Part 3

"By means of that mere snatch, to many a hoard Of fancies: as some falling cone bears soft The eye, along the fir-tree spire, aloft To a dove's nest."

The simile gives us such a new perception of the mysterious relations of mind and Nature that we should not be surprised if the object designated had really, in the great involvement of all things, some secret affinity with the thought; perhaps the thought has recognized the family mark and claimed kinship. This is an exalted claim because it sets free our personality. We become superior to Nature, and are made aware that we can vivify her as the Creator can; but, as we also are creatures, we admit her to a tender and refining confidence. "Daffodils, that come before the swallow dares," "take the winds of March with beauty."

"The centre-fire heaves underneath the earth, And the earth changes like a human face." "Earth is a wintry clod, But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes Over its breast to waken it." "The winds Are henceforth voices, in a wail or shout, A querulous mutter, or a quick, gay laugh,-- Never a senseless gust now man is born."

The imagination thus proclaiming the banns between spirit and matter reminds us of Wordsworth's dear maiden, of whom he says,--

"She was known to every star in heaven, And every wind that blew."

The impression of surprise which a perfect simile produces is transferred from the understanding back to the imagination before the former can venture to be amused. But sometimes the surprise lingers there long enough to have a narrow escape from smiling; as when Sir Thomas Brown, finding that midnight has overtaken him at his desk, says, "To keep our eyes open longer, were to _act_ the antipodes." His wakefulness is not only like the antipodal day, but dramatizes it; and this is a simile that imparts the shock of wit.

Here is one from Shakspeare that approaches it, but is intercepted by a sense of beauty:--

"These violent delights have violent ends, And in their triumph die; like fire and powder, Which, as they kiss, consume."

And he says that, when the people saw Anne Boleyn at her coronation, such a noise arose "as the shrouds make at sea in a stiff tempest." Mr. Browning makes us smile when he paints the "poppy's red effrontery--till autumn spoils their fleering quite with rain,"

"And, turbanless, a coarse, brown, rattling crane Protrudes."

This reminds me that in the West a bald man's head is spoken of as rising above the timber-line; which is quite in the style of American similes, as when Rufus Choate, who so frequently appeared to be saying to his jury, "If you have tears, prepare to shed them now," was described to be a man who always bored for water.

Charles Lamb commenting upon the following line from Davenport's King John and Matilda,--

"And thou, Fitzwater, reflect upon thy _name_, And turn the _Son of Tears_,"--

says, "Fitzwater: son of water." A striking instance of the compatibility of the _serious pun_ with the expression of the profoundest sorrows. Grief as well as joy finds ease in thus playing with a word. Old John of Gaunt in Shakspeare thus descants on his name: "Gaunt, and gaunt, indeed;" to a long string of conceits which no one has ever yet felt to be ridiculous. The poet Wither, thus, in a mournful review of the declining estate of his family, says with deepest nature,--

"'The very name of Wither shows decay.'"

But, in the following passage from John Fletcher's "Bonduca," pure poetry checks the laugh,--

"I have seen these Britons that you magnify Run as they would have outrun time, and roaring, Basely for mercy, roaring; the light shadows, That in a thought scur o'er the fields of corn, Halted on crutches to them."

That is in the finest style of an exaggeration which has been inherited by Americans and is the source of much of their wit and humor. Here is a coarser specimen, but perfectly witty. A person, remarking to a famous criminal lawyer that his client would certainly go to hell, had for a reply, "Go to hell! he ought to be thankful that there is a hell he _can_ go to."

This characteristic will recur under the head of Falstaff.

Some of the similes which Americans derive from their professions, and apply to persons, have all the character of wit. A farmer says of a meagre and unequal speech that it was "pretty scattering," alluding to ground crops that grow unevenly. An iron-founder will say of a speech that was all fusion and passion that, notwithstanding, it "didn't make a weld." Miners in the West use the word "color" for the finest gold in the ground. One of them remarked of a man who had been tried and found worthless, "I have panned him out clear down to the bed rock, but I can't even raise the color." Frequenters of the race-course mention a beaten politician as "the longest-eared horse they ever saw," as the ears hang to a jaded horse. And a Nantucket captain, when asked his opinion of a very rhetorical preacher, said, "He's a good sailor, but a bad carrier."

The poetry of Donne, Cowley, Suckling, and others of that epoch, easily furnish examples of similes which stop so far short of beauty that their aptness only serves to raise a smile. Suckling says,--

"Her feet beneath her petticoat Like little mice stole in and out."

Cowley begins his Hymn to Night,--

"First-born of chaos, who so fair didst come From the old negro's darksome womb,"

and we have to deny poetic freedom to this aboriginal contraband.

How charmingly, however, did the poor woman reply to the gentleman who found her watering her webs of linen cloth. She could not tell him even the text of the last sermon. "And what good can the preaching do you, if you forget it all?" "Ah, sir, if you will look at this web on the grass, you will see that as fast as ever I put the water on it the sun dries it all up, and yet, sir, I see it gets whiter and whiter." This is pure wit from the well of imagination, and the smile is as deep in it as truth.

It would be hazardous to liken a poet to a spider, we might think; but when Mr. Browning undertakes it, this dodger of brooms spins a web all dripping with the splendor of fancy. Mr. Browning speaks of young Sordello, the poet, as he dreams in the old castle and connects the events around him by absorbing surmises of his own:--

"Thus thrall reached thrall; He o'erfestooning every interval, As the adventurous spider, making light Of distance, sports her threads from depth to height, From barbican to battlement; so flung Fantasies forth and in their centre swung Our architect,--the breezy morning fresh Above, and merry,--all his waving mesh Laughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged. This world of ours by tacit pact is pledged To laying such a spangled fabric low, Whether by gradual brush or gallant blow."

Beauty has spun the poet and the insect into a cocoon out of which the splendid wings emerge; then wit takes up the thread with the conception of the prosaic old world's hostility to flimsy poesy, and we admire the sudden congruity which is established between two such irreconcilable objects.

Outside the domain of poetry involuntary wit lurks everywhere, even in passages of history whose passion seems capable of expunging all smiles upon the face. Two contrarious ideas may blend for a moment at one point, as when King Olaf put a pan of coals upon Eyvind's naked flesh until it broiled beneath them, and then asked, without suspecting any thing incongruous, "Dost thou now, O Eyvind, believe in Christ?" Here is a momentary inclusion of an act of belief under an act of physical pain. When in the course of time the deadly earnestness of Olaf fades away for us, we perceive the incongruity, but also perceive that Olaf, in sad simplicity, imagined there was congruity; or, he reflected, a pan of coals shall compel a congruity.

This grim practice of unconscious wit is heightened when we recollect that Christ was a person who declined to call down fire upon those who did not receive him; and such an incident affords us a ready passage from Wit into the domain of Irony.

IRONY.

Nature herself practised irony long before men had suffered from it enough to endow literature with its expressive form. She has always pretended to agree with our _penchant_ for pleasant but noxious habits, and for a long time seems to be of our opinion that such ways of living are of a capital kind; but eventually she is fatigued because we misunderstand her, and exclaims by many a twinge, "You simpletons! I meant just the reverse." "Why didn't you say so at first?" we reply, as we smart to find we had been so prosaic when we thought we were so romantic; but the smart etches the shapes of tragedy upon the soul.

The mind uses irony when it gravely states an opinion or sentiment which is the opposite of its belief, with the moral purpose of showing its real dissent from the opinion. It must therefore be done with this wink from the purpose in it, so that it may not pass for an acquiescence in an opposite sentiment. It may be done so well as to deceive even the elect; and perhaps the ordinary mind complains of irony as wanting in straightforwardness. There is a moment of hesitation, when the mind stoops over this single intention with a double appearance, and doubts upon which to settle as the real prey. So that only carefully poised minds with the falcon's or the vulture's glance can always discriminate rapidly enough to seize the point. In this moment of action the pleasure of irony is developed, which arises from a discovery of the contrast between the thing said and the thing intended. And this pleasure is heightened when we observe the contrast between the fine soul who means nobly, and his speaking as if he meant to be ignoble. Then the ignoble thing is doubly condemned, first, by having been briefly mistaken to be the real opinion of the speaker, and then by the flash of recognition of the speaker's superiority. Thackeray describes the high-minded intentions of Rebecca Sharp: "It became naturally Rebecca's duty to make herself, as she said, agreeable to her benefactors, and to gain their confidence to the utmost of her power. Who can but admire this quality of gratitude in an unprotected orphan? 'I am alone in the world,' said the friendless girl: 'well, let us see if my wits cannot provide me with an honorable maintenance.' Thus it was that our little romantic friend formed visions of the future for herself; nor must we be scandalized that, in all her castles in the air, a husband was the principal inhabitant. Of what else have young ladies to think but husbands? Of what else do dear mammas think? 'I must be my own mamma,' said Rebecca." Thus the great author confides to us his abhorrence of Vanity Fair.

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. This suspicion is derived from the mind's instinctive feeling that irony is a trait of a superior person who can afford to have a stock of original ideas with which it tests opinion, and who holds them so securely that he can never play with them a losing game. The Bastard in King John indicates this superiority when he says,--

"Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail, And say,--there is no sin but to be rich; And being rich, my virtue then shall be, To say,--there is no vice but beggary."

A man who pretends to hold the opposite of his own belief is morally a hypocrite, until we detect that slight touch of banter which is the proof of genuine irony. Then we see that he is honest though he equivocates, for he belies himself with sincerity. A man who can afford this is to that extent superior to the man who, whether right or wrong, is hopelessly didactic, and incapable of commending his own opinions by the bold ease with which he may deplore them.

It is irony when Lowell, speaking of Dante's intimacy with the Scriptures, adds, "They do even a scholar no harm." Jaques, in "As You Like It," is ironical when he indicates men by the actions of the wounded deer which augmented with tears the stream that did not need water, as men leave their money to those who have too much already. The herd abandons him: that is right,--misery parts company. Anon, they come sweeping by, and never stay to inquire into his hurt. That is just the proper fashion, too. "Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens!" This pretence of praising the deer is a parable which arraigns mankind.

In the Old Testament there is an instance of irony, where the priests of Baal called on his name but there was no reply, and Elijah suggested that "either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked." But the priests had all the prosaic singleness of an ignorant mind, and went on scarifying themselves with knives and lancets, as if Elijah had not already let their blood.

The New Testament furnishes a more delicate specimen in the parable of the unjust steward, which has difficulties of interpretation, arising from an unwillingness, perhaps, to recognize the irony. The steward is expecting to be dismissed for malfeasance in office. In the days of parable, whitewashing committees were unknown. He then expects to ingratiate himself with his lord's debtors by reducing the amount of their bills, hoping that some of them would take him up when discarded. It is not clear what commendation to a debtor who might also be a creditor lay in this fraudulent reduction of his bill; but a parable serves only the main point, which in this case is to show how much more tact a thoroughly worldly man has than a technically spiritual man. So the lord admires the shiftiness of his steward, because it had an ulterior purpose; whereas your conventional child of light has no genuine foresight. This is done to introduce the irony of the verse: "And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations." The master's hint of the superior sagacity of the people of mammon is delightfully qualified by the irony that lurks in his use of the word "everlasting." Then the serious intent of the parable is clearly stated in the three succeeding verses.

When irony becomes persistently cynical it defeats the moral advantage which it would possess of attracting men to its serious meaning, because it then involves too large a tract of human life in its insinuation. The pretences that things are all bad may become so clamorous at the door of our faith in human nature that no good things can gain admission. In literature, an irony that is tinged a little with cynicism is a healthy recoil from sentimentalism: for an affected ideal, if too long and too floridly sustained, piques our knowledge of human nature into making inquiries; and, as it is in public affairs when people are aroused to investigate, the facts which are discovered receive too great a valuation. They seem to indicate that every thing is rotten; and while one temper denounces, another temper sneeringly inquires for virtue. In broad day, this lantern of Diogenes goes about hunting up an honest citizen. "There is nothing but roguery to be found in villanous man."

The strained and almost impossible goodness of Dickens's "Battle of Life" is punished by the cool depreciation of Thackeray's pen. When the former insists too strongly that his humble characters shall be examples of all the British beatitudes, the latter depicts too easily sharpers and nonentities for women, and well-bred, high-toned rascals for men. But when a too fluent and prolific imagination, working in the steam of a great modern centre, has its shapes distorted, and the outlines waver into caricature, a tonic breath with the taste of brine in it will always set in to temper this radiation. Then it is inevitable that we shiver and complain that the tone has been reduced too far. When a skilfully distended bubble breaks, and only a thin spat of suds is left, a cynic finger will point to it as if to say, "Here's your fine iris all gone to unserviceable soap." But there is a solider ball, the earth itself, upon which human nature paints its zones; and although life is despicable at the poles, and revolting in many a foul quarter, we know that noble landscapes stocked with graciousness and honor spread on every side. Shakspeare alone seems to have this bubble hanging securely from his pipe, where it sheds the swift glances of myriad eyes.

Thackeray says, "How can I hold out the hand of friendship, when my first impression is, 'My good sir, I strongly suspect that you were up my pear-tree last night'? It is a dreadful state of mind. The core is black; the death-stricken fruit drops on the bough, and a great worm is within,--fattening and feasting and wriggling. Who stole the pears? I say. Is it you, brother? Is it you, Madam?"

These suspicions cannot conceal their good humor: the one hand drives the railing pen; the other, behind the chair, holds the glimmer, not of steel, but of a smile.

But when Swift writes a chapter upon the use and improvement of madness in a Commonwealth, the smile which scantily flickers over the surface of it is the smile of the Spartan boy while the fox was gnawing at his vitals. Swift's pen makes the Iron Madonna's gestures of invitation,--she that stood in mediæval torture-chambers and bade the bewildered prisoner take refuge in her opening arms, where a thousand lancets pricked life, faith, and hope away.

At one time, the German Heine's irony smacks of good humor; at another, you would ask for a bumper of gall to sweeten your mouth. He represents two fat Manchester ladies at a particularly exposed ballet, murmuring to each other, "Shocking! For shame!" And he says that they were so benumbed with horror that they could not for an instant take their opera-glasses from their eyes, and consequently remained in that situation to the last moment, when the curtain fell.

By and by we hear a change of tone. "I always obeyed the one commandment, that we should love our enemies; for, ah! those persons whom I have best loved were always, without my knowing it, my worst enemies." And again: "Madame, you can readily form an idea of what life is like in heaven,--the more readily, as you are married."

This style of innuendo is always more good-natured in Thackeray; as when speaking in the character of a widower, who remembers the late Mrs. Brown, he says: "By a timely removal she was spared from the grief which her widowhood would have doubtless caused her, and I acquiesce in the decrees of Fate in this instance, and have not the least regret at not having preceded her."

Heine also can be pleasantly mischievous. When he was about to travel from Lyons to Paris in the old days of diligences, a friend commissioned him to carry one of the colossal Lyons sausages to a homœopathic doctor in the capital. But Heine and his wife were so frequently hungry, and had trespassed so often upon the length of the sausage, that a very small end remained on their arrival. Heine thereupon shaved off a transparent slice with a razor, and enclosed it in the following letter to the doctor: "_My dear Sir_,--Your researches have helped to establish the fact that millionths produce the greatest effects. Pray receive herewith the millionth part of a Lyons sausage, which your friend consigned to you. In case your theory be true, it will have the effect of the whole sausage upon you."

Irony employs wit to feather its purport. A Frenchman said of a man who never really did make a witty remark: "How full of wit that man must be! he never lets any escape." That, when translated, is improved because the English word _any_ can refer at once to no wit and to no person's escaping the effect of wit. Thus the irony is increased.

One of the most characteristic and important specimens of irony is Thackeray's "Philip," a story of a villanous doctor who deceives a woman with a mock marriage, deserts her, and marries a lady with expectations, who has a son Philip and dies. But the traitor is endowed with an impressive amount of deportment, and his starched front and cravat seem to have been secreted by the stiffest of spotless souls, in a rapture of rigidness. This carapace of deportment is gradually worn too thin; for it has been put to rough service on all occasions to supply the place of virtue and to make its absence appear no calamity. The irony consists in accepting this deportment as if it were really put forth by an estimable man. The book is one long strain of grave assumption that Dr. Firmin is a good man and a killing physician; but the reader knows better on the first point, and enjoys tasting the man's villany through this pretence. And it is kept up long after the deportment becomes like the pantaloons of the stingy lawyer, which hung in his garret labelled thus, "Too old to wear, too good to give away." It is still good enough for Dr. Firmin; and he reaches a respectable grave in ignorance that we know him so thoroughly, and discovers rather late that he was always well known at the head-quarters of genius.

The story is a wonderfully sustained innuendo of rascality, carried on by this ironical pretence of virtue. Thackeray appears in it to be as green as Dr. Firmin's dupes; but the mask is lifted a little in every sentence, and the author and the reader peeping in at opposite sides, their eyes meet, and smiles at what they have discovered are exchanged.

Even the little sister, who becomes a living mother to the Philip of the dead lady, cannot flee from this great tide of irony, which catches her and stands up to her heart. The author is constantly deprecating her love for Philip; though he knows it is the sweet flower of her life that is fed from the ugly soil of her betrayal. Why will she go on so with that boy, and save up money for him, and extemporize little treats with brandy and water _ad libitum_, and believe in him when he tries to become a bad magazine writer, and believe in his fortune when he marries a beggar, and, in short, believe that she was sent into the world to be deceived, and then have a great, blundering, brave, pure, splendid Philip, as if by bequest from a legal mother? Why in Heaven's name does she not blow upon the doctor, and make a good thing out of betraying his contemptible meanness? Gracious goodness! why is she so expensively magnanimous? Would you, Madame, be so extravagant as to pinch yourself in that way to be faithful and tender to a seducer out of faith and tenderness for his wife's boy? But, there he is: God set such a pure amen to a hideous deed, and she is the woman to say, Amen, after him; for God is just and watches the index of the balance. What! shall she compete with God for retribution? So her life is a long sacrifice to the purest and most mute devotion, and our author banters her to keep the tears from obscuring the page at which he writes.

This charming insinuation of the great observer, who once said of himself that he had no head above his eyes, proves to us that he had a mighty truly-beating heart below them; and we reverently accept the little mother from his shaping hands, to place her in our Valhalla of Women, where Portia, Imogen, and Cordelia have long languished for her company.