Introduction

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.