Epigrams

Any one who reads Mr. R. N. Leonard’s charming little anthology of English epigrams in the Oxford Garlands Series will regret that the practice of writing poetical epigrams has died out. Until the Victorian age almost all professional writers, as well as many amateurs, tried their hands at epigram. If you had anything especially offensive to say about any one—and especially about politicians, doctors, and ladies unduly addicted to cosmetics—it was the natural thing to put it into a couplet or a quatrain. Ministers and Privy Councillors used to compose epigrams about each other; but who can imagine Sir Henry Dalziel writing witty quatrains about Sir Alfred Mond, or vice versa? Why the habit has died out I don’t profess to say. There may be some significance in the fact that the great age of epigrams was the eighteenth century—the prose age par excellence. There is probably more in the decay of knowledge of Greek and Latin. When almost every educated man was familiar with the Greek Anthology and the works of Martial—whence all kinds of epigrams, elegiac, amatory, and satirical, descend—it was perhaps natural that the temptation to continue the good work should be generally felt. It may even be that a form so small is incapable of infinite variety and grows exhausted. Johnson wrote a ludicrous burlesque epigram—

—and there is undoubtedly sound criticism in it. After a certain time the making of epigrams may proceed almost on a formula. At all events, the decline of the epigram is obvious. The well-meant effusions which the late Sir Wilfrid Lawson used to waft across the benches of the House of Commons were scarcely equal to the old level of our political quips; it is very rarely that a tolerable metrical epigram appears in the Press; and the poets have almost all abandoned the habit of attempting to get their thoughts into so small a compass. The custom of composing epigrams for private albums is virtually extinct. Every schoolgirl writes in every other schoolgirl’s album that there is nothing Original in her excepting Original Sin; and even that not very splendid mot was constructed by Thomas Campbell nearly a hundred years ago. The rest is silence.

The greater number of our epigrams are satirical, and Mr. Lennard’s selection is mainly composed of these verses with stings in their tails. One of the most taking of these is A. Evans’s on a Fat Man:

But that, perhaps, is not really stinging; if Mr. Tadlow was good-tempered, he must have liked it himself. Good couplets like these are few, but Coleridge’s on the Swan-Song is one:

The most brutal epigrams we have are Byron’s on Castlereagh’s suicide, after that statesman had cut his throat. These are not very good, but Mr. Lennard gives them; and, in fact, almost every famous epigram in the language. He classifies them under headings: “Political,” “Professional and Trading,” “Amatory,” and so on. Of the Literary epigrams one of the best is Bishop Stubbs’s on two of his nineteenth-century contemporaries:

Lord Erskine’s on Scott’s Waterloo Poem is good:

Theodore Hook’s epigram suggesting that it would be impossible to find a reader who would pay for the binding of Prometheus Unbound now falls as flat as Scott, owing to the utter falsification of the prophecy.

Mr. Lennard gives a fair number of epitaphs, including Evans’s well-known one on Vanbrugh and Gay’s even better-known one on himself. But I don’t think we have in English an epitaph so delightful as that written for his own tomb by the obscene French poet Piron:

Landor’s “I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,” however, could not be surpassed by any serious epitaph. From Landor Mr. Lennard has naturally had to draw freely for his more serious sections. Landor came nearer than any English writers to rivalling the feats of the best Greek epigrammatists. Many people would say that his Dirce is the most beautiful epigram in the language.

Mr. Lennard’s selection is, as I have said, a very good one. The only old one I miss is Richard Bentley’s on German scholarship:

The omission is the stranger in that Landor’s greatly inferior epigram on Germans is included. About the longest poem admitted is Clough’s revised version of the Ten Commandments: it is flat in places, but contains one famous couplet. Only when he comes to the moderns might Mr. Lennard have cast his net wider. Browning, who wrote some neat versicles, is unrepresented; and so is Mr. Watson, who, in his earlier days, wrote epigrams, some of which, if not masterpieces, were as good as some of Mr. Lennard’s old ones. And it would have been worth while to collect a few of the miscellaneous modern ones that float about. There are Limericks—and some Limericks will satisfy the narrowest definition of an epigram—which would be worth preserving; and then there are odd fragments like the effort alleged to have been written on the blackboard by a Cheltenham schoolgirl:

Tolerable modern epigrams are so few that it would be worth while saving all there are. Unfortunately the pleasantest personal ones that one hears privately, though they would have been printed in a franker day, must mostly remain unprinted in an age when direct satire is considered ungentlemanly, and the law of libel is so easily invoked. I remember Mr. ——’s epigram on Lady —— and Mr. ——’s on Sir —— ——. Mr. Lennard cannot be expected to publish these.