The rule never to make a comparison without realizing fully what it is should be regarded as being as binding as a moral precept. If this be obeyed, there is no danger of the production of that hybrid microbe with which the pages of sensational fiction swarm, which is known as the mixed metaphor. I took up in the smoking-room of a steamer not long ago a novel called “Half a Million of Money,” by Miss Amelia B. Edwards. I opened to a page on which was this sentence:—
Trefalden cast a hasty glance about the room, as if looking for some weapon wherewith to slake the hatred that glittered in his eye.—Chap. xciv.
I give carefully the origin of this, since it seems like an absurd mock simile manufactured for the occasion. If the author had felt the force of the word “slake,” and how it involves the idea of thirst, she could not have coupled it with “weapon” or with “glittered in his eye.” A thirst which is slaked with a sword and glitters in the eye needs only to be realized to be cast aside.
Goethe, in speaking of Klopstock, once said:—
An ode occurs to me where he makes the German muse run a race with the British; and indeed, when one thinks what a picture it is, where the girls run one against the other, throwing about their legs, and kicking up the dust, one must assume that the good Klopstock did not really have before his eyes such pictures as he wrote, else he could not possibly have made such mistakes.—Conversations of Goethe, November 9, 1824.
Of these lines of Montgomery,—
The soul aspiring pants its source to mount,
As streams meander level to their fount,—
Macaulay observes:—
We take this to be, on the whole, the worst similitude in the world. In the first place, no stream meanders or can possibly meander level with the fount. In the next place, if streams did meander level with their founts, no two notions can be less like each other than that of meandering level and mounting upward.—Cited in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.