Lytton shared the fondness of Dickens and Thackeray for pathos, but none of them went further into the anatomy of melancholy than some such comment as,--“Dig but deep enough, and under all earth runs water, under all life runs grief.”[405] * * * * * Thackeray muses on the theme of aspiration in a whimsically pensive vein. Between the questions and the exclamation of the following excerpt are several instances of disappointment, related in his jocular mock-sympathetic tone:[406] “Succeeding? What is the great use of succeeding? Failing? Where is the great harm? * * * Psha! These things appear as naught--when Time passes--Time the consoler--Time the 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 he does not attain it. They all escape through the avenue of satire, sometimes reinforced by action,--both being efficacious means of getting melancholia out of the system. Nowhere does Browning speak more as a Britisher than when he declares rage to be the right thing in the main, and acquiescence the vain and futile.