CHAPTER VII. FIGURES OF RHETORIC. PART SECOND. Simile. WITH many the conception is deep-rooted that poesy is necessarily at war with sound common-sense. It is one main object of this work to disabuse you of so inconsiderate a prejudice. In Shakespeare's beautiful drama, "The Tempest," study his conceptions, so contrasted— Ariel and Caliban. Supposing such beings to exist, Shakespeare's genius shows itself, its balance and wisdom, by his making them each play a part in perfect consistence with the supposed nature of each. Imagination created them, but common-sense, judgment exquisitely accurate, filled in the details; if not, both would have been ridiculous to every cultured mind. Accordingly, a simile that runs counter to any clear. perception jars on the intellect. Robert Montgomery contributes the subjoined. From his poem on "Satan" he is ycleped" Satan Montgomery:" "Lo! the bright dew-bead on the bramble lies, Very well to compare the dew-bead to the pity of a beautiful eye, but the ladies are entitled to object to likening their eyes to brambles. William Habington, who often wrote elegant and choice English, is chiefly remembered nowadays by an absurd simile. Blackfriars is a street in London abounding in candy-stores; and so of a feast so rich that Heaven must have rained down sweetmeats, he exclaims: "It seem'd as though Heaven were Blackfriars, and each star—a confectioner." Our very admiration of Mrs. Barrett Browning, queen of all poetesses, makes us more willing to aid in ridiculing her conceits and her husband's unendurable obscurities; as thus: "Then the bitter sea Inexorably pushed between us both; And sweeping up the ship with my despair, Saith Bayne: "No Ossianic juvenile ever perpetrated purer nonsense. What possible resemblance there can be between a ship and a pasture; why and when stars go out to grass; and wherefore having so gone they should feed on ships and young ladies -these are questions of insoluble mystery." But to admire is pleasanter than to carp. In "Festus" is this: "I'll not wish for stars; but I could love Some peaceful spot, where we might dwell unknown- Passing into the domain of eloquence, let us mark, we can not do it but with delight, how Lord Chatham rises from a casual expression, almost beneath the dignity of the occasion in the House of Lords, into a magnificent image, enforced by a sublime classic quotation: "I would not touch a feather of the prerogative. The expression perhaps is too light; but since I have made use of it, let me add that the entire command and power of directing the local disposition of the army is to the royal prerogative as the master-feather in the eagle's wing; and if I were permitted to carry the allusion a little farther, I would say that they have disarmed the imperial bird-the ministrum fulminis alitem (the winged minister of the thunder). The army is the thunder of the crown." This was spoken January 22d, 1770. A few months. after, Junius wrote what is considered his finest image: "The king's honor is that of his people. adorns the royal bird supports its flight. plumage, and you fix him to the earth." The feather that Strip him of his The proof from handwriting seems to have proved, quite recently (1871), Junius to have been Sir Philip Francis. Mr. Mudie, the author of some popular works on "The Seasons," was originally a teacher in Dundee. He happened to be one of a tea-party at the house of the Rev. Dr. M. The Doctor was renowned for the suavity of his manners, and his especial politeness toward the fair sex. Handing a dish of honey to one of the ladies, he said, in his wonted manner— "Do take a little honey, Miss yourself." 'tis so sweet-so like Mr. Mudie could not restrain his native tendency to humor; so, handing the butter-dish to the host, he exclaimed 1 "Do take a little butter, Doctor; 'tis so like yourself." A circumstance recorded in Mitford's "Life," of the poet Gray, is a striking example of how much a good simile improves a passage. Thomson, author of "The Seasons," had written thus his picture of Lavinia, in his "Autumn:" "Thoughtless of beauty, she was Beauty's self, Recluse among the woods; if city dames Will deign their faith. And thus she went, compell'd By strong necessity, with as serene And pleased a look as Patience e'er put on, Thomson laid this passage before Pope, then in the zenith of his fame. Pope drew his pen through it, and wrote thus: "Thoughtless of beauty, she was Beauty's self, John Locke, whose brief treatise on the "Conduct of the Understanding" is invaluable (let every young person buy it, and read it fifty times), a writer who uses a very plain style, very seldom giving way to the poetic, gives us, in endeavoring to explain the faculty of memory more accurately, this fine instance of a simile naturally suggested: "The ideas as well as the children of our youth often die before us, and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are approaching, where, though the brass and the marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery is mouldered away." If he had compared the aged mind to a canvas from which the painting had faded, the comparison would have been less beautiful far; because old age by no means so naturally suggests the thought of a picture as it does the thought of the sepulchre, to which the tottering step of Eld is so inevitably drawing near. But lay it to heart-nothing in a figure charms more than naturalness. Avoiding all we can the cant of the falsely Puritanic, we must maintain that poesy is marred by mean views of first principles. Pope tells us of angels wondering at the intellect of Newton: "Superior beings, when of late they saw Holy Writ, though revealing to us our hideous downward tendencies, insists on, rejoices in our priceless faculties, our capabilities of repenting and of soaring. Pope imbibed whatever of meanness there was in his philosophy from his shallow teacher, Lord Bolingbroke. You mark how the above lines are degraded by infidel views of man; till man dwindles down into a "pampered goose," or to an ape-as, long before Darwin, Lord Monboddo made our species out to be. Holy Writ would represent a Newton as an embodied eternity. The gifted Poe makes the worm greatly man's superior, when he says of human life "The play is the tragedy-man; And the hero, the conqueror-worm." Infidelity is the mean, crawling, and unintellectual thing which leads quick to the reign of the commune in our cities of the groveling in our literature. Once more, truth is necessary to every good simile in this, that it must be born from some real glow of soul; not from false fervors artificially wrought up. Go to the "Annus Mirabilis" of Dryden, Pope's immediate predecessor. He is describing a sea-fight between the Dutch and English, he knowing nothing of the sea save at second-hand from books: "Sometimes from fighting squadrons of each fleet, Deceived themselves or to preserve a friend, Two grappling Ætnas on the ocean meet, And English fires with Belgian flames contend." |