It is this passion for comprehension that explains the ironist’s apparently scandalous propensity to publicity. Nothing seems to him too sacred to touch, nothing too holy for him to become witty about. There are no doors locked to him, there is nothing that can make good any claim of resistance to scrutiny. His free and easy manner of including everything within the sweep of his vision is but his recognition, however, of the fact that nothing is really so serious as we think it is, and nothing quite so petty. The ironist will descend in a moment from a discussion of religion to a squabble over a card-game, and he will defend himself with the reflection that religion is after all a human thing and must be discussed in the light of everyday living, and that the card-game is an integral part of life, reveals the personalities of the players--and his own to himself--and being worthy of his interest is worthy of his enthusiasm. The ironist is apt to test things by their power to interest as much as by their nobility, and if he sees the incongruous and inflated in the lofty, so he sees the significant in the trivial and raises it from its low degree. Many a mighty impostor does he put down from his seat. The ironist is the great intellectual democrat, in whose presence and before whose law all ideas and attitudes stand equal. In his world there is no privileged caste, no aristocracy of sentiments to be reverenced, or segregated systems of interests to be tabooed. Nothing human is alien to the ironist; the whole world is thrown open naked to the play of his judgment. In the eyes of its detractors, irony has all the vices of democracy. Its publicity seems mere vulgarity, its free hospitality seems to shock all ideas of moral worth. The ironist is but a scoffer, they say, with weapon leveled eternally at all that is good and true and sacred. The adoption of another’s point of view seems little better than malicious dissimulation,--the repetition of others’ words, an elaborate mockery; the ironist’s eager interest seems a mere impudence or a lack of finer instincts; his interest in the trivial, the last confession of a mean spirit; and his love of classifying, a proof of his poverty of imaginative resource. Irony, in other words, is thought to be synonymous with cynicism. But the ironist is no cynic. His is a kindly, not a sour interest in human motives. He wants to find out how the human machine runs, not to prove that it is a worthless, broken-down affair. He accepts it as it comes, and if he finds it curiously feeble and futile in places, blame not him but the nature of things. He finds enough rich compensation in the unexpected charm that he constantly finds himself eliciting. The ironist sees life steadily and sees it whole; the cynic only a distorted fragment.