s. 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 e