4 Wit (with Ingenium)
If a man had time to study the history of one word only, wit would perhaps be the best word he could choose. Its fortunes provide almost perfect examples of the main principles at work in semantic development. Its early life was happy and free from complications. It then acquired a sense which brought into full play the distinction between the word’s and the speaker’s meanings. It also suffered the worst fate any word has to fear; it became the fashionable term of approval among critics. This made it a prey to tactical definitions of a more than usually unscrupulous type, and in the heat of controversy there was some danger of its becoming a mere rallying-cry, semantically null. Meanwhile, however, popular usage was irresistibly at work in a different direction; in the end those ‘who speak only to be understood’ rescued it from the critics and fixed upon it the useful meaning it bears to-day. The chequered story has—what is rare in such matters—a happy ending.
I. EARLY HISTORY
Anglo-Saxon wit or gewit is mind, reason, intelligence. Rational creatures are those to whom God has given wit. A mortally wounded man, until delirium or unconsciousness overtakes him, still is master of his gewitt. And of course these, or closely similar, senses survived for centuries. When a man is mad his ‘wit’s diseased’. As he grows older his wit ‘ought to be more’, he ought to have more sense. Davies (anticipating Paradise Lost VIII, 76f.) says that God left some problems dark ‘to punish pride of wit’, the pride of man’s intellect, and Pope follows him with the saw that Nature ‘wisely curbed proved man’s pretending wit’. In Ireland, and perhaps elsewhere, we still say ‘God give you wit’ or ‘If you’d only had the wit to get his address’, meaning by wit sense or gumption. In all such usages the ancient meaning is insulated from the contamination of later meanings by the context. And the context can have this insulating power even if it is only a single clause:
for a calm unfit,
Would steer too nigh the sands to boast his wit.
Great wits are sure to madness near allied.
The first wit means ‘sense’, common sense, prudence. But wits in the next line means a good deal more. The full stop, the adjective great, and the fact that the whole line is a traditional maxim, lead the reader, and perhaps led Dryden, to make the adjustment unconsciously.
II. WITS
Two quite different causes lead to the frequent use of wits in the plural. One is the old psychology with its five inward and five outward wits or senses. In Benedick’s encounter with Beatrice ‘four of his five wits went halting off’. This usage, so far as I can see, had almost no effect on other senses of the word.
The second cause is far more interesting. Men differ from one another not only in the amount of wit or intelligence they have but in the kind. Each man’s wit has its own cast, bent, or temper; one quick and another plodding, one solid and another showy, one ingenious to invent and another accurate to retain. Thus as we speak of sceptical or credulous, creative or analytic, ‘minds’, you could once speak of wits to mean types of mind, or ‘mentalities’, or the people who have them. Thus in Chaucer
For tendre wittes wenen al be wyle
Theras they can nat pleynly understande
people of ‘tender’ mind. The classic place for this usage is the account of ‘quick’ and ‘hard’ wits in Ascham’s Scholemaster.
This sense of wit, unimportant though it may seem at the first glance, actually opened the way to nearly all the later developments. Without this sense wit is something common to all rational creatures or at least to all men of good sense. But a man’s wit in this sense is something which can distinguish him, which is characteristic of him; his mental make-up.
One obvious result of this is to make wit the recognised translation of ingenium. Whether its constant use for that purpose actually helped to mould its meaning, or merely allows us to see more clearly just what that meaning was, I do not know. But a study of wit which does not take full account of its relation to ingenium would be out of court; and a full study, which I do not attempt, would have to spend some time on the Italian ingegno as well.
III. ‘INGENIUM’
This word, like natura in its earlier use, originally meant the character or ‘what-sortedness’ of a thing, so that Tacitus can talk about the ingenium of a hill. It concerns us, however, only when it is applied, as it far more often is, to human beings. ‘Precepts’, says Seneca, ‘lead to right actions only if they meet a pliant ingenium.’ Here ‘nature’ or ‘character’ would do. Elsewhere the word refers specifically to a man’s intellectual quality. Epicurus, says Lucretius, surpassed the whole human race in ingenium (III, 1043). Helvidius, in Tacitus, had at an early age turned his brilliant ingenium to the study of philosophy. The same tendency which has made ‘family’ mean good family, and ‘quality’ good quality, brought it about that ingenium should usually mean not merely ‘cast of mind’ but a ‘cast of mind above the ordinary’. Quintilian quotes from Cicero ‘Whatever my share of ingenium, which I know to be small, may be’ and ‘What I lack in ingenium I make up for by hard work’ (XI, i). The word obviously means something like cleverness, ability, high intellectual capacity. ‘Quickness to learn and memory . . . are summed up in the single word ingenium’, says Cicero, and adds that those who have them are called ingeniosi. But he includes too little, and it is indeed possible on other grounds that some words have dropped out of the text. Ingenium really means something more like ‘talent’ or even ‘genius’. This is clear when it is used in the plural to mean ‘men who have ingenium’ (we also speak about ‘men of talent’ as ‘talents’). When Tacitus says that the reign of Augustus has not lacked for its historians decora ingenia, we can hardly translate this by anything weaker than ‘distinguished talents’. So, when Suetonius records that Vespasian ‘patronised ingenia and the arts’, we must say ‘patronised genius’ or ‘talent’ (i.e. men of talent).
IV. ‘INGENIUM’ AND WIT
The liaison, so to call it, between these two words is much closer than I realised before I looked into the matter.
The one is the almost invariable translation of the other. Ingenii gloriam in Boethius becomes ‘glory of wit’ in J.T.’s version (1609). The Lucretian vaunt that Epicurus surpassed all mankind in ingenium, which I quoted a minute ago, is rendered by Burton ‘Whose wit excelled the wits of men so far’. Horace writes
Ingeniis non ille favet plauditque sepultis
Nostra sed impugnat,
literally ‘He does not favour and applaud buried ingenia but attacks our own’. Dryden translates it ‘He favours not dead wits but hates the living’. Shakespeare, when he speaks about ‘the wits of former days’ (Sonnet LIX) means exactly the same; the writers of talent or genius who flourished before his own time.
But wit does not appear only as the translation of ingenium; both words enter into exactly the same traditional antitheses.
Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae, no great ingenium without a dash of insanity, from Seneca’s De Tranquillitate (XVII, 4), becomes Dryden’s ‘Great wits are sure to madness near allied’.
‘You get what is called affectation (kakozelon) when ingenium lacks judicium.’ ‘It is a bad sign when a boy’s judicium gets ahead of his ingenium.’ This contrasted pair will be familiar to all readers of neo-classical criticism. Harvey, in Cowley’s Ode (stanza 13), has ‘so strong a wit as all things but his Judgment overcame’. ‘Wit and Judgment often are at strife,’ says Pope.
‘The poem of Lucretius has many flashes of ingenium, but also much art.’ Pope makes the same dichotomy when he speaks of a work where ‘Wit and Art conspire to move your mind’.
An author may be too fond of his own ingenium, nimium amator ingenii sui. Pope reproduces both this idea and also the antithesis of ingenium and judicium in one couplet:
Authors are partial to their wit, ’tis true.
But are not critics to their judgment too.
The difficulty here is to find, for our own purpose, a word to express what ingenium and wit both clearly mean. One cannot call it either ‘talent’ or ‘genius’ without foisting upon the Roman and English writers a far later, and Romantic, distinction; and ‘genius’ labours further under the disadvantage of having no tolerable plural. But what is hard to express is easy to understand. What is being talked about is the thing which, in its highest exaltation may border on madness; the productive, seminal (modern cant would say ‘creative’) thing, as distinct from the critical faculty of judicium; the thing supplied by nature, not acquired by skill (ars); the thing which he who has it may love too well and follow intemperately. It is what distinguishes the great writer and especially the great poet. It is therefore very close to ‘imagination’. Indeed, there is one Latin passage where ingenium can hardly be translated except by that very word. It comes at the beginning of Cicero’s De Legibus. Atticus looks round to see the oak which had been mentioned in Cicero’s poem Marius and asks if it is still alive. ‘Yes,’ comes the answer, ‘it is, and always will be, for it was planted by ingenium.’ It was an imaginary tree (I, i).
Since English words fail us, and since we may now bid goodbye to Latin itself, for the rest of this chapter I am going to call the sense of the word wit which we have been observing ‘the ingenium sense’ or ‘wit-ingenium’. And it seems to me absolutely essential to face this sense squarely and get it firmly fixed in our minds. If we once allow more familiar, though not necessarily later, meanings to colour our reading of the word wit wherever the neoclassical writers use it, we shall get into hopeless confusion.
This error has, I believe, been committed by a critic to whose ingenium we all owe a willing debt. In his Structure of Complex Words (p. 87) Professor Empson, speaking of the word wit in Pope’s Essay on Criticism, says that ‘there is not a single use of the word in the whole poem in which the idea of a joke is quite out of sight. Indeed I think that the whole structure of thought in the poem depends on this.’ Now I think there are plenty of passages where it is simply wit-ingenium with no idea of a joke, however far in the background. ‘Great Wits may sometimes gloriously offend’ (I, 152). Surely it is the great ingenia who are thus entitled to dispense with rule (l. 144) and transcend art (l. 154)? It is an affair of ‘nameless graces’ (l. 144) attainable only by a ‘master-hand’ (l. 145); a privilege best reserved for the ancients (l. 161) who have something like a royal prerogative (l. 162). The result pleases, but pleases like ‘the shapeless rock, or hanging precipice’ (l. 160) which Pope certainly did not find jocular. The truth seems to me to be that he is here handling what is almost a locus communis. Democritus, quoted by Horace, had said that ingenium was happier than ‘painful’ or ‘beggarly’ (misera) art. Milton, probably with that very word misera in mind, confesses that Shakespeare’s ‘easy numbers’ flow ‘to the shame of slow endeavouring art’. Closest to Pope is Boileau’s
par quel transport heureux
Quelquefois dans sa course un esprit vigoureux,
Trop resserré par l’art, sort des règles prescrites,
Et de l’art mesme apprend à franchir leurs limites.
None of these provides a background which makes Professor Empson’s view probable. And what of the ‘patriarch wits’ who survived a thousand years (II, 479)? Does this mean only Aristophanes and Lucian? I think rather, Homer, Sophocles, and Virgil.
But the crucial experiment is still to try. No interpretation of the word wit is acceptable unless it can stand up to the couplet
Some have at first for wits, then poets passed,
Turn’d critics next, and proved plain fools at last.
Clearly the whole rhetorical structure is in ruins unless we can find senses for the key-words which provide a continuous descent; a poet must be something inferior to a wit, a critic to a poet, and a ‘plain fool’ to a critic.
Unfortunately the word poet, as well as wit, now needs explanation. Poet has in our time become a term of laudation rather than of description, so that to speak of a ‘bad poet’ is for some almost an oxymoron. Dr Leavis, if I remember rightly, wrote to a paper to say that Mr Auden was not a poet. But of course there is another sense in which everyone, including Dr Leavis, would have to classify Mr Auden as a poet; the sense any teacher would be using if he said ‘No, no. You’re confusing Lucan and Lucian. The one was a Latin poet; the other a Greek prose-writer.’ The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century usage, if not identical with the teacher’s, was far nearer to his than to Dr Leavis’s. Johnson, who defines poetry as ‘metrical composition’, defines poet as ‘An inventor; an author of fiction; a writer of poems; one who writes in measure’. We can gauge how far we have travelled by comparing this with the Shorter Oxford Dictionary which, after a definition very like Johnson’s, feels obliged to add ‘A writer in verse (or sometimes in elevated prose) distinguished by imaginative power, insight, sensibility, and faculty of expression’. Johnson is probably pretty true to the age immediately before his own. Fiction and metre were the chief differentiae of the ‘poet’. Thus Shadwell is a poet in the Epilogue to The Silent Lovers (l. 9) and ‘our poet’ in that to The Squire of Alsatia. Even when he wrote verse, to call a man a poet implied neither that he had, nor that he had not, what we now call ‘poetic genius’. It was parallel to calling him an architect or an actor. It told you what craft or profession he followed; like calling him ‘an author’.
With this proviso, does not Pope’s couplet become plain when—but only when—we take wit as wit-ingenium? ‘Some have at first passed for men of genius; then for authors (or literary craftsmen); then for critics; and finally have proved fools.’
In the light of this two Drydenian passages are ‘patient’ (as the old divines said) of a far more important interpretation than they have usually received. In the Essay of Dramatic Poesy we are told that Jonson was ‘the more correct poet, but Shakespeare the greater wit’. In the Original and Progress of Satire it is said ‘if we are not so great wits as Donne, yet certainly we are better poets’. I believe the meaning of both to be almost the opposite of that which naturally occurs first to a modern reader. Wit and wits are used in the ingenium-sense. Dryden is saying that while Jonson was the more disciplined craftsman, Shakespeare was the greater genius; that while we have less genius than Donne we have more literary skill. This is borne out by the fact that he has just censured Donne for insufficient care for ‘words’ and ‘numbers’. In a word, Dryden is almost (not quite) saying that Shakespeare is, in one sense, a greater poet than Jonson; and Donne, in one sense, a greater poet than himself and his contemporaries.
It must be understood that the error of which I venture to suspect Professor Empson is not one in chronology. That sense of the word wit which he feels delicately present throughout the Essay on Criticism certainly existed in Pope’s time, and long before. It was destined to destroy the ingenium-sense in the end. The question between Professor Empson and me is whether that slowly rising tide had yet reached all Pope’s uses of the word. I believe it had not; the insulating power of the context still protected them. We will now leave wit-ingenium in its lofty, yet already precarious, position, and say something of this other sense.
V. EARLY HISTORY OF ‘THE DANGEROUS SENSE’
I take it that wit in the sense now current means that sort of mental agility or gymnastic which uses language as the principal equipment of its gymnasium. ‘Language’ must here be taken in a large sense, to include those proverbs, and quotations almost equivalent to proverbs, which are among the ordinary small change of conversation. Thus the Frenchman’s comment on the Munich agreement (ce n’est pas magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre) or Lady Dorothy Neville’s protest to the cook (‘you cannot serve cod and salmon’) are wit because the familiar gnomae which they appositely pervert make part of the whole linguistic situation in which they were said. Pun, half pun, assonance, epigram (in the modern sense) and distorted proverb or quotation are all witty. Hence of all the excellences prose can have it is the least translatable. This is the dangerous sense of wit and I shall refer to it henceforward as wit (d.s.). But besides wit (d.s.) and wit-ingenium we also need a name for the word’s earliest sense, for wit meaning mind, rationality, good sense. I call this wit (old sense).
There is no doubt that wit (d.s.) was current in the seventeenth century, but it is impossible to determine exactly when it arose. The reason for this impossibility is clear enough. A man’s intelligence (wit (old sense)) impresses other people most and is most talked about if he displays it in conversation. But no way of displaying it in conversation will be so obvious or so attractive to most hearers as repartee, epigram, and general dexterity—wit (d.s.). The evidence on which men attribute wit (old sense) to anyone will therefore very often be the wit (d.s.) of his talk. When wit (d.s.) has fully established itself in the language a very careful speaker might make a distinction between the quality shown in conversation and the general calibre of mind inferred from it. But not one speaker in a thousand has any care for such things, and until the quality in question has a name the distinction cannot easily be put into words. Hence there will be a period during which such a remark as ‘My lord showed prodigious wit in his discourse to-day’ is ambiguous. Does it mean ‘The wit (d.s.) of what he said was prodigious’, or ‘What he said showed (proved) that he has a prodigious wit (old sense)’? The speaker will not know and will not have raised the question.
We are told that Benedick and Beatrice ‘never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them’. No one doubts that what they displayed in fact was wit (d.s.). But is the speaker using the word in the dangerous sense, or does he only mean they set their brains at one another, skirmish with their wit (old sense)?
So with Falstaff’s ‘I am not only witty myself but the cause that wit is in other men’. So long as wit had its Old Sense, witty of course meant wise; as it does, though mockingly, in Tamburlaine (I, iv, 686), ‘Are you the witty king of Persia?’ Is Falstaff calling himself wise? or spirituel? The wit displayed by the other men was, as the context shows, the ‘invention’ of things that ‘tend to laughter’. This too could be wit in more than one sense.
There is, once more, no doubt about the fact of Falstaff’s wit (d.s.), and little doubt that his wit (d.s.) is, in part anyway, the thing he is referring to, the ground on which he bases his claim to be witty. But this does not prove that wit in his language already has the dangerous sense.
We may clarify the situation from a parallel case where the two senses of a word admit different spellings. A lady may show her courtesy by making a curtsy; more briefly, may show her courtesy by her curtsy. The fact that someone then speaks of her courtesy on a particular occasion, when her courtesy was wholly contained in her curtsy (she said nothing, and did nothing except making a curtsy), would not prove that courtesy had for him the sense curtsy. It is our distinction between word’s meaning and speaker’s meaning. From one point of view the speaker means by ‘her courtesy’ nothing more or less or other than her curtsy. But that need not be the sense, nor even a sense, of courtesy in his language. So here. What the Shakespearian characters are referring to may be in fact wit (d.s.) so that this becomes the speaker’s meaning of the word at that moment. It need not yet be the word’s meaning.
But clearly it soon will be one of the word’s meanings. If that particular gesture we now call a curtsy becomes the obligatory method by which every lady shows her courtesy on entering a room—so that girls who forget it will be reprimanded by a mother’s or duenna’s sharp ‘Remember your courtesy’ (i.e. your good manners)—then, with or without change of spelling, a new sense of courtesy in which it means simply this gesture, is almost bound to arise, and its very connection with cortesia in general may be forgotten. Similarly, if most of those who praise a man’s wit are in fact, inside that context, referring to his wit (d.s.), this is almost bound to become a new and distinguishable meaning of the word. The ambiguity of the Shakespearian passages is just what one might expect; the sort of thing that happens if we catch a new sense at the very moment when it is first branching off the parent stem.
Two less ambiguous passages illustrate a faint movement of the word away from its old sense in a direction which might finally lead to its meaning wit (d.s.). ‘Sharp and subtle discourses of wit’, says Hooker, ‘procure great applause, but being laid in the balance with that which the habit of sound experience plainly delivereth, they are over weighed’ (V, vii, I). Burton defines wit as ‘acumen or subtilty, sharpness of invention’ (I, I, 2, 10). Neither amounts to much. But the idea of levity (of the peu solide) which is there in Hooker, and that of sharpness in Burton, have perhaps some small significance. Wit is becoming something less staid and tranquil than intelligence.
It is in the second half of the seventeenth century that we find the most abundant and amusing evidences of the word’s drift towards its dangerous sense; amusing because they consist almost entirely of disclaimers. Everyone starts telling us what the word does not mean; a sure proof that it is beginning to mean just that.
1650: Davenant, describing something ‘which is not, yet is accompted, Wit’, includes in it ‘what are commonly called Conceits, things that sound like the knacks or toyes of ordinary Epigrammatists’.
1664: Flecknoe warns us that wit must not include ‘clenches (puns), quibbles, gingles, and such like trifles’.
1667: Dryden tells us that wit does not consist of ‘the jerk or sting of an epigram nor the seeming contradiction of a poor antithesis . . . nor the jingle of a more poor paranomasia’.
1668: Shadwell corrects those ignorant people who believed ‘that all the Wit in Playes consisted in bringing two persons upon the Stage to break Jests, and to bob one another, which they call Repartie’.
1672: Dryden classifies ‘clenches’ as ‘The lowest and most grovelling kind of wit’.
1700: Dryden says that ‘the vulgar judges . . . call conceits and jingles wit’.
Clearly the thing which they deny to be wit, or admit only to be ‘the lowest and most grovelling’ species of it, is wit (d.s.). And this, as I have said, proves that wit (d.s.) was increasingly the current meaning of the word wit. To be sure, Dryden’s reference to ‘vulgar judges’, and perhaps the language of all these critics, might lead us to believe that a group of cultivated speakers were defending their own usage against a vulgarism perpetrated only by ‘lesser breeds without the law’. But it is no such thing. They themselves used wit in the sense they reprobate. Watch Dryden off his guard when he is just using, not thinking about, the word.
‘As for comedy,’ he says, ‘repartee is one of its chief graces; the greatest pleasure of the audience is a chace of wit, kept up on both sides and swiftly managed.’ Or again, ‘They say the quickness of repartees in argumentative scenes receives an ornament from verse. Now what is more unreasonable than to imagine that a man should not only light upon the wit, but the rhyme too, upon the sudden.’ The ‘copiousness’ of Ovid’s ‘wit’ was such that he ‘often writ too pointedly for his subject’. Only intolerable straining could give wit anything but its dangerous sense in such passages. What Dryden probably believed, and would certainly have wished others to believe, about his use of the word is not true. ‘Out of school’ he often talked like the ‘vulgar judges’.
Often, not always, wit-ingenium and wit (d.s.) were both equally parts of his vocabulary; and so, I suspect, was wit (old sense) too. The situation is common enough. You and I at nine o’clock any morning, poring over the pencilled washing bill presented by our bedmakers, complain ‘I can’t read the last figure’. At ten, during a supervision, we mention a figure (of rhetoric). At our elevenses we say to a friend that the young woman who has just left the tap-room has a fine figure. So then. Dryden, joined on his way to the coffee-house by an elderly friend, and asked whether it were not true that my Lord Clarendon was a man of great wit, would at once understand wit (old sense). Seated an hour later among Templars and poets and discussing the nature of poetry he would use wit-ingenium. Yet, before the talk was out, if some bright youngster delighted them with brilliant repartee, he might praise that youngster’s wit (d.s.). He would slip in and out of the different meanings without noticing it. It is all ordinary and comfortable until one of the meanings happens to become strategically important in some controversy. A bad linguistic situation then results.
VI. THE AFFLICTIONS OF ‘WIT-INGENIUM’
The growing currency of wit (d.s.) would in any circumstances have endangered wit-ingenium. But the latter sense suffered from an internal weakness as well. It was a term of laudation; by attributing wit-ingenium to a man or calling him (in that sense) ‘a wit’, you praise him. This brings the distinction between word’s meaning and speaker’s meaning into play in a very acute form.
A Hottentot and a Dane might hammer out an agreed definition of beauty, and in that sense, lexically, ‘mean’ the same by it. Yet the one might continue, in a different sense, to ‘mean’ blubber lips, woolly hair, and a fat paunch while the other ‘meant’ a small mouth, silky hair, ‘white and red’, and a slender waist. And two men who agree about the (lexical) ‘meaning’ of comic would not necessarily find the same things funny.
This is even more obviously true of a word like genius. It may lexically ‘mean’ to all of us the mental quality, character, or state which produces, say, great literature. But we do not all think the same sorts of literature great. We shall therefore attribute genius to quite different authors, and we shall include in our conception of genius different mental powers. Lexical agreement can co-exist with fierce disagreements about denotation.
In just this way there was, during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a wide agreement among critics—‘in school’, when they were on their guard—on the meaning of wit. They agreed that the ingenium sense was its true or proper meaning. Never, never (till, next moment, they forgot) would they consent to the meaning wit (d.s.). No; this noble word meant the essential faculty of the poet, the inner cause of excellence in writing. But while this lexical agreement still lasted taste began to change. Wit was the cause of excellence, but people began to think different things excellent. And no one was ready to give up the magic word wit. However little the new poetry resembled the old, those who claimed excellence for it claimed that it showed wit. As new shopkeepers who have ‘bought the goodwill’ of their predecessor’s business keep his name for a while over their door, so the literary innovators want to retain the prestige, almost the ‘selling-power’, of the consecrated word. It occurred to no one to say ‘The school of wit is over; we offer excellence of a different kind.’ They preferred to say ‘What we offer is “the real” or “true” wit’. Hence the constant, and linguistically barren, definings and re-definings of the word. They are merely tactical. The word has to be stretched and contracted so as to cover whatever you and your friends write or enjoy and to exclude what the enemy writes or enjoys.
Cowley ‘meant’ by wit the essential gift of the poet. But then, for him, the essential gift was the power to produce that concordia discors which has been called ‘Metaphysical Wit’ ever since Johnson’s day:
In a true piece of Wit all things must be,
Yet all things there agree,
As in the Ark, join’d without force or strife,
All Creatures dwelt; all creatures that had Life.
Dryden also ‘meant’ by wit the essential gift of the poet. And in 1667 he defined this gift as ‘the faculty of imagination . . . which, like a nimble spaniel, beats over and ranges through the field of memory’. His ideal is already a little different from Cowley’s; there is less emphasis on the discors, the heterogeneity of the things the poet unites. But ten years later he and Cowley are leagues apart, each ‘hull down’ to the other. Wit is now ‘propriety of thoughts and words’. He produces this with some self-congratulation. He liked it so well that he repeated it in 1685.
This definition, as Addison observes, would commit us to the consequence, ‘Euclid was the greatest wit that ever set pen to paper’. It may also be asserted almost safely that no human being, when using the word wit to talk with and not talking about the word wit, has ever meant by it anything of the sort. Nor does Dryden himself anywhere make the slightest use of this definition; there is perhaps none to be made, since it leaves no room for any distinction in wit between the greatest literature in the world and any competent piece of draughting. We might tax our brains for a long time to explain how a man of Dryden’s stature could have said anything so false to all actual usage, so useless, and so unsupported, if we did not realise its tactical function. He is thinking neither about what the word actually meant nor about what it could, in the interests of clarity and precision and general utility, be made to mean. It is a valuable vogue-word. Therefore a strong point in the critical battle. He wants to deny the enemy the use of it. What use, if any, his own side can make of it hereafter may be left for consideration. ‘Propriety’ is a garrison word; thrown in to exclude Ovid and Cowley and Cleveland from the highest poetical honours.
Pope also meant by wit the essential gift of the poet. But with him the wheel has come almost full circle. Wit, for Cowley, depends on the unexpected thought which yokes together ‘things by nature most unneighbourly’. For Pope it is the perfect expression of well-worn thoughts, the pellucidity and finality which rescue the obvious from neglect—
True Wit is Nature to advantage dress’d,
What oft was thought but ne’er so well express’d.
But the tell-tale word is ‘true’. No one describes as ‘true happiness’ the life we all enjoy; it is just ‘happiness’. No one who is being agreeable calls himself our ‘true friend’; freedom and what Hegelians call ‘true freedom’ are almost mutually exclusive. If wit were the current name for the thing Pope describes, then he would have called it simply wit, not true wit. The adjective shows that he is twisting the noun into a sense it never naturally bore.
In the story I have to tell Dryden and Pope cut a sufficiently poor figure; it is therefore only fair to add at once that this did not come about through any lack of intelligence. Both show elsewhere that they knew, and could have done, much better. ‘Ben Jonson . . . always writ properly and in the character required; and I will not contest further with my friends who call that wit; it being very certain that even folly itself, well represented is wit in a larger signification’. Here we exchange dogmatism about what the word ought to mean for distinction between two of the things it actually meant. And Pope can write
Thus Wit, like faith, by each man is applied
To one small sect, and all are damn’d beside.
In his own definition of ‘true wit’ he wrote from within one of the sects and on its behalf. Here he stands above the conflict; for a moment.
VII. HAPPY ENDING
These tactical definitions, having served their momentary purpose, were dropped by their inventors and rejected by other speakers. If they had any influence on the history of the language, they probably helped to hasten the death of the ingenium sense by diminishing its utility. But even this is very doubtful.
The ingenium sense had an external enemy in the increasing popularity of the dangerous sense. But it also had what we may call an internal enemy. Lexically, as I have said, wit-ingenium had long meant the essential gift of the poet. That was the word’s meaning. And the speaker’s meaning, of course, was the gift required for producing the sort of poetry the speaker approved. And ever since the last quarter of the sixteenth century most people had approved a pointed, figured, conceited sort of poetry. Gascoigne and the young Shakespeare and Du Bartas had not, any more than Cowley and Cleveland and Butler, been offering ‘what oft was thought’. Nor had Ovid, nor the young Dryden, nor always the young Milton. Modern critics rightly distinguish the Elizabethan from the ‘Metaphysical’ conceit; but all these poets, set against either medieval or eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets, are a continuous dynasty. And by the time the mature Dryden and the young Pope are fighting for the recognition of a new kind of excellence, the long reign of that dynasty has associated wit-ingenium indissolubly with one kind of poetic ingenium. The speaker’s meaning has become the word’s meaning. The effort to appropriate the word wit to the new excellence is hopeless, just as now it would be hopeless to try to extend the word tragedy to cover plays (like the Helena, the Iphigenia in Tauris, or the Cid) that have a happy ending. It has been too long associated with deaths in Act V. So wit, as a term of praise for poetry, had been too long associated with a particular kind of poetry. And it was useful because it described the virtues of that kind, not of poetry in general. In this sense the meaning that survived the critical controversies may be called wit-ingenium demoted, the thing described by Addison, when, correcting Locke, he says that wit is not merely ‘the assemblage of ideas . . . wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity’, because ‘every resemblance of ideas is not that which we call wit, unless it be such an one that gives delight and surprise’. After that comes the perfection of Johnson, ‘a kind of discordia concors, a combination of dissimilar images, a discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike’. This belongs to a different world from the Popian and Drydenian definitions. Here is a man with no axe to grind, a man defining what he believes (no doubt rightly) to be the actual use of the word in one of its senses.
In one of its sense. For wit-ingenium even when thus demoted is still not quite synonymous with wit (d.s.). But they certainly have more in common with each other than either has with wit (old sense) or with any of the pseudo-senses the controversial critics gave the word. Both display the unexpected, the lively, the dexterous. Both, if disliked, are liable to be called ‘cleverness’, or ‘fireworks’. Thus, unforeseen, a very happy linguistic situation has come about. Outside literary circles wit means wit (d.s.). But those within the literary circles, while fully accepting wit (d.s.), have no difficulty in accepting the word wit (guarded with some such addition as metaphysical or baroque) as a name for the characteristic quality of Donne and Herbert. And most of us do not feel that the one wit and the other are what Aristotle calls ‘things accidentally homonymous’. We have rather the conception of wit as something with a very wide range (from the Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day to The Importance of Being Earnest) but also with a continuity throughout that range. Thus, after terrible danger, wit becomes once more a really useful word, as useful as it was in Anglo-Saxon. It enables us to distinguish; to point at this, and therefore not at that. In reaching this happy condition the word has, no doubt, had to abandon its large and lofty sense of ingenium. What has been (usefully) appropriated to one kind of literary excellence or even to one area of related excellences, cannot go on meaning literary excellence in general. As for its still more general meaning, its old sense, that survives in expressions like ‘God give you wit’. It is enabled to do so because it occurs in wholly un-literary contexts and therefore never clashes with wit as a critical term. Fallentis semita vitae; it lives by keeping out of its rival’s way.