Hitherto we have been listening to Thackeray, on
the whole, while he talked about Becky--talked with such extraordinary
brilliance that he evoked her in all her ways and made us see her with
his eyes; but now it is time to see her with our own, his lively
interpretation of her will serve no longer. Does Becky fail in the
end? After all that we have heard of her struggle it has become the
great question, and the force of the answer will be impaired if it is
not given with the best possible warrant. The best possible, better
even than Thackeray's wonderful account of her, will be the plain and
immediate _performance_ of the answer, its embodiment in a scene that
shall pass directly in front of us. The method that was not demanded
by the preceding phases of the tale is here absolutely prescribed.
Becky, Rawdon, Steyne, must now take the matter into their own hands
and show themselves without any other intervention. Hitherto,
practically throughout, they have been the creatures of Thackeray's
thought, they have been openly and confessedly the figures of _his_
vision. Now they must come forward, declare themselves, and be seen
for what they are.
And accordingly they do come forward and are seen in a famous passage.
Rawdon makes his unexpected return home from prison, and Becky's
unfortunate disaster overtakes her, so to say, in our very presence.
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