King Lear, 4, 1
| I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. | Emerson, Self-Reliance (1841) |
| My bet is that we have not the kind of cosmic importance that the parsons and philosophers teach. I doubt if a shudder would go through the spheres if the whole ant heap were kerosened. | Holmes, Jr., letter to Lewis Einstein (1909) |
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Sr. were both prolific producers of metaphor, and they each appear a number of times in the chapters to follow. The younger Holmes – the one who served on the Supreme Court – was the more underrated of the two in literary ability. His comparisons tended to be notable for their pungency, as we shall see again.
c. Comparison to make the subject visible. A comparison often makes an intangible subject available to the senses. Appeals to any of the five senses are possible, and some comparisons invoke several of them; by far the most frequent and important sensory effect of a comparison, however, is to make the subject visible, with uses of the other senses often present but subsidiary. Thus a simile may give visible form to an abstraction:
| And this is really all that we can do when we fight something really stronger than ourselves; we can deal it its death-wound one moment; it deals us death in the end. It is something if we can shock and jar the unthinking impetus and enormous innocence of evil; just as a pebble on a railway can stagger the Scotch express. | Chesterton, The Giant (1910) |
Or to invisible features of inner life:
| The conduct and manners of women, in fact, evidently prove that their minds are not in a healthy state; for, like the flowers which are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity. | Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) |
Or to the effects of language:
| No poem should be long of which the purpose is only to strike the fancy, without enlightening the understanding by precept, ratiocination, or narrative. A blaze first pleases, and then tires the sight. | Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (1781) |
Making those subjects available to the senses, and especially to the eyes, is one of the great repeating purposes of metaphor, and this book will spend a chapter on each of them. We respond strongly to what we see, and things can be seen as vividly in the mind’s eye as they can in the world – sometimes more vividly. Images also inspire feeling, and good metaphors are felt as well as observed. If one wants an audience to respond to an abstract proposition or to what otherwise cannot be seen, one does well to convert it to visible form by making a comparison.
d. Comparison for the sake of caricature. A quite different purpose of comparison is to caricature the subject – that is, to exaggerate some feature of it, whether for the sake of reduction, elevation, or mere emphasis.
| Mrs Pipchin hovered behind the victim, with her sable plumage and her hooked beak, like a bird of ill-omen. | Dickens, Dombey and Son (1848) |
| There are few things more disheartening and disgusting than when you are walking the streets of a strange village on the Sabbath, to hear a preacher shouting like a boatswain in a gale of wind, and thus harshly profaning the quiet atmosphere of the day. | Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) |
| [I]t was plain that the whale alongside must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated corpse. It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent to bury the departed. | Melville, Moby-Dick (1851) |
In none of these cases does the comparison make an invisible subject visible or otherwise available to the senses in a new way. Granted, in the case from Dickens the comparison lets the reader see a face that was otherwise visible only in the mind’s eye of the author; and so, perhaps, for each of the others. But for purposes of this book we would call that a case of making something familiar that the reader has not seen – a face. It is not an instance of giving visible form to an abstract thing inherently unavailable to the senses. Thoreau compares one noise to another, and Melville compares one smell to another. While both comparisons are picturesque, their primary purpose is to exaggerate. They compare the subject to a source with common properties but more extreme.
The examples just shown were similes. Sometimes, of course, a comparison of this kind takes the form of a metaphor, and the exaggeration or caricature just amounts to renaming the subject, as in this specimen:
| Shake the whole constitution to the centre, and the lawyer will sit tranquil in his cabinet; but touch a single thread in the cobwebs of Westminster-hall, and the exasperated spider crawls out in its defense. | Sheil, argument for the defense in the trial of John O’Connell (1844) |
(Sheil claimed that William Pitt the Elder devised this metaphor first; whoever may be entitled to credit for its invention, its use in the argument of a criminal trial suggests higher standards for rhetoric in that setting than we have since come to expect.)
Caricature of the type just shown is a major and recurring purpose of comparison. Sometimes a literal account of a subject does not speak sufficiently for the impression it creates, nor is the effect conveyed by adjectives. It can only be brought home by comparison to something extreme. The listener knows that the subject described wasn’t really quite as hooked or as loud or as dreadful as the source of the comparison but understands it to have seemed that way. And whatever the listener may know as a matter of reason, new associations are now attached to the subject and may not come off easily. The audience who imagines the subject also imagines bits of what it was compared to, and likely forms a combined picture – a composite (the lawyer as spider). The picture may contain strange proportions and juxtapositions, which can serve as foundation blocks of another rhetorical resource: comedy.
Exaggerated comparisons may be further divided into those that elevate their subjects and those that diminish them – the difference between caricaturing a person by comparison to Atlas or to a reptile. The latter category is especially handy, as metaphor is a potent instrument for the delivery of insult and invective. These applications require care. The victim’s complete recovery is by no means assured; when the results are clever they may enjoy a longevity out of all proportion to their accuracy, if any, as in Johnson’s unjust but well-remembered case:
| Next day, Sunday, July 31, I told him I had been that morning at a meeting of the people called Quakers, where I had heard a woman preach. Johnson. “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” | Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791) |
Let us be mindful of Beerbohm’s appreciative sensibility:
| After an encounter with him they never again were quite the same men in the eyes of their fellows. Whistler’s insults always stuck – stuck and spread round the insulted, who found themselves at length encased in them, like flies in amber. You may shed a tear over the flies, if you will. For myself, I am content to laud the amber. | Beerbohm, Whistler’s Writing (1909) |
e. Comparison to simplify. A comparison can give simpler form to a subject that is complicated. In theory