III. DEAD METAPHORS

Metaphor becomes a habit with writers who wish to express more emotion
than they feel, and who employ it as an ornament to statements that
should be made plainly or not at all. Used thus, it is a false
emphasis, like architectural ornaments in the wrong place. It demands
of the reader an imaginative effort where there has been no such
effort in the writer, an answering emotion where there is none to be
answered. And the reader gets the habit of refusing such effort and
such emotion; he ceases even to be aware of metaphors that are used
habitually. He may not consciously resent them; but unconsciously his
mind is wearied by them as the eye by advertisements often repeated.
By their sameness they destroy expectation so that, even if the writer
says anything in particular, it seems to be all generalities.

Here is an instance of habitual metaphor, not manufactured for this
tract, but taken from an article by a well-known writer. He is
speaking of the career of Mr. Lloyd George:

There was nothing like it in the histories of the ancient
European monarchies, hide-bound by caste and now lying on
the scrap-heaps of Switzerland and Holland. In the more
forward nations, the new republics, men have indeed risen
from humble beginnings to high station, but not generally by
constitutional means and usually only (as now in Russia) by
wading to their places through blood. The dizzy height to
which Lloyd George has attained, not as a British statesman
only but also as a world celebrity, seems to leave the
foreign nations breathless. It is a spectacle that has of