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