anodyne—Time the grey calm satirist, whose sad smile seems to say, Look, O man, at the vanity of the objects you pursue, and of yourself who pursue them."
In the essay Of Adversity Bacon says,—"We see in
needleworks and embroideries it is more pleasing to have
a lively work upon a sad and solemn ground, than to have
a dark and melancholy work upon a lightsome ground."
In so far as this can be granted, and applied to the novel,
it would explain why George Eliot is more pleasing than
Thackeray, for that is just the difference between them.
Athwart the brilliant background of Vanity Fair fall the
sinister shadows of the sordid little Puppets of the Show,—"the
bullies, the bucks, the knaves, the quacks, the yokels,
the tinselled dancers, the poor old rouged tumblers, and
the light-fingered folk operating on the pockets of the rest."
Behind Hayslope, Raveloe, and Middlemarch, the Floss
and the Arno, hangs the curtain of Destiny, somber with
pain, drudgery, sin and its wages. Yet over it plays a
light shed around the characters as they appear upon the
stage. It shines from Mrs. Poyser's kitchen and Mr. Irwine's
study, from the parlors of the sisters née Dodson
and the Garth family, from Celia Chettam's nursery, the
bar at the Rainbow, and the shops of Florence. Together
these actors weave a pattern of mirth and amusement,—the
incorrigible human defiance of the ache of life and the
agony of death.
Dickens, (upon whose Hogarthian gloom Taine lays great stress), Reade, and Kingsley are as critical of society in the larger sense as Thackeray is in the smaller, and as Eliot and Trollope are of human nature. Meredith has no illusions about any of these things, and Butler comes nearer than any to an unqualified pessimism. But even
