“The current answers don't do”: The comic form of night and day

L.[eonard] finds the philosophy [of Night and Day] very melancholy…. Yet, if one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don't admit to being hopeless though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one, and as the current answers don't do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old [answers] when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one. Still, if you think of it, what answers do Arnold Bennett or Thackeray, for instance, suggest? Happy ones—satisfactory solutions—answers one would accept, if one had the least respect for one's soul ?