Without form or useful accuracy, irony is lying. Lying is imagination without virtue, or form. Lying is the changing of the world, not to make it all that it is, but less. Lying arises from the self when timid and crafty, narrowly. It is the self wrongly on the defensive, though it may take the form of the offensive.

Irony is a simple thing, and in a sense the earliest form of imagination. It is next to the child’s desire to lie. It is lying changed to the beautiful, the valuable. If a child, looking out for its greatest interest, and knowing what it was saying, and not deceiving itself—said of a certain aunt who was mean and grudging and not adequately perceptive: “Aunt Nettie is a fine woman and she tries so hard”—the child would be ironical: and, perhaps, for a good purpose.