CHAPTER III
THE IRONIC
The science of Esthetics is a tribute to our zeal in attempting
to define the indefinable word beauty. Nearly
as elusive of categoric bondage is irony; but for its capture
no formal scientific crusade has as yet been organized. It
is, however, whether in spite of its vagueness or because
of it, a term of great and increasing popularity. No
phrase is at present more of a general favorite than "The
Irony of Fate," no exclamation more frequent than "How
ironic!" In this expressive and impressive utterance there
is as much individual variation of meaning as in "How
beautiful!" And it coexists with as much possibility of a
standardized conception. What the latter may be, it is the
business of the student of the subject to try to determine.
The etymology and early usage of the word are familiar enough. Generically, to the ancient Greeks, irony meant dissimulation in speech; specifically, that form of dissimulation used by Socrates for the confusion of his dialectic opponent, consisting on the part of the wise man of an assumption of ignorance which longed for enlightenment. On this bated hook were caught the unwary who pretended to wisdom the while they had it not, lured by flattering inquiry to a fatal communicativeness.
In its present status the term has two fairly distinct divisions, characterized by Bishop Thirwall, in his essay on the Irony of Sophocles, as the verbal and the practical. The former is the rhetorical device whereby a certain idea
