The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

their metaphors conventional (early
Hugo, George).
The position of the ‘like’ phrase is
significant. When it succeeds the justificatory
adjective or verb (‘thy beauty...stings
like an adder’ – Swinburne), we are given
a metaphor defused; the figurative dimension
of ‘stings’ is superseded by its literal
dimension. When it precedes (‘Mon
coeur, comme un oiseau, voltigeait ...’ –
Baudelaire), the relationship between
phenomena is more complete; here the
‘like’ phrase not so much explains away
the verb as supposes other verbs.
In calling simile provisional, we mean
that the comparability is provisional, its
appositeness dependent on a particular
confluence of circumstances, and this has
made simile a natural vehicle for a relativistic
view of the world (Proust); the
world of simile is a world of passing
acquaintances, incessant sensory flirtation
with objects never finally known. But
within these limitations the simile, by
using or implying the present tense, can
lift an action or perception out of the
fleeting and exceptional and install it in
the constant and familiar. (As A does B,
so X did Y.) This is a main function of the
epic simile, where often a noble or complex
sentiment is made accessible to the
reader through being linked with a familiar
external state of affairs. The same
expository function is performed by those
fantastic Renaissance conceits which take
the form of similes. These two notorious
stanzas from Donne’s ‘Valediction:
forbidding mourning’, for instance, externalize,
in an exploratory fashion, a spiritual
and emotional state which might be
impenetrable without the similes:
Our two soules therefore, which are one
Though I must goe, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion
Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate.
Sincerity 219
If they be two, they are two so
As stiffe twin compasses are two,
Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’other doe.
CS
Sincerity Prior to the eighteenth
century, a term of little significance in
criticism: the absence or otherwise of dissimulation
on the part of a writer (though
not necessarily of a fictional character,
such as Iago in Othello) was neither questioned
nor thought worthy of comment.
But in the late 1760s, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau’s Confessions, an unprecedentedly
frank, if subtly edited, autobiography,
projected a persona of the author
which the reader was beguiled or bludgeoned
into taking at face value. Soon
after this, Goethe, in his early novel The
Sorrows of Young Werther (1774),
attacked calm rationalism and exalted
instead sensibility and passionate
feelings, all in the name of sincerity. Both
these works were to prove of seminal
importance in the Romantic movement,
which arose in the late eighteenth century
and lasted well into the nineteenth.
During this period writers popularized
the image of poets suffering intense
emotions of grief and joy which they then
proceeded to enshrine directly and
‘sincerely’ in their works. But with
E. T. A. Hoffmann’s allegorical fairystory
The Golden Pot (1813), Byron’s
epic satire Don Juan (1819–24) and
Baudelaire’s figure of the poet as dandy
(analysed in his essay The Painter of
Modern Life, 1863) a new note is struck:
the idea of pose, show, even outright
duplicity begins to creep in. In the 1880s
Nietzsche perceptively noted that ‘every
profound spirit needs a mask’. This
tendency culminated in the life and art
of such fin-de-siècle ‘decadents’ as
J. K. Huysmans, the creator in Against