"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:[1]
"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:[2]
"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
