Part 2

Irony is that form of jest in which we ridicule a second person in the presence of a third. It is most complete when the second person is most ignorant of our intention, the third person most alive to it. Irony exists and is full even when the second person thus attacked is alone in suffering the attack, and irony exists and is full when the third person is restricted to our own expectant selves or even to God who made us and in whom is mirrored the universal truth of things. Irony enjoys an exuberant life, whether the second person so attacked is universal and the third as restricted as can be; or whether the second person so attacked is particular and singular, and the third person, the onlooker and the audience, comprehends the whole world.

It is in the intention of irony that it should do good, because it is of the nature of irony that it should avenge the truth. I say "avenge" because irony would not be irony were it not destined to inflict a fatal, or at least a grievous, wound. There is not in irony any measure of pity for the enemy, though irony could not exist without some vast motive of pity for a victim in whose defence it was aroused. Irony is a sword, and must be used as a sword. It has this quality about it, that, like some faery sword, it cannot be used with any propriety save in God's purpose; and those who have been the most expert swordsmen, when they take a wrong reward for their service, or use that weapon for an unworthy end, find it fail in their hands. Nay, like any faery sword, in hands that use it unworthily it will disappear. And the history of Letters is full of men who, tempted by this or by that, by money or by ease, or by random friendship, or by some appetite lower than the hunger and thirst after justice, have found their old strong irony grow limp and fruitless after they had sold their souls.

Irony, therefore, is unknown in those societies where the love of ease dominates all men. It is most powerful in those societies which are by their temper military. You will find irony treated angrily, as though it were an acid or a poison, where men love ease. And you will find it merely ignored when men have wholly lost the sense of justice. In such societies it retires from the realm of letters to that more powerful sphere in which divine vengeance and divine necessity have their action over things; and many such a society no longer capable of producing or of appreciating irony when it proceeds from the mouth or the pen of a man, learn it most dreadfully in the catastrophes of war.

To the young, the pure, and the ingenuous, irony must always appear to have in it a quality of something evil, and so it has, for, as I have said, it is a sword to wound. It is so directly the product or reflex of evil that, though it can never be used, nay, can hardly exist, save in the chastisement of evil, yet irony always carries with it some reflections of the bad spirit against which it was directed. How false it is to say that vengeance and the hatred of the evil men are in themselves evil, all human history can prove. Nay, but for irony in the last times of a decline no breath of health would remain to man. Nevertheless, as it is called into being by evil things, it works in an evil light. It suggests most powerfully the evil against which it is directed, and those innocent of evil shun so terrible an instrument.

Alone of the powers of expression possessed by the human spirit wherewith to defend right against wrong, irony is invulnerable, and alone of those powers it can always strike. Nor is anything invulnerable against it save that death of the intelligence which comes so shortly before the death of the society suffering it, that there is no need in the interval to attack the evil of that society or to attempt to remedy it; for when stupidity comes upon a State all is over.

A happy world, such as the world of children, or any society of men who have still preserved the general health of the soul, such a society as may be found in many mountain valleys, needs none of this salt for the curing and the preservation of morals. But even where men have so protected primal virtue, old men, old proverbs, dim records of past misfortunes leave some savour of irony in the traditions of the tribe. And irony is proved native to the scheme of things and not of its own self unnatural or rebellious by the manner in which the mere course of human happenings is perpetually filled with it. A dreadful irony is present when a man, having heard of the death of a friend, receives later his living letter posted from far off before that death. There is irony when, every defence having been made against some natural accident, that accident yet enters by another gate unsuspected to man. There is an irony in every unfulfilled prophecy and in every lengthy and worthless calculation. No man having purchased an honour defends unpurchased honour without the spirit of irony surrounding all his words. No man praises courage being himself but a rhetorician, or praises justice being himself a lawyer or a magistrate, without some savour of irony in the air of his audience, and it may be presumed without too much phantasy that spirits equal and undisturbed and of a high intelligence can see in every action of human life save the most holy an irony as strong as that which inhabits the tragedies of the great poets.

There is a last use for irony, or rather a last aspect of it which this general irony of Nature, and of Nature's God, suggests: I mean that irony which can only appear in the letters of a country when corruption has gone so far that the mere truth is vivid with ironical power.

For there comes a time--it is brief, as must be all final moments of decay--but there comes a time in the moral disruption of a State when the mere utterance of a plain truth laboriously concealed by hypocrisy, denied by contemporary falsehood, and forgotten in the moral lethargy of the populace, takes upon itself an ironical quality more powerful than any elaboration of special ironies could have taken in the past. Some truth too widely put aside and quietly thrust forward, a detail in general conversation about a powerful man strikes, in such societies, exactly like the point of a spear. Blood flows: and the blood is drawn by irony. Yet was here no act nor any fabric of words. Mere testimony to the truth was enough: and this should prove that irony is in touch with the divine and is a minister to truth. In such awful moments in the history of a State that which makes the dreadful jest is not the jester, but the eternal principle of truth itself. That which is jested at is the whole texture of the universal society upon which the truth falls, and for the audience, for the third person who shall see the jest at the second person's expense, there is present nothing less than the power by which truth is of such effect among men.

No man possessed of irony and using it has lived happily; nor has any man possessing it and using it died without having done great good to his fellows and secured a singular advantage to his own soul.

ON THE SIMPLICITY OF WORDS

That is simple which, when you have long looked at it, and when you have carefully considered it, you cannot justly discover to be built up of other unities. That is simple which, when we will divide it, divides into things like itself, and which, when we divide it, divides, not of its own nature, but violently and unnaturally by our volition. The acute mind will divide what is simple as freely as it will divide what is complex, but the just mind recognises simplicity and will not attempt its division. For in all analysis it is the business of the analyser to get at the ultimate unities; when he has reached the ultimate unities it is also his business to respect them: further division will show acuteness, but it will not show judgment.

The simplest thing we know is the soul of man, for it has about it a quality as it were crystalline and one. So that the more fundamentally it does a thing the more that thing is one. The powers of the soul, its instruments, and therefore the parts of its machinery, are innumerable and perhaps infinite (for we are said to be made in the image of the Infinite); but the thing itself is utterly simple.

Now the soul of man impresses, receives and expresses certain things: for instance, it impresses its unity upon things outside of it, it talks of "London," "mankind," "this landscape." It receives and it says of a colour, "This is such and such a colour"; of a tone, "This is such and such a tone"; of a truth hitherto unheard, "This is true--this is consonant with my nature, and with my making (for I was made); this has Authority, for Authority is authorship."

The soul of man impresses, receives and expresses. And, note you, in this business the soul of man has designed an instrument, and this instrument is the Word. Those who question whether the soul of man so acts, can only question from one of two causes: either they have not considered how we think and do, or else, like many men in our modern diliquescence, they believe all knowledge to be equally futile, and they despair equally of all kinds of careful view, whether of things that can be handled or of immaterial things.

The soul of man impresses, receives and expresses, and its instrument is the Word. It impresses its unity upon this mass of houses and people ("houses" and "people" are themselves words), and it stamps that impression as a word: "London." The soul of man receives. A certain physical impression (which a modern theory would have depend upon proportionate undulation--but this, like most physical hypotheses, is not proved) stirs in the mind a sentiment of colour and of a certain colour; and the mind records its reception in a word: blue. The soul of man expresses. It is cognisant and, in its own manner, sure of existence, secure in existence. To express this, to put forward its certainty exteriorly, out of itself, its instrument is again a word. It says, "I am."

Well then, the Word is all-important, for without the Word the soul of man would live within itself, and therefore stand imprisoned and null, a sort of death. And the Word is all-important in a second way, for by the Word the soul of man not only lives but also communicates. It is by the Word that soul and soul recognise, fertilise and enrich among themselves, each all its fellows. But there is a third character of dignity attaching to the Word, which is this: that the Word reflects and carries on, inherits, shows forth in little, presents, that great origin the soul of man, whence it proceeded; and here it is that I come to the kernel of my subject.

For it is my business to argue here that there is a mystical quality--that is, a quality not contradictory of reason but superior to it--inhabiting the right use of Words. I would say more: I would say that upon the exactitude of that quality in use depended the magic of the poets.

Very certainly men at random, any men, may experience the unexpressed emotion, but the function of the poet--in which he is a sort of splendid servant--is to bring words to his master, his fellow-man, the innumerable, and to untie his tongue.

Two things are most noticeable in this character of the poet: first, that he has the capacity to put these words before his fellow-men for their use, and of the right sort and in the right order; and secondly, that neither does he know how he does it nor can mortal man in any place or under any influence explain how it is done. Consider these three lines--

[Greek: Pempe de min pompoisin hama kraipnoisi pheresthai Hypnô kai Thanatô didymaosin; hoi rha men ôka Katthesan en Lykiês eureiês pioni dêmô.]

Let us suppose this translated by some man who would put an English word for nearly every Greek word, not considering that such mere transformation was by no means a resurrection of the dead. It is from the _Iliad_, where the body of Sarpedon is ordered by a god to be taken to Lycia--to which place he belonged. This god orders the body of Sarpedon, fallen in battle, to be taken to his native place; and this is how the poet speaks of his transference from the place where he died to his own land, if you put word for word--

"He gave him to be borne at once by swift companions, the twins Sleep and Death, who swiftly laid him in the rich land of Lycia the full."

Now a man caring more for resurrection than for a mechanical transference might put it in many ways--I suggest this--

"And he gave Sarpedon dead to be borne by swift companions, the twin-Gods Sleep and Death, who bore him to his own land of Lycia, a pleasant land."

I care not how it is translated, for whoever translates it, unless he is inspired (that is, ordered from outside mankind by a spirit), he will translate it wrong. But the nearer we get to the violent truth of those famous words the more we see what the Word is to the Soul, the more we see how the simplicity of the Word reflects and, to our eyes (and our ears), in some way enhances the simplicity of the Soul.

These toppling things which a man can neither escape nor avoid reside (it would seem from such a passage) not only in the inmost soul but also in Words. These words once written, the soul that put them forth has done its work for ever. Yet no man can say that common counters have been used, that a mere currency of expression has here done its work.

What could be more worn, what for all time more common, than these considerations, a dead man, companions, home, death, sleep and a fertile valley? But in some way it is possible to make of these things what was there made when the man who so wrote them wrote them; and there is no one who will not feel that a son of the gods, of the high gods, was taken by lesser but divine servants, Death and Sleep, who brought him back dead to where his mother had borne him, the land of Lycia, a pleasant land; and he was so borne out of battle, and he rested when the fight was done.

Now how is that purpose of words achieved? No man knows. No man can explain: it is the power of the Word, it is the magic power of the Word. There are some (poor fools!) who try to analyse the connotation of the Word; they will show how such and such a Word involving (in such and such a civilisation) such memories and such associations plays a trick with the mind and deceives it. They will show how Elizabethan English stirs us by modern experiences which the words used by the Elizabethans recall. But the whole of their philosophy is upset at once by the consideration of such a passage as this which I have quoted; for here are only the simplest of things, as simple, I say, as the human soul, and at once overwhelming.

There is more to be said than the mere praise of so amazing a success; the right choice of words in this example, or (to speak more accurately) the right acceptation of them--for poets do not choose--does much more than merely _say_ that thing which such words should say. It does much more than only _tell_ what the singer was inspired to tell. It expands, and embranches and conceives. And out of the right acceptation of words there grows a sacred and a further explanation of their meaning: they illumine not only what we are but what we might be and what we will be. And, above all, they raise echoes: they raise echoes from beyond the world.

Thus in that little bit of Homer quoted, do you not see what it means beyond its bare poetic statement? Not only did Death and Sleep take the body of Sarpedon back to Lycia, but the bodies of all of us are in such hands: for (if you will think of it closely) in what way do men recover their innocence, their childhood and the place where they were born? In what way do they pierce through time? By sleep, in dreams, and possibly, in a more final manner, by death.

ON SECLUDED PLACES

It is a commonplace, and a true one, that the modern world is full of illusions, or rather that the things which we interest ourselves about to-day are nearly all of them matters upon which we have no direct knowledge. The climate of Jamaica, a foreign trial, a war between two nations neither of which we have visited, come to entertain us far more than things upon which we have immediate and personal experience. After a little while we come also to judge these things as though we knew them.

I say that the whole modern world (with the exception of the peasants) suffers heavily from this disease, and no one more than politicians and their electorate. Of a politician upon whose judgment may depend the happiness of the country, most of those who admire or hate him have an impression drawn from caricatures. Of the electorate whom they are supposed to serve politicians have a vague conception, drawn from the hurried aspect of vast crowds of poor men seen by gaslight after dinner in huge halls, and in the course of all the distractions of a speech.

This fantastic ignorance which modern conditions have bred in the great towns seems to some to be wholly evil in its effect. It is not so; for among its effects are to be discovered a number of joyful surprises. Many things which we had imagined to be such and such and which we had deplored, turned out upon examination to be very different, and much better than our newspaper picture had conceived. Among these joyful surprises is the discovery that the earth is not full, that travel has not overspread it, and that there is perfect loneliness within the reach of all. No popular conception of the modern world is more firmly held, especially by educated, and therefore by jaded, men. There is none which it is more useful to explode. Two things have come side by side: first, an immense increase in the ease of communications; secondly, a positive delight in the crowd to associate with the crowd; and these two facts, the one economic and the other social, have more than counteracted all the expansion in numbers of those who travel about and defile the earth with their presence. In between the tracks of their travel, a few miles upon the centres in which they herd, pig and pen, there is an isolation which our forefathers never knew. A hundred years ago the Land's End and St. Davids were both places far removed from London; to-day the end of Cornwall is familiar to many thousands of men who are not native to it, but what about St. Davids? How many men who read this can say where it is or have visited it? A hundred years ago Midhurst, Petworth, Pulborough, Horsham, East Grinstead, Crowborough Top, Haywards Heath, Heathfield, Burwash, were places upon the map of Sussex intimately known to the men of that county, and visited but rarely by men from beyond the weald. But though they were visited rarely they were visited equally, and if a man said he knew the county then he knew those places. Compare their fate to-day. Crowborough, Haywards Heath, and Heathfield are suburbs of London, and right through the heart of the county a long bridge--pure London all the way--unites London with its suburb of Brighton. Do you imagine upon that account that the isolation of Sussex is lost? Very far from it. It is considerably increased. Nay, the loneliness of that vast proportion of the county which lines of travel do not touch is, if anything, too great--it is in excess even of what the greatest lover of contemplation can desire. And you may within a mile of the Brighton road lie in a wood and watch small beasts behaving with a freedom and an ignorance of human intercourse which perhaps they never had when village life was really strong, when the great estates were not mortgaged to cosmopolitan finance, when the old families lived in their houses and made the county town five miles away their resort for purchase and even for amusement.

It is equally true of the North; the whole chain of the Pennines between the two main lines of travel to the east and to the west of them is utterly deserted. A man may walk thirty times in a year from Hawes to Ribble Head and in not half those walks meet or speak to a man. This is true of the great high road across the chain, of the summits it is far truer. Go from Appleby over Cross Fell up Wild Boar Scar and down the water to Alston, and you will be as completely cut off from men the whole day long as you could be in the West of Canada. The same is true of the dales of Cheviot. From where Chevy Chase was fought all the way up Rededale is a fine great road that was once the highway to Scotland over Carter Fell. If a man goes lame upon the English side of it he cannot count upon getting a lift to Jedburgh; he must limp it all the way. And speaking of that road reminds one that not only has this novel isolation come upon a great part of Britain, but that as one watches it with a sense that is not wholly pleasurable (especially on winter evenings, after a day bereft of human intercourse) one has often around one evidences of a recent time when the activities of the country were more evenly spread. Upon this same great road from Carter Fell there is upon the Scotch side of the path a house which once paid a high rental and did great trade with the traffic. It is in ruins. Upon that same Cross Fell which is now completely alone, you come perpetually upon abandoned workings, upon bits of hardened road, now half sunk into the bog, and even upon the remains of broken bridges over streams.

In the quadrilateral which is formed by the railways in the south-west of Scotland there is a great area of silence, and in that belt of Wales which separates the northern from the southern dialects, a belt which is again served by a fine high road, and which has been throughout English history the scene of the western advance from across the Marches into the Principality, there is silence also. Plinlimmon, the mountain which dominates this central part, is unknown, and the reason is easy enough to discover. Plinlimmon is not an abrupt mountain, astonishing in outline or difficult of ascent. It is, upon the contrary, a great rounded hill, but there is perhaps no height in the island more solemn nor commanding a more awful and spacious scene, and those few who would still take the trouble to reach it may find the north a chasm more wonderful, I think, than any in the range of Snowdon or in the neighbourhood of Cader Idris. All this is true of that little narrow space which lies between the North Sea and St. George's Channel, and when one considers the neighbouring countries of the Continent the instances that arise are innumerable. Within two days of London, and to be reached at about an expense of £2, there is a little democracy in which no man has ever been put to death, in which no wheeled vehicles have ever been seen, of which the few laws are made, or rather the ancient and honourable customs maintained, by the heads of families meeting for discussion. You can from the little village in its centre telephone to Paris if you wish, and yet who has been to that place? Or who knows the way there from London? Probably not a dozen men. There is on one of the main railways of Europe a chain of mountains abrupt, intensely blue, comparable only to the background of certain mediæval illuminations, and, with their astonishing, unworldly aspect, making one understand how the active mediæval imagination could see, remember, and use things that we pass by. I know of no artist who has drawn that range nor of any traveller who has described it. You cannot see it from the train; it runs along a narrow and profound valley. You must leave the railway at a little roadside station, you must climb two thousand feet on to the plateau above, and from there, when you have turned a corner of the road, there breaks upon you this unearthly vision of the range.