Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/275

 Godfrey Cass, having little to say for himself, is drawn with much sympathy, the responsibility being thrown upon his self-excusing father:

"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:

"* * * 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