Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric—a guidebook of rhetorical devices—was an unexpected success in 2010. David R. Godine, the noted Boston publisher, had planned a print run of 4,000 copies, but sales shot to over 20,000 following glowing reviews in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. Ward Farnsworth, dean of the University of Texas School of Law, turned out to be a clear and engaging guide with a good eye for eloquence. One of the chief pleasures of the book is the quotations from Shakespeare and various 18th- and 19th-century writers, whose artistry is even more striking when compared with our own, rather ineloquent, age.
Now he’s back with the follow-up, Farnsworth’s Classical English Metaphor. In Rhetoric, which is now available in paperback, Farnsworth discusses the function of a particular classical device in each chapter. He notes how polysyndeton, for example, uses repeated conjunctions to help regulate “the pace of an utterance” as well as speed it up, suggesting “excitability and urgency.” Or in a chapter on chiasmus—the inversion of key words or phrases in a subsequent sentence (“Men need not trouble to alter conditions, conditions will so soon alter men,” to take an example from G. K. Chesterton)—he explains how it uses circularity to make a state of affairs seem undeniably true and improve memorability.
Classical English Metaphor is organized differently. Since the book examines just the one device (he includes similes as a species of metaphor), Farnsworth divides the chapters by categories. In the first chapter, for example, he looks at the use of animals to describe humans. In the second, he turns to the use of nature to describe abstract ideas. In the third, he explains and provides examples of how nature is used to describe feelings and inner states. And so on. There is a separate chapter for personification, as well as brief examinations of the syntax of both similes and metaphors.
While Metaphor may be less immediately practical than Rhetoric—most people are relatively familiar with how to use metaphors—it is equally erudite and perhaps even more entertaining.
Metaphors, Farnsworth writes, do a number of things:
Finally, metaphors can serve as “repositories of wisdom.”
In discussing categories of metaphor, some interesting patterns emerge. Comparisons of humans to animals, for example, almost always exaggerate a human feature. This is because, Farnsworth writes, animals often share the same physical structure of humans “but in different proportions.” Sometimes the comparison can elevate a human quality—men are as strong and courageous as a “red-eyed bison” and women as resolute as a crab or boa constrictor—but most are unflattering. In Washington Irving’s Bracebridge Hall (1822), for example, the apothecary is described as a “rather fat man, with a pair of prominent eyes, that diverge like those of a lobster.” An old lady stares “with something of the apoplectic stare of a parrot” in the final story in Chesterton’s The Club of Queer Trades (1905). “Where’s the girl,” Daniel Dravot asks in Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King (1888), “with a voice as loud as the braying of a jackass?”
Some negative traits, such as a lack of originality, are compared to a wide variety of animals. “Critics?” the poet Lombardo is said to have complained in Herman Melville’s Mardi (1849), “Asses! rather mules!—so emasculated, from vanity, they can not father a true thought.” In a footnote to John Locke’s Conduct of the Understanding (1854), James Augustus St. John remarked that “men think in packs as jackals hunt.” Other animals are used with surprising consistency to represent the same thing, such as the war elephant to depict human unpredictability and the capacity to harm one’s own country or friends in the heat of a metaphorical or literal battle.
When it comes to describing human thought, water, it turns out, is a favorite because the mind is something that should move or change—at least, sometimes. “The man who never alters his opinion,” William Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), “is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.” Henry David Thoreau wrote, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), “Most men have no inclination, no rapids, no cascades, but marshes, and alligators, and miasma instead.” Thoreau also notes that “the current of our thoughts made as sudden bends as the river, which was continually opening new prospects to the east or south, but we are aware that rivers flow most rapidly and shallowest at these points.” In the Spectator, Joseph Addison remarks that the mind can be subjected to thoughts that rise “of themselves from time to time, though we give them no encouragement; as the tossings and fluctuations of the sea.”
According to Thomas Carlyle, some minds are like ducks: They have difficulty flying and, instead, are “ever splashing webfooted in the terrene mud.” The mind’s “fancies” are like a “hoar frost,” according to Melville: As soon as the sun comes out, they vanish. The mind of a bigot, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), is like “the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts.”
As these snippets, I hope, show, one of the great pleasures of Classical English Metaphor is the wide selection of pithy examples. Some sections provide a mini-history of the use of a particular vehicle. This is true of the use of water, as we’ve seen, as well as trees and classical mythology, to which Farnsworth devotes an entire chapter. Mythological metaphors are less common today because writers cannot confidently assume that their audience is sufficiently familiar with them to understand the comparison. This is a shame, since comparisons to Greek and Roman mythology—or biblical characters, for that matter—are more nuanced than comparisons to animal or plant life, or popular culture. Classical comparisons tend to represent the essence of a person “in simpler terms and in colors more vivid,” Farnsworth writes. While “there is such a thing as looking like a gentleman,” Charles Kingsley writes in Alton Locke (1850), “There are men whose class no dirt or rags could hide, any more than they could Ulysses.”
“I observed,” Boswell writes in his Life of Johnson (1791), “that Garrick, who was about to quit the stage, would soon have an easier life. Johnson. ‘I doubt that, Sir.’ Boswell. ‘Why, Sir, he will be Atlas with the burthen off his back.’ Johnson. ‘But I know not, Sir, if he will be so steady without his load.’ ”
Similes and metaphors are presented in different ways in a sentence. Farnsworth’s explanation of these is clear and concise, if also constituted of mostly common knowledge. Still, there are some good reminders. Similes usually come at the end of a sentence because it increases their rhetorical force. The advantage of using “as” rather than “like” is that the former allows for a wider variety of sentence structure and can even be followed by complete sentences, which, Farnsworth notes, “allows the source of the comparison to be explained in more detail.”
It is regularly stated that similes make explicit comparisons while metaphors make implicit ones. This isn’t always the case. Metaphors can be just as explicit as similes. But metaphors are often more evocative when the “sameness” is assumed rather than stated. Metaphors also often create a stronger effect because of the absence of a connecting conjunction. “If one says,” Farnsworth writes, “that life is like a tale told by an idiot, the like provides a reassuring bit of insulation between the source and subject. Leaving out the word blurs the line between them and suggests deeper affinities.”
In his essay on Robert Browning, John Jay Chapman remarks that Browning “writes like a lion devouring an antelope. He rends his subject, breaks its bones, and tears out the heart of it.” Not Farnsworth. He is like a surgeon who, after removing a cataract, allows us to see the colors of language in their spring splendor.
Micah Mattix is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and assistant professor of literature at Houston Baptist University.
