others. The daily fabric of the life of irony is woven out of our
critical communings with ourselves and the personalities of our friend,
and the people with whom we come in contact. The ironist, by adopting
another’s point of view and making it his own in order to carry light
and air into it, literally puts himself in the other man’s place.
Irony is thus the truest sympathy. It is no cheap way of ridiculing an
opponent by putting on his clothes and making fun of him. The ironist
has no opponent, but only a friend. And in his irony he is helping that
friend to reveal himself. That half-seriousness, that solemn treatment
of the trivial and trivial treatment of the solemn which is the pattern
of the ironist’s talk is but his way of exhibiting the unexpected
contrasts and shadings that he sees to be requisite to the keenest
understanding of the situation. The ironist borrows and exchanges
and appropriates ideas and gives them a new setting in juxtaposition
with others, but he never burlesques or caricatures or exaggerates
them. If an idea is absurd, the slightest change of environment will
show that absurdity. The mere transference of an idea to another’s
mouth will bring to light all its hidden meaninglessness. It needs no
extraneous aid. If an idea is hollow, it will show itself cowering
against the intellectual background of the ironist like the puny,
shivering thing it is. If a point of view cannot bear being adopted
by another person, if it is not hardy enough to be transplanted, it
has little right to exist at all. This world is no hothouse for ideas
and attitudes. Too many outworn ideas are skulking in dark retreats,
sequestered from the light; every man has great sunless stretches in
his soul where base prejudices lurk and flourish. On these the white
light of irony is needed to play. And it delights the ironist to watch
them shrivel and decay under that light. The little tabooed regions of
well-bred people, the “things we never mention,” the basic biases and
assumptions that underlie the lives and thinking of every class and
profession, our second-hand dogmas and phrases,--all these live and
thrive because they have never been transplanted, or heard from the
lips of another. The dictum that “the only requisites for success are
honesty and merit,” which we applaud so frantically from the lips of
the successful, becomes a ghastly irony in the mouth of an unemployed
workingman. There would be a frightful mortality of points of view
could we have a perfectly free exchange such as this. Irony is just
this temporary borrowing and lending. Many of our cherished ideals
would lose half their validity were they put bodily into the mouths
of the less fortunate. But if irony destroys some ideals it builds up
others. It tests ideals by their social validity, by their general
interchangeability among all sorts of people and the world, but if it
leaves the foundations of many in a shaky condition and renders more
simply provisional, those that it does leave standing are imperishably
founded in the common democratic experience of all men.
To the ironist it seems that the irony is not in the speaking but in
the things themselves. He is a poor ironist who would consciously
distort, or attempt to make another’s idea appear in any light except
its own. Absurdity is an intrinsic quality of so many things that they
only have to be touched to reveal it. The deadliest way to annihilate
the unoriginal and the insincere is to let it speak for itself. Irony
is this letting things speak for themselves and hang themselves by
their own rope. Only, it repeats the words after the speaker, and
adjusts the rope. It is the commanding touch of a comprehending
personality that dissolves the seemingly tough husk of the idea.
The ironical method might be compared to the acid that develops a
photographic plate. It does not distort the image, but merely brings
clearly to the light all that was implicit in the plate before. And
if it brings the picture to the light with values reversed, so does
irony revel in a paradox, which is simply a photographic negative of
the truth, truth with the values reversed. But turn the negative ever
so slightly so that the light falls upon it, and the perfect picture
appears in all its true values and beauty. Irony, we may say then, is
the photography of the soul. The picture goes through certain changes
in the hands of the ironist, but without these changes the truth would
be simply a blank, unmeaning surface. The photograph is a synonym for
deadly accuracy. Similarly the ironist insists always on seeing things
as they are. He is a realist, whom the grim satisfaction of seeing the
truth compensates for any sordidness that it may bring along with it.
Things as they are, thrown against the background of things as they
ought to be,--this is the ironist’s vision. I should like to feel that
the vision of the religious man is not too often things as they are,
thrown against the background of things as they ought not to be.
The ironist is the only man who makes any serious attempt to
distinguish between fresh and second-hand experience. Our minds are so
unfortunately arranged that all sorts of beliefs can be accepted and
propagated quite independently of any rational or even experimental
basis at all. Nature does not seem to care very much whether our ideas
are true or not, as long as we get on through life safely enough.
And it is surprising on what an enormous amount of error we can get
along comfortably. We cannot be wrong on every point or we should
cease to live, but so long as we are empirically right in our habits,
the truth or falsity of our ideas seems to have little effect upon
our comfort. We are born into a world that is an inexhaustible store
of ready-made ideas, stored up in tradition, in books, and in every
medium of communication between our minds and others. All we have to
do is to accept this predigested nourishment, and ask no questions.
We could live a whole life without ever making a really individual
response, without providing ourselves out of our own experience with
any of the material that our mind works on. Many of us seem to be just
this kind of spiritual parasite. We may learn and absorb and grow, up
to a certain point. But eventually something captures us: we become
encased in a suit of armor, and invulnerable to our own experience. We
have lost the faculty of being surprised. It is this encasing that the
ironist fears, and it is the ironical method that he finds the best for
preventing it. Irony keeps the waters in motion, so that the ice never
has a chance to form. The cut-and-dried life is easy to form because
it has no sense of contrast; everything comes to one on its own terms,
vouching for itself, and is accepted or rejected on its own good looks,
and not for its fitness and place in the scheme of things.
This is the courage and this the sympathy of irony. Have they not
a beauty of their own comparable in excellence with the paler glow
of religious virtue? And the understanding of the ironist although
aggressive and challenging has its justification, too. For he is mad
to understand the world, to get to the bottom of other personalities.
That is the reason for his constant classification. The ironist is
the most dogmatic of persons. To understand you he must grasp you
firmly, or he must pin you down definitely; if he accidentally nails
you fast to a dogma that you indignantly repudiate, you must blame
his enthusiasm and not his method. Dogmatism is rarely popular, and
the ironist of course suffers. It hurts people’s eyes to see a strong
light, and the pleasant mist-land of ideas is much more emotionally
warming than the clear, sunny region of transmissible phrases. How the
average person wriggles and squirms under these piercing attempts to
corner his personality! “Tell me what you mean!” or “What do you see
in it?” are the fatal questions that the ironist puts, and who shall
censure him if he does display the least trace of malicious delight as
he watches the half-formed baby ideas struggle towards the light, or
scurry around frantically to find some decent costume in which they may
appear in public?
The judgments of the ironist are often discounted as being too
sweeping. But he has a valid defense. Lack of classification is
annihilation of thought. Even the newest philosophy will admit that
classification is a necessary evil. Concepts are indispensable,--and
yet each concept falsifies. The ironist must have as large a stock as
possible, but he must have a stock. And even the unjust classification
is marvelously effective. The ironist’s name for his opponent is a
challenge to him. The more sweeping it is, the more stimulus it gives
him to repel the charge. He must explain just how he is unique and
individual in his attitude. And in this explanation he reveals and
discovers all that the ironist wishes to know about him. A handful of
epithets is thus the ammunition of the ironist. He must call things
by what seem to him to be their right names. In a sense, the ironist
assumes the prisoner to be guilty until he proves himself innocent;
but it is always in order that justice may be done, and that he may
come to learn the prisoner’s soul and all the wondrous things that are
contained there.
It is this passion for comprehension that explains the ironist’s
apparently scandalous propensity to publicity. Nothing seems to him too
sacred to touch, nothing too holy for him to become witty about. There
are no doors locked to him, there is nothing that can make good any
claim of resistance to scrutiny. His free and easy manner of including
everything within the sweep of his vision is but his recognition,
however, of the fact that nothing is really so serious as we think it
is, and nothing quite so petty. The ironist will descend in a moment
from a discussion of religion to a squabble over a card-game, and he
will defend himself with the reflection that religion is after all a
human thing and must be discussed in the light of everyday living,
and that the card-game is an integral part of life, reveals the
personalities of the players--and his own to himself--and being worthy
of his interest is worthy of his enthusiasm. The ironist is apt to
test things by their power to interest as much as by their nobility,
and if he sees the incongruous and inflated in the lofty, so he sees
the significant in the trivial and raises it from its low degree.
Many a mighty impostor does he put down from his seat. The ironist is
the great intellectual democrat, in whose presence and before whose
law all ideas and attitudes stand equal. In his world there is no
privileged caste, no aristocracy of sentiments to be reverenced, or
segregated systems of interests to be tabooed. Nothing human is alien
to the ironist; the whole world is thrown open naked to the play of his
judgment.
In the eyes of its detractors, irony has all the vices of democracy.
Its publicity seems mere vulgarity, its free hospitality seems to shock
all ideas of moral worth. The ironist is but a scoffer, they say, with
weapon leveled eternally at all that is good and true and sacred. The
adoption of another’s point of view seems little better than malicious
dissimulation,--the repetition of others’ words, an elaborate mockery;
the ironist’s eager interest seems a mere impudence or a lack of
finer instincts; his interest in the trivial, the last confession of
a mean spirit; and his love of classifying, a proof of his poverty
of imaginative resource. Irony, in other words, is thought to be
synonymous with cynicism. But the ironist is no cynic. His is a kindly,
not a sour interest in human motives. He wants to find out how the
human machine runs, not to prove that it is a worthless, broken-down
affair. He accepts it as it comes, and if he finds it curiously feeble
and futile in places, blame not him but the nature of things. He finds
enough rich compensation in the unexpected charm that he constantly
finds himself eliciting. The ironist sees life steadily and sees it
whole; the cynic only a distorted fragment.
If the ironist is not cynic, neither is he merely a dealer in satire,
burlesque and ridicule. Irony may be the raw material, innocent in
itself but capable of being put to evil uses. But it involves neither
the malice of satire, nor the horse-play of burlesque, nor the stab of
ridicule. Irony is infinitely finer and more delicate and impersonal.
The satirist is always personal and concrete, but the ironist deals
with general principles, and broad aspects of human nature. It cannot
be too much emphasized that the function of the ironist is not to
make fun of people, but to give their souls an airing. The ironist
is a judge on the bench, giving men a public hearing. He is not an
aggressive spirit who goes about seeking whom he may devour, or a
spiritual lawyer who courts litigation, but the judge before whom file
all the facts of his experience, the people he meets, the opinions
he hears or reads, his own attitudes and prepossessions. If any are
convicted they are self-convicted. The judge himself is passive,
merciful, lenient. There is judgment, but no punishment. Or rather, the
trial itself is the punishment. Now satire is all that irony is not.
The satirist is the aggressive lawyer, fastening upon particular people
and particular qualities. But irony is no more personal than the sun
that sends his flaming darts into the world. The satirist is a purely
practical man, with a business instinct, bent on the main chance and
the definite object. He is often brutal, and always overbearing; the
ironist never. Irony may wound from the very fineness and delicacy of
its attack, but the wounding is incidental. The sole purpose of the
satirist and the burlesquer is to wound, and they test their success
by the deepness of the wound. But irony tests its own by the amount
of generous light and air it has set flowing through an idea or a
personality, and the broad significance it has revealed in neglected
things.
If irony is not brutal, neither is it merely critical and destructive.
The world has some reason, it is true, to complain against the rather
supercilious judiciousness of the ironist. “Who are you to judge us?”
it cries. The world does not like to feel the scrutinizing eyes of the
ironist as he sits back in his chair; does not like to feel that the
ironist is simply studying it and amusing himself at its expense. It
is uneasy, and acts sometimes as if it did not have a perfectly clear
conscience. To this uncomfortableness the ironist can retort,--“What
is it that you are afraid to have known about you?” If the judgment
amuses him, so much the worse for the world. But if the idea of the
ironist as judge implies that his attitude is wholly detached, wholly
objective, it is an unfortunate metaphor. For he is as much part and
parcel of the human show as any of the people he studies. The world
is no stage, with the ironist as audience. His own personal reactions
with the people about him form all the stuff of his thoughts and
judgments. He has a personal interest in the case; his own personality
is inextricably mingled in the stream of impressions that flows
past him. If the ironist is destructive, it is his own world that
he is destroying; if he is critical, it is his own world that he is
criticizing. And his irony is his critique of life.
This is the defense of the ironist against the charge that he has
a purely æsthetic attitude towards life. Too often, perhaps, the
sparkling clarity of his thought, the play of his humor, the easy
sense of superiority and intellectual command that he carries off,
make his irony appear as rather the æsthetic nourishment of his life
than an active way of doing and being. His rather detached air makes
him seem to view people as means, not ends in themselves. With his
delight in the vivid and poignant he is prone to see picturesqueness
in the sordid, and tolerate evils that he should condemn. For all
his interest and activity, it is said that he does not really care.
But this æsthetic taint to his irony is really only skin-deep. The
ironist is ironical not because he does not care, but because he cares
too much. He is feeling the profoundest depths of the world’s great
beating, laboring heart, and his playful attitude towards the grim and
sordid is a necessary relief from the tension of too much caring. It
is his salvation from unutterable despair. The terrible urgency of the
reality of poverty and misery and exploitation would be too strong upon
him. Only irony can give him a sense of proportion, and make his life
fruitful and resolute. It can give him a temporary escape, a slight
momentary reconciliation, a chance to draw a deep breath of resolve
before plunging into the fight. It is not a palliative so much as a
perspective. This is the only justification of the æsthetic attitude,
that, if taken provisionally, it sweetens and fortifies. It is only
deadly when adopted as absolute. The kind of æsthetic irony that Pater
and Omar display is a paralyzed, half-seeing, half-caring reflection
on life,--a tame, domesticated irony with its wings cut, an irony that
furnishes a justification and a command to inaction. It is the result
not of exquisitely refined feelings, but of social anæsthesia. Their
irony, cut off from the great world of men and women and boys and girls
and their intricate interweavings and jostlings and incongruities,
turns pale and sickly and numb. The ironist has no right to see beauty
in things unless he really cares. The æsthetic sense is harmless only
when it is both ironical and social.
Irony is thus a cure for both optimism and pessimism. Nothing is so
revolting to the ironist as the smiling optimist, who testifies in his
fatuous heedlessness to the desirability of this best of all possible
worlds. But the ironist has always an incorrigible propensity to see
the other side. The hopeless maladjustment of too many people to their
world, of their bondage in the iron fetters of circumstance,--all
this is too glaring for the ironist’s placidity. When he examines
the beautiful picture, too often the best turns worst to him. But if
optimism is impossible to the ironist, so is pessimism. The ironist
may have a secret respect for the pessimist,--he at least has felt
the bitter tang of life, and has really cared,--but he feels that
the pessimist lacks. For if the optimist is blind, the pessimist is
hypnotized. He is abnormally suggestive to evil. But clear-sighted
irony sees that the world is too big and multifarious to be evil
at heart. Something beautiful and joyous lurks even in the most
hapless,--a child’s laugh in a dreary street, a smile on the face of a
weary woman. It is this saving quality of irony that both optimist and
pessimist miss. And since plain common sense tells us that things are
never quite so bad or quite so good as they seem, the ironist carries
conviction into the hearts of men in their best moments.
The ironist is a person who counts in the world. He has all sorts of
unexpected effects on both the people he goes with and himself. His
is an insistent personality; he is as troublesome as a missionary.
And he is a missionary; for, his own purpose being a comprehension of
his fellows’ souls, he makes them conscious of their own souls. He
is a hard man; he will take nothing on reputation; he will guarantee
for himself the qualities of things. He will not accept the vouchers
of the world that a man is wise, or clever, or sincere, behind the
impenetrable veil of his face. He must probe until he elicits the
evidence of personality, until he gets at the peculiar quality which
distinguishes that individual soul. For the ironist is after all a
connoisseur in personality, and if his conversation partakes too
often of the character of cross-examination, it is only as a lover of
the beautiful, a possessor of taste, that he inquires. He does not
want to see people squirm, but he does want to see whether they are
alive or not. If he pricks too hard, it is not from malice, but merely
from error in his estimation of the toughness of their skins. What
people are inside is the most interesting question in the world to the
ironist. And in finding out he stirs them up. Many a petty doubting
spirit does he challenge and bully into a sort of self-respect. And
many a bag of wind does he puncture. But his most useful function
is this of stimulating thought and action. The ironist forces his
friends to move their rusty limbs and unhinge the creaking doors of
their minds. The world needs more ironists. Shut up with one’s own
thoughts, one loses the glow of life that comes from frank exchange
of ideas with many kinds of people. Too many minds are stuffy, dusty
rooms into which the windows have never been opened,--minds heavy
with their own crotchets, cluttered up with untested theories and
conflicting sympathies that have never got related in any social way.
The ironist blows them all helter-skelter, sweeps away the dust, and
sets everything in its proper place again. Your solid, self-respectful
mind, the ironist confesses he can do little with; it is not of his
world. He comes to freshen and tone up the stale minds. The ironist is
the great purger and cleanser of life. Irony is a sort of spiritual
massage, rubbing the souls of men. It may seem rough to some tender
souls, but it does not sere or scar them. The strong arm of the ironist
restores the circulation, and drives away anæmia.
On the ironist himself the effect of irony is even more invigorating.
We can never really understand ourselves without at least a touch of
irony. The interpretation of human nature without is a simple matter
in comparison with the comprehension of that complex of elations and
disgusts, inhibitions and curious irrational impulses that we call
ourselves. It is not true that by examining ourselves and coming to
an understanding of the way we behave we understand other people, but
that by the contrasts and little revelations of our friends we learn
to interpret ourselves. Introspection is no match for irony as a
guide. The most illuminating experience that we can have is a sudden
realization that had we been in the other person’s place we should have
acted precisely as he did. To the ironist this is no mere intellectual
conviction that, after all, none of us are perfect, but a vivid
emotional experience which has knit him with that other person in one
moment in a bond of sympathy that could have been acquired in no other
way. Those minds that lack the touch of irony are too little flexible,
or too heavily buttressed with self-esteem to make this sudden change
of attitudes. The ironist, one might almost say, gets his brotherhood
intuitively, feels the sympathy and the oneness in truth before he
thinks them. The ironist is the only man who really gets outside of
himself. What he does for other people,--that is, picking out a little
piece of their souls and holding it up for their inspection,--he does
for himself. He gets thus an objective view of himself. The unhealthy
indoor brooding of introspection is artificial and unproductive,
because it has no perspective or contrast. But the ironist with
his constant outdoor look sees his own foibles and humiliations in
the light of those of other people. He acquires a more tolerant,
half-amused, half-earnest attitude toward himself. His self-respect
is nourished by the knowledge that whatever things discreditable and
foolish and worthless he has done, he has seen them approximated by
others, and yet his esteem is kept safely pruned down by the recurring
evidence that nothing he has is unique. He is poised in life, ready to
soar or to walk as the occasion demands. He is pivoted, susceptible to
every stimulus, and yet chained so that he cannot be flung off into
space by his own centrifugal force.
Irony has the same sweetening and freshening effect on one’s own life
that it has on the lives of those who come in contact with it. It gives
one a command of one’s resources. The ironist practices a perfect
economy of material. For he must utilize his wealth constantly and
over and over again in various shapes and shadings. He may be poor
in actual material, but out of the contrast and arrangement of that
slender store he is able, like a kaleidoscope, to make a multifarious
variety of wonderful patterns. His current coin is, so to speak, kept
bright by constant exchange. He is infinitely richer than your opulent
but miserly minds that hoard up facts, and are impotent from the very
plethora of their accumulations.
Irony is essential to any real honesty. For dishonesty is at bottom
simply an attempt to save somebody’s face. But the ironist does not
want any faces saved, neither his own nor those of other people. To
save faces is to sophisticate human nature, to falsify the facts, and
miss a delicious contrast, an illuminating revelation of how people
act. So the ironist is the only perfectly honest man. But he suffers
for it by acquiring a reputation for impudence. His willingness to
bear the consequences of his own acts, his quiet insistence that
others shall bear consequences, seem like mere shamelessness, a lack
of delicate feeling for “situations.” But accustomed as he is to range
freely and know no fear nor favor, he despises this reserve as a
species of timidity or even hypocrisy. It is an irony itself that the
one temperament that can be said really to appreciate human nature, in
the sense of understanding it rightly, should be called impudent, and
it is another that it should be denounced as monstrously egotistical.
The ironical mind is the only truly modest mind, for its point of view
is ever outside itself. If it calls attention to itself, it is only as
another of those fascinating human creatures that pass ever by with
their bewildering, alluring ways. If it talks about itself, it is only
as a third person in whom all the talkers are supposed to be eagerly
interested. In this sense the ironist has lost his egotism completely.
He has rubbed out the line that separates his personality from the
rest of the world.
The ironist must take people very seriously, to spend so much time over
them. He must be both serious and sincere or he would not persist in
his irony and expose himself to so much misunderstanding. And since it
is not how people treat him, but simply how they act, that furnishes
the basis for his appreciation, the ironist finds it easy to forgive.
He has a way of letting the individual offense slide, in favor of a
deeper principle. In the act of being grossly misrepresented, he can
feel a pang of exasperated delight that people should be so dense; in
the act of being taken in, he can feel the cleverness of it all. He
becomes for the moment his enemy; and we can always forgive ourselves.
Even while he is being insulted, or outraged or ignored, he can feel,
“After all, this is what life is! This is the way we poor human
creatures behave!” The ironist is thus in a sense vicarious human
nature. Through that deep, anticipatory sympathy, he is kept clean from
hate or scorn.