That produces a shock, and when applied to irony this is an effect still more powerful than when it is applied to fiction, as, for instance, in Ambrose Bierce’s _An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge_. But the irony is not artificial: it is the sort of irony given to those who walk the world with their eyes open. It inspires the feeling of amusement which invaded a few of us during the great European War, when we read in the newspapers articles about Russian culture, and remembered what the same newspapers used to say about the Bear. I could not help smiling at our attitude to the sausage-eaters when recalling how completely we had forgotten the frog-eaters and candle-eaters of times gone by. Very likely, though the war roused him to action in defence of ancient French culture, Anatole France chuckled over the intimate friendship between France and England, which, in 1898, at the time of Fashoda, and in 1899, at the time of the Boer War, was such an intimate hatred. He would have chuckled still more had he known that a patriotic English inn-keeper had changed the name of his tavern from “The King of Prussia” to “The Czar’s Head.” For history has staying power, and one wonders a little whether, as generations pass, “The Czar’s Head” may not have to turn into “The Roosevelt Arms,” “The Garibaldi,” or perhaps one day into “The Chung Ling Soo....” But ironic as it all is, it is very living. This should strike nobody as extraordinary, for life is most ironic: it would be quite intolerable to some of us if it were not. But this is worth saying because a great many other satirists--Swift, Rabelais, Cervantes--obtain most of their effects by distortion. Anatole France obtains his by bringing out the essential incongruity of life: funerals passing under the windows of the Ritz where there is a smart luncheon-party, sermons bidding us love our enemies while newsboys shout casualty lists; life is full of it. That is why the archdeacon and another cleric hold, in the midst of a theological crisis, that earnest argument about omelettes. Life and people are like that, and there is nothing at all distorted in the diplomatic, furry, soft-spoken priests who ... well, let us say, do not discourage their fair penitents from committing adultery with powerful republicans, provided this serves a good cause. After all Judith ... and Jael, and all that. And it does not seem monstrous that the new bishop should be selected while Madame de Gromance does up her suspenders, for it is quite conceivable that lovers should now and then, at intervals, talk politics.