That democratic, sympathetic outlook upon the feelings and thoughts and actions of men and women is the life of irony. That life is expressed in the social intercourse of ourselves with others. The daily fabric of the life of irony is woven out of our critical communings with ourselves and the personalities of our friend, and the people with whom we come in contact. The ironist, by adopting another’s point of view and making it his own in order to carry light and air into it, literally puts himself in the other man’s place. Irony is thus the truest sympathy. It is no cheap way of ridiculing an opponent by putting on his clothes and making fun of him. The ironist has no opponent, but only a friend. And in his irony he is helping that friend to reveal himself. That half-seriousness, that solemn treatment of the trivial and trivial treatment of the solemn which is the pattern of the ironist’s talk is but his way of exhibiting the unexpected contrasts and shadings that he sees to be requisite to the keenest understanding of the situation. The ironist borrows and exchanges and appropriates ideas and gives them a new setting in juxtaposition with others, but he never burlesques or caricatures or exaggerates them. If an idea is absurd, the slightest change of environment will show that absurdity. The mere transference of an idea to another’s mouth will bring to light all its hidden meaninglessness. It needs no extraneous aid. If an idea is hollow, it will show itself cowering against the intellectual background of the ironist like the puny, shivering thing it is. If a point of view cannot bear being adopted by another person, if it is not hardy enough to be transplanted, it has little right to exist at all. This world is no hothouse for ideas and attitudes. Too many outworn ideas are skulking in dark retreats, sequestered from the light; every man has great sunless stretches in his soul where base prejudices lurk and flourish. On these the white light of irony is needed to play. And it delights the ironist to watch them shrivel and decay under that light. The little tabooed regions of well-bred people, the “things we never mention,” the basic biases and assumptions that underlie the lives and thinking of every class and profession, our second-hand dogmas and phrases,--all these live and thrive because they have never been transplanted, or heard from the lips of another. The dictum that “the only requisites for success are honesty and merit,” which we applaud so frantically from the lips of the successful, becomes a ghastly irony in the mouth of an unemployed workingman. There would be a frightful mortality of points of view could we have a perfectly free exchange such as this. Irony is just this temporary borrowing and lending. Many of our cherished ideals would lose half their validity were they put bodily into the mouths of the less fortunate. But if irony destroys some ideals it builds up others.