Finally, if Thackeray had made himself a dramatist, by dint of determination, he would have lost as an artist more than he gained since he would have had perforce to forego the interpretive comment in which his narrative is perpetually bathed. In his unfolding of plot and his presentation of character, Thackeray could act as his own chorus, his own expositor, his own _raisonneur_ (to borrow the French term for the character introduced into a play not for its own sake but to serve as the mouthpiece of its author). “Thackeray,” so W. C. Brownell has asserted in his sympathetic study, enwraps and embroiders his story with his personal philosophy, charges it with his personal feeling, draws out with inexhaustible personal zest its typical suggestiveness, and deals with his material directly instead of dispassionately and disinterestedly. This is a privilege implacably denied to the playwright, even if he has abundant compensation in other ways. As Brownell also reminded us, the novel is a picture of life, but a picture that not only portrays but shows the significance of its subject; its form is particularly, uniquely elastic, and it possesses epic advantages which it would fruitlessly forego in conforming itself to purely dramatic canons. III Dickens’s novels were both theatrical and dramatic; they were influenced by the melodramas and farces of his youth, as has already been noted; and it was natural that they should tempt adapters to dramatize them. They abounded in robustly drawn character, often verging into caricature; and therefore they appealed to the actor. They had episodes of violence certain to prove attractive to the public which liked to be powerfully moved and which had little delicacy as to the passions portrayed. Dickens’s sprawling serials were too straggling in story ever to make it possible to compress them into a solidly built framework of plot; but it was not difficult to disentangle a succession of situations sufficient to make an effective panorama of action, peopled with familiar figures. And of these there have been an unnumbered host. If Thackeray’s novels lend themselves less temptingly to the paste-and-scissors method of the dramatizer, they had an immediate vogue and an enduring reputation, which have allured a host of playwrights, most of whom have confined their exertion to the singling out of a salient character and to the presentation in a play of the more important situations in which this personality is involved, utilizing the other figures and the other episodes only in so far as these might be necessary to set off the chosen hero or heroine. Naturally enough it is upon ‘Vanity Fair’ that they have laid hands most frequently. The final monthly part of the original publication had scarcely been issued when John Brougham ventured upon a stage-version of it, which he produced at Burton’s theater in New York in 1849.