ctly through her
speech, her actions, her environment, and her effect on other people,
and at the same time is delineated directly through comments made upon
her by the author and by other figures in the story, through analysis
of her thoughts and her emotions, through expository statements of her
traits, and through occasional descriptions of her. In all of these
ways does Thackeray exert himself to give the world assurance of a
woman.

It would, however, be extremely difficult to imagine Becky Sharp
divorced from her environment of London high society. She is a part of
her setting, and her setting is a part of her. We have just noticed,
in the case of that queer room of the Boffins', how the mere
representation of setting may contribute to the delineation of
character. But setting is important in many other ways; and it is to
a special consideration of that element of narrative that we must next
turn our attention.

CHAPTER VI

SETTING

In the history of figure painting it is interesting to study the
evolution of the element of background. This element is non-existent
in the earliest examples of pictorial art. The figures in Pompeiian
frescoes are limned upon a blank bright wall, most frequently deep
red in color. The father of Italian painting, Cimabue, following
the custom of the Byzantine mosaicists, whose work he had doubtless
studied at Ravenna, drew his figures against a background devoid
of distance and perspective and detail; and even in the work of his
greater and more natural pupil, Giotto, the element of background
remains comparatively insignificant. What interests us in Giotto's
work at Padua and Assisi is first of all the story that he has
to tell, and secondly the human quality of the characters that he
exhibits. His sense of setting is extremely slight; and the homely
details that he presents for the purpose of suggesting the time and
place and circumstances of his action are very crudely depicted. His
frescoes are all foreground. It is the figures in the forefront of
his pictures that arrest our eye. His buildings and his landscapes are
conventionalized out of any real reference to his people. These are
examples of the first stage of evolution,--the stage in which the
element of background bears no significant relation to the main
business of the picture.

In the second stage, the background is brought into an artistic, or
decorative, relation with the figures in the foreground. This p