uld do double duty; it would authenticate and so enhance the
picture; it would add a new and independent interest as well. It seems
that there is everything to be said for making a drama of the narrator
himself.

And so Thackeray evidently felt, for in all his later work he refused
to remain the unaccountable seer from without. He did not carry the
dramatizing process very far, indeed, and it may be thought that the
change in his method does not amount to much. In The Newcomes and its
successors the old Thackerayan display seems essentially the same as
ever, still the familiar, easy-going, intimate outpouring, with all
the well-known inflexions of Thackeray's voice and the humours of his
temperament; certainly Pendennis and Esmond and George Warrington and
Thackeray have all of them exactly the same conception of the art of
story-telling, they all command the same perfection of luminous style.
And not only does Thackeray stop short at an early stage of the
process I am considering, but it must be owned that he uses the device
of the narrator "in character" very loosely and casually, as soon as
it might be troublesome to use it with care. But still he takes the
step, and he picks up the loose end I spoke of, and he packs it into
his book; and thenceforward we see precisely how the narrator stands
towards the story he unfolds. It is the first step in the
dramatization of picture.

A very simple and obvious step too, it will be said, the natural
device of the story-teller for giving his tale a look of truth. It is
so indeed; but the interest of the matter lies in recognizing exactly
what it is that is gained, what it is that makes that look. Esmond
tells the story quite as Thackeray would; it all comes streaming out
as a pictorial evocation of old times; there is just as little that is
strictly dramatic in it as there is in Vanity Fair. Rarely, very
rarely indeed, is there anything that could be called a scene; there
is a long impression that creeps forward and forward, as Esmond
retraces his life, with those piercing moments of vision which we
remember so well. But to the other people in the book it makes all the
difference that the narrator is among them. Now, when Beatrix appears,
we know who it is that so sees her, and we know where the seer is
placed; his line of sight, striking across the book, from him the seer
to her the seen, is measurable, its angle is shown; it gives to
Beatrix a new dimension and a sharper re