The kind of æsthetic irony that Pater and Omar display is a paralyzed, half-seeing, half-caring reflection on life,--a tame, domesticated irony with its wings cut, an irony that furnishes a justification and a command to inaction. It is the result not of exquisitely refined feelings, but of social anæsthesia. Their irony, cut off from the great world of men and women and boys and girls and their intricate interweavings and jostlings and incongruities, turns pale and sickly and numb. The ironist has no right to see beauty in things unless he really cares. The æsthetic sense is harmless only when it is both ironical and social. Irony is thus a cure for both optimism and pessimism. Nothing is so revolting to the ironist as the smiling optimist, who testifies in his fatuous heedlessness to the desirability of this best of all possible worlds. But the ironist has always an incorrigible propensity to see the other side. The hopeless maladjustment of too many people to their world, of their bondage in the iron fetters of circumstance,--all this is too glaring for the ironist’s placidity. When he examines the beautiful picture, too often the best turns worst to him. But if optimism is impossible to the ironist, so is pessimism. The ironist may have a secret respect for the pessimist,--he at least has felt the bitter tang of life, and has really cared,--but he feels that the pessimist lacks. For if the optimist is blind, the pessimist is hypnotized. He is abnormally suggestive to evil. But clear-sighted irony sees that the world is too big and multifarious to be evil at heart. Something beautiful and joyous lurks even in the most hapless,--a child’s laugh in a dreary street, a smile on the face of a weary woman. It is this saving quality of irony that both optimist and pessimist miss. And since plain common sense tells us that things are never quite so bad or quite so good as they seem, the ironist carries conviction into the hearts of men in their best moments.