Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/305

 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:

"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." And in them all he illustrates the higher hedonism voiced by Lady Dunstane to her Tony, though from the negative