Tito Melema also leaned heavily on the law of compensation:[387]
“It was not difficult for him to smile pleadingly on those whom he had injured, and offer to do them much kindness: and no quickness of intellect could tell him exactly the taste of that honey on the lips of the injured.”
Godfrey Cass, having little to say for himself, is drawn with much sympathy, the responsibility being thrown upon his self-excusing father:[388]
“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:[389]
“* * * 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 the senses generally. We are not bound to accept more than we choose from them.”[390]
It is in Sandra Belloni that Meredith is most expository on the subject, and in connection with the Pole sisters. He says of them,—[391]
“It may be seen that they were sentimentalists. That is to say, they supposed that they enjoyed exclusive possession of the Nice Feelings, and exclusively comprehended the Fine Shades.” They had “that extraordinary sense of superiority to mankind which was the crown of their complacent brows. Eclipsed as they may be in the gross appreciation of the world by other people, who excel in this or that accomplishment, persons that nourish Nice Feelings and are intimate with the Fine Shades carry their own test of intrinsic value.”
Here, however, the sentimental fallacy is shown to be the reverse side of the refusal to see what is, and to consist in the assertion of what is not. This is a logical corollary, since merely to disregard the unpleasant is a passive state until reinforced by the active process of manufacturing the desirable. Actually to manufacture the desirable is a constructive work, and the occupation of the enterprising idealist. The sentimentalist manufactures only in fancy, and, being a sentimentalist, does not know the difference. His imagination, that marvelous power of visualizing the absent or non-existent, is perverted by being turned inward and forced to rest content with its hollow fabrication, instead of being directed outward upon a plastic world waiting its formative touch. As the urge to an ideal of excellence is the most hopeful quality of human nature, so the satisfied repose on the fictitious supposition of such excellence is the most hopeless. Being, as Meredith adds, “a perfectly natural growth of a fat soil,” it lacks the stimulus of a rebuff that turns earth’s smoothness rough, and perceives no necessity for striving or daring.