[Illustration: Carlyle, Ruskin, Thackeray, Dickens.]
Thackeray's genius was, perhaps, less astonishing than Dickens's; less fertile, spontaneous, and inventive; but his art is sounder, and his delineation of character more truthful. After one has formed a taste for his books, Dickens's sentiment will seem overdone, and much of his humor will have the air of buffoonery. Thackeray had the advantage in another particular: he described the life of the upper classes, and Dickens of the lower. It may be true that the latter offers richer material to the novelist, in the play of elementary passions and in strong native developments of character. It is true, also, that Thackeray approached "society" rather to satirize it than to set forth its agreeableness. Yet, after all, it is "the great world" which he describes, that world upon which the broadening and refining processes of a high civilization have done their utmost, and which, consequently, must possess an intellectual interest superior to any thing in the life of London thieves, traveling showmen, and coachees. Thackeray is the equal of Swift as a satirist, of Dickens as a humorist, and of Scott as a novelist. The one element lacking in him--and which Scott had in a high degree--is the poetic imagination. "I have no brains above my eyes" he said; "I describe what I see." Hence there is wanting in his creations that final charm which Shakspere's have. For what the eyes see is not all.
The great woman who wrote under the pen-name of George Eliot was a humorist, too. She had a rich, deep humor of her own, and a wit that crystallized into sayings which are not epigrams only because their wisdom strikes more than their smartness. But humor was not, as with Thackeray and Dickens, her point of view. A country girl, the daughter of a land agent and surveyor at Nuneaton, in Warwickshire, her early letters and journals exhibit a Calvinistic gravity and moral severity. Later, when her truth to her convictions led her to renounce the Christian belief, she carried into positivism the same religious earnestness, and wrote the one English hymn of the religion of humanity:
Her first published work was a translation of Strauss's _Leben Jesu_, 1846. In 1851 she went to London and became one of the editors of the Radical organ, the _Westminster Review_. Here she formed a connection--a marriage in all but the name--with George Henry Lewes, who was, like herself, a freethinker, and who published, among other things, a _Biographical History of Philosophy_. Lewes had also written fiction, and it was at his suggestion that his wife undertook story writing. Her _Scenes of Clerical Life_ were contributed to _Blackwood's Magazine_ for 1857, and published in book form in the following year. _Adam Bede_ followed in 1859, the _Mill on the Floss_ in 1860, _Silas Marner_ in 1861, _Romola_ in 1863, _Felix Holt_ in 1866, and _Middlemarch_ in 1872. All of these, except _Romola_, are tales of provincial and largely of domestic life in the midland counties. _Romola_ is an historical novel, the scene of which is Florence in the 15th century; the Florence of Macchiavelli and of Savonarola.