DECLINE OF EPIGRAMS

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 December 1934, Page 9

DECLINE OF EPIGRAMS

WHEN THEY WERE THE FASHION The wireless “scrap-book” series, in which an attempt is made to revive the history and atmosphere of a past year, recently included 1910 (writes Ivor Brown in the “Manchester Guardian”). It would have been opposite and amusing, I thought, if somebody had stepped up to the microphone and discharged a volley of epigrams. For the epigram was then the height of intellectual fashion. Now Mr. Somerset Maugham, himself a master of the sport so modish at that time, can describe a. decaying institution as being “dead as the epigram.”. In 1910 no Oxford undergraduate, aspiring to glory at the Union, would have dared to enter the hall and rise to his feet without a pocketful of epigrams. The smart plays of the period were peppered with these formalities of wit. Mr. Maugham has himself described the dramatist’s discipline. He had been trying to sell a play called “Lady Frederick,” ultimately a great success and renowned for its verbal brilliance. “The play,” he tells us. “was eventually bought by Mr. George Tyler and ho asked me to write in some more epigrams. I went away, and in two hours I had written twentyfour. It is easj r to write an epigram (you have only to loop the loop in a commonplace and come down between the lines), but it is easier not to write one.” What was this precious and play-selling article which he could turn out in two and a half minutes? “It’s one of the injustices of fate that clothes only hang on a woman really well when she has lost every shred of her reputation.” Wilde-and-water? It seems poor enough now in the chill of print, and Mr. Maugham would blush for it to-day. But it was the vogue. It had its varieties. Mr. Chesterton combined it with alliterative paradox and pun. To some extent.he still does. He had a large influence then; the young heretics all read “Orthodoxy” for its sparkle; they were not constrained to become Christians in faith, but many of them become Chestertonians in style. “G.K.C.” was a dangerous model, as dangerous as “C.E. M.” in another manner. How the poor dons must have ached at the essays to which they listened, “crambe repetita” of Chestertonian dialectic. It was fashionable to have a Bernard Shaw calendar — w ith an epigram for every day in the year. To look up the date was to have the Anarchist’s Hand-book by heart. Then, in a lighter vein, there was a “Said.” The naughtiness of Wilde was a trifle faded, but his style went marching on. The stage of to-day is so much more natural, so much less formal, that the epigram is avoided. An audience would wriggle uncomfortably beneath the epigrams gummed to the surface of "Lady Frederick.” Mr. Noel Coward was leader of the post-war wits, but there are few epigrams in his text. Acid comment is now far more of an ejaculation; the poised sentence is out

of "fashion. The fashionable humour of recent years has relied upon inconsequence and absurdity. The comic method of Mr. Evelyn Waugh and of his numerous imitators depends very little upon a. verbal neatness; the humorists of to-day have little polish, but a fertile and a freakish invention. They conjure up a fantastic world, whose inhabitants are infantile, frank, disconcerting, preposterous. They are savages in civilised trappings, and they amuse by their gibberings; Wycherley’s courtiers are savages below their skin, but they do not gibber. They amuse by their verbal elegance. The epigram, good or bad, was a civilised article. It was a snatch at style. STYLE DERIDED . Style now is derided. There is a flow of derision directed against Lamb and Stevenson. Nothing smooth is acceptable. The turbid, vivid, angry prose of D. H. Lawrence became the model of the young idea in serious composition. In comedy the roughness of the American “wisecrack” has supplanted the balanced antitheses of the epigram. The sly, lazy, back-chat of coon-comedians was prized above a. deliberate wit. and the fashion infected all contemporary notions of dialogue. Random nonsense was sure of its laughter; “crazy” became the darling epithet of showmanship, “cracking” the accepted triumph of the art of speech. It is possible to assert that some modern comedians have epigrammatic limbs and faces, but nobody would attribute an aphoristic genius of the tongue to the prime ministers of mirth in our time.

The epigram will come back, when style comes back. It has played many parts in its time. Philosophers, who choose to write in close-packed sentences instead of in loose and lengthy volumes, have used it since the beginning of human reflection. Bacon made epigram the vehicle of his farranging' mind. Wherever audiences l ad an ear for a phrase the dramatists have delighted to feed them with an elegance of wit. Sometimes the trick of the trade was too superficial, and many old tricks, the Elizabethan conceit, for example, seem tiresome now. Shakespeare took years to throw off the lure of Lyly’s verbal play, and never wholly escaped. The stylish audience of the Restoration relished a well dressed sentence, a verbal foppery. Congreve’s dialogue has often that antithetical balance so dear to the Greeks, clause modified by clause, as colour sets off colour. Take any of his rakes and they have a patterned poise of utterance which they carry like their ribboned uniform of gallantry. “Yet it is oftentimes too late with some of your termagant and flashy sinners. You have all the guilt of the intention and none of the pleasure of the practice. You are so eager in the pursuit of. the temptation that you save the devil the trouble of leading you to it!”

COULD KEEP IT UP He could keep it up for as long as he chose, ajid that craving for rhythm

evidently dear to his audience, was not lost until the decay of style in living; epigram so rode the eighteenth century that it captured poetry, a kingdom not properly its own; Pope's English is often Congreve’s, put into.lines of ten syllables and carrying a special genius for pointing the last word. When, after its Victorian eclipse, style came back into English life at the e nd of the nineteenth century epigram immediately reappeared and Wilde renewed the stylish tradition of the English comedy. He tossed epigrams into his dialogue too easily, too often. But he gave to the theatre a formal quality of speech which lasted for a quarter of a century. The triumph of naturalism in writing and acting was inevitably the destruction of epigram. Let us admit Unit it can be tiresome; when art is attempting to be sincere epigrammatic facility trips it by the heels. At the worst, epigrammatic dialogue or epigrammatic writing becomes a tinkle which annoys the mind with its self-conscious jangles of conceits, however much it may console the eye and ear. But a period disdainful of epigram is confessing a limitation. Are we to polish our shoes and never observe the lacquer of our phrases? To be content with “wisecracks” was all very well for an age of jazz; but surely we arc working our way through that and returning to more civil harmonies. In that case the epigram will assuredly be restored to honour. Naturalism and plain speaking arc sterling qualities, but not the only qualities of human communication. For my part, I agree with Halifax. “A man that should call everything by its right name, would hardly pass the streets without being knocked down as a common enemy.” If truth be a jewel, as we are often told, and language its medium, why should we refuse to have w’ords cut and set to their own manifest advantage?