A POLITICAL SATIRIST.f IT is a long time since we
have seen a volume of political satire with merits so great as those which strike the reader of Mr. Colvin's Party Whips. Satire, indeed, for one reason or another, is a literary form which seems alien to the spirit of the twentieth and even the nineteenth century. And even Mr. Colvin has been forced to abandon any attempt to produce satire with a technique which could possibly be described as modern. He has looked to the past for his style if not for his subject-matter; and it is not Pope, but Dryden, whom he seems to have chosen as his model. And certainly Mr. Colvin has produced no mere mechanical, academic pastiche. His verse is full of life and spirit and of something more than a shadow of Dryden's own passion. Here, as an example, are some lines upon a member of Parliament :- "I cannot toll you how he came to sit,—
Perhaps, like Lulu, by his father's wit, Or Herbert, scion of a greater strain, To show there's still heredity in brain ; Perhaps a fortune by his grandsire made In far San Thom6, in the cocoa trade,
Bought him his seat—or no, the phrase is crude— Say, rather, earned his party's gratitude.
No matter how, suffice to say that he
Is idol of a shire's democracy ;
A hundred chapels weekly bless his name ;
A hundred cricket clubs his gifts acclaim; Of every charity he heads the list, And every child his duteous wifo has kissed ; His pheasants fly through every tradesman's door,
His hares and rabbits feed the grateful poor."
Perhaps one of the most important reasons why Mr. Colvin succeeds as a satirist better than most of his contemporaries is that he is not afraid of giving hard knocks to his victims. Satire is clearly not a game that can be played by any one with squeamish views on the subject of "good taste." Among the most powerful of Mr. Colvin's verses, for instance, is " A • The Kew Bulletin, 1511. London : Wyman and Sons. [4e. 6d.] Party Whips. By Ian D. Colvin. London : Frank Palmer. [Is. net.] Playful Epistle to F. C. G.," with the actual wording of which we should be sorry to associate ourselves, but of which the expression is none the less striking. It opens as follows :— " Good F. C. G., when I behold you in
The frayed horse-collar of the same old grin, Two ancient jests, no more, your stook-in-trade, And even those poor two by others made— The hatter that from Wonderland you stole, The penguin tribe devised by Anatole— I wonder how you lost that frolic vein Which was at once our pleasure and our pain, When your sharp pencil never missed the raw, And could do almost everything but draw."
Mr. Colvin's own pen certainly never " misses the raw," and, though his victims may wince at its sharpness they cannot, if they are honest with themselves, help admiring its force.
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