This is the courage and this the sympathy of irony. Have they not a beauty of their own comparable in excellence with the paler glow of religious virtue? And the understanding of the ironist although aggressive and challenging has its justification, too. For he is mad to understand the world, to get to the bottom of other personalities. That is the reason for his constant classification. The ironist is the most dogmatic of persons. To understand you he must grasp you firmly, or he must pin you down definitely; if he accidentally nails you fast to a dogma that you indignantly repudiate, you must blame his enthusiasm and not his method. Dogmatism is rarely popular, and the ironist of course suffers. It hurts people’s eyes to see a strong light, and the pleasant mist-land of ideas is much more emotionally warming than the clear, sunny region of transmissible phrases. How the average person wriggles and squirms under these piercing attempts to corner his personality! “Tell me what you mean!” or “What do you see in it?” are the fatal questions that the ironist puts, and who shall censure him if he does display the least trace of malicious delight as he watches the half-formed baby ideas struggle towards the light, or scurry around frantically to find some decent costume in which they may appear in public? The judgments of the ironist are often discounted as being too sweeping. But he has a valid defense. Lack of classification is annihilation of thought. Even the newest philosophy will admit that classification is a necessary evil. Concepts are indispensable,--and yet each concept falsifies. The ironist must have as large a stock as possible, but he must have a stock. And even the unjust classification is marvelously effective. The ironist’s name for his opponent is a challenge to him. The more sweeping it is, the more stimulus it gives him to repel the charge. He must explain just how he is unique and individual in his attitude. And in this explanation he reveals and discovers all that the ironist wishes to know about him. A handful of epithets is thus the ammunition of the ironist. He must call things by what seem to him to be their right names. In a sense, the ironist assumes the prisoner to be guilty until he proves himself innocent; but it is always in order that justice may be done, and that he may come to learn the prisoner’s soul and all the wondrous things that are contained there.