I could never, until recently, divest myself of the haunting feeling that being ironical had something to do with the entering of the iron into one’s soul. I thought I knew what irony was, and I admired it immensely. I could not believe that there was something metallic and bitter about it. Yet this sinister connotation of a clanging, rasping meanness of spirit, which I am sure it has still in many people’s minds, clung about it, until one happy day my dictionary told me that the iron had never entered into the soul at all, but the soul into the iron (St. Jerome had read the psalm wrong), and that irony was Greek, with all the free, happy play of the Greek spirit about it, letting in fresh air and light into others’ minds and our own. It was to the Greek an incomparable method of intercourse, the rub of mind against mind by the simple use of simulated ignorance and the adoption, without committing one’s self, of another’s point of view. Not until I read the Socrates of Plato did I fully appreciate that this irony,--this pleasant challenging of the world, this insistent judging of experience, this sense of vivid contrasts and incongruities, of comic juxtapositions, of flaring brilliancies, and no less heartbreaking impossibilities, of all the little parts of one’s world being constantly set off against each other, and made intelligible only by being translated into and defined in each others’ terms,--that this was a life, and a life of beauty, that one might suddenly discover one’s self living all unawares. And if one could judge one’s own feeble reflection, it was a life that had no room for iron within its soul. We should speak not of the Socratic method but of the Socratic life. For irony is a life rather than a method. A life cannot be taken off and put on again at will; a method can. To be sure, some people talk of life exactly as if it were some portable commodity, or some exchangeable garment. We must live, they cry, as if we were about to begin. And perhaps they are. Only some of us would rather die than live that puny life that they can adopt and cover themselves with. Irony is too rich and precious a thing to be capable of such transmission. The ironist is born and not made. This critical attitude towards life, this delicious sense of contrasts that we call irony, is not a pose or an amusement. It is something that colors every idea and every feeling of the man who is so happy as to be endowed with it.