Chapter 2
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.
IRRELEVANT ALLUSION
We all know the people--for they are the majority, and probably include our particular selves--who cannot carry on the ordinary business of everyday talk without the use of phrases containing a part that is appropriate, and another that is pointless or worse; the two parts have associated themselves together in their minds as making up what somebody has said, and what others as well as they will find familiar, and they have the sort of pleasure in producing the combination that a child has in airing a newly acquired word. There is, indeed, a certain charm in the grown man's boyish ebullience, not to be restrained by thoughts of relevance from letting the exuberant phrase jet forth. And for that charm we put up with it when a speaker draws our attention to the methodical by telling us there is a method in the madness, though method and not madness is all there is to see, when another's every winter is the winter of his discontent, when a third cannot complain of the light without calling it religious as well as dim, when for a fourth nothing can be rotten outside the State of Denmark, or when a fifth, asked whether he does not owe you 1s. 6d. for that cab fare, owns the soft impeachment.
A slightly fuller examination of a single example may be useful. The phrase to _leave severely alone_ has two reasonable uses--one in the original sense of to leave alone as a method of severe treatment, i.e. to send to Coventry or show contempt for, and the other in contexts where _severely_ is to be interpreted by contraries--to leave alone by way not of punishing the object, but of avoiding consequences for the subject. The straightforward meaning, and the ironical, are both good; anything between them, in which the real meaning is merely to leave alone, and _severely_ is no more than an echo, is pointless and vapid and in print intolerable. Examples follow: (1, straightforward) _You must show him, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into a moral Coventry, your detestation of the crime_; (2, ironical) _Fish of prey do not appear to relish the sharp spines of the stickleback, and usually seem to leave them severely alone_; (3, pointless) _Austria forbids children to_ _smoke in public places; and in German schools and military colleges there are laws upon the subject; France, Spain, Greece, and Portugal leave the matter severely alone_. It is obvious at once how horrible the faded jocularity of No. 3 is in print; and, though things like it come crowding upon one another in most conversation, they are not very easy to find in newspapers and books of any merit; a small gleaning of them follows:
_The moral_, as Alice would say, _appeared to be that, despite its difference in degree, an obvious essential in the right kind of education had been equally lacking to both these girls_ (as Alice, or indeed as you or I, might say).
_Resignation_ became a virtue of necessity _for Sweden_ (If you do what you must with a good grace, you make a virtue of necessity; without _make_, a virtue of necessity loses its meaning).
_I strongly advise the single working-man who would become a successful backyard poultry-keeper_ to ignore the advice of Punch, _and to secure a useful helpmate_.
_The beloved lustige Wien_ [merry Vienna] _of his youth had_ suffered a sea-change. _The green glacis ... was blocked by ranges of grand new buildings_ (Ariel must chuckle at the odd places in which his sea-change turns up).
_Many of the celebrities who in that most frivolous of watering-places_ do congregate.
_When about to quote Sir Oliver Lodge's tribute to the late leader, Mr. Law_ drew, not a dial, _but what was obviously a penny memorandum book_ from his pocket (You want to mention that Mr. Bonar Law took a notebook out of his pocket. But pockets are humdrum things. How give a literary touch? Call it a poke? No, we can better that; who was it drew what from his poke? Why, Touchstone, a dial, to be sure! and there you are).--H.W.F.
CORRESPONDENCE
We have a constant flow of correspondence, and we are afraid the writers must think us unpractical, incompetent, or neglectful, because we give their inquiries no place in our tracts; they may naturally think that it is our business to pass judgement on any linguistic question that troubles them; but most of these queries would be satisfactorily answered by reference to the _O. E. D._, which we do not undertake to reprint; in other cases, where we are urged to protest against the common abuse of some word or phrase, we do not think (as we have before explained) that it is worth while to treat any such detail without full illustration, and this our correspondents do not supply. We propose now to demonstrate the situation by dealing with a small selection of these abused words, which may serve as examples.
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IMPLICIT
The human mind likes a good clear black-and-white contrast; when two words so definitely promise one of these contrasts as _explicit_ and _implicit_, and then dash our hopes by figuring in phrases where contrast ceases to be visible--say in 'explicit support' and 'implicit obedience', with _absolute_ or _complete_ or _full_ as a substitute that might replace either or both--, we ask with some indignation whether after all black is white, and perhaps decide that _implicit_ is a shifty word with which we will have no further dealings. It is noteworthy in more than one respect.
First, it means for the most part the same as _implied_, and, as it is certainly not so instantly intelligible to the average man, it might have been expected to be so good as to die. That it has nevertheless survived by the side of _implied_ is perhaps due to two causes: one is that _explicit_ and _implicit_ make a neater antithesis than even _expressed_ and _implied_ (we should write _all the conditions, whether explicit or implicit_; but _all the implied conditions; implied_ being much commoner than _implicit_ when the antithesis is not given in full); and the other is that the adverb, whether of _implicit_ or of _implied_, is more often wanted than the adjective, and that _impliedly_ is felt to be a bad form; _implicitly_, preferred to _impliedly_, helps to keep _implicit_ alive.
Secondly, there is the historical accident by which _implicit_, with _faith, obedience, confidence_, and such words, has come to mean absolute or full, whereas it originally meant undeveloped or potential or in the germ. The starting-point of this usage is the ecclesiastical phrase _implicit faith_, i.e. a person's acceptance of any article of belief not on its own merits, but as a part of, as 'wrapped up in', his general acceptance of the Church's authority; the steps from this sense to unquestioning, and thence to complete or absolute or exact, are easy; but not every one who says that implicit obedience is the first duty of the soldier realizes that the obedience he is describing is not properly an exact one, but one that is involved in acceptance of the soldier's status.--[H.W.F.]
It seems to us (by virtue of this 'historical accident') that in such a phrase as the _implied_ or _implicit conditions_ of a contract, there is a recognized difference of meaning in the two words. _Implied_ conditions, though unexpressed, need not be hidden, they are rather such as any one who agreed to the main stipulation would recognize as involved; and the word _implied_ might even carry the plea that they were unspecified because openly apparent. On the other hand _implicit_ conditions are rather such as are unsuspected and in a manner hidden.--[ED.]
PRACTICALLY
A correspondent complains that the adverb 'almost' is being supplanted by 'practically'. 'The true meaning of "practically" (he writes) is "in practice" as opposed to "in theory" or "in thought"; for instance, _Questions which are theoretically interesting to thoughtful people and practically to every one_, or again, _He loves himself contemplatively by knowing as he is known and practically by loving as he is loved._' And he finds fault with the _O.E.D._, whence he takes his quotations, for not condemning such phrases as these, _The application was supported by practically all the creditors_, and, _He has been very ill but is now practically well again_.
The word is no doubt abused and intrudes everywhere. _The Times_ writes of a recent gale, _Considerable damage was done by the gale in practically every parish in Jersey_, and again of a bridge on the Seine that _The structure has practically been swept away_; but it seems that in the sense of 'for practical purposes' it can be defended as a useful word. For instance, a friend, leaving your house at night to walk home, says, _It is full moon, isn't it?_ and you reply _Practically_, meaning that it is full enough for his purpose. You might say _nearabouts_ or _thereabouts_ or _sufficiently_, but you cannot say _almost_ or _nearly_ without implying that you know the full moon to be nearly due and not past. In such cases it might be argued that 'practically' is truly opposed to 'theoretically', but 'actually' is rather its opposite. 'Practically' implies an undefined margin of error which does not affect the situation.
LITERALLY
A correspondent quotes: _For the last three years I literally coined money_, and, _My hair literally stood on end_. The common misuse of this word is so absurd that it would not be worth while to protest against it, if its daily appearance in every newspaper did not show that it was tolerated by educated people. Mr. Fowler writes:
'We have come to such a pass with this emphasizer that where the truth would require us to acknowledge our exaggeration with, "not literally, of course, but in a manner of speaking", we do not hesitate to insert the very word that we ought to be at pains to repudiate; such false coin makes honest traffic in words impossible. _If the Home Rule Bill is passed, the 300,000 Unionists of the South and West of Ireland will be_ literally thrown to the wolves. _The strong "tête-de-pont" fortifications were rushed by our troops, and a battalion crossed the bridge_ literally on the enemy's shoulders. In both, _practically_ or _virtually_, opposites of _literally_, would have stood.'
INFINITELY
This word, like _infiniment_ in French, is commonly used for 'extremely', and it is pedantic to object to it by insisting always on its full logical meaning; but it should be avoided where measurable quantities are spoken of; for instance, one may say _to indoctrinate the mob with philosophical notions does infinite harm_, but to say that _England is infinitely more populous than Australia_ is absurd. That one can rightly call atoms infinitely small means that they are to our senses immeasurable, and the word, as it here carries wonder, may, like other conversational expletives, have an emotional force, and can therefore be sometimes well used even where its exaggeration is apparent. As when a man heightens some assertion with a 'damnable,' he intends by the colour of his speech to warn you that his conviction is profound, and that he is in no mood to listen to reason, so the exaggeration of 'infinite' may have special value by giving emotional colour to a sentence.
On the above principles there will be doubtful cases. For instance, was Mr. Lloyd George justified the other day in saying, _If you cut down expenditure to the lowest possible limit, the war debt would still be so enormous that ... the expenditure for this country is bound to be infinitely greater than before the war?--The Times_, Oct. 23.
THE AMERICAN INVITATION
The English reply to the American Invitation was despatched last October. The text of it is as follows:
'To Professor Fred Newton Scott.
DEAR SIR,
We thank you heartily for the letter addressed to us by Professors James Wilson Bright, Albert Stanburrough Cook, Charles Hall Grandgent, Robert Underwood Johnson, John Livingston Lowes, John Matthews Manly, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, and yourself.
We regret that so long a time should have passed before our joint reply could be despatched: but our intentions have in the meanwhile been privately made known to you. We now write to give you formal assurance of the interest and sympathy with which your proposal has been received, and to thank you for your generous suggestion that we in the mother country of our language should take the lead in furthering the project.
Since then we, both Americans and British, are in complete agreement as to our aims, we have only to decide on the best means and devise the best machinery that we can to attain them.
We feel that this practical question needs very careful consideration and consultation: and we have therefore appointed a small committee of five persons on our side to confer and draw up a table of suggestions which can be submitted to you. We would invite you on your side to take a similar step: we could then compare our respective proposals and agree upon a basis on which to work. There are two dangers which we feel it especially desirable to avoid: one is the establishment of an authoritative academy, tending inevitably to divorce the literary from the spoken language; the other is the creation of a body so large as to be unmanageable. We have also to cope with the difficulty of co-ordinating the activities of members representing many branches in widely scattered territories. Our committee for consultation on these matters consists of Henry Bradley, Robert Bridges, A.T.Q. Couch, Henry Newbolt, and J. Dover Wilson: and we shall be glad if you can tell us that you approve of our preliminary step and will be willing to consider our suggestions when they are ready.
(Signed) BALFOUR. ROBERT BRIDGES. HENRY NEWBOLT.'
A first meeting of the consulting committee mentioned in the above reply was held in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, on Nov. 1st ult.
Present: Henry Bradley, Robert Bridges, Sir Henry Newbolt, and J. Dover Wilson.
Discussion was confined to practical questions of organization, and Sir Henry Newbolt undertook to draft a letter in which the sense of