Chapter III: Part 3

This conservation of the spirit is even more necessary for the woman than for the man. The active life of the latter makes it fairly certain that he, while he may become hard and callous, will at least retain some sort of grip on the world’s bigger movements. There is no such certainty for the mother. Indeed, she seems often to take a real pleasure in voluntarily offering up in sacrifice at the time of marriage what few ideal interests and tastes she has. The spectacle of the young mother devoting all her time and strength to her children and husband, and surrendering all other interests to the interests of the home, is usually considered inspiring and attractive, especially by the men. Not so attractive is she thirty years later, when, her family cares having lapsed and her children scattered, she is left high and dry in the world. If she then takes a well-earned rest, it seems a pity that that rest should be so generally futile and uninteresting. Without interests and tastes, and with no longer any useful function in society, she is relegated to the most trivial amusements and pursuits. Idle and vapid, she finds nothing to do but fritter away her time. The result is a really appalling waste of economic and social energy in middle age. Now it is the virtue of this season of life to avoid all this. The woman as well as the man must realize that her home is not bounded by the walls of the house, that it has wider implications, leading out into all the interests of the community and the state. That women of this age have not yet learned to be good mothers and good citizens at the same time, does not show that it is impossible, but that it is a virtue that requires more resolution than our morality has been willing to exhibit. The relish of right and wrong must be a relish of social right and wrong as well as of individual.

As middle age passes on into old age, however, one earns a certain right of relaxation. If there is no right to let go the sympathy for the virtues of youth and the conservation of its spirit, there comes the right to give over some of the aggressive activity. To youth belongs the practical action. At no other age is there the same impulse and daring. The virtue of later middle age is to encourage and support, rather than actively engage. It is true we have never learned this lesson. We still surrender to semi-old men the authority to govern us, think for us, act for us. We endow them with spiritual as well as practical leadership, and allow them to strip youth of its opportunities and powers. We permit them to rule not only their own but all the generations. If we could be sure that their rule meant progress, we could trust them to guide us. But, in these times at least, it seems to mean nothing so much as a last fight for a discredited undemocratic philosophy that modern youth are completely through with. From this point of view one of the virtues of this middle season of life will be the imaginative understanding of youth’s purposes and radical ideals. At that age, one no longer needs the same courage to face the battles of life; they are already most of them irrevocably won or lost. There is not the same claim of temperance; the passions and ambitions are relaxed. The sense of justice and democracy will have become a habit or else they will have been forever lost. Only the need of wisdom remains,--that unworldly wisdom which mellowing years can bring, which sees through the disturbance and failure of life the truth and efficacy of youth’s ideal vision.

Old age is such a triumph that it may almost be justly relieved of any burden of virtues or duties; it is so unique and beautiful that the old should be given the perfect freedom of the moral city. So splendid a victory is old age over the malign forces of disease and weakness and death that one is tempted to say that its virtue lies simply in being old. Those virtues of youth which grew out of the crises and temptations, physical and spiritual, of early life, are no longer relevant. There may come instead the quieter virtues of contentment and renunciation. Old people have few crises and few temptations; they live in the past and not in the future, as youth does. They cannot be required, therefore, to have that scorn for tradition which is the virtue of youth. They can keep alive for us the tradition that _is_ vital, and from them we can learn many things.

The value of their experience to us is not that it teaches us to avoid their mistakes, for we must try all things for ourselves. The older generation, it is true, often flatters itself that its mistakes somehow make for our benefit, because we learn from their errors to avoid the pitfalls into which they came. But there is no making mistakes by the proxy of a former generation. The world has moved on in the mean time; the pitfalls are new, and we shall only entangle ourselves the more by adopting the methods of our ancestors in getting out of the difficulties. But the value of an old man’s experience is that he has preserved in it the living tradition and hands down to us old honesties, old sincerities, and old graces, that have been crushed in the rough-and-tumble of modern life. It is not tradition in itself that is dangerous, but only dead tradition that has no meaning for the present and is a mere weight on our progress. Such is the legal and economic tradition given to us by our raucous, middle-aged leaders of opinion, adopted by them through motives of present gain, and not through sincere love of the past.

But old men, looking back over the times in which they have lived, throw a poetic glamour over the past and make it live again. They see it idealized, but it is the _real_ that they see idealized. An old man of personality and charm has the faculty of cutting away from the past the dead wood, and preserving for us the living tissue which we can graft profitably on our own growing present. Old men have much of the disinterestedness of youth; they have no ulterior motive in giving us the philosophy of their past. The wisest of them instinctively select what is vital for our present nourishment. It is not old men that youth has to fear, but the semi-old, who have lost touch with their youth, and have not lived long enough to get the disinterested vision of their idealized past. But old men who have lived this life of radical virtue are the best of teachers; they distill the perfume of the past, and bring it to us to sweeten our present. Such men grow old only in body. The radical spirit of youth has the power of abolishing considerations of age; the body changes, but the spirit remains the same. In this sense, it is the virtue of old age not to become old.

The besetting sin of this season of life is apathy. Old age should not be a mere waiting for death. The fact that we cannot reconcile death with life shows that they ought not to be discussed in the same terms. They belong to two different orders. Death has no part in life, and in life there can be no such thing as preparation for death. An old man lives to his appointed time, and then his life ends; but the life up to that ending, barring the loss of his faculties, has been all life and not a whit death. Old men do not fear death as much as do young men, and this calmness is not so much a result of disillusionment with life as a recognition that their life has been lived, their work finished, the cycle of their activity rounded off. One virtue of old age, then, is to live as fully at the height of one’s powers as strength will permit, passing out of life serene and unreluctant, with willingness to live and yet with willingness to die. To know an old man who has grown old slowly, taking the seasons as they came, conserving the spirit of his youthful virtues, mellowing his philosophy of life, acquiring a clearer, saner, and more beautiful outlook on human nature and all its spiritual values with each passing year, is an education in the virtues of life. The virtues which produce an old age such as this do not cut across the grain of life, but enhance and conserve the vital impulses and forces. Such an old age is the crowning evidence of the excellent working of the soul. A life needs no other proof than this that each season has known its proper virtue and healthful activity.

IV

THE LIFE OF IRONY

I could never, until recently, divest myself of the haunting feeling that being ironical had something to do with the entering of the iron into one’s soul. I thought I knew what irony was, and I admired it immensely. I could not believe that there was something metallic and bitter about it. Yet this sinister connotation of a clanging, rasping meanness of spirit, which I am sure it has still in many people’s minds, clung about it, until one happy day my dictionary told me that the iron had never entered into the soul at all, but the soul into the iron (St. Jerome had read the psalm wrong), and that irony was Greek, with all the free, happy play of the Greek spirit about it, letting in fresh air and light into others’ minds and our own. It was to the Greek an incomparable method of intercourse, the rub of mind against mind by the simple use of simulated ignorance and the adoption, without committing one’s self, of another’s point of view. Not until I read the Socrates of Plato did I fully appreciate that this irony,--this pleasant challenging of the world, this insistent judging of experience, this sense of vivid contrasts and incongruities, of comic juxtapositions, of flaring brilliancies, and no less heartbreaking impossibilities, of all the little parts of one’s world being constantly set off against each other, and made intelligible only by being translated into and defined in each others’ terms,--that this was a life, and a life of beauty, that one might suddenly discover one’s self living all unawares. And if one could judge one’s own feeble reflection, it was a life that had no room for iron within its soul.

We should speak not of the Socratic method but of the Socratic life. For irony is a life rather than a method. A life cannot be taken off and put on again at will; a method can. To be sure, some people talk of life exactly as if it were some portable commodity, or some exchangeable garment. We must live, they cry, as if we were about to begin. And perhaps they are. Only some of us would rather die than live that puny life that they can adopt and cover themselves with. Irony is too rich and precious a thing to be capable of such transmission. The ironist is born and not made. This critical attitude towards life, this delicious sense of contrasts that we call irony, is not a pose or an amusement. It is something that colors every idea and every feeling of the man who is so happy as to be endowed with it.

Most people will tell you, I suppose, that the religious conviction of salvation is the only permanently satisfying coloring of life. In the splendid ironists, however, one sees a sweeter, more flexible and human principle of life, adequate, without the buttress of supernatural belief, to nourish and fortify the spirit. In the classic ironist of all time, irony shows an inherent nobility, a nobility that all ages have compared favorably with the Christian ideal. Lacking the spur of religious emotion, the sweetness of irony may be more difficult to maintain than the mood of belief. But may it not for that very reason be judged superior, for is it not written, He that endureth unto the end shall be saved?

It is not easy to explain the quality of that richest and most satisfying background of life. It lies, I think, in a vivid and intense feeling of aliveness which it gives. Experience comes to the ironist in little darts or spurts, with the added sense of contrast. Most men, I am afraid, see each bit of personal experience as a unit, strung more or less loosely on a string of other mildly related bits. But the man with the ironical temperament is forced constantly to compare and contrast his experience with what was, or what might be, or with what ought to be, and it is the shocks of these comparisons and contrasts that make up his inner life. He thinks he leads a richer life, because he feels not only the individual bits but the contrasts besides in all their various shadings and tints. To this sense of impingement of facts upon life is due a large part of this vividness of irony; and the rest is due to the alertness of the ironical mind. The ironist is always critically awake. He is always judging, and watching with inexhaustible interest, in order that he may judge. Now irony in its best sense is an exquisite sense of proportion, a sort of spiritual tact in judging the values and significances of experience. This sense of being spiritually alive which ceaseless criticism of the world we live in gives us, combined with the sense of power which free and untrammeled judging produces in us, is the background of irony. And it should be a means to the truest goodness.

Socrates made one mistake,--knowledge is not goodness. But it is a step towards judging, and good judgment is the true goodness. For it is on judgment impelled by desire that we act. The clearer and cleaner our judgments then, the more definite and correlated our actions. And the great value of these judgments of irony is that they are not artificial but spring naturally out of life. Irony, the science of comparative experience, compares things not with an established standard but with each other, and the values that slowly emerge from the process, values that emerge from one’s own vivid reactions, are constantly revised, corrected, and refined by that same sense of contrast. The ironic life is a life keenly alert, keenly sensitive, reacting promptly with feelings of liking or dislike to each bit of experience, letting none of it pass without interpretation and assimilation, a life full and satisfying,--indeed a rival of the religious life.

The life of irony has the virtues of the religious life without its defects. It expresses the aggressive virtues without the quiescence of resignation. For the ironist has the courageous spirit, the sympathetic heart and the understanding mind, and can give them full play, unhampered by the searching introspection of the religious mind that often weakens rather than ennobles and fortifies. He is at one with the religious man in that he hates apathy and stagnation, for they mean death. But he is superior in that he attacks apathy of intellect and personality as well as apathy of emotion. He has a great conviction of the significance of all life, the lack of which conviction is the most saddening feature of the religious temperament. The religious man pretends that every aspect of life has meaning for him, but in practice he constantly minimizes the noisier and vivider elements. He is essentially an aristocrat in his interpretation of values, while the ironist is incorrigibly a democrat. Religion gives a man an intimacy with a few selected and rarified virtues and moods, while irony makes him a friend of the poor and lowly among spiritual things. When the religious man is healing and helping, it is at the expense of his spiritual comfort; he must tear himself away from his companions and go out grimly and sacrificingly into the struggle. The ironist, living his days among the humbler things, feels no such severe call to service. And yet the ironist, since he has no citadel of truth to defend, is really the more adventurous. Life, not fixed in predestined formulas or measurable by fixed, immutable standards, is fluid, rich and exciting. To the ironist it is both discovery and creation. His courage seeks out the obscure places of human personality, and his sympathy and understanding create new interests and enthusiasms in the other minds upon which they play. And these new interests in turn react upon his own life, discovering unexpected vistas there, and creating new insight into the world that he lives in. That democratic, sympathetic outlook upon the feelings and thoughts and actions of men and women is the life of irony.

That life is expressed in the social intercourse of ourselves with 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.

The ironist therefore has a valid defense against all the charges of brutality and triviality and irreverence, that the religious man is prone to bring against him. He can care more deeply about things because he can see so much more widely. And he can take life very seriously because it interests him so intensely. And he can feel its poignancy and its flux more keenly because he delivers himself up bravely to its swirling, many-hued current. The inner peace of religion seems gained only at the expense of the reality of living. A life such as the life of irony, lived fully and joyously, cannot be peaceful; it cannot even be happy, in the sense of calm content and satisfaction. But it can be better than either--it can be wise, and it can be fruitful. And it can be good, in a way that the life of inner peace cannot be. For the life of irony having no reserve and weaving itself out of the flux of experience rather than out of eternal values has the broad, honest sympathy of democracy, that is impossible to any temperament with the aristocratic taint. One advantage the religious life has is a salvation in another world to which it can withdraw. The life of irony has laid up few treasures in heaven, but many in this world. Having gained so much it has much to lose. But its glory is that it can lose nothing unless it lose all.

To shafts of fortune and blows of friends or enemies then, the ironist is almost impregnable. He knows how to parry each thrust and prepare for every emergency. Even if the arrows reach him, all the poison has been sucked out of them by his clear, resolute understanding of their significance. There is but one weak spot in his armor, but one disaster that he fears more almost than the loss of his life,--a shrinkage of his environment, a running dry of experience. He fears to be cut off from friends and crowds and human faces and speech and books, for he demands to be ceaselessly fed. Like a modern city, he is totally dependent on a steady flow of supplies from the outside world, and will be in danger of starvation, if the lines of communication are interrupted. Without people and opinions for his mind to play on, his irony withers and faints. He has not the faculty of brooding; he cannot mine the depths of his own soul, and bring forth after labor mighty nuggets of thought. The flow and swirl of things is his compelling interest. His thoughts are reactions, immediate and vivid, to his daily experience. Some deep, unconscious brooding must go on, to produce that happy precision of judgment of his; but it is not voluntary. He is conscious only of the shifting light and play of life; his world is dynamic, energetic, changing. He lives in a world of relations, and he must have a whole store of things to be related. He has lost himself completely in this world he lives in. His ironical interpretation of the world is his life, and this world is his nourishment. Take away this environmental world and you have slain his soul. He is invulnerable to everything except that deprivation.

V

THE EXCITEMENT OF FRIENDSHIP

My friends, I can say with truth, since I have no other treasure, are my fortune. I really live only when I am with my friends. Those sufficient persons who can pass happily long periods of solitude communing with their own thoughts and nourishing their own souls fill me with a despairing admiration. Their gift of auto-stimulation argues a personal power which I shall never possess. Or else it argues, as I like to think in self-defense, a callousness of spirit, an insensitiveness to the outside influences which nourish and sustain the more susceptible mind. And those persons who can shut themselves up for long periods and work out their thoughts alone, constructing beautiful and orderly representations of their own spirits, are to me a continual mystery. I know this is the way that things are accomplished, that “monotony and solitude” are necessary for him who would produce creative thought. Yet, knowing well this truth, I shun them both. I am a battery that needs to be often recharged. I require the excitement of friendship; I must have the constant stimulation of friends. I do not spark automatically, but must have other minds to rub up against, and strike from them by friction the spark that will kindle my thoughts.

When I walk, I must have a friend to talk to, or I shall not even think. I am not of those who, like Stevenson, believe that walking should be a kind of vegetative stupor, where the sun and air merely fill one with a diffused sense of well-being and exclude definite thought. The wind should rather blow through the dusty regions of the mind, and the sun light up its dark corners, and thinking and talking should be saner and higher and more joyful than within doors. But one must have a friend along to open the windows. Neither can I sympathize with those persons who carry on long chains of reasoning while they are traveling or walking. When alone, my thinking is as desultory as the scenery of the roadside, and when with a friend, it is apt to be as full of romantic surprises as a walk through a woodland glen. Good talk is like good scenery--continuous yet constantly varying, and full of the charm of novelty and surprise. How unnatural it is to think except when one is forced to do it, is discovered when one attempts to analyze one’s thoughts when alone. He is a rare genius who finds something beyond the mere visual images that float through his mind,--either the reflection of what he is actually seeing, or the pictorial representations of what he has been doing or what he wants or intends to do in the near or far future. We should be shocked to confess to ourselves how little control we have over our own minds; we shall be lucky if we can believe that we guide them.

Thinking, then, was given us for use in emergencies, and no man can be justly blamed if he reserves it for emergencies. He can be blamed, however, if he does not expose himself to those crises which will call it forth. Now a friend is such an emergency, perhaps the most exciting stimulus to thinking that one can find, and if one wants to live beyond the vegetative stupor, one must surround one’s self with friends. I shall call my friends, then, all those influences which warm me and start running again all my currents of thought and imagination. The persons, causes, and books that unlock the prison of my intellectual torpor, I can justly call my friends, for I find that I feel toward them all the same eager joy and inexhaustible rush of welcome. Where they differ it shall be in degree and not in kind. The speaker whom I hear, the book that I read, the friend with whom I chat, the music that I play, even the blank paper before me, which subtly stirs me to cover it with sentences that unfold surprisingly and entice me to follow until I seem hopelessly lost from the trail,--all these shall be my friends as long as I find myself responding to them, and no longer. They are all alike in being emergencies that call upon me for instant and definite response.