Or
you may wildly mix your metaphors, as when a critic accuses Mr. Browning
of "giving the irridescence of the poetic afflatus," as if the poetic
afflatus were blown through a pipe, into soap, and produced soap bubbles.
This is a more troublesome method than the mere picking up of every
newspaper commonplace that floats into your mind, but it is equally
certain to lead--where you want to go. By combining the two fashions a
great deal may be done. Thus you want to describe a fire at sea, and you
say, "the devouring element lapped the quivering spars, the mast, and the
sea-shouldering keel of the doomed _Mary Jane_ in one coruscating
catastrophe. The sea deeps were incarnadined to an alarming extent by
the flames, and to escape from such many plunged headlong in their watery
bier."
As a rule, authors who would fail stick to one bad sort of writing;
either to the newspaper commonplace, or to the out of the way and
inappropriate epithets, or to the common word with a twist on it. But
there are examples of the combined method, as when we call the trees
round a man's house his "domestic boscage." This combination is
difficult, but perfect for its purpose.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25