'An Aristocratic Genre of Writing'

More than brevity I admire concision. Think of brevity as the macro-scale, a sonnet as opposed to an epic. In theory at least a sonnet can be prolix while maintaining its brevity and Homer can be concise. In prose, the model is Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” – 272 words some of us know by heart, as though it were a poem. Concision works at the micro-scale, at the level of words and phrases, and thus is well-adapted for use in satire and other forms of wit. In his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson defines concision as “cutting off; excision; destruction.” The supremely concise poetic form is the epigram and its modern master is J.V. Cunningham:  

“Hang up your weaponed wit

Who were destroyed by it.

If silence fails, then grace

Your speech with commonplace,

And studiously amaze

Your audience with his phrase.

He will commend your wit

When you abandon it.”

 

The ancient master is Martial, as in Susan McLean’s translation (Selected Epigrams, 2014) of Epigram I.110:

 

“‘Write shorter epigrams’ is your advice.

Yet you write nothing, Velox. How concise!”

 

The contemporary master is R.L. Barth. Here is his “Small Arms Fire” (Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems, Broadstone Books, 2021):

 

“Why not adjust? Forget this? Let it be?

Because it’s truth. Because it’s history.”

 

The supreme prose form of concision is the aphorism. In his introduction to The Viking Book of Aphorisms (1962), W.H. Auden writes: “Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser or more intelligent than his readers.”

 

I’m not sure that’s quite true, though any assertion is by definition concise. Think of La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, Chesterton, Johnson, Montaigne, Santayana, Pascal, Lichtenberg, Kraus and Valéry. The recent exemplar of concision among aphorists is Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913-94), the Colombian writer better known as Don Colacho, whose work has been translated into English online by the pseudonymous Stephen. He called them in Spanish escolios – in English, “scholia” or “glosses.” This aphorism might stand as the Don’s own credo: “Many people believe that a laconic statement is dogmatic and judge the generosity of an intelligence by the verbosity of its prose.”

 

And here, at the risk of posing the paradox of writing at length about concision, are other pertinent Don Colacho aphorisms:

 

“No writer has ever been born who did not write too much.”

 

“To accuse the aphorism of expressing only part of the truth is tantamount to supposing that a verbose discourse can express all of it.”

 

“Prolixity is not an excess of words but a dearth of ideas.”