IRONY.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 330, 17 October 1908, Page 12

IRONY.

Like the villian of ■ melodrama, Irony dissembles: saying one'thing, it usually means the opposite. Its employment as a figure of rhetoric is'various. We find it under the pons of grave, important signiors, suoh_ as Gibbon ; of elegant reprovers of their times, such of Addison; of wielders of the plaited scourge, such as Swift; of whimsical ana meditative gossips, such as Lamb. The preacher and the orator make use of it. It has a cousin at several removes, hold in affection by us all, in the form of a good-tempered raillery known as Banter. It is of nearer kin to Innuendo, which insinuates. It ownß a terrible brother of the "dreaded name" of Sarcasm, that rends as with fangs. They are all, with others of the family, ill tho regular service , of Satire. When Lamb, writing to a friend in Botany/Bay, says (we'. quote from memory), "Your hemp, I take it, is ono of your chief industries;" we recognise the bantor he excelled in,' with a spico of tho oblique, the innuendo. When Sydney Smith, discussing •with the Chapter-of-St. Paul's the proposal to pare the path around the Cathedral with wood, romarks confidingly, "If we lay our heads togother the thing is done," we recognise tho same method, with an added relish of his peculiar and vory frolicsome wit. When he advises the Bishop of New Zealand to assure the Native chiefs that there will bo "rold curate and roasted missionary on the sideboard,"'he-touches what Bain calls the "cannibal humou'r" that Swift had developed with proper ferocity in the communication on boiled baby. When a gentlenun in Parliamentis told by a gentleman on the other side of the floor that "he did his party all the harm'in his power —he spoke ,for it and, voted', against it," we perceive the:, innuendo in .about as direct and deadly a mode as_ it is capable of. When Addison exhibits Sir Jtoger~do Coverley in church, .wo nro conscibus""<sf'that irony of delicate malice which Thackeray (possibly misled by -Macaulay) so strangely mistook for the te'nderest humour. When Junius addresses himself to the Duke of Bedford (and minds, as ho does not always mind, his grammar), "My lord, you are so little accustomed to .receive any marks of respect or esteem from the"public, that, jf .in the following lines a compliment-or-expression of applause should escape me, I foar you would consider it as a mockery of your established character, and perhaps an insult to your understanding—" wo have tho irony, at its artistic best, of pure malignity. When Do Quincey presses tho claims of murder as a fine art, we feel that his ironic humour will only just go .down .with, us,..that..it only just makes tho situation tolcrablo. When Gladstone, rising to answer Disraeli, who had manifestly lingered over dessert, said icily, "The right honourable gentlnian has apparently had access to sources of inspiration which havo been denied to mo," ho had recourse to a figuro of speech which, politely styled periphrasis, contains the quick, dagger-like thrust of sarcasm. Irony, the loamed tell us, was the method of Socratos with tho Sophists. It is tho method of all who seek to lure on disputants to their discoihfiture. It ramifies, however, very widely in literature. Tho world's masterpiece of sustained irony is, or course, "Don Quixote," which, if a satire, is also very much more. Fitting examples would bo too long to prosent, but, as a happy instanco of irony within irony, tho reader might be directed to -the scene where the bachelor, Sampson plays witk the Don concerning the veracious history of him by Cid Hamet Benengeli. ... • Half a century nearer to us than Smollet is Walter Savago Landor; and wo might bring forward as a thoroughly literary example of sustained irony his "Citation and Examination of. William Shakespeare," but ■jyitli diffideuso we submit that it is a little

tough in tho reading. Rather would we name tho matchless "Imaginary Conversations," and in especial such a piece as tho talk between Louis XIV and the unctuous confessor.

Still nearer to us, chronologically, is the namesako of the author of "HuidbraSj" Samuel Butler, whoso "Erewhon," at no time as well known as it should have been, is greatly distinguished among tho minor, or even tho greater, efforts of satire. In "Erewhon" (need we say?) sickness is a crime, whilo crime receives the treatment that wo bestow on sickness. In working this out, Butler, as Garnett says, "holds an inverting mirror to the world's face with imperturbable gravity." Tho chapter entitled "An Erewhonian Trial" is a finished pattorn of the author's ironic art. . Ho begins with tho directness and seeming earnestness of Swift:— " But I shall perhaps best convey to tho reader an idea the entire perversion of thought which exists among this extraordinary people, by describing tho public trial of a man who was accused of pulmonary consumption—an offence which until quite recently was_ punished with death." The case is clearly a very bad one. Tho prisoner, a young man of twenty-three, coughs incessantly in tho dock, and is kept on his legs there solely by the attention of the two surgeons in charge of him. Vainly does his counsel plead that tho young man has been simulating consumption in order defraud an insurance company from whom he wanted to buy an annuity. "If this could have been shown to be the case he would have escaped a criminal prosecution,' and been sent to tho hospital as for a moral ailment." But tho prisoner is damned by his appearance and his cough; and in ten minutes the jury find him guilty. The judge, in passing sentence of hard labour for life, says:—

" It pains me much to see one who is yet so young, and whose prospects in life were othorwise so excellent, brought to this distressing condition by a constitution which I can only regard as radically vicious; but yours is no case for compassion: this is not your first offence: you have led a career of crime. . . . You were convicted of aggravated bronchitis last yearj and I find that, although you are now only twenty-three years old, you have been imprisoned on no fewer than fourteen occasions, for illnesses of a more or less hateful character "

and so forth. Here, again, is an instance of the art that raises the smile which sympathy would repress. But all humour, and tho appreciation of humour, have their- foundation in malice —and who should know this more certainly than the masters of irony?—"Tho Nation."