DEFINITION OF WIT
Wit is the putting together in jest,i.e.in fancy, or in bare supposition, ideas between which there is a serious,i.e.a customary incompatibility, and by this pretended union, or juxtaposition, to point out more strongly some lurking incongruity. Or, wit is the dividing a sentence or an object into a number of constituent parts, as suddenly and with the same vivacity of apprehension to compound them again with other objects, ‘wherein the most distant resemblance or the most partial coincidence may be found.’ It is thepolypuspower of the mind, by which a distinct life and meaning is imparted to the different parts of a sentence or object after they are severed from each other; or it is the prism dividing the simplicity and candour of our ideas into a parcel of motley and variegated hues; or it is the mirror broken into pieces, each fragment of which reflects a new light from surrounding objects; or it is the untwisting the chain of our ideas, whereby each link is made to hook on more readily to others than when they were all bound up together by habit, and with a view to asetpurpose. Ideas exist as a sort offixturesin the understanding; they are likemoveables(that will also unscrew and take to pieces) in the wit or fancy. If our grave notions were always well founded; if there were no aggregates of power, of prejudice, and absurdity; if the value and importance of an object went on increasing with the opinion entertained of it, and with the surrender of our faith, freedom, and every thing else to aggrandise it, then ‘the squandering glances’ of the wit, ‘whereby the wise man’s folly is anatomised,’ would be as impertinent as they would be useless. But while gravity and imposture not only exist, but reign triumphant; while the proud, obstinate, sacred tumours rear their heads on high, and are trying to get a new lease of forever and a day; then oh! for the Frenchman’s art (‘Voltaire’s?—the same’) to break the torpid spell, and reduce the bloated mass to its native insignificance! When a Ferdinand still rules, seated on his throne of darkness and blood, by English bayonets and by English gold (that have no mind to remove him thence) who is not glad that an Englishman has the wit and spirit to translate the title ofKing FerdinandintoThing Ferdinand; and does not regret that, instead of pointing the public scorn and exciting an indignant smile, the stroke of wit has not the power to shatter, to wither, and annihilate in its lightning blaze the monstrous assumption, with all its open or covert abettors? This would be aset-off, indeed, to the joint efforts of pride, ignorance, and hypocrisy: as it is, wit plays its part, and does not play it ill, though it is too apt to cut both ways. It may be said that what I have just quoted is not an instance of the decomposition of an idea or word into its elements, and finding a solid sense hid in the unnoticed particles of wit, but is the addition of another element or letter. But it was the same lively perception of individual and salient points, that saw the wordKingstuck up in capital letters, as it were, and like a transparency in theIlluminated Missalof the Fancy, that enabled the satirist to conjure up the letter T before it, and made the transition (urged by contempt) easy. For myself, with all my blind, rooted prejudices against the name, it would be long enough before I should hit upon so happy a mode of expressing them. My mind is not sufficiently alert and disengaged. I cannot run along the letters composing it like the spider along its web, to see what they are or how to combine them anew; I am crushed like the worm, and writhing beneath the load. I can give no reasons for the faith that is in me, unless I read a novel of Sir Walter’s, but there I find plenty of examples to justify my hatred of kings in former times, and to prevent my wishing to ‘revive the ancient spirit of loyalty’ in this! Wit, then, according to this account of it, depends on the rapid analysis or solution of continuity in our ideas, which, by detaching, puts them into a condition to coalesce more readily with others, and form new and unexpected combinations: but does all analysis imply wit, or where is the difference? Does the examining the flowers and leaves in the cover of a chair-bottom, or the several squares in a marble pavement, constitute wit? Does looking through a microscope amount to it? The painter analyses the face into features—nose, eyes, and mouth—the features into their component parts: but this process of observation and attention to details only leads him to discriminate more nicely, and not to confound objects. The mathematicianabstractsin his reasonings, and considers the same line, now as forming the side of a triangle, now of a square figure; but does he laugh atthe discovery, or tell it to any one else as a monstrous good jest? These questions require an answer; and an evasive one will not do. With respect to the wit of words, the explanation is not difficult; and if all wit were verbal, my task would be soon ended. For language, being in its own nature arbitrary and ambiguous; or consisting of ‘sounds significant,’ which are now applied to one thing, now to something wholly different and unconnected, the most opposite and jarring mixtures may be introduced into our ideas by making use of this medium which looks two ways at once, either by applying the same word to two different meanings, or by dividing it into several parts, each probably the sign of a different thing, and which may serve as the starting-post of a different set of associations. The very circumstance which at first one might suppose would convert all the world into punsters and word-catchers, and make a Babel and chaos of language,viz.the arbitrary and capricious nature of the symbols it uses, is that which prevents them from becoming so; for words not being substantive things in themselves, and utterly valueless and unimportant except as the index of thought, the mind takes no notice of or lays no kind of stress upon them, passes on to what is to follow, uses them mechanically and almost unconsciously; and thus the syllables of which a word may be composed, are lost in its known import, and the word itself in the general context. We may be said neither to hear nor see the words themselves; we attend only to the inference, the intention they are meant to communicate. This merging of the sound in the sense, of the means in the end, both common sense, the business of life, and the limitation of the human faculties dictate. But men of wit and leisure are not contented with this; in the discursiveness of their imaginations and with their mercurial spirits, they find it an amusement to attend not only to the conclusion or the meaning of words, but to criticise and have an eye to the words themselves. Dull, plodding people go no farther than the literal, or more properly, the practical sense; the parts of a word or phrase aremassed togetherin their habitual conceptions; their rigid understandings are confined to the one meaning of any word predetermined by its place in the sentence, and they are propelled forward to the end without looking to the right or the left. The others, who are less the creatures of habit and have a greater quantity of disposable activity, take the same words out of harness, as it were, lend them wings, and flutter round them in all sorts of fantastic combinations, and in every direction that they choose to take. For instance: the wordeldersignifies in the dictionary eitherageor a certain sort oftreeorberry; but if you mentionelder wineall the other senses sink into the dictionary as superfluous and nonsensical, and you think only of the winewhich happens to bear this name. It required, therefore, a man of Mr. Lamb’s wit and disdain of the ordinary trammels of thought, to cut short a family dispute over some very excellent wine of this description, by saying, ‘I wonder what it is that makeselder wineso very pleasant, whenelder brothersare so extremely disagreeable?’Compagnons du lys, may mean either thecompanions of the order of the flower-de-luce, or thecompanions of Ulysses—who were transformed into swine—according as you lay the emphasis. The French wits, at the restoration of LouisXVIII., with admirable point and truth, applied it in this latter sense. Two things may thus meet, in the casual construction and artful encounters of language, wide as the poles asunder and yet perfectly alike; and this is the perfection of wit, when the physical sound is the same, the physical sense totally unlike, and the moral sense absolutely identical. What is it that in things supplies the want of thedouble entendreof language?—Absurdity.And this is the very signification of the term. For it is only when the two contradictory natures are found in the same object that the verbal wit holds good, and the real wit orjeu d’espritexists and may be brought out wherever this contradiction is obvious with or without thejeu-de-motsto assist it. We can comprehend how the evolving or disentangling an unexpected coincidence, hid under the same name, is full of ambiguity and surprise; but an absurdity may be written on the face of a thing without the help of language; and it is in detecting and embodying this that the finest wit lies. Language is merely one instrument or handle that forwards the operation: Fancy is the midwife of wit. But how?—If we look narrowly and attentively, we shall find that there is a language of things as well as words, and the same variety of meaning, a hidden and an obvious, a partial and a general one, in both the one and the other. For things, any more than words, are not detached, independent existences, but are connected and cohere together by habit and circumstances in certain sets of association, and consist of an alphabet, which is thus formed into words and regular propositions, which being once done and established as the understood order of the world, the particular ideas are either not noticed, ordeterminedto a set purpose and ‘foregone conclusion,’ just as the letters of a word are sunk in the word, or the different possible meanings of a word adjusted by the context. One part of an object being habitually associated with others, or one object with a set of other objects, welumpthe whole together, take the general rule for granted, and merge the details in a blind and confused idea of the aggregate result. This, then, is the province of wit; to penetrate through the disguise or crust with which indolence and custom ‘skin and slur over’ our ideas, to move this slough of prejudice, and toresolve these aggregates or bundles of things into their component parts by a more lively and unshackled conception of their distinctions, and the possible combinations of these, so as to throw a glancing and fortuitous light upon the whole. There is then, it is obvious, adouble meaningin things or ideas as well as in words (each being ordinarily regarded by the mind merely as the mechanical signs or links to hold together other ideas connected with them)—and it is in detecting thisdouble meaningthat wit in either case is shown. Having no books at hand to refer to for examples, and in the dearth of imagination which I naturally labour under, I must look round the room in search of illustrations. I see a number of stars or diamond figures in the carpet, with the violent contrast of red and yellow and fantastic wreaths of flowers twined round them, without being able to extract either edification or a particle of amusement from them: a joint-stool and a fire-screen in a corner are equally silent on the subject—the first hint I receive (or glimmering of light) is from a pair of tongs which, placed formally astride on the fender, bear a sort of resemblance to the human figure calledlong legs and no body. The absurdity is not in the tongs (for that is their usual shape) but in the human figure which has borrowed a likeness foreign to itself. With thiscontre-sens, and the uneasiness and confusion in our habitual ideas which it excites, and the effort to clear up this by throwing it from us into a totally distinct class of objects, where by being made plain and palpable, it is proved to have nothing to do with that into which it has obtruded itself, and to which it makes pretensions, commences the operation of wit and the satisfaction it yields to the mind. This I think is the cause of the delightful nature of wit, and of its relieving, instead of aggravating, the pains of defect or deformity, by pointing it out in the most glaring colours, inasmuch as by so doing, we, as it were, completely detach the peccant part and restore the sense of propriety which, in its undetected and unprobed state, it was beginning to disturb. It is like taking a grain of sand out of the eye, a thorn out of the foot. We have discharged our mental reckoning, and had our revenge. Thus, when we say of asnub-nose, that it is like an ace of clubs, it is less out of spite to the individual than to vindicate and place beyond a doubt the propriety of our notions of form in general. Butler compares the knight’s red, formal-set beard to a tile:—
‘In cut and die so like a tile,A sudden view it would beguile;’
‘In cut and die so like a tile,A sudden view it would beguile;’
‘In cut and die so like a tile,A sudden view it would beguile;’
‘In cut and die so like a tile,
A sudden view it would beguile;’
we laugh in reading this, but the triumph is less over the wretched precisian than it is the triumph of common sense. So Swift exclaims:—
‘The house of brother Van I spy,In shape resembling a goose-pie.’
‘The house of brother Van I spy,In shape resembling a goose-pie.’
‘The house of brother Van I spy,In shape resembling a goose-pie.’
‘The house of brother Van I spy,
In shape resembling a goose-pie.’
Here, if the satire was just, the characteristics of want of solidity, of incongruity, and fantastical arrangement were inherent in the building, and written on its front to the discerning eye, and only required to be brought out by the simile of the goose-pie, which is an immediate test and illustration (being an extreme case) of those qualities. The absurdity, which before was either admired, or only suspected, now stands revealed, and is turned into a laughing stock, by the new version of the building into a goose-pie (as much as if the metamorphosis had been effected by a play of words, combining the most opposite things), for the mind in this case having narrowly escaped being imposed upon by taking a trumpery edifice for a stately pile, and perceiving the cheat, naturally wishes to cut short the dispute by finding out the most discordant object possible, and nicknames the building after it. There can be no farther question whether a goose-pie is a fine building. Butler compares the sun rising after the dark night to a lobster boiled, and ‘turned from black to red.’ This is equally mock-wit and mock-poetry, as the sun can neither be exalted nor degraded by the comparison. It is a play upon the ideas, like what we see in a play upon words, without meaning. In a pantomime at Sadler’s Wells, some years ago, they improved upon this hint, and threw a young chimney-sweeper into a cauldron of boiling water, who came out a smart, dapper volunteer. This waspractical wit; so that wit may exist not only without the play upon words, but even without the use of them. Hogarth may be cited as an instance, who abounds in wit almost as much as he does in humour, considering the inaptitude of the language he used, or in those double allusions which throw a reflected light upon the same object, according to Collins’s description of wit,
‘Like jewels in his crisped hair.’
‘Like jewels in his crisped hair.’
‘Like jewels in his crisped hair.’
‘Like jewels in his crisped hair.’
Mark Supple’s calling out from the Gallery of the House of Commons—‘A song from Mr. Speaker!’ when Addington was in the chair and there was a pause in the debate, was undoubtedly wit, though the relation of any such absurd circumstance actually taking place, would only have been humour. A gallant calling on a courtesan (for it is fair to illustrate these intricacies how we can) observed, ‘he should only make her a present every other time.’ She answered, ‘Then come only every other time.’ This appears to me to offer a sort of touchstone to the question. The sense here is, ‘Don’t come unless you pay.’ There is no wit in this: the wit then consists in the mode of conveying the hint: let us see into what this resolves itself. The object is to point out as strongly as can be, the absurdity of not paying; and in order to do this, an impossibility is assumed by running aparallel on the phrases, ‘paying every other time,’ and ‘coming every other time,’ as if the coming went for nothing without paying, and thus, by the very contrast and contradiction in the terms, showing the most perfect contempt for the literal coming, of which the essence, viz. paying, was left out. It is, in short, throwing the most killing scorn upon, and fairly annihilating the coming without paying, as if it were possible to come and not to come at the same time, by virtue of an identical proposition or form of speech applied to contrary things. The wit so far, then, consists in suggesting, or insinuating indirectly, an apparent coincidence between two things, to make the real incongruity, by the recoil of the imagination, more palpable than it could have been without this feigned and artificial approximation to an union between them. This makes the difference between jest and earnest, which is essential to all wit. It is onlymake-believe. It is a false pretence set up, or the making one thing pass in supposition for another, as a foil to the truth when the mask is removed. There need not be laughter, but there must be deception and surprise: otherwise, there can be no wit. When Archer, in order to bind the robbers, suddenly makes an excuse to call out to Dorinda, ‘Pray lend me your garter, Madam,’ this is both witty and laughable. Had there been any propriety in the proposal or chance of compliance with it, it would no longer have been a joke: had the question been quite absurd and uncalled-for, it would have been mere impudence and folly; but it is the mixture of sense and nonsense, that is, the pretext for the request in the fitness of a garter to answer the purpose in question, and the totally opposite train of associations between a lady’s garter (particularly in the circumstances which had just happened in the play) and tying a rascally robber’s hands behind his back, that produces the delightfulequivoqueand unction of the passage in Farquhar. It is laughable, because the train of inquiry it sets in motion is at once on pleasant and on forbidden ground. We did not laugh in the former case—‘Then only come every other time’—because it was a mere ill-natured exposure of an absurdity, and there was an end of it: but here, the imagination courses up and down along a train of ideas, by which it is alternately repelled and attracted, and this produces the natural drollery or inherent ludicrousness. It is the difference between the wit of humour and the wit of sense. Once more, suppose you take a stupid, unmeaning likeness of a face, and throwing a wig over it, stick it on a peg, to make it look like a barber’s block—this is wit without words. You give that which is stupid in itself the additional accompaniments of what is still more stupid, to enhance and verify the idea by a falsehood. We know the head so placed is not a barber’s block; but it might, we see, verywell pass for one. This is caricature or thegrotesque. The face itself might be made infinitely laughable, and great humour be shown in the delineation of character: it is in combining this with other artificial and aggravating circumstances, or in the setting of this piece of lead that the wit appears.[62]Recapitulation.It is time to stop short in this list of digressions, and try to join the scattered threads together. We are too apt, both from the nature of language and the turn of modern philosophy, which reduces every thing to simple sensations, to consider whatever bears one name as one thing in itself, which prevents our ever properly understanding thosemixed modesand various clusters of ideas, to which almost all language has a reference. Thus if we regardwitas something resembling a drop of quicksilver, or a spangle from off a cloak, a little nimble substance, that is pointed and glitters (we do not know how) we shall make no progress in analysing its varieties or its essence; it is a mere word or an atom: but if we suppose it to consist in, or be the result of, several sets and sorts of ideas combined together or acting upon each other (like the tunes and machinery of a barrel-organ) we may stand some chance of explaining and getting an insight into the process. Wit is not, then, a single idea or object, but it is one mode of viewing and representing nature, or the differences and similitudes, harmonies and discords in the links and chains of our ideas of things at large. If all our ideas were literal, physical, confined to a single impression of the object, there could be no faculty for, or possibility of, the existence of wit, for its first principle ismockingor making a jest of anything, and its first condition or postulate, therefore, is the distinction between jest and earnest. First of all, wit implies a jest, that is, the bringing forward a pretended or counterfeit illustration of a thing; which, being presently withdrawn, makes the naked truth more apparent by contrast. It is lessening and undermining our faith in any thing (in which the serious consists) by heightening or exaggerating the vividness of our idea of it, so as by carrying it to extremes to show the error in the first concoction, and from a received practical truth and object of grave assent, to turn it into a laughing stock to the fancy. This will apply to Archer and the lady’s garter, which is ironical: but how does it connect with the comparison of Hudibras’s beard to a tile, which is only an exaggeration; or theCompagnons d’Ulysse, which is meant for a literal and severe truth, as well as a play upon words? More generally then, wit is the conjuring up in the fancy any illustration of an idea by likeness, combination of other images, or by a form of words, that being intended to point out theeccentricityordeparture of the original idea from the class to which it belongs does so by referring it contingently and obliquely to a totally opposite class, where the surprise and mere possibility of finding it, proves the inherent want of congruity. Hudibras’s beard is transformed (by wit) into a tile: a strong man is transformed (by imagination) into a tower. The objects, you will say, are unlike in both cases; yet the comparison in one case is meant seriously, in the other it is merely to tantalize. The imagination is serious, even to passion, and exceeds truth by laying a greater stress on the object; wit has no feeling but contempt, and exceeds truth to make light of it. In a poetical comparison there cannot be a sense of incongruity or surprise; in a witty one there must. The reason is this: It is granted stone is not flesh, a tile is not hair, but the associated feelings are alike, and naturally coalesce in one instance, and are discordant and only forced together by a trick of style in the other. But how can that be, if the objects occasioning these feelings are equally dissimilar?—Because the qualities of stiffness or squareness and colour, objected to in Hudibras’s beard, are themselves peculiarities and oddities in a beard, or contrary to the nature or to our habitual notion of that class of objects; and consequently (not being natural or rightful properties of a beard) must be found in the highest degree in, and admit of, a grotesque and irregular comparison with a class of objects, of which squareness and redness[63]are the essential characteristics (as of a tile), and which can have, accordingly, no common point of union in general qualities or feeling with the first class, but where the ridicule must be just and pointed from this very circumstance, that is, from the coincidence in that one particular only, which is the flaw and singularity of the first object. On the other hand, size and strength, which are the qualities on which the comparison of a man to a tower hinges, are not repugnant to the general constitution of man, but familiarly associated with our ideas of him: so that there is here no sense of impropriety in the object, nor of incongruity or surprise in the comparison: all is grave and decorous, and instead of burlesque, bears the aspect of a loftier truth. But if strength and magnitude fall within our ordinary contemplations of man as things not out of the course of nature, whereby he is enabled, with the help of imagination, to rival a tower of brass or stone, are not littleness and weakness the counterpart of these, and subject to the same rule? What shall we say, then, to the comparison of a dwarf to a pigmy, or to Falstaff’s comparison ofSilenceto ‘a forked radish, or a man made after supper of a cheese-paring?’ Once more then, strength and magnitude are qualities which impress the imagination in a powerful and substantive manner; if they are an excess above theordinary or average standard, it is an excess to which we lend a ready and admiring belief, that is, wewillthem to be if they are not, because theyought to be—whereas, in the other case of peculiarity and defect, the mind is constantly at war with the impression before it; our affections do not tend that way; we will itnotto be; reject, detach, and discard it from the object as much and as far as possible; and therefore it is, that there being no voluntary coherence but a constant repugnance between the peculiarity (as ofsquareness) and the object (as abeard), the idea of a beard as being both naturally and properly of a certain form and texture remains as remote as ever from that of a tile; and hence the double problem is solved, why the mind is at once surprised and not shocked by the allusion; for first, the mind being made to see a beard so unlike a beard, is glad to have the discordance increased and put beyond controversy, by comparing it to something still more unlike one,viz., a tile; and secondly,squarenessnever having been admitted as a desirable and accredited property of a beard as it is of a tile, by which the two classes of ideas might have been reconciled and compromised (like those of a man and a tower) through a feeling or quality common (in will) to both, the transition from one to the other continues as new and startling, that is, as witty as ever;—which was to be demonstrated. I think I see my way clearly so far. Wit consists in two things, the perceiving the incongruity between an object and the class to which it generally belongs, and secondly, the pointing out or making this incongruity more manifest, by transposing it to a totally different class of objects in which it is prescriptively found in perfection. The medium or link of connexion between the opposite classes of ideas is in the unlikeness of one of the things in questionto itself,i.e.the class it belongs to: this peculiarity is the narrow bridge or line along which the fancy runs to link it to a set of objects in all other respects different from the first, and having no sort of communication, either in fact or inclination, with it, and in which the pointedness and brilliancy, or thesurpriseandcontrastof wit consists. The faculty by which this is done is the rapid, careless decomposition and recomposition of our ideas, by means of which we easily and clearly detach certain links in the chain of our associations from the place where they stand, and where they have an infirm footing, and join them on to others, to show how little intimacy they had with the former set.
The motto of wit seems to be,Light come, light go. A touch is sufficient to dissever what already hangs so loose as folly, like froth on the surface of the wave; and an hyperbole, an impossibility, a pun or a nickname will push an absurdity, which is close upon the verge of it, over the precipice. It is astonishing how much wit or laughterthere is in the world—it is one of the staple commodities of daily life—and yet, being excited by what isout of the wayand singular, it ought to be rare, and gravity should be the order of the day. Its constant recurrence from the most trifling and trivial causes, shows that the contradiction is less to what we find things than to what we wish them to be. A circle of milliner’s-girls laugh all day long at nothing, or day after day at the same things—the same cant phrase supplies the wags of the town with wit for a month—the same set of nicknames has served theJohn BullandBlackwood’s Magazineever since they started. It would appear by this that its essence consisted in monotony, rather than variety. Some kind of incongruity however seems inseparable from it, either in the object or language. For instance, admiration and flattery become wit by being expressed in a quaint and abrupt way. Thus, when the dustman complimented the Duchess of Devonshire by saying, as she passed, ‘I wish that lady would let me light my pipe at her eyes,’ nothing was meant less than to ridicule or throw contempt, yet the speech was wit and not serious flattery. The putting a wig on a stupid face and setting it on a barber’s pole is wit or humour:—the fixing a pair of wings on a beautiful figure to make it look more like an angel is poetry; so that thegrotesqueis either serious or ludicrous, as it professes to exalt or degrade. Whenever any thing is proposed to bedonein the way of wit, it must be in mockery or jest; since if it were a probable or becoming action, there would be no drollery in suggesting it; but this does not apply to illustrations by comparison, there is here no line drawn between what is to take place and what is not to take place—they must only be extreme and unexpected. Mere nonsense, however, is not wit. For however slight the connexion, it will never do to have none at all; and the more fine and fragile it is in some respects, the more close and deceitful it should be in the particular one insisted on. Farther, mere sense is not wit. Logical subtilty or ingenuity does not amount to wit (although it may mimic it) without an immediate play of fancy, which is a totally different thing. The comparing the phrenologist’s division of the same portion of the brain into the organs of form and colour to the cutting a Yorkshire pudding into two parts, and calling the onecustardand the otherplum-cakemay pass for wit with some, but not with me. I protest (if required) against having a grain of wit.[64]