- prehension. Never does she forget or cease to commiserate
the great predicament of the human race, condemned to make bricks without straw, under a hard taskmaster, with little prospect of reward to encourage perseverance or satisfy an outraged sense of justice. Yet she is able to apply a few satiric goads,—not to the taskmaster, for he directs from behind the veil and is not subject to human aspersions, nor to the weak or the blundering, but to the shirkers, the selfish, and those who demand more wage than a fair return for work done as well as possible under the circumstances.
In 1902 Meredith wrote to his daughter-in-law:[1]
"You have a liking for little phrases; I send you three:—Love
is the renunciation of self. Passion is noble strength on fire.
Fortitude is the one thing for which we may pray, because without
it we are unable to bear the Truth."
Here we have in juxtaposition, quite unconsciously no
doubt, his obiter dicta on emotion and intellect. In many
places he had already dramatized them. His egoists—Sir
Austin, Sir Willoughby, Wilfred Pole[2]—are satirized because
they conceived love as self-assertion instead of renunciation;
his epicures and snobs—Adrian Harley, Edward
Blancove, Ferdinand Laxley—because their passion
was neither noble nor truly strong; his sentimentalists of
every description, because they neither realized that Truth
is the highest thing a man may keep, nor, whether high or
- ↑ Letters, II, 535.
- ↑ A description of this youth concludes with a most significant epigram: "He was one of those who delight to dally with gentleness and faith, * * * but the mere suspicion of coquetry and indifference plunged him into a fury of jealous wrathfulness, and tossed so desirable an image of beauty before him that his mad thirst to embrace it seemed love. By our manner of loving we are known." Vittoria, 378.
