Godfrey Cass, having little to say for himself, is drawn with much sympathy, the responsibility being thrown upon his self-excusing father:[1]
"The Squire's life was quite as idle as his sons', but it was a
fiction kept up by himself and his contemporaries in Raveloe
that youth was exclusively the period of folly, and that their
aged wisdom was constantly in a state of endurance mitigated
by sarcasm."
In addition to these instances, and such casual phrases
as, "that softening influence of the fine arts which makes
other peoples' hardships picturesque," and "that pleasure
of guessing which active minds notoriously prefer to
ready-made knowledge," George Eliot defines sentimentality
indirectly in the words of Mary Garth, an observant
young woman and something of a humorist in her
own right:[2]
"* * * people were so ridiculous with their illusions,
carrying their fools' caps unawares, thinking their own lies
opaque while everybody elses' were transparent, making themselves
exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked
yellow under a lamp they alone were rosy."
The sentimentalist is rampant in Meredith's novels, depicted
in all his aspects. The keynote is that the sentimental
spirit may be arbitrarily hospitable, not obliged
to keep open house whither all truths may turn for shelter.
"Bear in mind," he admonishes, "that we are sentimentalists.
The eye is our servant, not our master; and so are
- ↑ Silas Marner, 84. Cf. Catherine Arrowpoint's interpretation of parental piety: "People can easily take the sacred word duty as a name for what they desire any one else to do." Daniel Deronda, I, 370.
- ↑ Middlemarch, II, 61. She also refused to marry Fred Vincy if he took orders, because she "could not love a man who is ridiculous." He would be so because of the entire absence of the clerical in his nature.
