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
itself some of the thrill and fascination of romance.
Here are metaphors that might be used, or have been used, so as to
surprise the reader; but in this case they are stock-ornaments to a
passage that needs no ornament. If the metaphors in the first sentence
were alive to us they would be mixed; at least the transition from
monarchies hide-bound by caste to monarchies lying on scrap-heaps
would be too sudden; but we hardly notice it because we hardly notice
the metaphors. And there is an inconsistency in the notion of rising
by wading which, again, we do not notice only because we are so used
to rising and wading as metaphors that both have lost their power as
images.
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