spoken thoughts are as clear as the day. The inner struggle in the soul of Richard Feverel is as concrete and distinct to his penetrating vision as are the very towers of Raynham Abbey to his eye. This method of omniscience is the method of the psychologist and of the historian combined. Like Gibbon and Hume, the narrator follows the movements of his characters; and he expounds their innermost personalities with the analytic exactness of a James or a Meredith.

This method may be called external, as distinguished from the internal method whereby the writer, in presenting his characterization, identifies himself with one or more of his own creations. The external point of view, in turn, falls into two subdivisions, which we may term respectively the objective and the subjective. In objective external characterization the narrator's own personality is entirely out of sight. The reader gets no hint of approval or of disapproval of the characters as portrayed. The author's attitude is that of the historian, the judicial, unbiassed expounder of mere facts. It is the attitude of mind commended by Macaulay in his essay on Hallam's Constitutional History of England:

His [Hallam's] work is eminently judicial. Its whole spirit is that of the bench, not that of the bar. He sums up with a calm, steady impartiality, turning neither to the right nor to the left, glossing over nothing, exaggerating nothing, while the advocates on both sides are alternately biting their lips to hear their conflicting mis-statements and sophisms exposed.

This attitude of absolute aloofness from the narrative, offering no hint of the author's own inclinations, is not uncommon with writers of fiction. The Necklace or The Outcasts of Poker Flat offers illustration. In neither of these stories do we find direct indication of

Maupassant or of Bret Harte, except as the style may reveal here and there certain individual turns of expression. Of the author's attitude to life, whether in sympathy with Madame Loisel's hard-won compensation or in condemnation of Oakhurst's career, there is no word.

A modification of this attitude of objective omniscience is to be found in those narratives in which the narrator, while not revealing his own individuality, yet limits his range of vision to that of some actor in the story. To take a very simple illustration, — when, in Flute and Violin, we see Parson James Moore in the privacy of his own room, clad in the evening dress of some bygone day and treading the measure of a minuet to the music of his own flute, we see him not from some far off vantage point of unlimited range, but through the slit in the window curtain of Arsena Furnace's room across the way. This modification of the wider field of view presents indeed a restricted range of characterization, but it may often happen that from its closer identity with the setting and the action it adds dramatic effect. In either case, complete unity of characterization is quite possible. With the wide range of unrestricted vision, as in The Necklace, the writer is at liberty to include or to exclude such details as will most completely portray the character in accordance with his conception. In the other case, illustrated by the scene from Flute and Violin, unity of a more restricted range may be secured, the unity that belongs to the limited horizon of a single person.

In contrast to this objective characterization — the point of view by which the individuality of the creator is kept out of sight is subjective characterization, wherein the writer's personality is frankly expressed. It is still external in the sense that the writer does not iden

tify himself with any of the figures in the narrative; but now at each interposition of himself there is a sudden change in the current of the action, and the writer for the moment occupies the scene that has been filled by his characters. Thackeray's proneness to assume this rôle of the mere showman, to reveal that he is but the puller of the wires, is well known, and to many readers is extremely disagreeable. He constantly halts the narrative and obtrudes himself in a way so personal as to destroy all illusion of reality. The following passage from Vanity Fair is typical:

I warn my "kyind friends," then, that I am not going to tell a story of harrowing villainy and complicated — but, as I trust, intensely interesting — crime. My rascals are no milkand-water rascals, I promise you. When we come to the proper places we won't spare fine language — No, no! But when we are going over the quiet country we must perforce be calm. A tempest in a slop basin is absurd. We will reserve that sort of thing for the mighty ocean and the lonely midnight. The present Chapter is very mild. Others-but we will not anticipate.

And, as we bring our characters forward, I will ask leave, as a man and a brother, not only to introduce them, but occasionally to step down from the platform, and talk about them: if they are good and kindly, to love them and shake them by the hand: if they are silly, to laugh at them confidentially in the reader's sleeve: if they are wicked and heartless, to abuse them in the strongest terms which politeness admits of.

Otherwise you might fancy it was I who was sneering at the practice of devotion, which Miss Sharp finds so ridiculous; that it was I who laughed good-humoredly at the reeling old Silenus of a baronet whereas the laughter comes from one who has no reverence except for prosperity, and no eye for anything beyond success. Such people there are living and flourishing in the world Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless; let us have at them, dear friends, with might and main. Some there are, and

very successful too, mere quacks and fools: and it was to combat and expose such as these, no doubt, that Laughter was made.

While it is the feeling of many modern historians that in the chronicling of facts the writer should efface himself and present a purely impersonal statement of events, yet in characterization, as well as in the ordering of facts, the historian frequently assumes the attitude of which we have seen illustration in Thackeray. Like other experts, he has reached his own theory as to men and motives, and the narrative becomes, for the moment, an exposition of that theory. Macaulay, for instance, in his characterization of great men usually holds a brief either for the defence or the prosecution. In the biography of Macaulay in English Men of Letters the author says:

He allowed himself to cultivate strong antipathies towards a number of persons - statesmen, soldiers, men of letters in the past, and he pursued them with a personal animosity which could hardly have been exceeded if they had crossed him in the club or the House of Commons. He conceived a contemptuous view of their characters; his strong historical imagination gave them the reality of living beings, whom he was always meeting “in the corridors of Time," and each encounter embittered his hostility. Marlborough, Penn, and Dundee (in his History), Boswell, Impey, and Walpole (in his Essays), always more or less stir his bile, and his prejudice leads him into serious inaccuracies.1

Of course it is to be said that in the method of approach now under consideration there is certainly unity of characterization. The portraits are all presented from one consistent point of view - the author's. They are therefore marked by one harmonious

1 Morrison's Macaulay in the English Men of Letters. Published by Harper and Brothers.

tone and are drawn to a uniform scale. The objection that many readers feel to the method — impatience at the constant interruptions of the action by the showman's obtrusion of himself in order to expound or to moralize - is rhetorically justified, but not on the ground of its being a violation of unity in characterization. It is the unity of the action or the coherence of the plot that receives an unpleasant check at these moments. The characterization of Tess, for example, is unified throughout by the attitude that the author takes toward her and her world. It is his purpose to depict her as essentially a pure woman, and the characterization is consistently carried out by his attitude to life that men and women are but the playthings of an ironic Fate having out its little joke with them and throwing them aside as mere dross; that the world is a blighted planet, created and forgotten by some great Intelligence that knows not itself or its own power. This disheartening philosophy is kept persistently and consistently before the reader, and the characterization is in consequence thoroughly unified. Yet the reader is conscious of the author's presence throughout. The same thing is true of Thackeray's disgust with the sham-decent, of Macaulay's delight with modern material progress, of George Eliot's devotion to the altruistic formula, and to Hume's consistent belittlement of Christianity. In each of them we feel constantly the personality of the writer as well as that of the individual under consideration, and this very consistency of attitude toward the subject secures unity of characterization.

In order to objectify in concrete form what has been said regarding point of view, we may, by way of illustration, examine in some detail Flute and Violin.