'He Will Return Deeply Dyed the True Tint'

“Metaphors will, I know, ultimately be my ruin, but in the meantime I hope I make myself reasonably plain.” 

I think of metaphors less as literary devices than a mode of thought. To describe something to another person, especially something novel or inexplicable, we liken it to something familiar. My mind has always worked by association. One thing reminds me automatically of another, so metaphors tend to appear without effort. There’s a mystery here. I’ve learned to trust, in most cases, the instantaneous appearance of a metaphor.

 

In Thursday’s post I likened encountering an interesting bit of trivia to “finding a gold coin on an empty beach.” The sense is plain but a reader objects to the metaphor as being “too cute,” “a stretch.” Perhaps. I intended it to be vivid and slightly absurd, which brings up another aspect of metaphor-making: the potential for humor. Metaphors can be amusing while doing the more sober job of making something clear to a reader. So many of the metaphors we hear in conversation and see in print – “black as night,” “sharp as a tack” – are tediously lazy clichés. Accuracy with a hint of comedy or irony is a pleasing combination.

The admission at the top is from Augustine Birrell’s review of Leslie Stephen’s three-volume Hours in a Library (1874-79), collected in his Men, Women, and Books (1910). Birrell is unusual in several ways. He was a first-rate reviewer with a strong sense of style, but most of his professional life was devoted to being the British chief secretary for Ireland (1907–16) – a combination unimaginable today. We don’t think of politicians as even being literate today. Here are the metaphor-rich sentences preceding the one quoted at the top:

 

“The author of ‘Hours in a Library’ belongs, it is hardly necessary to say, to the class of writers who use their steam for the purpose of going straight ahead. He is always greatly concerned with his subject. If he is out fox-hunting, he comes home with the brush, and not with a spray of blackberries; but if, on the other hand, he goes out blackberrying, he will return deeply dyed the true tint, and not dragging behind him a languishing coil of seaweed.”