“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:[189]
“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 that relates facts true in a different sense from that meant by the speaker, thus conveying a reverse effect from the one intended.
A text for the first kind is furnished by Noah Claypole, the sordid bully and snob, prompt to retaliate on one still lower in the scale of circumstance than himself:[190]
“This affords charming food for contemplation. It shows us what a charming thing human nature may be made to be; and how impartially the same amiable qualities are developed in the finest lord and the dirtiest charity-boy.”
Another is the Chuzzlewit Family, introduced by a long prologue of ironic symbolism. Specifically there is the eulogy of the head of the present branch of it:[191]
“Some people likened him to a direction post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there: but these were his enemies; the shadows cast by his brightness; that was all.”
Later in his illustrious career, he is upheld in his holy horror at the mercenary diplomacy of a landlady. Mr. Pecksniff rebukes,—
“Oh, Baal, Baal! Oh my friend, Mrs. Todgers! To barter away that precious jewel, self-esteem, and cringe to any mortal creature—for eighteen shillings a week!”