Abstract
Considering how well known Oscar Wilde was, in his own time, for his wit and how ready he was to volunteer an opinion on just about everything, it is slightly surprising to note that he never explicitly defined wit itself. He may have commented on it, in one of his many public conversations, but there is certainly no statement in Wilde’s written work akin to Mark Twain’s suggestion that “[w]it is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.”1 Any attempt to determine how Wilde understood the inner workings of, perhaps, his greatest talent, if not also his unique genius, is, therefore, necessarily an inference founded on ideas scattered throughout his criticism, prose, and plays. On the basis of these isolated scraps of thought, it is, for instance, possible to assert that he saw with as an essentially intellectual operation. When Wilde characterizes someone as witty, he invariably also qualifies this person as “clever.” Princess Wilhelmine of Prussia, Margravine of Brandenburg-Bayreuth, is described as “clever, witty, and entertaining,” while the letters of nineteenth-century English translator and editor Sarah Austin are considered “thoughtful, or witty.”2 Elsewhere, Wilde parallels wit to its etymological kin—wisdom—and, in his commentary on George Meredith’s novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, even suggests that its author “gives us his philosophy through the medium of wit,”3 an indication that further reinforces the notion of wit as a purveyor of rational arguments.
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Notes
Mark Twain, Notebooks and Journals, eds. Frederick Anderson, Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975–79), 3:172.
Oscar Wilde, Reviews, vol. 13 of The First Collected Edition of the Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Robert Ross (London: Dawsons, 1969), 196, 378. All subsequent citations from this source will use the abbreviation R.
Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, intro. Merlin Holland, Vyvyan Holland, and Owen Dudley Edwards (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 2003), 107.
H. Paul Grice, “Logic and Conversation,” Syntax and Semantics: Speech Acts 3 (1975): 45.
see Richard Ellmann’s biography Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), 228;.
Nicholas Udall, trans., Apophthegmes, by Desiderius Erasmus (London, 1564).
William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, 1.1.60. All references to Shakespeare’s works are based on The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).
Ben Jonson, Discoveries: Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthomden, ed. G. B. Harrison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), 25–26.
John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956–2000), 12:97.
Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism, 2.98, in The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Henry W. Boynton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903).
Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, intro. L. Archer-Hind (London: Dent, 1964), 1:11.
William Hazlitt, The Collected Works, ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (London: J. M. Dent, 1902–04), 5:7.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971–2001), 5:294.
See Robert Bernard Martin, The Triumph of Wit: A Study of Victorian Comic Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 26–28.
Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Collected and Repub-lished (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866–67), 2:154.
James Henry Leigh Hunt, Wit and Humour, Selected from the English Poets (London: Smith, Elder, 1870), 11.
Henry James, Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974–84), 3:514.
Arthur Bingham Walkley, “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” The Speaker 5 (27 February 1892): 258.
Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 204.
Arthur Bingham Walkley, “A Woman of No Importance,” The Speaker 7 (29 April 1893): 485.
Bryan Robertson, “Insights,” Spectator 245, no. 7946 (25 October 1980): 24.
Clement Scott, “The Playhouses,” Illustrated London News (12 January 1895): 35.
George Bernard Shaw, The Drama Observed, ed. and intro. Bernard F. Dukore (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 1:240.
William Tydeman, ed., Wilde, Comedies: A Selection of Critical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1982), 18–21.
Compare Adam Kilgarriff, “Googleology is Bad Science,” Computational Linguistics 33.1 (March 2007): 147;
Mike Thelwall, “Extracting Accurate and Complete Results from Search Engines: Case Study Windows Live,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59.1 (January 2008): 39;
Péter Jacsó, “Google Scholar: the Pros and the Cons,” Online Information Review 29.2 (2005): 209.
Oscar Wilde, Oscariana: Epigrams (London: Arthur Humphreys, 1895).
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© 2015 Jure Gantar
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Gantar, J. (2015). Introduction. In: The Evolution of Wilde’s Wit. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137483553_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137483553_1
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