Both have their advantages and their drawbacks.  We all admire the man who has observed, and can state, accurately.  It is upon this belief of ours in the literal that Defoe shrewdly traffics. (See Appendix 5.) He does not stir us as some writers do, but he gains our implicit confidence.  Dame Quickly, on the contrary, makes egregious use of the literal. (See paragraph above EXERCISE — Wordiness III above.) Her facts are accurate, yes; but how strictly, how unsparingly accurate!  And how many of them are beside the point!  She quite convinces us that the devotee of the literal may be dull.

An advantage of the figurative also is that it may make meanings lucid.  Thus when Burke near the close of his discussion (Appendix 2) wishes to make it clear that by a law of nature the authority of extensive empires is slighter in its more remote territories, he has recourse to a figure of speech:  “In large bodies, the circulation of power must be less vigorous at the extremities.  Nature has said it.”  More often, however, the function of the figurative is to drive home a thought or a mood of which a mere statement would leave us unmoved—­to make us feel it.  Thus Burke said of the Americans “Their love of liberty, as with you, fixed and attached on this specific point of taxing.”  He added:  “Here they felt its pulse, and as they found that beat they thought themselves sick or sound.”  Had you been one of his Parliamentary hearers, would not that second sentence have made more real and more important the colonial attitude to taxation?  The poets of course make frequent and noble use of the figurative.  This is how Coleridge tells us that the descent of a tropical night is sudden: 

  “The sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out;
  At one stride comes the dark.”

The words rush out and at one stride comes convert the stars and the darkness into vast beings or at least vast personal forces; the comparisons are so natural as to seem inevitable; we are transported to the very scene and feel the overwhelming abruptness of the nightfall.  But if a figure of speech seems artificial, if it is strained or far-fetched or merely decorative, it subtracts from the effectiveness of the passage.  Thus when Tennyson says: 

  “When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free
  In the silken sail of infancy.”

we must stop and ponder before we perceive that what he means is “When I was a happy child.”  The figure is like an exotic plant rather than a natural outgrowth of the soil; it appears to us something thought up and stuck on; it is a parasite rather than a helper.

Of course, as with abstraction and concreteness, you should develop facility in gliding from literalness to figurativeness and back again.  But you are always to remember that your gymnastics are not to militate against verbal concord.  You must never set words scowling and growling at each other through injudicious combinations like this:  “She was five feet, four and three-quarter inches high, had a small, round scar between her nose and her left cheek-bone, and moved with the lissom and radiant grace of a queen.”