ABSTRACT
Having got Ring Lardner and Mark Twain into the same pen with Socrates, we would seem to have finished our task of defining irony. We were telling the history of the word, however, and that history has been significant since Socrates. It has followed two roads, a low road and a high road. The low road has brought it out in the vicinity of the word sarcasm, with which its relations are badly in need of adjustment. The high, or high-brow, road has led it up into the heaven of pure intellectuality, where it can not be defined, and can “mean a different thing with every writer,” and will therefore stand in no danger of attaching itself to any real fact and hindering the proliferation of ideas in the literary mind.
