It is more than a picture of a
place and an impression of romance, it is more than the portrait of a
child; besides all this it is the most masterly of "time-pictures," if
that is a word that will serve. The effect I am thinking of is
different from that of which I spoke in the matter of Tolstoy's great
cycles of action; there we saw the march of time recording itself,
affirming its ceaseless movement, in the lives of certain people. This
of Thackeray's is not like that; time, at Castlewood, is not
movement, it is tranquillity--time that stands still, as we say, only
deepening as the years go. It cannot therefore be shown as a sequence;
and Thackeray roams to and fro in his narrative, caring little for the
connected order of events if he can give the sensation of time, deep
and soft and abundant, by delaying and returning at ease over this
tract of the past. It would be possible, I think, to say very
precisely where and how the effect is made--by what leisurely play
with the chronology of the story, apparently careless and
unmethodical, or by what shifting of the focus, so that the house of
Castlewood is now a far-away memory and now a close, benevolent
presence. Time, at any rate, is stored up in the description of the
child's life there, quiet layers of time in which the recorded
incidents sink deep.
VIII
In dealing with the method that I find peculiarly characteristic of
Thackeray, the "panoramic" method, I have spoken of it also as
"pictorial"; and it will be noticed that I have thus arrived at
another distinction which I touched upon in connection with Bovary.
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