ironic explanation to his own affairs, but prides himself on his detached, Olympian, ironic view of the cosmos. This spirit is incarnate in the wise youth, Adrian Harley.[1]
"He had no intimates except Gibbon and Horace, and the
society of these fine aristocrats of literature helped him to accept
humanity as it had been, and was; a supreme ironic procession,
with laughter of Gods in the background. Why not laughter of
mortals also?"
From the tranquillity of this calm eminence he observes
the mortal excitement produced by the news of Richard's
marriage.[2]
"When one has attained that felicitous point of wisdom from
which one sees all mankind to be fools, the diminutive objects
may make what new moves they please, one does not marvel
at them; their sedateness is as comical as their frolic, and their
frenzies more comical still."
Whether or not there is such an actuality as an Ironic
Fate, upon whom mortals may blame their failures, or
against whom they are doomed to strive in vain, is as
speculative a question as any in metaphysics. The
ironist is as dogmatic as the theist; and he no doubt gets
as much satisfaction from his denial of a rationally ordered
universe, as the other does from his assertion of it. To be
able to fling back a jest into the face of the Sphinx is undeniably
a poor equivalent for guessing her riddle, but it
at least helps to take the edge off her inscrutability.
In his La Satire en France, Lenient makes irony the opposite of enthusiasm, and emphasizes the fact and the necessity of their perennial alternation, like the recurrence of day and night. It would indeed be a fearful world whose
