certain occasion and sets a scene with due
circumspection--rarely and a trifle awkwardly, as we saw--that he can
for the time being efface the thought of his active part in the
affair.

So much of a novel, therefore, as is not dramatic enactment, not
_scenic_, inclines always to picture, to the reflection of somebody's
mind. Confronted with a scene--like Becky's great scene, once more--we
forget that other mind; but as soon as the story goes off again into
narrative a question at once arises. _Who_ is disposing the scattered
facts, whose is this new point of view? It is the omniscient author,
and the point of view is his--such would be the common answer, and it
is the answer we get in Vanity Fair. By convention the author is
allowed his universal knowledge of the story and the people in it. But
still it is a convention, and a prudent novelist does not strain it
unnecessarily. Thackeray in Vanity Fair is not at all prudent; his
method, so seldom strictly dramatic, is one that of its nature is apt
to force this question of the narrator's authority, and he goes out of
his way to emphasize the question still further. He flourishes the
fact that the point of view is his own, not to be confounded with that
of anybody in the book. And so his book, as one may say, is not
complete in itself, not really self-contained; it does not meet and
satisfy all the issues it suggests. Over the whole of one side of it
there is an inconclusive look, something that draws the eye away from
the book itself, into space. It is the question of the narrator's
relation to the story.

However unconsciously--and I dare say the recognition is usually
unconscious--the novelist is alive to this difficulty, no doubt; for
we may see him, we presently shall, taking various steps to circumvent
it. There is felt to be an unsatisfactory want of finish in leaving a
question hanging out of the book, like a loose end, without some kind
of attempt to pull it back and make it part of an integral design.
After all, the book is torn away from its author and given out to the
world; the author is no longer a wandering _jongleur_ who enters the
hall and utters his book to the company assembled, retaining his book
as his own inalienable possession, himself and his actual presence and
his real voice indivisibly a part of it. The book that we read has no
such support; it must bring its own recognisances. And in the
fictitious picture of life the effect of validity is all