Of the great soul there are two characteristics, irony and pity.
By irony I mean nothing hard or cruel, but only that gentle laughter which arises from the realization that most things make no matter. Most tempests are in a teapot, much of the world’s ado is about nothing, most frantic medicines are for diseases that would best cure themselves if let alone.
So experience works a kindly indifference in those who are wise enough to learn. And the really beautiful time of life is old age, when the storms of passion have been outsailed, and the thunders of protest have died down, and in the calm of twilight the subtle wisdom of adjustment lends the landscape a crystal beauty. The high lights are gone, and in their absence we perceive actual values. The crash of endeavor, the discord of struggle, have ceased and the universe hums with pure harmony.
Then we simile, but without bitterness. We are amused, but without contempt. Our laugh at the vanity of men’s vanities rings with no derision, no mockery, no egotistic superiority, but bespeaks only our happy vision of the heart of things. We laugh. Once we would have wept.
With irony, a sense of removal, comes pity, a sense of nearness. We are far from men. We are nearer than ever before.
We pity, because no longer we condemn. We have come down from the judge’s bench and are a friend at court, because we have found out that human hearts do not need judgment, but help.
Once we criticized; now we see it is not worth while; the essential is sympathy. We dealt damnation right and left, we divided sheep from goats with a thorny stick, we had heroes and villains.
Time has budded our staff, has blunted our sword. We are coming neared to the gods, and perceive that after all they do not judge men; they smile at them and pity them.
Children and grandchildren have sprung up around us and thought us something. What they have taught us is that we are all children, to be borne with and waited for, and not to be forced continually to sharp decisions beyond their powers.
With age we learn that we are under more obligations to our children that they to us; and we suspect the gods feel also that their responsibility is greater than ours, that the judgment-day would be as terrible for the judge as for the prisoners.
Pity weeps and makes life sacred. Irony smiles and makes life amiable. And irony is gentle and kind. “It teaches us to smile at wicked men and fools whom, without it, we might have the weakness to hate.”
