Irony

“ His irony arose from that peculiar mode in which he viewed all earthly things, himself and all that was dear to him not excepted. It was his poetry. Irony is, indeed, the natural way in which men of high views and keen intellect view the world: they cannot find middle terms of controversy with men of ordinary views; they feel a gulf between them and the world; they cannot descend to the level of lower views, or raise others from that level to their own. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It seems to me a most prodigious Banter upon us, for Men to talk in general of the Immorality of Ridicule and Irony, and of punishing Men for those Matters, when their own Practice is universal Irony and Ridicule of all those who go not with them, and universal Applause and Encouragement for such Ridicule and Irony, and distinguishing by all the honourable ways imaginable such drolling Authors for their Drollery ”

“ 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. ”

“ And for this reason it is from the Irony that we have eternal lamentations over the lack of profound feeling, artistic insight, and genius in the public, inasmuch as it does not understand these heights of Irony. ”

“ It is one of those instances of the irony inherent in human fate which move at once to tears and bitter laughter; the waste of emotion, the involuntary folly, the cruel deception caused by limit of faculties—how they concentrate into an hour or a day the essence of life itself! ”

“ Whether we regard irony, then, as this art of universal destruction, or as the yearning of which we have spoken in contrast with the true Ideal, it betrays a secret lack of proportion and restraint which is detrimental to the artist. ”

“ That the irony of things in their relation to our desires and aims has its amusing aspect is certain: but who that knows anything of the diversified forms of human mirth could ever think of trying to drag all of them under so narrow a rubric? ”

“ Only the initiated body of men he addressed could understand the horrible bitterness of irony that lurked under the quiet words ‘useless ones,’ and the ghastliness of the laughter apparently so natural. ”

“ If the ironist is not cynic, neither is he merely a [Pg 117] 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. ”

“ It wouldn't be the first time she had seen herself obliged to accept with smothered irony other people's interpretation of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to them—it seemed really the way to live—the version that met their convenience. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Where such a relation, as that between teacher and pupil, does not exist, irony is a rudeness and a vulgar conceit. All ironical writers count on the silly species of human beings, who like to feel themselves superior to all others in common with the author himself, whom they look upon as the mouthpiece of their arrogance. Moreover, the habit of irony, like that of sarcasm, spoils the character ; it gradually fosters the quality of a malicious superiority ; one finally grows like a snappy dog, that has learnt to laugh as well as to bite. ”

“ The constant illusions; the many disappointments; the bitter earnestness of the man amid the grim humour, or more often sheer cacchination of his surroundings; all the bestial mockery of the baffling fiends; the still more hideous mockery in which the Powers of Good themselves seem to indulge; doubt of the reality of that which he seeks; doubt even of the seeker; the irony of the whole strife: are fascinating to me as they are, I make no doubt, to the majority of mankind. ”

“ If he makes his phrases concise, and selects his epithets, it was not from a love of style, but in order the better to stamp his insult. Oratorical artifices in his hand become instruments of torture, and when he files his periods it was to drive the knife deeper and surer; with what audacity of denunciation, with what sternness of animosity, with what corrosive and burning irony, applied to the most secret corners of private life, with what inexorable persistence of calculated and meditated persecution, the quotations alone will show. ”

“ This implies, not merely that we are not to be serious about the right, the moral, and the true, but that the highest and best of all has nothing in it, inasmuch as in its exhibition through individuals, characters, and actions, it refutes and annihilates itself, and so is irony at its own expense. ”

“ Irony.—Irony is to the high-bred what billingsgate is to the vulgar; and when one gentleman thinks another gentleman an ass, he does not say it point-blank, he implies it in the politest terms he can invent.—Bulwer-Lytton. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Irony turns things into ridicule in a peculiar manner. It consists in laughing at a man under disguise, by appearing to praise or speak well of him. Swift affords us many illustrious examples of this species of ridicule. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The irony of the present age.—In our days Europeans have contracted the habit of treating all matters of great interest with irony, because, through our activity in their service, we have no time for dealing seriously with them. ”

“ This arbitrariness or lawlessness, which, in the domain of art, becomes the Friedrich Schlegelian "irony," the artist's attitude of aloofness from his subject, his free play with it (resulting, as far as poetry is concerned, in the dictatorship of pure form, which mocks at its own substance and destroys its own illusions) , becomes in the domain of real life an irony which is the dominant feature in the characters and lives of the gifted few, the aristocracy of intellect. ”

“ I. First, If what you call Insult, Buffoonery, Banter, Ridicule and Irony, Mockery and bitter Railing, be Crimes in Disputation, you will find none more deeply involv’d in it than our most famous Writers, in their controversial Treatises about serious Matters; as all Notions and Practices in Religion, whether reasonable or absurd, may be equally and justly deem’d: the Notions and Practices of Papists, Presbyterians, Quakers, and all other Sects, being no less serious to their respective Sects than ridiculous to one another. ”

“ A true-born Englishman's a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction:
A banter made to be a test of fools,
Which those that use it justly ridicules; ”

“ It is a familiar example of irony in the degradation of words that "what a man is worth" has come to mean how much money he possesses; but there seems a deeper and more melancholy irony in the shrunken meaning that popular or polite speech assigns to "morality" and "morals." ”

“ There are few amusements more dangerous for an author than the indulgence in ironic descriptions of his own work. If the irony is depreciatory, posterity is but too likely to say, "Many a true word is spoken in jest;" ”

“ That produces a shock, and when50 applied to irony this is an effect still more powerful than when it is applied to fiction, as, for instance, in Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. But the irony is not artificial: it is the sort of irony given to those who walk the world with their eyes open. ”

“ Delicate irony, the citadel of the intelligent, has a curious effect on these people. They wish always to be exhorted, at all times no matter how incongruous and unsuitable, to do those things which almost any one will and does do whenever suitable opportunity is presented. ”

“ It does not touch the ‘catharsis’ of tragedy, which is another matter. For the rest, Congreve’s attitude, cynicism apart, is an attitude of irony and superiority over common emotions, the attitude, artificial and inoffensive, of the society he depicts in his greatest play. ”

“ From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. ”

“ Irony is jesting hidden behind gravity. Humor is gravity concealed behind the jest. ”

“ But the quality of humor, depending upon various moral traits, exists only wherever a broad imagination is combined with a sweet and tolerant moral sense that is devoid of malice and all uncharitableness, and at peace with all mankind. A petulant egotism may exist with wit, but never with humor. Sarcasm and satire are the forms which best agree with imperfect moral dispositions. A too prolonged irony has something melancholy and dyspeptic in it, and passes into the blood of a faulty temper even if there be the tonic of an upright moral sense. ”

“ It must be the art-playfulness of irony that tempts most people, when they write for children or talk with them, to adopt some form of this method of speaking. But this method of communing with little [Pg 52] people is full of dangers; while a pervading and abiding atmosphere of irony is most unfair to them. Slow children are baffled and stupefied by it; quick children all too soon catch and adopt the element of insincerity underlying it. ”

“ The degrading, utterly different, back view of them teaches that Life is an irony. If the teaching is not accepted, and we are to take the blame, can we bear to live? Therefore, either way the irony of Life is proved. ”

“ They cannot suppress a smile at the false assumptions and pretensions and hopes of this perishing world. The same temper leads them to assume, for the purpose of mirth, or argument, or self-discipline (which you please) , the very worst that the world can possibly think of themselves, their own views and designs. Irony, in fact, seems only an ethical expression of the logical reductio ad absurdum, as applied to matters of taste, morality, and religion. Great examples have shown it to be compatible with real humility and wide benevolence ”

“ Without departing from the analogy that pervades the various kinds of verbal irony, we may speak of a practical irony, which is independent of all forms of speech, and needs not the aid of words. Life affords as many illustrations of this, as conversation and books of the other. ”

“ Force one to laugh, and then take laughing ill?
II. Secondly, If it be a Fault in those reverend Divines, mention’d in the foregoing Article, to use Irony, Drollery, Ridicule, and Satire, in any Case; or if the Fault lies in an exorbitant Use thereof, or in any particular Species of Drollery; as, for example, such Drollery as is to be found in the polemical Writings and Sermons of Dr. South; it is fit some Remedy should be employ’d for the Cure of this Evil. ”

“ but fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony. ”

“ One is taught to refrain from irony, because mankind does tend to take it literally. In the hearing of the gods, who hear all, it is conversely unsafe to make a simple and direct statement. So what is one to do? The dilemma needs a whole volume to itself. ”

“ At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. ”

“ To take, for example, from the series a typical sentence which served so many for a text—
“To whom does the materialist cry his defiance—to whom but to God? He cannot rest from baiting a Deity whose existence he denies. He forgets that irony can wring no response from a vacuum.” A propos of which wrote the following:—
A Half-pay General.—Don’t tell me, Sir, but you’ve served, like me, a confounded ungrateful country, and learned your lesson! ”

“ Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it. ”

“ Chalmers, in his historical and biographical preface to this series—differs from its predecessors in the general plan, although the ultimate tendency is similar. We have here no philosophy of morals, no indignant censure of the grosser vices, no critical disquisitions, and, in general, scarcely anything serious. Irony is the predominant feature. This caustic species of wit is employed in the 'World' to execute purposes which other methods had failed to accomplish. ”

“ These arrows, winged by fancy, sharpened by wit, poisoned by truth, always reached the centre.
It is claimed by many that anything, the best and holiest, can be ridiculed. As a matter of fact, he who attempts to ridicule the truth, ridicules himself. He becomes the food of his own laughter. ”

“ When the shaft of wit flies like the arrow of Ulysses through all the rings and strikes the centre; when words of wisdom mingle with the clown's conceits; when folly laughing shows her pearls, and mirth holds carnival; when the villain fails and the right triumphs, the trials and the griefs of life for the moment fade away. ”