think, be surprised to find how often the power and pleasure of the most memorable passages of prose and verse spring mainly from a gift for metaphor. No doubt its use is often difficult, often dangerous. It is difficult because, after so many centuries, new metaphors are not so easy to find. And weary old metaphors, decrepit with long years of service, bring at each reappearance, not pleasure, but nausea. ‘The long arm of coincidence’ has become palsied with overwork; the non-existent ‘snakes of Iceland’ have long lost their bite; ‘the jam that sweetens the powder’, telling enough once in Lucretius, no longer sweetens the reader’s temper; ‘trump-cards’ are dog-eared, ‘burning questions’ leave us cold, and ‘the eleventh hour’ no longer strikes.