Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/268

 *anne Dashwood and her mother. At that time it was thought of as excess of feeling or sentiment cherished for its own sake, without much regard for the worthiness of its object. Marianne, disappointed in the vanished romance she had built up chiefly from imaginative material, "would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby. She would have been ashamed to look her family in the face the next morning, had she not risen from her bed in more need of repose than when she lay down in it."

If Meredith, three-quarters of a century later, had been relating the sad fortunes of a self-deceived young lady, he would have stressed in his account of her character, the cause of the trouble, that is, the process of constructing a Spanish castle with a flimsy foundation in fact, rather than the effect, namely, the emotional orgy which celebrated its inevitable but astonishing collapse. He would have seen that preliminary process as possible because of the disregard for facts which is the real mark of the sentimentalist. This later interpretation is not a contradiction of the earlier one, but a shifting of emphasis. The common factor in the two definitions is feeling, ranging all the way from