ct and were mentioning the details as they passed. There seems to be
no particular process at work in his mind, so little that the figure
of Maupassant, the showman, is overlooked and forgotten as we follow
the direction of his eyes. The scene he evokes is contemporaneous, and
there it is, we can see it as well as he can. Certainly he is
"telling" us things, but they are things so immediate, so perceptible,
that the machinery of his telling, by which they reach us, is
unnoticed; the story appears to tell itself. Critically, of course, we
know how far that is from being the case, we know with what judicious
thought the showman is selecting the points of the scene upon which he
touches. But the _effect_ is that he is not there at all, because he
is doing nothing that ostensibly requires any judgement, nothing that
reminds us of his presence. He is behind us, out of sight, out of
mind; the story occupies us, the moving scene, and nothing else.

But Thackeray--in _his_ story we need him all the time and can never
forget him. He it is who must assemble and arrange his large
chronicle, piecing it together out of his experience. Becky's mode of
life, in his story, is a matter of many details picked up on many
occasions, and the power that collects them, the mind that contains
them, is always and openly Thackeray's; it could not be otherwise. It
is no question, for most of the time, of watching a scene at close
quarters, where the simple, literal detail, such as anybody might see
for himself, would be sufficient. A stretch of time is to be shown in
perspective, at a distance; the story-teller must be at hand to work
it into a single impression. And thus the general panorama, such as
Thackeray displays, becomes the representation of the author's
experience, and the author becomes a personal entity, about whom we
may begin to ask questions. Thackeray _cannot_ be the nameless
abstraction that the dramatist (whether in the drama of the stage or
in that of the novel) is naturally. I know that Thackeray, so far from
trying to conceal himself, comes forward and attracts attention and
nudges the reader a great deal more than he need; he likes the
personal relation with the reader and insists on it. But do what he
might to disguise it, so long as he is ranging over his story at a
height, chronicling, summarizing, foreshortening, he _must_ be present
to the reader as a narrator and a showman. It is only when he descends
and approaches a