Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/327

 fiction is such an insight into the personality of the author as one derives from passing back and forth between the novels and the Monypenny-Buckle biography, keeping always in mind this remark of St. Aldegonde in "Lothair":

The inexhaustible fun which Disraeli offers to the student consists in contrasting the nervous, subtle, highly civilized intellectual that he was with the representative English country gentleman that he affected to be. The moment one enters into it, one is on the trail of Disraeli's own fun in life and in fiction. One perceives with fresh vividness that his grand society, his dukes and duchesses, his lords and ladies, and the entire bag and baggage of his traditional Tory system are riddled with his own Voltairean satire, are ablaze with his own sense of their comedy. The "Young Duke," whose coming of age "creates almost as great a sensation among the aristocracy of England as the Norman Conquest;" Lord Monmouth, who leaves his immense fortune to his natural daughter by an actress of the Théâtre Français; St. Aldegonde, who travels, by Jove, "three hundred miles for a slice of cod and a beefsteak"—these and countless other noble beings are pictured for derision. What the real Disraeli