Of the notions on the subject of method that are suggested by Bovary,
the first I shall follow is one that takes me immediately, without any
doubt whatever, into the world of Thackeray. I start from that
distinction between the "panoramic" and the "scenic" presentation of a
story, which I noted a few pages ago; and to turn towards the
panorama, away from the scene, is to be confronted at once with Vanity
Fair, Pendennis, The Newcomes, Esmond, all of them. Thackeray saw them
as broad expanses, stretches of territory, to be surveyed from edge to
edge with a sweeping glance; he saw them as great general, typical
impressions of life, populated by a swarm of people whose manners and
adventures crowded into his memory. The landscape lay before him, his
imagination wandered freely across it, backwards and forwards. The
whole of it was in view at once, a single prospect, out of which the
story of Becky or Pendennis emerged and grew distinct while he
watched. He wrote his novel with a mind full of a surge and wash of
memories, the tenor of which was somehow to be conveyed in the outward
form of a narrative. And though his novel complies with that form
more or less, and a number of events are marshalled in order, yet its
constant tendency is to escape and evade the restrictions of a scenic
method, and to present the story in a continuous flow of leisurely,
contemplative reminiscence.
And that is evidently the right way for the kind of story that
Thackeray means to create. For what is the point and purpose of Vanity
Fair, where is the centre from which it grows? Can it be described as
a "plot," a situation, an entanglement, something that raises a
question of the issue? Of plots in this sense there are plenty in
Vanity Fair, at least there are two; Becky dominates one, Amelia
smiles and weeps in the other. They join hands occasionally, but
really they have very little to exchange. Becky and her Crawleys,
Becky and her meteoric career in Curzon Street, would have been all as
they are if Amelia had never been heard of; and Bloomsbury, too, of
the Osbornes and the Sedleys, might have had the whole book to itself,
for all that Becky essentially matters to it. Side by side they exist,
and for Thackeray's purpose neither is more important than the other,
neither is in the middle of the book as it stands. Becky seems to be
in the middle, certainly, as we think of her; but that is not where
Thackeray placed her. He meant Amelia to be no less appealing than
Becky is striking; and if Amelia fails and drops into the background,
it is not because she plays a subordinate part, but only because she
plays it with so much less than Becky's vivid conviction. They fill
the book with incident between the two of them; something is always
happening, from the moment when they drive out of Miss Pinkerton's
gate at Chiswick till the last word that is told of either. But the
book as a whole turns upon nothing that happens, not even upon the
catastrophe of Curzon Street; that scene in Becky's drawing-room
disposes of _her_, it leaves the rest of the book quite untouched.
Not in any complication of incident, therefore, nor in any single
strife of will, is the subject of Vanity Fair to be discerned. It is
now here but in the impression of a world, a society, a time--certain
manners of life within a few square miles of London, a hundred years
ago. Thackeray flings together a crowd of the people he knows so well,
and it matters not at all if the tie that holds them to each other is
of the slightest; it may easily chance that his good young girl and
his young adventuress set out together upon their journey, their paths
may even cross from time to time later on. The light link is enough
for the unity of his tale, for that unity does not depend on an
intricately woven intrigue. It depends in truth upon one fact only,
the fact that all his throng of men and women are strongly,
picturesquely typical of the world from which they are taken--that all
in their different ways can add to the force of its effect. The book
is not the story of any of them, it is the story which they unite to
tell, a chapter in the notorious career of well-to-do London. Exactly
how the various "plots" evolve is not the main matter; behind them is
the presence and the pressure of a greater interest, the mass of life
which Thackeray packs into his novel. And if that is the meaning of
Vanity Fair, to give the succession of incident a hard, particular,
dramatic relief would be to obscure it. Becky's valiant struggle in
the world of her ambition might easily be isolated and turned into a
play--no doubt it has been; but consider how her look, her value,
would in that case be changed. Her story would become a mere personal
affair of her own, the mischance of a certain woman's enterprise.
Given in Thackeray's way, summarized in his masterly perspective, it
is part of an impression of manners.
Such, I take it, is Thackeray's difference, his peculiar mark, the
distinction of his genius. He is a painter of life, a novelist whose
matter is all blended and harmonized together--people, action,
background--in a long retrospective vision. Not for him, on the whole,
is the detached action, the rounded figure, the scenic rendering of a
story; as surely as Dickens tended towards the theatre, with its
clear-cut isolation of events and episodes, its underlining of the
personal and the individual in men and women, so Thackeray preferred
the manner of musing expatiation, where scene melts into scene,
impressions are foreshortened by distance, and the backward-ranging
thought can linger and brood as it will. Every novel of his takes the
general form of a discursive soliloquy, in which he gradually gathers
up the long train of experience that he has in mind. The early
chapters of Esmond or Pendennis, the whole fragment of Denis Duval,
are perfect examples of Thackeray's way when he is most himself, and
when he is least to be approached by any other writer of fiction. All
that he has to describe, so it seems, is present to him in the hour of
recollection; he hangs over it, and his eye is caught by a point here
and there, a child with a book in a window-seat, the Fotheringay
cleaning her old shoe, the Major at his breakfast in Pall Mall; the
associations broaden away from these glimpses and are followed hither
and thither. But still, though the fullness of memory is directed into
a consecutive tale, it is not the narrative, not its order and
movement, that chiefly holds either Thackeray's attention or ours who
read; the narrative is steeped in the suffusion of the general tone,
the sensation of the place and the life that he is recalling, and it
is out of this effect, insensibly changing and developing, that the
novel is created.
For a nearer sight of it I go back to Vanity Fair. The chapters that
are concerned with Becky's determined siege of London--"How to live
well on nothing a year"--are exactly to the point; the wonderful
things that Thackeray could do, the odd lapse of his power when he had
to go beyond his particular province, both are here written large.
Every one remembers the chapters and their place in the book. Becky,
resolutely shaking off old difficulties for the moment, installs
herself with her husband in the heart of the world she means to
conquer; she all but succeeds, she just fails. Her campaign and its
untimely end are to be pictured; it is an interlude to be filled with
stir and glitter, with the sense of the passage of a certain time,
above all with intimations of insecurity and precarious fortune; and
it is to lead (this it must do) to a scene of final and decisive
climax. Such is the effect to be drawn from the matter that Thackeray
has stored up--the whole hierarchy of the Crawleys, Steyne, Gaunt
House, always with Becky in the midst and to the fore. Up to a point
it is precisely the kind of juncture in which Thackeray's art
delights. There is abundance of vivid stuff, and the picture to be
made of it is highly functional in the book. It is not merely a
preparation for a story to follow; it is itself the story, a most
important part of it. The chapters representing Becky's manner of life
in Curzon Street make the hinge of her career; she approaches her
turning-point at the beginning of them, she is past it at the end.
Functional, therefore, they are to the last degree; but up to the very
climax, or the verge of it, there is no need for a set scene of
dramatic particularity. An impression is to be created, growing and
growing; and it can well be created in the loose panoramic style which
is Thackeray's paramount arm. A general view, once more, a summary of
Becky's course of action, a long look at her conditions, a
participation in her gathering difficulties--that is the nature and
the task of these chapters, that is what Thackeray proceeds to give
us.
He sets about it with a beautiful ease of assurance. From his height
he looks forth, takes in the effect with his sweeping vision,
possesses himself of the gradation of its tone; then, stooping nearer,
he seizes the detail that renders it. But the sense of the broad
survey is first in his thought. When he reflects upon Becky's life in
London and all that came of her attempt to establish herself there, he
is soon assailed by a score of definite recollections, tell-tale
incidents, scraps of talk that show how things were going with her;
but these, it would seem, arise by the way, they spring up in his mind
as he reviews the past. They illustrate what he has to say, and he
takes advantage of them. He brushes past them, however, without much
delaying or particularizing; a hint, a moment, a glance suffices for
the contribution that some event or colloquy is to make to the
picture. Note, for example, how unceremoniously, again and again, and
with how little thought of disposing a deliberate scene, he drifts
into his account of something that Becky said or did; she begins to
talk, you find there is some one else in the room, you find they are
in a certain room at a certain hour; definition emerges unawares in a
brooding memory. Briefly, to all appearance quite casually, the little
incident shows itself and vanishes; there is a pause to watch and
listen, and then the stream sets forward again, by so much enriched
and reinforced. Or in a heightened mood, as in the picture of the
midnight flurry and alarm of the great desolate house, when old Pitt
Crawley is suddenly struck down, still it is as though Thackeray
circled about the thought of the time and place, offering swift and
piercing glimpses of it, giving no continuous and dramatic display of
a constituted scene.
That foreshortening and generalizing, that fusion of detail, that
subordination of the instance and the occasion to the broad effect,
are the elements of the pictorial art in which Thackeray is so great a
master. So long as it is a matter of sketching a train of life in
broad free strokes, the poise and swing of his style are beyond
praise. And its perfection is all the more notable that it stands in
such contrast with the curious drop and uncertainty of his skill, so
soon as there is something more, something different to be done. For
Becky's dubious adventure has its climax, it tends towards a
conclusion, and the final scene cannot be recalled and summarized in
his indirect, reminiscential manner. It must be placed immediately
before us, the collapse of Becky's plotting and scheming must be
enacted in full view, if it is to have its proper emphasis and rightly
round off her career. Hitherto we have been listening to Thackeray, on
the whole, while he talked about Becky--talked with such extraordinary
brilliance that he evoked her in all her ways and made us see her with
his eyes; but now it is time to see her with our own, his lively
interpretation of her will serve no longer. Does Becky fail in the
end? After all that we have heard of her struggle it has become the
great question, and the force of the answer will be impaired if it is
not given with the best possible warrant. The best possible, better
even than Thackeray's wonderful account of her, will be the plain and
immediate _performance_ of the answer, its embodiment in a scene that
shall pass directly in front of us. The method that was not demanded
by the preceding phases of the tale is here absolutely prescribed.
Becky, Rawdon, Steyne, must now take the matter into their own hands
and show themselves without any other intervention. Hitherto,
practically throughout, they have been the creatures of Thackeray's
thought, they have been openly and confessedly the figures of _his_
vision. Now they must come forward, declare themselves, and be seen
for what they are.
And accordingly they do come forward and are seen in a famous passage.
Rawdon makes his unexpected return home from prison, and Becky's
unfortunate disaster overtakes her, so to say, in our very presence.
Perhaps I may seem to exaggerate the change of method which I note at
this point; but does it not appear to any one, glancing back at his
recollection of the book, that this particular scene is defined and
relieved and lighted differently, somehow, from the stream of
impressions in which it is set? A space is cleared for it, the stage
is swept. This is now no retrospective vision, shared with Thackeray;
it is a piece of present action with which we are confronted. It is
strictly dramatic, and I suppose it is good drama of its kind. But
there is more to be said of it than this--more to be said, even when
it has been admitted to be drama of rather a high-pitched, theatrical
strain. The foot-lights, it is probably agreed, seem suddenly to flare
before Becky and Rawdon, after the clear daylight that reigned in
Thackeray's description of them; they appear upon the scene, as they
should, but it must be owned that the scene has an artificial look, by
comparison with the flowing spontaneity of all that has gone before.
And this it is exactly that shows how and where Thackeray's skill
betrays him. He is not (like Dickens) naturally inclined to the
theatre, the melodramatic has no fatal attraction for him; so that if
he is theatrical here, it is not because he inevitably would be, given
his chance. It is rather because he must, at all costs, make this
climax of his story conclusively _tell_; and in order to do so he is
forced to use devices of some crudity--for him they are crude--because
his climax, his _scène à faire_, has been insufficiently prepared for.
Becky, Rawdon, Steyne, in all this matter that has been leading up to
the scene, have scarcely before been rendered in these immediate
terms; and now that they appear on their own account they can only
make a sure and pronounced effect by perceptibly forcing their note. A
little too much is expected of them, and they must make an unnatural
effort to meet it.
My instance is a small one, no doubt, to be pressed so far; in
lingering over these shades of treatment a critic, it may be thought,
loses sight of the book itself. But I am not trying, of course, to
criticize Vanity Fair; I am looking for certain details of method, and
the small instance is surely illuminating. It shows how little
Thackeray's fashion of handling a novel allowed for the big dramatic
scene, when at length it had to be faced--how he neglected it in
advance, how he refused it till the last possible moment. It is as
though he never quite trusted his men and women when he had to place
things entirely in their care, standing aside to let them act; he
wanted to intervene continually, he hesitated to leave them alone save
for a brief and belated half-hour. It was perverse of him, because the
men and women would have acquitted themselves so strikingly with a
better chance; he gave them life and vigour enough for much more
independence than they ever enjoyed. The culmination of Becky's
adventure offered a clear opening for full dramatic effect, if he had
chosen to take advantage of it. He had steadily piled up his
impression, carefully brought all the sense of the situation to
converge upon a single point; everything was ready for the great scene
of Becky's triumph in the face of the world, one memorable night of a
party at Gaunt House. It is incredible that he should let the
opportunity slip. There was a chance of a straight, unhampered view
of the whole meaning of his matter; nothing was needed but to allow
the scene to show itself, fairly and squarely. All its force would
have been lent to the disaster that follows; the dismay, the
disillusion, the snarl of anger and defiance, all would have been made
beforehand. By so much would the effect of the impending scene, the
scene of catastrophe, have been strengthened. There would have been no
necessity for the sudden heightening of the pitch, the thickening of
the colour, the incongruous and theatrical tone.
Yet the chance is missed, the triumphal evening passes in a confused
haze that leaves the situation exactly where it was before. The
episode is only a repetition of the kind of thing that has happened
already. There are echoes of festive sound and a rumour of Becky's
brilliance; but the significant look that the actual facts might have
worn and must have betrayed, the look that by this time Thackeray has
so fully instructed his reader to catch--this is not disclosed after
all. There is still nothing here but Thackeray's amusing,
irrepressible conversation _about_ the scene; he cannot make up his
mind to clear a space before it and give the situation the free field
it cries out for. And if it is asked what kind of clarity I mean, I
need only recall another page, close by, which shows it perfectly.
Becky had made an earlier appearance at Gaunt House; she had dined
there, near the beginning of her social career, and had found herself
in a difficulty; there came a moment when she had to face the frigid
hostility of the noble ladies of the party, alone with them in the
drawing-room, and her assurance failed. In the little scene that
ensues the charming veil of Thackeray's talk is suddenly raised; there
is Becky seated at the piano, Lady Steyne listening in a dream of old
memories, the other women chattering at a distance, when the jarring
doors are thrown open and the men return. It is all over in half a
page, but in that glimpse the story is lifted forward dramatically;
ocular proof, as it were, is added to Thackeray's account of Becky's
doubtful and delicate position. As a matter of curiosity I mention the
one moment in the later episode, the evening of those strangely
ineffective charades at Gaunt House, which appears to me to open the
same kind of rift in the haze; it is a single glimpse of Steyne,
applauding Becky's triumph. He is immediately there, an actor in the
show, alive and expressive, but he is alone; none of the others so
emerges, even Becky is only a luminous spot in the dimness. As for the
relation of the three, Steyne, Becky, and her husband, which is on the
point of becoming so important, there is nothing to be seen of it.
Right and left in the novels of Thackeray one may gather instances of
the same kind--the piercing and momentary shaft of direct vision, the
big scene approached and then refused. It is easy to find another in
Vanity Fair. Who but Thackeray could have borne to use the famous
matter of the Waterloo ball, a wonderful gift for a novelist to find
in his path, only to waste it, to dissipate its effect, to get no real
contribution from it after all? In the queer, haphazard, polyglot
interlude that precedes it Thackeray is, of course, entirely at home;
there it is a question of the picture-making he delights in, the large
impression of things in general, the evocation of daily life; Brussels
in its talkative suspense, waiting for the sound of the guns, feeding
on rumour, comes crowding into the chapter. And then the great
occasion that should have crowned it, into which the story naturally
and logically passes--for again the scene is not a decorative patch,
the story needs it--the Waterloo ball is nothing, leaves no image,
constitutes no effect whatever; the reader, looking back on the book,
might be quite uncertain whether he had been there or not. Nobody
could forget the sight of Lady Bareacres, sitting under the _porte
cochère_ in her horseless carriage--of good Mrs. O'Dowd, rising in the
dawn to equip her warrior for battle--of George Osborne, dead on the
field; but these are Thackeray's flashes of revelation, straight and
sure, and they are all the drama, strictly speaking, that he extorts
from his material. The rest is picture, stirringly, vivaciously
reflected in his unfailing memory--with the dramatic occasion to which
it tends, the historic affair of the "revelry by night," neglected and
lost.
There is scarcely need for more illustration of my point, but it is
tempting to look further. In all these well-remembered books
Thackeray, in an expansive mood, opens his mind and talks it out on
the subject of some big, loosely-knit company of men and women. He
remembers, as we all remember, with a strong sense of the tone and air
of an old experience, and a sharp recollection of moments that
happened for some reason to be salient, significant, peculiarly keen
or curious. Ethel Newcome, when she comes riding into the garden in
the early morning, full of the news of her wonderful discovery, the
letter shut in the old book; Blanche Amory, when she is caught out in
her faithlessness, warbling to the new swain at the piano and whipping
her handkerchief over his jewel-case as the old one enters; Madam
Esmond, on her balcony, defying the mob with "Britons, strike home";
old Sir Pitt, toasting his rasher in the company of the char-woman: I
name them at random, they are all instances of the way in which the
glance of memory falls on the particular moment, the aspect that
hardens and crystallizes an impression. Thackeray has these flashes in
profusion; they break out unforgettably as we think of his books. The
most exquisite of all, perhaps, is in Esmond, that sight of the dusky
choir of Winchester Cathedral, the shine of the candle-light, the
clear faces of Rachel and her son as they appear to the returned
wanderer. We no longer listen to a story, no longer see the past in a
sympathetic imagination; this is a higher power of intensity, a
fragment of the past made present and actual. But with Thackeray it is
always a fragment, never to any real purpose a deliberate and
continuous enactment.
For continuity he always recurs to his pictorial summary. The Newcomes
alone would give a dozen examples of this side of his genius--in the
pages that recall the lean dignity of the refugees from revolutionary
Paris, or the pious opulence of Clapham, or the rustle of fashion
round the Mayfair chapel, or the chatter and scandal of Baden-Baden,
or the squalid pretensions of English life at Boulogne. I need not
lengthen the list; these evocations follow one upon another, and as
quickly as Thackeray passes into a new circle he makes us feel and
know what it was like to live there and belong to it. The typical look
of the place is in his mind, the sense of its habitual life, the
savour of the hours that lapse there. But Esmond again has the last
word; the early chapters of the old days at Castlewood show a subtlety
of effect that is peculiar and rare. It is more than a picture of a
place and an impression of romance, it is more than the portrait of a
child; besides all this it is the most masterly of "time-pictures," if
that is a word that will serve. The effect I am thinking of is
different from that of which I spoke in the matter of Tolstoy's great
cycles of action; there we saw the march of time recording itself,
affirming its ceaseless movement, in the lives of certain people. This
of Thackeray's is not like that; time, at Castlewood, is not
movement, it is tranquillity--time that stands still, as we say, only
deepening as the years go. It cannot therefore be shown as a sequence;
and Thackeray roams to and fro in his narrative, caring little for the
connected order of events if he can give the sensation of time, deep
and soft and abundant, by delaying and returning at ease over this
tract of the past. It would be possible, I think, to say very
precisely where and how the effect is made--by what leisurely play
with the chronology of the story, apparently careless and
unmethodical, or by what shifting of the focus, so that the house of
Castlewood is now a far-away memory and now a close, benevolent
presence. Time, at any rate, is stored up in the description of the
child's life there, quiet layers of time in which the recorded
incidents sink deep.