Irony

Irony (Gr. eirōneia, eirōn, 'a dissembler'), the name applied to a figure which enables the speaker to convey his meaning with greater force by means of a contrast between his thought and his expression, or, to speak more accurately, between the thought which he evidently designs to express and that which his words properly signify. It may be employed to convey assent and approbation as well as the contrary, but it is more properly a weapon belonging to the armoury of controversy, by means of which weight and point may be added to the gravest part of the argument. The dialogues of Plato are admirable examples of a subtle dialectic irony, in which the opinion of the adversary is put respectfully in the foreground, and the appearance of deference is never dropped until the supports on which it rests are one by one withdrawn, and the whole is completely undermined and seems to sink by the weight of its own absurdity. Of this rare art in modern literature there is nothing worthy of comparison, save the Provincial Letters of Pascal. The Minute Philosopher of Bishop Berkeley is one of the most unfortunate attempts at its revival. A more recent master of dialectic irony is the Danish theologian and philosopher, Kierkegaard. The highest triumphs of irony consist not in refutation and demolition, but in clear demonstration of the truth once the fallacy has been exposed and overthrown. Of what may be called practical irony numberless instances of the most various kinds occur in life. A man humours the follies of another to render them more extravagant, either for his own amusement or his victim's ultimate profit; another, under the mask of friendship, panders to the wishes of some deluded man to lead him to his ruin. In such spirit Timon gave his gold to Alcibiades, the witches fed the ambitious hopes of Macbeth, and Mephistopheles echoed the aspirations and the despair of Faust. Fate itself brings bitter irony to bear upon the hopes of mortal life, in the inevitable reflection how little the actual good and ill have corresponded with the antecedent hopes and fears. The calm retrospect of an unembittered age, no longer disturbed by the passions of the actor, is ever tinged with a genial sense of the dumb irony of things as it recognises at last that life has been little more than a vain pursuit of the phantoms of youth. And alike in the broad arena of history we find human impatience and temerity punished by the relentless hand of destiny, as in the signal and sudden reverses that follow close on the heels of arrogant ambition. And so in the microcosm of the drama, which must be a faithful image of human existence concentrated in the mimic sphere. An admirable amplification of this thought as applied to one of the greatest tragedians of all time will be found in Thirlwall's famous essay, 'On the Irony of Sophocles,' in his Essays, Speeches, and Sermons, edited by Dean Perowne (1880).