t is not _my_ subject, and Madame
Bovary, a beautifully finished piece of work, is for my purpose
singularly fertile.

VII

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 stand