Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/210



all its falsehood and deceit."
 * lected all the graces and charities of artifice, they have adopted

Mr. Howard de Howard, rebuking a drawing room smart set, speaks for himself and his class:

"Gentlemen, I have sate by in silence and heard my king derided, and my God blasphemed; but now when you attack the aristocracy, I can no longer refrain from noticing so obviously intentional an insult. You have become personal."

When young Chillingly absconds for a taste of real life, he leaves a letter for his father in which he promises a safe return, and adds,—

"I will then take my place in polite society, call upon you to pay all expenses, and fib on my own account to any extent required by that world of fiction which is peopled by illusions and governed by shams."

In his first adventure, masquerading as a yeoman, he is quizzed by Uncle Bovill on topics for the intelligent,—politics, agriculture, finance. To maintain his incognito, he affects ignorance; and is astonished at the triumphant deduction,—

"Just as I thought, sir; you know nothing of these matters—you are a gentleman born and bred—your clothes can't disguise you, sir."

Disraeli, whose career paralleled Lytton's in several ways, takes the same tone toward his own social environment, but his deeper political earnestness led him to criticise that environment in the wider as well as narrower social sense. In his first real novel we find the latter by itself, in such touches as this: