Society for Pure English, Tract 11 | Page 4

of Commons.' What a mixture of metaphor! One pictures this gospel-apple battling with the stream released by the opened floodgates._ In point of fact, the floodgates and the apple are successive metaphors, unmixed; the mixing of them is done by the critic himself, not by the criticized; and as to _gospel-apple,_ by which it is hinted that the mixture is triple, the original writer had merely mentioned in the gospel phrase the thing compared by the side of what it is compared to, as when one explains the Athens of the North by adding _Edinburgh._
Writers who are on the defensive apologize for change and mixture of metaphors as though one was as bad as the other; the two sins are in fact entirely different; a man may change his metaphors as often as he likes; it is for him to judge whether the result will or will not be unpleasantly florid; but he should not ask our leave to do it; if the result is bad, his apology will not mend matters, and if it is not bad no apology was called for. On the other hand, to mix metaphors, if the mixture is real, is an offence that should have been not apologized for, but avoided. Whichever the phrase, the motive is the same--mortal fear of being accused of mixed metaphor.
_...showed that Free Trade could provide the jam without recourse being had to Protective food-taxes: next came a period in which (to mix our metaphors) the jam was a nice slice of tariff pie for everybody, but then came the Edinburgh Compromise, by which the jam for the towns was that there were to be..._ When jam is used in three successive sentences in its hackneyed sense of consolation, it need hardly be considered in the middle one of them a live metaphor at all; however, the as-good-as-dead metaphor of jam is capable of being stimulated into life if any one is so foolish as to bring into contact with it another half-dead metaphor of its own (i.e. of the foodstuff) kind, and it was, after all, mixing metaphors to say the jam was a slice of pie; but then the way of escape was to withdraw either the jam or the pie, instead of forcing them together down our throats with a ramrod of apology.
_Time sifts the richest granary, and posterity is a dainty feeder. But Lyall's words, at any rate--to mix the metaphor--will escape the blue pencil even of such drastic editors as they_. Since all three metaphors are live ones, and they are the sifter and the feeder, the working of these into grammatical connexion with the blue pencil does undoubtedly mix metaphors. But then our author gives us to understand that he knows he is doing it, and surely that is enough. Even so some liars reckon that a lie is no disgrace provided that they wink at a bystander as they tell it, even so those who are addicted to the phrase 'to use a vulgarism' expect to achieve the feat of being at once vulgar and superior to vulgarity.
_Certainly we cannot detect the suggested lack of warmth in the speech as it is printed, for in his speech, as in the Prime Minister's, it seems to us that (if we may change the metaphor) exactly the right note was struck_.
_We may, on the one hand, receive into our gill its precise content of the complex mixture that fills the puncheon of the whole world's literature, on the other--to change the metaphor--our few small strings may thrill in sympathetic harmony to some lyrical zephyrs and remain practically unresponsive to the deep-sea gale of Aeschylus or Dante_.
Why, yes, gentlemen, you may change your metaphors, if it seems good to you, but you may also be pretty sure that, if you feel the necessity of proclaiming the change, you had better have abstained from it.
_Two of the trump cards played against the Bill are (1) that 'it makes every woman who pays a tax-collector in her own house', and (2) that 'it will destroy happy domestic relations in hundreds of thousands of homes'; if we may at once change our metaphor, these are the notes which are most consistently struck in the stream of letters, now printed day by day for our edification in the_ Mail. This writer need not have asked our leave to change from cards to music; he is within his rights, anyhow, and the odds are, indeed, that if he had not reminded us of the cards we should have forgotten them in the intervening lines, but how did a person so sensitive to change of metaphor fail to reflect that it is ill playing the piano in the water? 'A stream of letters', it is true, is only a picturesque way