Subjective also is it in the one account we have from George Eliot:[1]
"But anyone watching keenly the stealthy convergence of
human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on
another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference
or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced
neighbor. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personæ
folded in her hand."
That is, our ignorance makes a dramatic irony out of a
situation in itself a link in the logical chain of cause
and effect.
The implication that to the Victorians life is on the whole rational rather than ironic is made by the fact that the ironic situations are incidental, and the conclusions are based on poetic justice, whether happy or tragic, and not on ironic injustice. It may be worth noting that these various situations seem divisible into three or four classes, and that such division serves to bring some order out of the chaos of their multiplicity.
There is first the irony already mentioned as dramatic, where ignorance is not bliss. Such is the case in Lytton's Alice, when Maltravers falls in love with his own unknown daughter, an Œdipean tragedy being averted by timely information. A similar relationship with opposite effect is that of Harold Transome, exasperating with warnings of exposure the slippery scoundrel Jermyn, until he forces the incredible exposure of his own social position. Even more ironic is that behavior which in ignorant zeal pre-*
- ↑ Middlemarch, I, 142. She also comments as follows on the undeniably just statement of Jermyn to Mrs. Transome that Harold should be told the secret of his birth: "Perhaps some of the most terrible irony of the human lot is this of a deep truth coming to be uttered by lips that have no right to it." Felix Holt, II, 242.
