ness in his legs" (The English Mail-coack.) So the coachman is afterward mentioned as "a crocodile belonging to the antepenultimate generation," and in De Quincey's becomes " a venerable crocodile, in a royal livery of scarlet and gold, in a coat with sixteen capes." Of course the crocodile is not an especially ridiculous animal, but the incongruity of the comparison arouses feelings which we attach to the man.

66

To go from the ridiculous to the trivial, we would not compare anything important to anything essentially insignificant, and conversely a comparison to a trivial thing will make us think slightingly of it. So Ruskin, desiring to degrade the hurry for wealth in our day, tells a story of some children who were free of a beautiful house in which they might have enjoyed any kind of delightful pleasure, and goes on: But in the midst of all this it struck two or three of the more practical' children that they would like some of the brass-headed nails that studded the chairs; and so they set to work to pull them out." And finally they all got wild about the brass-headed nails, and quarrelled with each other and hurt their fingers in trying to get them out, and neglected all the pleasures they might have enjoyed, merely for this foolish fancy. You may remember the illustration; it is in The Mystery of Life and its Arts. The comparison with such trivial things as brass nails has the effect (for the moment) of degrading wealth in our eyes, so that for the time being the pursuit of wealth for its own sake seems like a trivial and unworthy thing.

In like manner may we render the idea contemptible. So George Macdonald in Sir Gibbie, speaking of Fergus, the preacher whom he wishes to prejudice in the eyes of the reader; he compares him to a pedlar and his oratory to fireworks. "The new preacher," he says, "the pyrotechnist of human logic and eloquence, who was about to burn his

halfpenny blue-lights over the abyss of truth, and throw his yelping crackers into it" (Sir Gibbie, iii. ch. xiii.). And then he speaks of him as "the pedlar who now rose to display his loaded calico and beggarly shoddy over the bookboard of the pulpit." These cheap blue-lights and yelping crackers, the loaded calico and beggarly shoddy, these are things which a sensible man thinks either matters of no consideration, or else he has a sound contempt for them. Hence Fergus suffers in our estimation, as Macdonald meant he should.

On the other hand, just as some figures have, unconsciously enough on our part, the effect of lowering our estimation of the object, so some figures for one reason or another have the power to command our respect, and the feeling which we really have for the image we transfer in a measure to the idea. Such a figure is Wordsworth's mention of Newton as "voyaging on strange seas of thought alone." The figure at once exalts our conception of Newton, as we may see if we imagine that Wordsworth had compared him, for instance, to a mole burrowing in the ground. The comparison would not have been wholly inapt, for Newton found his way along paths unseen by men, and his course was known only by very slight disturbances in the everyday order of affairs. He was a retired man and kept his studies much to himself. But wholly aside from the appositeness, the latter simile is worthless, for it lacks the imaginative, elevating power of the former. Somewhat the same heightening effect has the following simile from Newman:

"The mind ranges to and fro, and spreads out and advances forward with a quickness which has become a proverb, and a subtlety and versatility which baffle investigation. It passes on from point to point, gaining one by some indication; another on a probability; then availing itself of an association; then falling back on some received

law; next seizing on testimony; then committing itself to some popular impression, or some inward instinct, or some obscure memory; and thus it makes progress not unlike a clamberer on a steep cliff, who by quick eye, prompt hand, and firm foot ascends, how he knows not himself, by personal endowments and by practice rather than by rule, leaving no track behind him, and unable to teach another. It is not too much to say that the stepping by which great geniuses scale the mountain of truth is as unsafe and precarious to men in general as the ascent of a skilful mountaineer up a literal crag."-Oxford University Sermons (ed. 1887), p. 275.

And I may bring this slight excursus to an end by a pair of comparisons which illustrate both sides of the matter, namely, those of the First Psalm: "And he [the righteous man] shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. The ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away. Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous." The righteous man is compared to a palm, because he is fruitful, firmly rooted, flourishing; and the wicked is, as in many other passages, like chaff, because it is suddenly scattered and comes to naught. But in each comparison that which is not mentioned is as important as that which is; the palm is a blessing to all about it, the chaff is worthless and despised by all.

EXERCISE.

Find some figure which, aside from the aptness of the comparison, shall put the following in a good or bad light:

1. The Scholar.

2. The Miser.

3. The Demagogue.

4. The Bully.

5. The Flirt.

6. The Dandy.

7. The Man of Common Sense.

8. The Good Housekeeper.

9. Doing Wrong.

10. Doing Right.

III. THE SOURCES OF SIMILITUDES.

85. Everyday Affairs. By far the greater number of figures, if not of illustrations, are drawn from the events and affairs of everyday life, a combination of phenomena so vast and unrelated that it would be as difficult as it would be for us useless a task to attempt any classification. One merit have such figures: they compare with something familiar to all. One drawback they may perhaps be thought to have, that they are commonplace. But commonplace they need not be; however common the image, a happy likeness gives an air of distinction. How excellent are some of Lowell's figures from the commonest sources. When he says of Chaucer that "in him we see the first result of the Norman yeast upon the home-baked Saxon loaf" (My Study Windows, p. 251), or of the Life of Josiah Quincy," Thus many a door into the past, long irrevocably shut upon us, is set ajar" (Ibid., 99), or in the essay on Thoreau, "The word 'transcendental' then was the maid of all work for those who could not think, as 'Pre-Raphaelite' has been more recently for people of the same limited housekeeping" (Ibid., 195), the figure is as good as those drawn from Gothic volume (p. 251), the horn of Huon of Bordeaux (p. 100), or stained-glass windows (p. 195).

So it is with Emerson. Of "those affections and consuetudes that grow near us, he says "These old shoes are easy to the feet" (Essays, First Series, Prudence); of Life, "Seen from the nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front (Ibid., Heroism); of the power of exhilaration of the imagination he says "We are

like persons who come out of a cellar into the open air" (Ibid., Intellect). Of course many such similitudes are now so trite that we hardly notice them; roads and walls, fire and food, debit and credit, and a thousand other things give us metaphors that everybody uses without thinking. But this is because we use them merely from having heard them. A keen observation stores the mind with original images. Lowell is as figurative a writer as I know, and his similitudes are rarely trite; but I should say the majority of them came from the simplest things.

86. Nature. Next to the great world of everyday matters, and, indeed, not so very different from it, though deserving a place by itself, is nature. We all know how trite are some figures from nature; the flowing of a stream, the tossing of the sea, the sprouting of a seed, solid rocks, shifting sands, birds, beasts, and what not, give forms of expression so common that everybody shuns them. But here again the keen observer has always something new. I quote again from Lowell's My Study Windows.

Of Emerson's writings he says: "It is wholesome to angle in those profound pools, though one be rewarded with nothing more than the leap of a fish that flashes his freckled side in the sun and as suddenly absconds in the dark and dreamy waters again" (p. 377). And of his oratory: "There is a kind of undertow in that rich baritone of his that sweeps our minds from their foothold into deeper waters with a drift we cannot and would not resist " (p. 383). Of great poets he writes: "As an oak profits by the foregone lives of immemorial vegetable races that have worked over the juices of earth and air into organic life out of whose dissolution a soil might gather fit to maintain that nobler birth of nature, so we may be sure that the genius of every remembered poet drew the forces that built it up out of the decay of a long succession of forgotten ones (p. 234). Of the similes of the old rhymes: "They are wood