not, would they purchase it at the price of a disturbance to their equanimity. They might pray for the truth to be pleasant, but never for fortitude to endure it if it were otherwise. The apparent pessimism underlying the implication that the Truth is such as to demand courage for facing it, is counterbalanced by Diana's exclamation, "Who can really think, and not think hopefully?"
None of Meredith's novels lacks an intellectual theme, and it was this that he himself regarded as most important. In the very last one he says:[1]
"But the melancholy, the pathos of it, * * * have been
sacrificed in the vain effort to render events as consequent to
your understanding as a piece of logic, through an exposure of
character!"
At the same time he surpasses all others in the treatment
of love. Contemporary readers, who had had to be content
with David and Dora, Pen and Laura, Rochester and
Jane, Adam and Dinah, were vouchsafed a revelation,—which,
however, they apparently did not at once appreciate,—in
Richard and Lucy, Evan and Rose, Redworth
and Diana, Dartrey and Nesta. To them all Meredith
would say approvingly what he said warningly to a more
unfortunate cavalier,—"You may love, and warmly love,
so long as you are honest. Do not offend reason."[2] And
in them all he illustrates the higher hedonism voiced by
Lady Dunstane to her Tony, though from the negative
- ↑ An Amazing Marriage, 511. He adds, "Character must ever be a mystery, only to be explained in some degree by conduct; and that is very dependent upon accident."
- ↑ The Egoist, 4. It is in this connection that comedy "watches over sentimentalism with a birch-rod." And it is at the end of the same story that she is "grave and sisterly" toward Clara and Vernon, though when she regards certain others, "she compresses her lips."
