Defoe's pilloried renown is well known. Butler's work "in Defense of the Miraculous Element in Our Lord's Ministry upon Earth," was solemnly greeted by the reviewers as a champion of orthodoxy, and sent by Canon Ainger to a friend he wished to convert. Swift and De Quincey have been condemned for abuse of children and encouragement of crime.
Misunderstanding of this sort is a triumph for irony, a test of success. But there are also signs of a misapprehension of the ironic disposition, especially as related to the satiric. Of this conception two modern critics afford examples. In the Introduction to his Defoe, Masefield remarks,—
"An ironical writer has always nobility of soul; a satirist has
seldom any quality save greater baseness than his subject.
An ironical writer knows the good; a satirist need only know
the evil."
The superb eulogy of the first statement may be dismissed
as a bit of rhetoric, but the doom pronounced in its corollary,
is based on a double confusion; first between the
ironist and the humorist, and second between the satirist
and the misanthrope. In a recent discussion the same
fallacy is promulgated at greater length:[1]
"The satirist is the aggressive lawyer, fastening upon particular
people and particular qualities. But irony is no more
personal than the sun that sends his flaming darts into the world.
The satirist is a purely practical man, with a business instinct,
bent on the main chance and the definite object. He is often
brutal, and always overbearing; the ironist, never. Irony may
wound from the very fineness and delicacy of the attack, but
the wounding is incidental. The sole purpose of the satirist
and the burlesquer is to wound; and they test their success by
- ↑ Randolph Bourne: The Life of Irony. Atlantic, III, 357.
