W

Wit The term first comes into critical importance applied to literature in the seventeenth century, though it was used in the previous century in a general way to denote liveliness and brilliance of conversation. ‘Witty Jack Donne’ is an Elizabethan man-about-town, but when he turns up in Carew’s ‘Elegie upon the Death of the Deane of Pauls’ (1623) as

a King, that rul’d as hee thought fit The universall Monarchy of wit

we are moving into a time when wit was a powerful if disputed critical concept or basis for value-judgement, though such a time was more surely after the Restoration. The clue to the reason for this may lie in a meaning of wit which is assigned to the Restoration years: ‘the seat of consciousness or thought, the mind’. Dryden, living in this critical climate, defined wit as ‘sharpness of conceit’. His emphasis is on selfconsciousness on the part of both the poet and the audience. It is no accident, then, that at this time ‘the wits’ emerged – a group conscious of their nimble minds and cultural awareness. Apart from selfconsciousness itself, there are several other characteristics of Restoration and eighteenth-century wit that come from such an in-group attitude. Comparison is stressed. The wit demands to be used in a context of accepted ideas and reading, though the opposite side of this is also valued, namely unexpected justness. Cleverness and quickness are parts of it, too, and the idea of the marshalled disposition of material. Lastly, ideas are important: the most famous characterization of wit, echoed by later critics and

poets, is that of the most influential philosopher of the age, John Locke, who defines it as ‘the Assemblage of Ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety’.