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Updated: May 16, 2025
However, there were among them great thinkers, and great ironists, who, when they wrote, printed their subtle and profound remarks in italics, so that there might be no mistake. They all had the cult of the letter I: it was the only cult they had. They tried to proselytize. But, unfortunately, other people were subscribers to the cult.
Whosoever it was, he knew King's Speeches and communications from "My lords" and such like things, very well indeed; and the contrast of the mention in the first letter of "Aman who excelled in wisdom among us and was approved for his constant good will and steadfast fidelity" with "the wicked wretch Aman a stranger received of us ... his falsehood and cunning" the whole of both letters being carefully attuned to the respective key-notes is worthy of any one of the best ironists from Aristophanes to the late Mr.
The times have furnished Mr. Sinclair the keen, cool, dangerous art of Thomas Paine. To mention Paine is to rank Mr. Sinclair with the ragged philosophers among whom he properly belongs, rather than with learned misanthropes like Swift or intellectual ironists like Bernard Shaw. An expansive passion for humanity at large colors all this proletarian radical has written.
But far deeper qualities made him significant. From ancient times, at least from the days of Greece and Rome, Democracy as a political ideal had been dreamed of, and had even been put into practice on a small scale here and there. But its shortcomings and the frailty of human nature made it the despair of practical men and the laughing stock of philosophers and ironists.
The Romanticism of Thackeray has been denied with great obstinacy and almost passion, for like Heinrich Heine, the chief of German Romantic ironists, he poked fun at this movement. But “to laugh at what you love,” as Mr. George Saintsbury has pointed out in his History of the French Novel, “is not only permissible, but a sign of the love itself.”
These are the methods of the ragged philosophers, whereas the learned understand that justice comes slowly and so rest now and then from effort; and the ironists understand that justice may never come and so now and then sit down, detached and cynical. Naïve inquirers like Upton Sinclair take and give fewer opportunities for comfort.
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