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.