Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/247

 only he says bluntly that one is "an ass * * * to have brains in a country where brains are a crime." This national stupidity and sentimentality are made impregnable by national complacency. Lytton remarks on the egotistic nature of British patriotism:

"The vanity of the Frenchman consists (as I have somewhere read) in belonging to so great a country; but the vanity of the Englishman exults in the thought that so great a country belongs to himself."

These criticisms are all from within. Disraeli is able to contribute one from without. He describes the British through his Jewish Besso:

"There is not a race so proud, so wilful, so rash and so obstinate. They live in a misty clime, on raw meats, and wines of fire. They laugh at their fathers, and never say a prayer. They pass their days in the chase, gaming, and all violent courses. They have all the power of the State, and all its wealth; and when they can wring no more from their peasants, they plunder the kings of India."

Nevertheless they all, even the Hebrew within their parliamentary halls, believed in the English character and the civilization it was blunderingly working out. The most incorrigible satirist of that civilization was Peacock (who often, we suspect, gets carried away by his own eloquence), and in his fervent summary of almost all our public failures, he hints in the very phrasing, although ironically,