Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/56

 hint of the superior sagacity of the people of mammon is delightfully qualified by the irony that lurks in his use of the word "everlasting." Then the serious intent of the parable is clearly stated in the three succeeding verses.

When irony becomes persistently cynical it defeats the moral advantage which it would possess of attracting men to its serious meaning, because it then involves too large a tract of human life in its insinuation. The pretences that things are all bad may become so clamorous at the door of our faith in human nature that no good things can gain admission. In literature, an irony that is tinged a little with cynicism is a healthy recoil from sentimentalism: for an affected ideal, if too long and too floridly sustained, piques our knowledge of human nature into making inquiries; and, as it is in public affairs when people are aroused to investigate, the facts which are discovered receive too great a valuation. They seem to indicate that every thing is rotten; and while one temper denounces, another temper sneeringly inquires for virtue. In broad day, this lantern of Diogenes goes about hunting up an honest citizen. "There is nothing but roguery to be found in villanous man."

The strained and almost impossible goodness of Dickens's "Battle of Life" is punished by the cool depreciation of Thackeray's pen. When the former insists too strongly that his humble characters shall be examples of all the British beatitudes, the latter depicts too easily sharpers and nonentities for women,