Now
and then in his latest diaries--the diaries written in his deep
affliction--he comes near the edge of it. Once, for instance, he says,
"What a strange scene if the surge of conversation could suddenly ebb
like the tide, and show us the state of people's real minds!
'No eyes the rocks discover
Which lurk beneath the deep.'
Life could not be endured were it seen in reality." But this is not
irony, only the sort of meditation which, in a mind inclined to thrust
deep into the secrets of life's paradoxes, is apt to lead to irony.
Scott, however, does not thrust deep in this direction. He met the
cold steel which inflicts the deepest interior wounds, like a soldier,
and never seems to have meditated on the higher paradoxes of life till
reason reeled. The irony of Hamlet is far from Scott. His imagination
was essentially one of distinct embodiment. He never even seemed so
much as to contemplate that sundering of substance and form, that
rending away of outward garments, that unclothing of the soul, in
order that it might be more effectually clothed upon, which is at the
heart of anything that may be called spiritual irony.
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