nterprise.
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