Nature herself practised irony long before men had suffered from it
enough to endow literature with its expressive form. She has always
pretended to agree with our _penchant_ for pleasant but noxious habits,
and for a long time seems to be of our opinion that such ways of
living are of a capital kind; but eventually she is fatigued because
we misunderstand her, and exclaims by many a twinge, "You simpletons!
I meant just the reverse." "Why didn't you say so at first?" we reply,
as we smart to find we had been so prosaic when we thought we were so
romantic; but the smart etches the shapes of tragedy upon the soul.
The mind uses irony when it gravely states an opinion or sentiment
which is the opposite of its belief, with the moral purpose of
showing its real dissent from the opinion. It must therefore be done
with this wink from the purpose in it, so that it may not pass for
an acquiescence in an opposite sentiment. It may be done so well as
to deceive even the elect; and perhaps the ordinary mind complains
of irony as wanting in straightforwardness. There is a moment of
hesitation, when the mind stoops over this single intention with a
double appearance, and doubts upon which to settle as the real prey.
So that only carefully poised minds with the falcon's or the vulture's
glance can always discriminate rapidly enough to seize the point. In
this moment of action the pleasure of irony is developed, which arises
from a discovery of the contrast between the thing said and the thing
intended. And this pleasure is heightened when we observe the contrast
between the fine soul who means nobly, and his speaking as if he meant
to be ignoble. Then the ignoble thing is doubly condemned, first, by
having been briefly mistaken to be the real opinion of the speaker,
and then by the flash of recognition of the speaker's superiority.
Thackeray describes the high-minded intentions of Rebecca Sharp: "It
became naturally Rebecca's duty to make herself, as she said, agreeable
to her benefactors, and to gain their confidence to the utmost of her
power. Who can but admire this quality of gratitude in an unprotected
orphan? 'I am alone in the world,' said the friendless girl: 'well, let
us see if my wits cannot provide me with an honorable maintenance.'
Thus it was that our little romantic friend formed visions of the
future for herself; nor must we be scandalized that, in all her castles
in the air, a husband was the principal inhabitant. Of what else have
young ladies to think but husbands? Of what else do dear mammas think?
'I must be my own mamma,' said Rebecca." Thus the great author confides
to us his abhorrence of Vanity Fair.
In matters which are morally indifferent, irony is only a jesting which
is disguised by gravity; as when we apparently agree with the notions
of another person which are averse from our own, so that we puzzle him
not only on the point of our own notion, but on the point of his own,
and he begins to have a suspicion that he is not sound in the matter.
This suspicion is derived from the mind's instinctive feeling that
irony is a trait of a superior person who can afford to have a stock
of original ideas with which it tests opinion, and who holds them so
securely that he can never play with them a losing game. The Bastard in
King John indicates this superiority when he says,--
"Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail,
And say,--there is no sin but to be rich;
And being rich, my virtue then shall be,
To say,--there is no vice but beggary."
A man who pretends to hold the opposite of his own belief is morally
a hypocrite, until we detect that slight touch of banter which is
the proof of genuine irony. Then we see that he is honest though he
equivocates, for he belies himself with sincerity. A man who can afford
this is to that extent superior to the man who, whether right or wrong,
is hopelessly didactic, and incapable of commending his own opinions by
the bold ease with which he may deplore them.
It is irony when Lowell, speaking of Dante's intimacy with the
Scriptures, adds, "They do even a scholar no harm." Jaques, in "As
You Like It," is ironical when he indicates men by the actions of the
wounded deer which augmented with tears the stream that did not need
water, as men leave their money to those who have too much already. The
herd abandons him: that is right,--misery parts company. Anon, they
come sweeping by, and never stay to inquire into his hurt. That is just
the proper fashion, too. "Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens!" This
pretence of praising the deer is a parable which arraigns mankind.
In the Old Testament there is an instance of irony, where the priests
of Baal called on his name but there was no reply, and Elijah suggested
that "either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey,
or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked." But the priests had
all the prosaic singleness of an ignorant mind, and went on scarifying
themselves with knives and lancets, as if Elijah had not already let
their blood.
The New Testament furnishes a more delicate specimen in the parable of
the unjust steward, which has difficulties of interpretation, arising
from an unwillingness, perhaps, to recognize the irony. The steward
is expecting to be dismissed for malfeasance in office. In the days
of parable, whitewashing committees were unknown. He then expects to
ingratiate himself with his lord's debtors by reducing the amount of
their bills, hoping that some of them would take him up when discarded.
It is not clear what commendation to a debtor who might also be a
creditor lay in this fraudulent reduction of his bill; but a parable
serves only the main point, which in this case is to show how much
more tact a thoroughly worldly man has than a technically spiritual
man. So the lord admires the shiftiness of his steward, because it
had an ulterior purpose; whereas your conventional child of light
has no genuine foresight. This is done to introduce the irony of the
verse: "And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon
of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into
everlasting habitations." The master's hint of the superior sagacity
of the people of mammon is delightfully qualified by the irony that
lurks in his use of the word "everlasting." Then the serious intent of
the parable is clearly stated in the three succeeding verses.
When irony becomes persistently cynical it defeats the moral advantage
which it would possess of attracting men to its serious meaning,
because it then involves too large a tract of human life in its
insinuation. The pretences that things are all bad may become so
clamorous at the door of our faith in human nature that no good things
can gain admission. In literature, an irony that is tinged a little
with cynicism is a healthy recoil from sentimentalism: for an affected
ideal, if too long and too floridly sustained, piques our knowledge of
human nature into making inquiries; and, as it is in public affairs
when people are aroused to investigate, the facts which are discovered
receive too great a valuation. They seem to indicate that every thing
is rotten; and while one temper denounces, another temper sneeringly
inquires for virtue. In broad day, this lantern of Diogenes goes about
hunting up an honest citizen. "There is nothing but roguery to be found
in villanous man."
The strained and almost impossible goodness of Dickens's "Battle of
Life" is punished by the cool depreciation of Thackeray's pen. When
the former insists too strongly that his humble characters shall be
examples of all the British beatitudes, the latter depicts too easily
sharpers and nonentities for women, and well-bred, high-toned rascals
for men. But when a too fluent and prolific imagination, working in
the steam of a great modern centre, has its shapes distorted, and
the outlines waver into caricature, a tonic breath with the taste of
brine in it will always set in to temper this radiation. Then it is
inevitable that we shiver and complain that the tone has been reduced
too far. When a skilfully distended bubble breaks, and only a thin spat
of suds is left, a cynic finger will point to it as if to say, "Here's
your fine iris all gone to unserviceable soap." But there is a solider
ball, the earth itself, upon which human nature paints its zones; and
although life is despicable at the poles, and revolting in many a foul
quarter, we know that noble landscapes stocked with graciousness and
honor spread on every side. Shakspeare alone seems to have this bubble
hanging securely from his pipe, where it sheds the swift glances of
myriad eyes.
Thackeray says, "How can I hold out the hand of friendship, when my
first impression is, 'My good sir, I strongly suspect that you were up
my pear-tree last night'? It is a dreadful state of mind. The core is
black; the death-stricken fruit drops on the bough, and a great worm is
within,--fattening and feasting and wriggling. Who stole the pears? I
say. Is it you, brother? Is it you, Madam?"
These suspicions cannot conceal their good humor: the one hand drives
the railing pen; the other, behind the chair, holds the glimmer, not of
steel, but of a smile.
But when Swift writes a chapter upon the use and improvement of
madness in a Commonwealth, the smile which scantily flickers over
the surface of it is the smile of the Spartan boy while the fox was
gnawing at his vitals. Swift's pen makes the Iron Madonna's gestures of
invitation,--she that stood in mediæval torture-chambers and bade the
bewildered prisoner take refuge in her opening arms, where a thousand
lancets pricked life, faith, and hope away.
At one time, the German Heine's irony smacks of good humor; at another,
you would ask for a bumper of gall to sweeten your mouth. He represents
two fat Manchester ladies at a particularly exposed ballet, murmuring
to each other, "Shocking! For shame!" And he says that they were so
benumbed with horror that they could not for an instant take their
opera-glasses from their eyes, and consequently remained in that
situation to the last moment, when the curtain fell.
By and by we hear a change of tone. "I always obeyed the one
commandment, that we should love our enemies; for, ah! those persons
whom I have best loved were always, without my knowing it, my worst
enemies." And again: "Madame, you can readily form an idea of what life
is like in heaven,--the more readily, as you are married."
This style of innuendo is always more good-natured in Thackeray; as
when speaking in the character of a widower, who remembers the late
Mrs. Brown, he says: "By a timely removal she was spared from the grief
which her widowhood would have doubtless caused her, and I acquiesce
in the decrees of Fate in this instance, and have not the least regret
at not having preceded her."
Heine also can be pleasantly mischievous. When he was about to
travel from Lyons to Paris in the old days of diligences, a friend
commissioned him to carry one of the colossal Lyons sausages to a
homœopathic doctor in the capital. But Heine and his wife were so
frequently hungry, and had trespassed so often upon the length of
the sausage, that a very small end remained on their arrival. Heine
thereupon shaved off a transparent slice with a razor, and enclosed it
in the following letter to the doctor: "_My dear Sir_,--Your researches
have helped to establish the fact that millionths produce the greatest
effects. Pray receive herewith the millionth part of a Lyons sausage,
which your friend consigned to you. In case your theory be true, it
will have the effect of the whole sausage upon you."
Irony employs wit to feather its purport. A Frenchman said of a man
who never really did make a witty remark: "How full of wit that man
must be! he never lets any escape." That, when translated, is improved
because the English word _any_ can refer at once to no wit and to no
person's escaping the effect of wit. Thus the irony is increased.
One of the most characteristic and important specimens of irony is
Thackeray's "Philip," a story of a villanous doctor who deceives a
woman with a mock marriage, deserts her, and marries a lady with
expectations, who has a son Philip and dies. But the traitor is
endowed with an impressive amount of deportment, and his starched front
and cravat seem to have been secreted by the stiffest of spotless
souls, in a rapture of rigidness. This carapace of deportment is
gradually worn too thin; for it has been put to rough service on
all occasions to supply the place of virtue and to make its absence
appear no calamity. The irony consists in accepting this deportment
as if it were really put forth by an estimable man. The book is one
long strain of grave assumption that Dr. Firmin is a good man and a
killing physician; but the reader knows better on the first point,
and enjoys tasting the man's villany through this pretence. And it is
kept up long after the deportment becomes like the pantaloons of the
stingy lawyer, which hung in his garret labelled thus, "Too old to
wear, too good to give away." It is still good enough for Dr. Firmin;
and he reaches a respectable grave in ignorance that we know him so
thoroughly, and discovers rather late that he was always well known at
the head-quarters of genius.
The story is a wonderfully sustained innuendo of rascality, carried on
by this ironical pretence of virtue. Thackeray appears in it to be as
green as Dr. Firmin's dupes; but the mask is lifted a little in every
sentence, and the author and the reader peeping in at opposite sides,
their eyes meet, and smiles at what they have discovered are exchanged.
Even the little sister, who becomes a living mother to the Philip of
the dead lady, cannot flee from this great tide of irony, which catches
her and stands up to her heart. The author is constantly deprecating
her love for Philip; though he knows it is the sweet flower of her
life that is fed from the ugly soil of her betrayal. Why will she go
on so with that boy, and save up money for him, and extemporize little
treats with brandy and water _ad libitum_, and believe in him when he
tries to become a bad magazine writer, and believe in his fortune when
he marries a beggar, and, in short, believe that she was sent into the
world to be deceived, and then have a great, blundering, brave, pure,
splendid Philip, as if by bequest from a legal mother? Why in Heaven's
name does she not blow upon the doctor, and make a good thing out of
betraying his contemptible meanness? Gracious goodness! why is she
so expensively magnanimous? Would you, Madame, be so extravagant as
to pinch yourself in that way to be faithful and tender to a seducer
out of faith and tenderness for his wife's boy? But, there he is: God
set such a pure amen to a hideous deed, and she is the woman to say,
Amen, after him; for God is just and watches the index of the balance.
What! shall she compete with God for retribution? So her life is a long
sacrifice to the purest and most mute devotion, and our author banters
her to keep the tears from obscuring the page at which he writes.
This charming insinuation of the great observer, who once said of
himself that he had no head above his eyes, proves to us that he had
a mighty truly-beating heart below them; and we reverently accept the
little mother from his shaping hands, to place her in our Valhalla of
Women, where Portia, Imogen, and Cordelia have long languished for her
company.
If irony does not forget good nature in its indignation at discovered
shams, it can impart the exhilaration of wit. In a late novel, entitled
the "Maid of Sker," there is a fishmonger who says that, "when the eyes
of a fish begin to fail him through long retirement from the water,"
he has means of setting up their aspect; "and I called" my patrons
"generous gentlemen and Christian-minded ladies every time they wanted
to smell my fish, which is not right before payment. What right has
another man to disparage the property of another? When you have bought
him, he is your own; but, when he is put in the scales, remember
'nothing but good of the dead,' if you remember any thing."
This recalls Hamlet's irony, when he said that he knew Polonius
excellent well,--he was a fishmonger! "Not I, my lord." "Then I would
you were so honest a man." Poor, stale Polonius! He was not as fresh as
the fish which Shakspeare used to scent at Billingsgate, and knavery in
the wind besides.
The cynicism of irony can be illustrated by the character of Jaques in
"As You Like It," as the character of Apemantus in "Timon of Athens"
will serve to show us a cynicism that has grown so ferocious as almost
to beat irony from the field.