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.