Mr. Lloyd George has waded to such a dizzy height that he
seems to leave foreign nations breathless; and we should be breathless
at the thought of such an impossibility if the metaphors were not
dead.
It is indeed the mark of a dead metaphor that it escapes absurdity
only by being dead. The term has been used for metaphors that have
lost all metaphorical significance; but these, perhaps, are better
called buried metaphors. I prefer to use the word _dead_ of metaphors
not yet buried but demanding burial. 'Risen from humble beginnings' is
perhaps a buried metaphor; 'wading to their places through blood' is a
dead one. It has been used so often that it jades instead of
horrifying us; it is a corpse that fails to make us think of corpses.
But in the next sentence the writer returns to the metaphor of rising
and elaborates it so that it is no longer buried, though certainly
dead. We are vaguely aware of the sense of this passage, but the
metaphors are a hindrance, not a help, to our understanding of it.
Writers fall into habitual metaphor when they fear that their thought
will seem too commonplace without ornament; and, because the motive is
unconscious, they choose metaphors familiar to themselves and their
readers. The article from which I have quoted contains many such
metaphors. Mr. Lloyd George is 'like other men only cast in bigger
mould'. He is 'clearly no plaster saint'. 'You cannot think of him in
relation to the knock-out blow except as the man who gives, not
receives, it.
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