Word: epigrames
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George's soldiers have rendered the most devastating verdict on him. They call him O Aghelastos-he who does not laugh. Once, at the Oxford Union, he achieved an epigram: "The world is too full of bookworms and blue stockings, long-haired men and short-haired women." This was in 1928, and not new then; no subsequent wisecracks by George are on the record...
Bogging down in dialogue midway in the second act, "Laura" stagnates because the characters describe rather than do anything. Otto Kruger's Waldo Lydecker, who, in his own words, "sprang from the womb with an epigram on my lips," is too amusing, turning what should have been a taut mystery into a second rate Phillip Barry drawing room comedy incidentally concerned with murder. "Laura's" John Dalton climax, so successful in the film, is inexplicably greeted by laughs in the play: the change in medium has somehow twisted the playwright's intentions...
Housman could indulge in depths of unblushing self-pity; but he could also write the magnificent Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle. His gift for epigram and poetic conceit was too glib, but he could also write...
...Shakespeare should be seen and not read" has become as much an epigram in the lecture-hall as "Children should be seen and not heard" in the drawing room. Of course both axioms are vigorously hedged: Shakespeare should be read, too, just as children should occasionally be heard. But reading "The Winter's Tale" before seeing the current grandiose and interpretively satisfactory Theatre Guild production is less profitable and less necessary than is reading, say, "The Tempest" before seeing a stylized Margaret Webster...
Christopher Marlowe wasn't thinking of the Guardian when he remarked in 1588 that one often finds "infinite riches in a little room." That epigram, however, describes the magazine's latest issue exactly. Only three articles are included, but they stand far above the calibre of work usually published in Harvard's "Review of the Social Sciences." Everything required of a successful issue is here: theory, fact, and interpretation...