Here we have in juxtaposition, quite unconsciously no doubt, his _obiter dicta_ on emotion and intellect. In many places he had already dramatized them. His egoists--Sir Austin, Sir Willoughby, Wilfred Pole[419]--are satirized because they conceived love as self-assertion instead of renunciation; his epicures and snobs--Adrian Harley, Edward Blancove, Ferdinand Laxley--because their passion was neither noble nor truly strong; his sentimentalists of every description, because they neither realized that Truth is the highest thing a man may keep, nor, whether high or 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:[420] “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.”[421] And in them all he illustrates the higher hedonism voiced by Lady Dunstane to her Tony, though from the negative side,--“The mistake of the world is to think happiness possible to the senses.”[422] In addition to these, Meredith gives us pictures of other than the purely romantic devotion. There is the brooding tenderness of maturity for childhood and youth: of Sir Austin, Lady Blandish, Wentworth, and Mrs. Berry, for Richard and later, Lucy; of Clara Middleton for Crossjay; of Rosamund for Beauchamp. This relationship is enhanced by a more intimate comradeship in the case of Lady Jocelyn and Rose, of Natalia Radnor and Nesta, and, in a happy-go-lucky fashion, of Roy Richmond and Harry. Nesta and Rose illustrate respectively Meredith’s genuine and exquisite sentiment, and the omnipresent common sense which preserved it from sentimentality. When Nesta felt the first chill of the shadow on her life,--[423]