Oscar Wilde's saying

"It is not uncommon to commiserate with a stranger's misfortune, but it takes a really fine nature to appreciate a friend's succes"— Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde’s saying, “It is not uncommon to commiserate with a stranger's misfortune, but it takes a really fine nature to appreciate a friend's success” impresses me because it concisely reveals the truth of sophisticated human nature in a simple but powerful sentence. The power of Wilde’s saying stems from the structure, the tone and the diction.

The literal interpretation for this aphorism is that people tend to be compassionate with the unfortunate person, even if it is stranger, but may not be truly happy with their friends’ success. In this saying, Wilde is trying to convey the truth that human nature is intrinsically imperfect, which can be proved by the fact that jealousy of others is the weakness of most people.
The structure of the sentence involves both opposition and balance. First Wilde concedes that for most people, either good nature of bad nature, show mercy to the unfortunate. Then the latter part of the saying transits into arguing that only people with food nature can truly appreciate friends’ success. The conceding and transition express opposite attitude towards human nature. The conceding part seems to praise the kindness of people but the transition raises the doubt towards that kindness. Can we treat our friends as good as to an unfortunate stranger? The contrasting attitude makes the whole argument balanced because the argument avoids going to any extreme, neither admitting only the positive sides of human nature nor denying all positive sides of human nature, and thus the saying becomes very persuasive by involving the audiences to reflect on themselves when they think about the doubt raised by Wilde after accepting the conceding part at the beginning. Besides the contrasting attitude, the balance of the structure is also reflected in the corresponding words in the conceding and transition parts. For example, the counterpart for the word “commiserate” is “appreciate”; “misfortune” is corresponding with “success”; “stranger” is versus “friends”. The power of the saying also derives from such balanced structure, the symmetry of language, which impresses audiences with the beauty and stability of the sentence.

Unlike some other saying which may directly and sarcastically criticize human nature, Wilde’s saying is relatively mild in both the conceding part and the transition part. In conceding, Wilde prepares for his following argument in transition by arousing the audiences’ interest to keep on reading rather than saying something that is not easy for the audiences to accept at the beginning. For the transition part, rather than saying most people can not appreciate a friend’s success, Wilde adopts a more euphemistic way to express, stating that only people with fine nature can truly appreciate friends’ success. In this way, although raising doubts towards human nature, Wilde also leaves some hope for people because he does not utterly deny that people can appreciate friends. It is a mild tone, but it is more powerful than a harsh tone. Harsh tone will expel the audiences without enabling them to think about the argument carefully, while a mild tone can keep the audience and let them move on while thinking about the deep meaning of the argument. It is natural that people are more inclined to accept an argument that has been examined by themselves than to accept a direct and harsh argument. It is also the power of a mild argument.

The idea of Wilde’s saying is not new, but the diction makes the saying much persuasive and impressive than a cliché. Some words used by Wilde, uncommon, commiserate, appreciate, are high diction level words and some other words, like stranger, friend, fine nature are conversational level words. High level words give a sense of authority while the conversational level words are easy to understand. The combination of diction level, together with the balanced structure, makes the saying very convincing and objective because the sentence would be neither too serious nor too causal with different diction levels.