Читать книгу Facts and fancies for the curious from the harvest-fields of literature - Charles C. Bombaugh - Страница 77

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A Chicago critic addicted to figurative fancies was very much affected by the play of Arrah na Pogue. “There are passages in it,” he writes, “which thunder at the heart like the booming of the Atlantic tide, and drown it in floods of bitter tears.” This idea of being drowned in floods of tears, by the way, has been always very popular with struggling muses who long to launch into bolder strains. Lee describes a young lady with an exuberance of tears:

“I found her on the floor

In all the storm of grief, yet beautiful;

Pouring forth tears at such a lavish rate

That, were the world on fire, they might have drowned

The wrath of heaven, and quenched the mighty ruin.”

Cowley makes a sighing lover sigh in an excessively gusty manner:

“By every wind that comes this way,

Send me at least a sigh or two,

Such and so many I’ll repay

As shall themselves make winds to get to you.”

But Shakespeare, who always surpasses, unites the tears and sighs, and makes a perfect rain tempest:

“Aumerle, thou weepest, my tender-hearted cousin!

We’ll make foul-weather with despised tears;

Our sighs and they shall lodge the summer corn,

And make a dearth in this revolting land.”

The play mentioned by a Chicago critic could hardly have been as affecting as the oratory of a preacher who is described by an admiring editor. “I have,” he says, “repeatedly heard the most famous men in America, but there are times when the flame of his pathos licks the everlasting hills with a roar that moves your soul to depths fathomed by few other men.” Evidently this preacher should go to Congress; he is imbued with the spirit of oratory, and would be an antidote, on the principle of “similia similibus curantur,” for a politician who, in announcing himself a candidate for Congress, remarked in his card: “I am an orator, and yearn to roar in the capitol, and clap my wings like Shakespeare’s rooster, or the eagle on his celestial cliff, gazing at the prey my arrows did slay.”

An excellent specimen of hyperbole is mentioned by a Houston (Maine) paper, which says, on the question of a new town-hall, that one gentleman urged the measure in order, as he expressed it, “that the young men of our town may have a suitable place to assemble, and be so imbued with the spirit of liberty and patriotism that every hair of their head will be a liberty-pole with the star-spangled banner floating from it.”

A Leavenworth paper thus confusedly mixed things animate and inanimate: “The fall of corruption has been dispelled, and the wheels of the State government will no longer be trammelled by sharks that have beset the public prosperity like locusts.” And a Nebraska paper, in a fervent article upon the report of a legislative committee, said, “The apple of discord is now fairly in our midst, and if not nipped in the bud it will burst forth in a conflagration which will deluge society in an earthquake of bloody apprehension.”

In the words of an English poet is this rather too exaggerated hyperbole:

“Those overwhelming armies whose command

Said to one empire, ‘Fall,’ another, ‘Stand,’

Whose rear lay wrapped in night while breaking dawn

Roused the broad front and called the battle on.”

But these metaphorical rhapsodies were eclipsed soon after our Civil War by The Crescent Monthly in an article on Lee’s surrender. The writer thus laughs to scorn all competitors:

“The supreme hour has now come when, from across Fame’s burning ecliptic, where it had traced in flaming sheen its luminous path of glory, the proud Aldebaran of Southern hope, in all the splendors of its express, Hyades brightness, should sink to rest behind lurid war-clouds, in the fateful western heaven, there to bring out on death’s dark canopy the immortal lights of immortal deeds, and spirits great and glorious shining forever down upon a cause in darkness, like the glittering hosts upon a world in night.”

This gushing sentence comes from a novel called “Heart or Head:”

“And she, leaning on his strong mind, and giving up her whole soul to him, was so happy in this spoiling of herself, so glad to be thus robbed, offering him the rich milk of love in a full udder of trust, and lowing for him to come and take it!”

A grotesque simile is sometimes very expressive. We may mention those of Daniel Webster, who likened the word “would,” in Rufus Choate’s handwriting, to a small gridiron struck by lightning; of a sailor, who likened a gentleman whose face was covered with whiskers up to his very eyes, to a rat peeping out of a bunch of oakum; of a Western reporter who, in a weather item on a cold day, said that the sun’s rays in the effort to thaw the ice were as futile as the dull reflex of a painted yellow dog; and of a conductor who, in a discussion as to speed, said that the last time he ran his engine from Syracuse the telegraph poles on the side looked like a fine-tooth comb.

Similes of a like character are often heard among the common people, and are supposed to be the peculiar property of Western orators. Instances: As sharp as the little end of nothing; big as all out-doors; it strikes me like a thousand of bricks; slick as grease, or as greased lightning; melancholy as a Quaker meeting by moonlight; flat as a flounder; quick as a wink; not enough to make gruel for a sick grasshopper; not clothes enough to wad a gun; as limp and limber as an india-rubber stove-pipe; uneasy as a cat in a strange garret; not strong enough to haul a broiled codfish off a gridiron; after you like a rat-terrier after a chipmunk squirrel; useless as whistling psalms to a dead horse; no more than a grasshopper wants knee-buckles; no more than a frog wants an apron; don’t make the difference of the shake of a frog’s tail; soul bobbing up and down in the bosom like a crazy porpoise in a pond of red-hot grease; enthusiasm boils over like a bottle of ginger-pop; as impossible to penetrate his head as to bore through Mont Blanc with a boiled carrot; as impossible as to ladle the ocean dry with a clam-shell, or suck the Gulf of Mexico through a goose-quill; or to stuff butter in a wild-cat with a hot awl; or for a shad to swim up a shad-pole with a fresh mackerel under each arm; or for a cat to run up a stove-pipe with a teasel tied to his tail; or for a man to lift himself over a fence by the strap of his boots. A simile resembling these was used by Lady Montague when, getting impatient in a discussion with Fox, she told him she did not care three skips of a louse for him, to which he replied in a few minutes with the following:

“Lady Montague told me, and in her own house,

‘I do not care for you three skips of a louse.’

I forgive her, for women, however well-bred,

Will still talk of that which runs most in their head.”

There is another class of similes scarcely as pertinent, as, for instance: straight as a ram’s horn; it will melt in your mouth like a red-hot brickbat; talk to him like a Dutch uncle; smiling as a basket of chips; odd as Dick’s hatband; happy as a clam at high water; quicker than you can say Jack Robinson; like all possessed; like fury; like blazes; like all natur’; like all sixty; as quick as anything; mad as hops; mad as Halifax; sleep like a top; run like thunder; deader than a door-nail. Thunder is a very accommodating word. A person may be told to go to thunder, or may be thundering proud, or thundering sensible, or thundering good-looking, or thundering smart, or thundering mean, or thundering anything; and anything may be likened to thunder. The epitaph quoted from a tombstone in Vermont over a man’s two wives was quite proper, but was rendered ludicrous by this common use of the word:

“This double call is loud to all,

Let none surprise or wonder;

But to the youth it speaks a truth

In accents loud as thunder.”

“Dead as a door-nail” would not seem to be very expressive, and yet it has long been used. In “Henry IV.” we read the following dialogue:

“Falstaff.—What! is the old king dead?

Pistol.—As nail in door.”

Dickens, in his “Christmas Carol,” wonders why Scrooge should be dead as a door-nail rather than any other kind of nail. Probably the explanation is in the fact that proverbs are often pointed by alliteration, and that door-nail gratifies this conceit while any other nail would not.