uy 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 answe