It depends in truth upon one fact only,
the fact that all his throng of men and women are strongly,
picturesquely typical of the world from which they are taken--that all
in their different ways can add to the force of its effect. The book
is not the story of any of them, it is the story which they unite to
tell, a chapter in the notorious career of well-to-do London. Exactly
how the various "plots" evolve is not the main matter; behind them is
the presence and the pressure of a greater interest, the mass of life
which Thackeray packs into his novel. And if that is the meaning of
Vanity Fair, to give the succession of incident a hard, particular,
dramatic relief would be to obscure it. Becky's valiant struggle in
the world of her ambition might easily be isolated and turned into a
play--no doubt it has been; but consider how her look, her value,
would in that case be changed. Her story would become a mere personal
affair of her own, the mischance of a certain woman's enterprise.
Given in Thackeray's way, summarized in his masterly perspective, it
is part of an impression of manners.
Such, I take it, is Thackeray's difference, his peculiar mark, the
distinction of his genius. He is a painter of life, a novelist whose
matter is all blended and harmonized together--people, action,
background--in a long retrospective vision. Not for him, on the whole,
is the detached action, the rounded figure, the scenic rendering of a
story; as surely as Dickens tended towards the theatre, with its
clear-cut isolation of events and episodes, its underlining of the
personal and the individual in men and women, so Thackeray preferred
the manner of musing expatiation, where scene melts into scene,
impressions are foreshortened by distance, and the backward-ranging
thought can linger and brood as it will.
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