Word: wits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...take only so much. With nearly every article written in the hortatory mood, one longs for a descriptive piece, a reminiscence or a burst of wit (such as have appeared in previous issues). For though the October Current covers a rich variety of subjects, its tone remains lamentably uniform. Those interested in hearing the views of articulate Catholic intellectuals will still find the journal valuable; but the present issue should be read in small doses...
Rogers was a terror in the courtroom. His pet technique was ridicule. Peering disdainfully at a witness through his lorgnette, flashing his mordant wit, he often provoked the jury to laughter-a near-sure sign he had won his case...
...paradox was: "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person; give him a mask and he will tell you the truth." But there are rare crises when the mask is torn away and truth spills from the naked soul. The mask of England's sharpest wit and most industrious idler fell away in Reading Gaol, after the decade's most scandalous trial had resulted in his conviction for pederasty. The Wilde of this epistolary confession, here published for the first time in full (though it has been published previously in heavily edited versions...
...reader observes Wilde's polite overtures to literary elders ("I take the liberty of sending you a short monograph. . . . It is little more than a stray sheet from a boy's diary"), watches with tolerance as the young wit, in an endless series of newspaper debates, carefully builds his reputation for outrageousness, and follows the unpredictable triumph of his American lecture tour, as the 27-year-old aesthete, dressed in velvet doublet and knee breeches, lectures enthusiastic Leadville miners on Italian art (Pearson's biography helps explain the Leadville success: it seems that Wilde wowed the miners...
...were not so witty as his talk. Rather, the letters confirm Pearson's estimate of Wilde as a man utterly without meanness of spirit, the kindest and most gracious of egomaniacs. Constantly he is seen doing a kindness, praising another author, gracefully laughing off an insult. His own wit, unlike that of his artist friend Whistler, almost never dealt in insults (except when he was insulting Whistler; Wilde observed in one letter that Whistler's only really original artistic opinions were those in which he claimed superiority to other artists...