Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/158



"How can he compose when he is not appreciated? Had he been appreciated he would today not only have repeated the escalopes a la Bellamont, but perhaps even invented what might have outdone it. * * * These things in themselves are nothing; but they prove to a man of genius that he is understood. Had Leander been in the Imperial kitchen, or even with the emperor of Russia, he would have been decorated!"

It transpires, however, that the artist's wounded feelings were soothed by a belated acknowledgment, accompanied by a tactful hint that he suffered in a good cause, and that as an esthetic missionary he should be lenient to the social delinquencies of the barbarians he ministered unto:

"Was it nothing, by this development of taste, to assist in supporting that aristocratic influence which he wished to cherish, and which can alone encourage art?"

It is not to be supposed that this indicates the range of Disraeli's ideas, merely the subject on which he chiefly expends his ironic persiflage. A representative example of his more serious sarcasm is found in the second volume of his Young England Trilogy, the one most alive with social sympathy:

"Infanticide is practised as extensively and as legally in England as it is on the banks of the Ganges; a circumstance which apparently has not yet engaged the attention of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts."

In Dickens and Trollope irony is a substantial though not exactly an integral element; more substantial in the former than the latter. We find ironic comment both direct, by the writer, and indirect, through ironic characters; and the still more indirect, in the betraying speech