the deepness of the wound. But irony tests its own by the amount of generous light and air it has set flowing through an idea or a personality, and the broad significance it has revealed in neglected things."
The only pertinent reply to such eloquence is one that
may seem impertinent, namely, to refer the special pleader
to a useful principle in argument greatly favored by a certain
canny Greek dialectician, and quaintly restated in
the eighteenth century:[1]
"If once it was expected by the Public that Authors should
strictly define their Subjects, it would instantly cheque an
Innundation of Scribbling. The desultory Manner of Writing
would be absolutely exploded; and Accuracy and Precision
would be necessarily introduced upon every Subject. * * *
If Definitions had been constantly expected from Authors
there would not have appeared one hundredth Part of the
present Books, and yet every Subject had been better ascertained."
Irony, it is true, is defined by the essayist as "the science
of comparative experience," but this attempt to fit a philosophic
giant to the bed of his smaller ironic brother meets
with the usual Procrustian result. As for the tribute to
irony, a far more impressive one is paid in the almost casual
utterance of Lamb, who makes it the climax of his
enumeration of the blessings vouchsafed to mortality,—"and
irony itself—do these things go out with life?"
In Victorian fiction the presence of this element is found very much as it is in life, unobstrusive but easily detectable. What Saintsbury says of Jane Austen would apply in varying degrees to her successors:[2]
