' 'He has never lost his head on the dizzy height to
which he has so suddenly attained. He is clearly in no danger of the
intoxicating impulse of the people who find themselves for the first
time on great eminences, to leap over. In a word, he is not spoiled.'
Here the writer, as he would put it, gives himself away. All that
metaphor means only that Mr. George is not spoiled, and the fact that
he is not spoiled would be established better by instances than by
metaphors.
Then we are told that some of Mr. George's feats 'seem to partake of
the nature of legerdemain'. 'He sways a popular assembly by waves of
almost Hebraic emotion.' 'No man has ever had his ear closer to the
ground and listened more attentively to the tramp of the oncoming
multitudes.' He 'held Great Britain's end up' at the International
conference. A 'magnificent tribute was paid to him by Earl Balfour'
but it 'did not put him alone on a pinnacle'. And then we read of the
whirligig of time, of 'clouds of misunderstanding which point to the
coming of a storm'; of how 'foreign nations suddenly became aware that
a new star had swum into the world's ken'; of how 'the situation of
this country is perilous with so much Bolshevik gunpowder moving
about', and how 'it has required a strong heart and a clear head to
keep the nation from falling either into the sloughs of despond or the
fires of revolution'.
Some of these are metaphors that were excellent in their first use and
original context; but they lose their excellence if repeated in any
context where they have not been discovered by the emotion of the
writer but are used by him to make a commonplace appear passionate.
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