Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/326

 themselves at one as to the strange way in which the reader comes back to them as he advances in life.' What the mature reader discovers as he returns to them in that the purple of the purpurei panni is frequently finely royal; that the characterization, especially in the later books, is often masterly and occasionally exquisitely fine; that there are abundant passages of noble feeling and delicate sentiment; that the numberless epigrams which stud the pages from the exuberant "Vivian Grey" to the mellow sobriety of "Endymion" are not merely brilliant but increasingly sage, weighty with an experience in public affairs and in the society of the "great world" such as no other English novelist has enjoyed, wise with the distilled wisdom of native insight and of prolonged critical reflection upon the ways of human nature. But, above all, one discovers that these novels are far more subtle than a first reading revealed and far more deeply saturated with irony than most of Disraeli's contemporaries suspected.

In his lifetime his books were generally received and labeled as "fashionable novels," and as such they have come down to us. Their piquancy in their day seems to have consisted largely in the fact that many of the characters were understood to be portraits of contemporary celebrities, as indeed they were. To assist in the identification of the originals, the curious were provided with a "key." But that was comparatively puerile sport. The only true key, the master key, to the Disraelian