Of this sharp impression of life as consisting of the nearly-achieved or barely-failed, there are indications here and there in mid-century fiction, but no thoroughgoing exponent, because none of that unqualified pessimism which acknowledges irrationality as the presiding genius of the world. It is natural that in Disraeli, Brontë, Kingsley, circumstantial irony should be as snakes in Iceland; and that Lytton, Gaskell, Dickens, Thackeray, Reade, should furnish a pair of white crows apiece. It is interesting though also not astonishing to find that out of about three dozen culled examples, Peacock and Butler not counted because they do not work in the medium of normal circumstance, Meredith leads with nearly one-third the total amount, Eliot being a close second, and Trollope a lagging third. Yet these three are decidedly anti-ironic in general belief; shown both by actual testimony and by implication. The former comes, as would be supposed, from Meredith. Writing to a friend and alluding to the weakness of old age, he says,--[237] “We who have loved the motion of legs and the sweep of the winds, we come to this. But for myself, I will own that it is the natural order. There is no irony in Nature.” In his last novel he gives a backhanded thrust at the ironic philosophy in his favorite equivocal fashion:[238] “We are convinced we have proof of Providence intervening when some terrific event of the number at its disposal accomplishes the thing and no more than the thing desired.” In the same story the motive and emotion of the bridegroom is thus described:[239] “A sour relish of the irony in his present position sharpened him to devilish enjoyment of it, as the finest form of loathing: * * * He had cried for Romance--here it was!” But the author makes it clear that this irony is subjective. The objective complement to it arrives later, and its real name is Nemesis. Subjective also is it in the one account we have from George Eliot:[240] “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.