AN ESSAY ON EPIGRAMS.
Who nowadays writes epigrams? The species epigrammatist seems to be well-nigh extinct. Now and then some Herr Professor, whose learning is less ponderous than common, after due incubation hatches what he calls a Sinngedicht. But his achievement is too often a paraphrase, if not a literal translation, of some Latin original. At intervals, too, Thorold Rogers, clergyman and social reformer, flings into London journals some explosive squib couched in verse, but the missile is tolerably harmless, and draws far less attention than a telegram. No doubt before the invention of the newspaper the epigram, so easy to remember and so incisive in its effect, was no mean engine of cajolery, or calumny. But the days are gone when such weapons were effective in the political arena, and either conquered a pension or provoked a lettre de cachet. Byron, who worshipped Pope, and deemed everything his master had done worth doing, sometimes ventured into Martial’s province, but rarely successfully, except in Don Juan. A score of epigrams might be culled from that poem which would answer all the conditions of a rigorous definition. Since Byron, no poet of eminence has condescended to this form of art. Tennyson indeed is terse and telling, as is proved by the facility with which we quote him; yet he seems as incapable of epigrams as Morris, of whom most of us, much as we like him, can with difficulty remember a line. Browning might write them if he chose, but he does not choose, and so it is that the old epigrammatist lingers only in some isolated representative, as the dodo did in Madagascar, or like that Tasmanian survivor whose present existence is clouded with a doubt.
Epigrammatists may perish from the face of the earth, but the epigram is immortal. It well deserves to be so. What form of wit imparts so much pleasure to so many persons? If the world could be fairly polled, it might be found that some tiny epigram has yielded more genuine delight than the most ambitious works of genius, as, for instance, the Paradise Lost. If there is one Latin author who is still read for hearty amusement, it is Martial, and even the candid schoolboy who declines to be charmed by the Iliad can see some fun in the Anthology.
It would probably pose most persons to be suddenly called on to define an epigram. And no wonder, for every great scholar since the manuscripts of Martial were recovered in Western Europe has tried his hand at a definition, and none except Lessing has grasped it. The literal meaning is, of course, inscription, and the word was originally applied to the writing on a monument or tomb. But in later times the word obtained in Greek rhetoric and poetry the peculiar significance which in English distinguishes the epigram from an epitaph, and in German the Sinngedicht from a mere Aufschrift or Ueberschrift. We shall at once lay our finger on this peculiar significance by answering the question, why the Greeks had but one word where the Germans have two?
We need hardly say that it could be neither a poverty of language nor a contempt for precision which led the former to content themselves with the original term. If there is anything notorious, it is that the Athenian never suffered a new idea, or the finest shade of deviation from an old idea, to shiver in the cold of paraphrase, but straightway clothed it with a snug, warm word, cut and fitted to the shape. We may be sure that a sense of some nice propriety, the recognition, perhaps, of some just and suggestive metaphor, induced him to attach the name of epigram to a particular class of little poems, without any direct reference to their fitness for inscription on memorial stones.
The fact is, that every genuine epigram is divisible into two distinct parts, of which the first answers precisely to the monument or tomb on which the primitive epigram was written, and the second to the inscription proper which the monument bore. To surprise, and thereupon to explain, to secure the twofold delight which springs in curiosity and ripens in gratification, was the purpose of the inscribed monument, and is still the aim of the true epigram. Let us apply this to some faultless type, like that stanza by Sir William Jones:
On parent knees, a naked new-born child,
Weeping thou sat’st, while all around thee smiled;
So live that, sinking to thy last long sleep,
Thou then may’st smile when all around thee weep.
It is plain that the first two lines awaken curiosity, excite interest. They answer to the graceful shaft which arrests the eye and allures the step. They win us to approach and investigate, to look for some further revelation, to ponder on the lesson which the last two lines convey. In a word, attention is first secured, and then rewarded. Let the reader test this analysis in other instances, and he will find it essential to the epigram that both these feelings, the longing of expectation and the satisfaction of it, should be evoked, and in this order. All the other qualities which have been supposed to be peculiar to the epigram, but are really common to many sorts of short and witty poems, may be easily deduced from this definition. Thus, the more terse and vigorous are the lines which introduce the subject, the more potent will be their appeal to curiosity, and the more tenacious their hold upon our interest. Architecturally, the monument will be more impressive. On the other hand, the more novel and delightful is the concluding thought, or the more felicitous and pointed the expression of it, the more complete is our satisfaction, the more amply do we feel repaid for our pains in deciphering the inscription. It follows likewise that the second half, or thought, of the epigram must interpret the fact embodied in the first, otherwise the inscription, instead of explaining the particular monument which bears it, serves merely to point us to another. So much for the veritable Sinngedicht. Of the pseudo-epigram there are many varieties, but the two commonest are those which awaken curiosity without appeasing it, or else instruct without enlisting attention. Without stopping to point out the flaws in many little poems, more or less witty, more or less compact, which are falsely called epigrams, we shall perceive the accuracy and value of the above definition by glancing at some famous models of the true form. In all the examples we may cite, we will give the originals, that they who do not like our version may make a better for themselves.
Let us begin with a couplet from Wenicke, who has written so much and so well in this way as to merit the name of the German Martial: