Metaphor (John Middleton Murry)
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"Metaphor is as ultimate as speech itself." --"Metaphor" (1927) by John Middleton Murry |
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"Metaphor" (1927) is an essay by John Middleton Murry first published in John Clare and Studies (pp.87-88), not in Countries of the Mind (1931), as is usually stated.
It is collected in Shakespeare Criticism (1936) and in Essays on Metaphor (Whitewater, WI: Language Press, 1972) by Warren Shibles.
Full text
DISCUSSIONS of metaphor — there are not many of them — often strike us at first as superficial. Not until we have ourselves made the attempt to get farther do we begin to realize that the investigation of metaphor is curiously like the investigation of any of the primary data of consciousness: it cannot be pursued very far without our being led to the border of sanity. Metaphor is as ultimate as speech itself, and speech as ultimate as thought. If we try to penetrate them beyond a certain point, we find questioning the very faculty and instrument with which are trying to penetrate them. The earth trembles and yawns beneath the explorer’s feet Medio tutissimus ibis, but the middle way is hard to find.
Suppose we take a familiar metapnor, as that th.
fiery spirit of Emily Bronte burned up her body, h can^ot’^fairly be called cliche-, a is rad,er a ^
necessary idiom. Necessary, because we tbat th is no way of saying what we want to say “bout L y Bronte save by tliis mctaplior or one of Tltis obvious necessity of ti.e metaphor ' of genuine alternatives, seems to make tt soon as one person perceved m anotlter and ^<=“8' describe such a quality "%Emily Bronte s a k, metaphor was forced upon him. We m.ay even s y the qLlity could not have been perceived w thou
metaphor. The imagination that >'>= „,„s,
body as fire inhabits the material which it burns
. CountrU, of,h. Mind, Second Scries CmjO-
surely go back to the moment ulicn tlie existence of tlie soul was first surmised; for onlv by such an image could the nature of the soul’s existence be at all ap- prehended. And we may leave it undecided, or as impossible of decision, whetlier the creation of the metaphor was the result of a search for a description of the previously felt existence of the soul, or the exis- tence of the soul was suggested by die manner of tlie flame’s existence.
For, wliichevcr it may have been, and perhaps the processes were equally prevalent, metaphor appears as die instinctive and necessary act of the mind exploring reality' and ordering experience. It is the means by which the less familiar is assimilated to die more familiar, die unknown to the known: it ‘gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name’, so that it ceases to be airy nothing. To attempt a fundamental exa- mination of metaplior would be nothing less than an investigation of the genesis of thought itself— a dangerous enterprise. 7 herefore we instinctively seek to circumscribe our own inquiries by leaving out of account as far as may be die countless host of dead or dormant metaphors of which the most part of language IS composed, and concentrating upon the living one” We take for granted the past exploration of reality of which dead and dormant metaphors are die record and try to focus our minds on tliai present, hazardous! incomplete, and thrilling exploration of reality which
metapliors whicli still retain dieir
Such are the metaphors of what we call creative literature These remain alive because tliey are die
headlnd Ih" of reality by men who stood
head and shou ders above their fellows, who discerned
resemblances between the unknown and the known
which the generality could not accept nor common speech assimilate. Their metaphors are felt still to be the vehicle of some immediate revelation to those who attend to them. As Aristotle said, ‘But the greatest thin"^ of all by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is die one thing that cannot be learned from others; and it is also a sign of original genius, since a good meta- phor implies the intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.' The statement, made so long ago, seems final still.
But before we hazard a small attempt to advance from it towards Coleridge’s discussion of imagery', we need to inquire, for the sake of clarity, wheiiier there is any but a formal difference between metaphor and simile and image. ‘Far out, as though idly, listlessly, gulls were flying. Now they settled on the waves, now thev beat up into the rainy air, and shone against the pale sky like the lights within a pearl.' The last words would be called indifferently an image or a simile. Change them to ‘shining lights in the pale pearl ot sky , it becomes— not by any means to its advantage, lor a reason we may discover— a metaphor. But the act of creative perception remains the same. And seem. impossibL to regard metaphors and similes as dtfjeren in any essential property; metaphor is compreswd simile^ The word ‘image’, however, which has com to usurp a prominent place in these discussions, is
more re^Icitrant. It not only narrows
tlie word ‘simile’, but tends to force unduly into th
foreground the part played by
the bcauuful simile quoted above the visual image preponderant; in Baudelaire’s agonizing one:
- Ces affreuses nuits.
- Qui compriment le coeur comme un papier qu’on froisse [Réversibilité]
the visual image has no part at all. Again, it is obvious foolislmess 10 persuade oneself that any visual image underlies the magnificent metaphors —
- Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness:
- Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time.
Yet tliougli the suggestion of the word ‘image’ is dangerous, the word is necessary. For metaphor and simile belong to formal classification. The word image’, precisely because it is used to cover both metaphor and simile, can be used to point towards tlieir fundamental identity; and if we resolutely ex- clude from our minds the suggestion that the image is solely or even predominantly visual, and allow the word to share in the heightened and comprehensive sigmhcance with which its derivative ‘imagination’ has perforce been endowed— if we conceive the ‘image’ not as primary and independent, but as the most singular and potent instrument of die faculty of ima- gination— it is a more valuable word than those which It subsumes; metaphor and simile. To them
clings something worse than false suggestion, a logical taint, an aura of irrelevancy.
Tlie image may be visual, may be auditory, may refer back to any primary physical experience — as those hoary metaphors which describe the process of thought hselt as a grasping or apprehension — or it may be wholly psycliological, tlie reference of one emotional or intellectual experience to another, as
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken . . .
The essential is simply tliat there should be that in-
tuitive perception of similarity between dissimilars of
which Aristotle speaks. What we primarilv demand is that the similarity should be a true similarity, and that
it should have lain hitherto unperceived, or but rarely
perceived by us, so that it comes to us with an effect
of revelation: somethins; hidierto unknown is sud-
denly made known. To that extent the image is truly
creative; it marks an advance, for tlie writer who per-
ceives and the reader who receives it, in die conquest
of some reality.
We also in our inquiry may take a step forward. That we demand more of imagery than this may be seen in our instinctive refusal of the image of a modem prose-writer, who speaks of the ‘churches, like shapes of grey paper, breasting the stream of die Strand’. There are two images, and they war with each other. If die churches really breasted the stream of the Strand, they were not at diat moment like shapes of grey paper. Possibly boUi perceptions are valid in isola- tion; in association diey nullify one anotlier. Yet how often does Shakespeare seem to commit the same
offence.
It IS gre.nt
To do that thing that ends all other deeds; Which shackles accident, and bolts up change; Which sleeps, and never palates more the dug, The beggar’s nurse and Caesar’s.
Yet the offence is only apparent. The images do not
in fact disturb each other, whereas the modern writer s
images do. This is partly because m the modern
writer’s imagery the stress lies wliolly upon die visual,
if we do not see what we are required to sec, t e
sentence fails of its effect; and partly because of the
characteristic swiftness of Shakespeare slanguage. Wc
have not, and we are not intended to have, urne to unfold his metaphors; and, moreover, tjte boldest and most abrupt transition among them is in its effect me
smootJiest. For the rhythm leaves no doubt tl»at it is not ‘die dug’ but Death diat is ‘the beggar’s nurse and Caesar’s’. Death wliich in the previous line was ilie child sleeping against the heart, becomes the bosom diat receives mankind. We may say it is the mere verbal suggestion that links the metaphors. Yet, though it is true that verbal ‘self-suggestion’ is potent in high poetry (‘Forlorn! the very word is like a knell . . .’), it seems truer in this case to say that the one metaphor grows immediately out of the other. It is as tliough the vague ‘thing’, from which the images take their rise, swiftly groped alter shapes before our mind’s eye, and finally achieved a full realization — ‘the beggar’s nurse and Caesar’s’.
This is the work of die greatest of all masters of metaphor, and it would be preposterous to try others’ achievement by its standard. The self-creative pro- gress of Shakespeare’s imagery is a tiling apart. But by comparing small things with great we may sec that the internal harmony which the modern writer fails to secure is a necessary quality of true imagery. Shake- speare s methods of securing it are indeed startling; he takes what seem to be impossible risks, and wins with case. His success, when we examine it, is not really so surprising, for the extent to which images are discordant depends upon the extent to which we un- fold them, and that is wholly within the great poet’s control, for it in turn depends primarily upon the rhythm and tempo of his writing. And this, more than any other, is die reason why the successful use of metaphor is infinitely bolder in poetry dian in prose.
I he poet’s means of control— diat is to say, the possi- bilities of tempo and rhythm in poetry— are infinitely richer and more flexible dian in prose. He has our sensibilities, our powers of realization and comparison far more completely under his thumb than the prose- writer. So tliat we may hazard a generalization and say that the creative simile is by nature more appropriate to prose than the creative metaphor. Prose gives us time to bear upon the comparison, which if it be exact and revealing, will stand tlie strain of our attention, and is better frankly exposed to the inquiry it must receive. And, again, the function of imagery’ in poetry dilfers perceptibly from the function of imagery in prose, in poetry metaphor is chiefly a means to excite in us a vague and lieightened awareness of qualities we can best call spiritual. Exactness and precision are seldom sought, and, if tfiey are, are seldom valuable; and often, where an apparent exactness exists, as in the Homeric simile, it is an incidental exactness and does not reinforce the point of specific analogy. Set tw'o equally famous heroic portraits by great poets against each other.
His legs besrrid tire ocean; his rear’d arm Crested the world: his voice was propertied As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail .and shake the orb.
He was as rattling tliundcr. For his bounty,
There was no winter in 't: an autumn ’twas That grew the more by reaping; his delights Were dolphin-like; they show’d his back above The element they liv’d in: in his livery Walk’d crowns and crownets; realms and islands were As plates dropp’d from his pocket . . .
He above the rest
In shape and gesture proudly eminent Stood like a Tower; his form had not yet lost All her original brightness, nor appear'd Less than archangel ruin’d, and th’ excess Of glory obscur’d, as hen the sun new risen Looks tlirough the horizontal misty air
Shorn of his beams; or from behind the moon In dim eclipse disastrous twiliglit siteds On half the nations; and with fear of change Perplexes monarehs.
The Miltonic tempo, as ever, is far slower tlian Shake- speare’s; therefore we bear more heavily upon his comparisons, and in sufficient measure they stand the strain; but die whole effect is not precise, but rather vague, vast, and foreboding. So also, in its totally different kind, the picture of Antonv that is impressed upon our minds is of some thing (rather than some one) immense, generous, genial, a careless and over- flowing force of nature — a dynamic phenomenon as peculiar to Shakespeare’s view of the universe as tlie static figure of Satan to Milton’s. Exactness of this kind there is in both; but it comes not from the exact- ness of the particular comparisons, it is a total effect of many comparisons, as it were a painting of one great and indefinable quality by many strokes of minor yet allied analogies. To evoke such elemental spirits is seldom the purpose of prose, nor of the imagery proper to it. It also seizes, in so far as it is creative, indefinable qualities, but they arc more specific and more local.
Soon after daybreak we were steaming down the arrowy Rhone, at the rate of twenty miles an hour, in a very dirty vessel lull of merchandise, and with only three or four other passengers for our companions: among whom the most remarkable was a silly old, meek-faced, garlic-eating, immeasurably polite Chevalier, with a dirty scrap of red ribbon at his buttonhole, as if he had tied it there to remind him of something.
It is perfect, it gives us the man — an individual and comic inhabitant of eartli. Perhaps as an example it suggests that tlie prose use of simile must be more prosaic tiian we mean to imply. We have quoted solely to point an essential difference between the imager)' of prose and poetry. Tiie imagery of poetry is in the main complex and suggestive; the imagery of prose single and explicit.
But the three examples serve also to illustrate what is the highest function of imageiy — namely, to define indefinable spiritual qualities. All metaphor and simile can be described as the analogy by which the human mind explores the universe of quality and charts ilie non-measurablc w'orld. Of tlicse indefinite qualities some are capable of direct sensuous appreliension, while otiicrs can be grasped only by a faculty wliich, though obviously akin to sensuous apprehension, yet difi'crs from it. Sensuous perception is of the qualities of the visible, audible, tangible world; of the spiritual qualities of die more recondite world of human personality and its creations there is intuition. Both faculties are necessary to the great poet, but there have been many who, though richly gifted \t iih sensuous perception, have been deficient or altogether lacking in spiritual intuition. To the great poet his constant accumulation of vivid sense-perceptions supplies the most potent means by which he articulates his spiritual intuitions, for recognitions of spiritual quality can be most forcefully and swiftly conveyed through ana- logous recognitions of sensuous quality. One has only to imagine how much, and how much in vain, anodier writer might toil to render the quality of Antony that is given once for all in the words, gram- madcally confused diough dicy arc;
. . . his delights
Were dolphin-like; they show'd his back above
Tlie element they lived in . . .
or to consider the pregnant subtlety of these two kindred images:
This common body.
Like to a vagabond flag upon die stream,
Goes to and back, lackeying the varying tide.
To rot itself with motion. . . .
Her tongue will not obey her heart, nor can Her heart inform her tongue — the swan’s down-featlicr That stands upon the swell at full of tide And neither way inclines . . .
to realize the enormous resources for describing die subtlest nuances of emotion and character which a vivid percipience of the sensuous world can give.
But the greatest mastery of imagery docs not lie in the use, however beautiful and revealing, of isolated images, but in the harmonious total impression pro- duced by a succession of subtly related images. In such cases the images appear to grow out of one another and to be fulfilling an independent life of their own. Yet diis apparent autonomy is as strictly subordinated to a final impression as tlie steps of a logical argument are to their conclusion. Such triumplis of imagery are to be conceived as a swift and continuous act of ex- ploration of tlie world of imagination — though an obvious metaphor is in that phrase. A magnificent example of this peculiar movement of mind on a scale so large iliat it can be carefully examined is Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale. The strange combination of imagina- tive autonomy and profound total harmony in that poem is characteristic of tlie movement of creative imagery in its highest forms. We can perhaps get a clear glimpse of the nature of diis contradictory process of creative imagery — the maximum of independence combined with the most complete and pervasive sub- ordination — in one of the rare moments when we can honestly claim to look over Shakespeare’s shoulder. The famous picture of Cleopatra on Cydnus comes substantially from North’s Plutarch, of which the fol- lowing sentence is the original of Shakespeare’s first seven lines:
Site disdained to set forward otherwise, but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus, tlie poope whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, and the owers of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of flutes, liowboys, cythern, violls, and such other instruments as they played upon the barge. . . .
It is often said that Shakespeare followed North as closely as he could, with the minimum of original effort. It is not true. North’s sentence would fall quite easily into good blank verse, but it would be nothing like —
The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne.
Burn don the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster.
As amorous of their strokes. . , .
The phrases in italics are Shakespeare’s addidons:
afierw'ards he keeps more closely to North, until he
comes to the climax. North has it;
Others also rann out of the city to see her coming in.
So that in the end, there rann such multitudes of people
one after another, that Antonias was left post alone in tiic
market-place, in liis Imperiall scate to give audience.
Which is transformed into:
The city cast
Her people out upon her, and Antony,
Enthron’d in the market-place, did sit alone.
IVhistling to the air; which, but for vacancy.
Had gone to ga^e on Cleopatra too
And made a gap in nature.
The additions are worth attention. North’s somewhat amorphous prose is given a beginning and an end. The additions are all, in spite of formal differences, essentially similes and metaphors; and, after the first, which gathers the vision into one wliole which it puts imperisljably before the mind’s eye, the second and third develop the theme which is clinched in climax by the fourth. In them the successive elements — the winds, the water, the air — are represented all as suc- cumbing to the enchantment of love which breathes from the great Queen and her burning barge; and by this varied return on a single motive North’s incon- sequential panorama is given an organic unity. It is quite impossible to conceive Shakespeare as dovetail- ing old and new together. Before his mind’s eye as he read North liad risen a picture half visible, half spiritual, in short, truly imaginative — the manifesta- tion of Egypt, before whom the elements made t>bcisance. All of North that was congruous with this enchanted vision he incorporated with a flowing pen into his new creation. And the added imagery, about which he probably took no second thought, grew naturally into harmony witli itself and with tlie whole.
To tliis strange but strangely natural process Coleridge was referring in his often-quoted and some- times violendy interpreted words:
Images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only in so far as they arc modi- fied by a predominant passion, or by associated thoughts and images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet’s own spirit.
Instances, and better instances than Coleridge himself gives, of all the qualities which he demands of truly creative imagery are obviously to be found in the picture of Cleopatra. ‘Multitude is reduced to unity’ by the first of the added images; and in the other three a human and intellectual life is transferred to die images (Coleridge should perhaps have said, to the objects of the images) from die poet’s own spirit. This last desideratum had been put forward long before by Aristotle in his discussion of ‘vividness’ in the Rhetoric. Vividness, he there says, depends upon metaphor and on ‘setting things before die eyes’; but ‘setting things before the eyes’ turns out itself to be a metaphor, and not, as one might imagine, a demand for die visual image. ‘This is my definition’, says Aristotle.
Those words set a thing before the eyes which describe it in an active state. - . . Or we may use the device often employed by Homer of giving life to lifeless things by means of metaphor. In ail such cases he wins applause by describing an active state, as in the line
‘Back to die plain rolled the shameless stone.’
Whether die process is described thus dryly as by Aristode, or more transcendcntally by Coleridge, as the working of the poetic spirit ‘which shoots its being through earth, sea, and air’, the fact is indubitable. It seems to be an imperious need of the creative spirit of the poet to impart life to the apparently lifeless. This may appear a ‘device’ in the cold light of analysis; but nothing is more certain dian diat wJien it is used as a device it is intolerable. No conscious contrivance pro- duced ‘Tiiou still unravish’d bride of quietness’, or
‘Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips. Bidding adieu . Such things as these — and how many of the most magnificently natural achievements of poetry belong to this kind — are, beyond all doubt, the effect of some ‘silent working of the spirit’. By die intensity of the poet’s contemplation the lifeless thing lives indeed.
Probably the world of true imagination of which these miracles are die common substance is for ever inviolable by intellectual analysis. Even to apprehend its subject-matter die intellect must suffer a sea-change, so that it is no longer itself and cannot perform its proper function. Restore its power to the intellect, again, and tliat which it seeks to understand has ceased to exist as what it really is. This world of imagination is a universe wherein quality leaps to coliere witli quality across the abysms of classification tliat divide and category die universe of intellectual apprehension. Its true citizens are few and far bctv.een; diey are the masters of metaphor, and the authentic messages the} bring from that near yet distant country perplex our brains and comfort our souls with the half-assurance that the things diat are may be odierwise dian as we know them.
Towards diis exalted region, as to die sole rcalit}’, Coleridge was ever groping; and what he meant by the ‘predominant passion’ wliich modifies die images of original genius is the power by wliich genius com- prehends its cliosen region of diis world of qualitadvc interpenetration. The passion is a passionate contem- plation of the unity which pervades the chosen region : a creative passion to correspond with an organic unity. Whether the unity proceeds from the passion, or die passion fiom the unity, it would be profitless to in- quire. Tliey are knit together, as knower and known, in one act of creative comprehension. But if we are shy of the notion of Coleridge which seems to give the poetic spirit an actually plastic power over the material world, we have only to reflect that the predominant passion of the poet’s mind is but the counterpart of a predominant quality of the region of die universe wliich he contemplates. His passion roused by the quality is reflected back upon the quality, and gives it redoubled power; so that it begins to dominate all other qualities and properdes, to suffuse diem with itself till it becomes as it were the living and governing soul of that which the poet contemplates. By means of his passion the actual realizes its own idea.
However much we struggle, w’e cannot avoid tran- scendentalism, for we are seeking to approximate to a universe of quality with analogy for its most essential language through a universe of quantity with a lan- guage of identities. Sooner or later, and sooner radier thaiTlater, a transcendentalism (which is only the name for a prodigious metaphor) is inevitable. But the process may be brought a little closer to the light of common day if we take once more that region of the qualitative universe which Shakespeare embodied in Cleopatra. She w'as, we may say, the incarnation of love: die mighty, elemental power which, in Shake- speare’s experience, was love, was made corporeal in iier. She is possessed by it; from her it radiates and compels obeisance from the elements. But she is not merely a contemplated but a self-uttering thing; and this power that informs her body informs her soul also. All her dioughts are shaped by it. Without her love she will die, she must die; but when she imagines death, she imagines it as a consummation of love, as
the thing
Which sleeps, and never palates more the dug,
The beggar’s nurse and Caesar s. . . .
She dies, and her dying she imagines as a reliving of her triumph on Cydnus. ‘I am again for Cydnus, to meet Mark Antony!’ And it is a more wonderful triumph. ‘Yare, yare, good Iras.’ The flower-soft liands tliat yarely framed the office frame one last office more; and at the aspic’s touch the Queen is wholly dedicate to the love she is and serves. The winds, the v/ater, the air obeyed on Cydnus; now the most fickle element of all obeys — her own secret self, from which well up the images of love in death, and death in love:
The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch Tliat hurts and is desired. . . .
Peace, peace!
Dost thou not sec my baby at my breast That sucks the nurse asleep.^
In the intensity of Shakespeare’s imagination the great property takes utter and complete possession of that it dwells in. By the alchemy of Cleopatra’s images death is transmuted into a sleep of love. But her dioughts are Shakespeare’s thoughts, her predominant passion his. Therefore it is not strange that Caesar, who in the waking world knows nothing of her dying words
should echo tliem, and prolong her triumph beyond her death.
She looks like sleep.
As she would catch anotlier Antony In her strong toil of grace.
But Caesar did not know wliat Shakespeare knew that It was tlie scif-same Antony whom she had taken.
