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centre, the focus, of various avenues of approach. This does not preclude unity; it may well be that the truest understanding may be reached through the consensus of various considerations. Presentation from a single point of view, while it may aid unity, may yet not bring out all the delicate lights and shadows, the fine discriminations, that the author feels to be essential to the characterization. This may be secured in a variety of ways. It may come through an enlargement of the method already indicated in connection with Henry Esmond; that is, instead of confining observation and comment to one person, the narrative may be a composite of several such expositions. Stevenson's Master of Ballantrae, as far as it is a study of character, presents by this method a fairly complete portrait of the Master externally and psychologically through the narratives of Mackellar and of the Chevalier de Burke. Classic and highly elaborate examples of the same method are to be found in the epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson. Of his style Professor Raleigh writes:

There is an incessant doubling back on what has gone before; first a letter is written describing "what has passed,” this letter is communicated by its recipient to a third character, who comments on it, while the story waits. This constant repercussion of a theme or event produces a structure of story very like The House that Jack Built. Each writer is narrating not events alone, but his or her reflections on previous narrations of the same events. And so, on the next-to-nothing that happened there is superimposed the young lady that wrote to her friend describing it, the friend that approved her for the decorum of the manner in which she described it, the admirable baronet that chanced to find the letter approving the decorum of the young lady, the punctilio of honour that prevented

the admirable baronet from reading the letter he found, and so on.1

It is apparent that in this method there is both value and danger: value, from the completeness of detail that belongs to the many-sided approach, constituting practically an intensive as well as an extensive study; and danger, from the possible want of harmony that may attend the various points of view. It is also apparent that if the writer elects this method of delineation he must visualize to himself very clearly in advance the character under consideration, so that he may secure convergence among the many rays that he turns on his picture. The author may assume still a third attitude toward his work, the wholly external point of view. He does not, as in the first case, identify himself with the principal figure of the narrative, nor does he assume in turn identity with the various figures, and thus, as one of the dramatis persona, forward the process of characterization. On the contrary, he stands apart from the action. As the creator of the respective personages he assumes the rôle of omniscience. Physical barriers are to him as nothing; to his all-seeing vision time and space present no obstacles. He can see Arthur Donnithorne hastily conceal Hetty's tell-tale neckerchief at the Hermitage, yet Arthur is entirely alone. He leaps from Rotherwood to Sherwood Forest, from Defarge's wine-shop to Tellson's Bank, from Thomas Newcome's boyhood at Clapham to the later years of the old Colonel in India and all within a page. Yet he draws to a scale, and presents a Cedric, a Carton, or a Colonel Newcome essentially individual and one. More than that, the heart and the inner soul are open pages to him; secret motives and un

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1 Raleigh's The English Novel. By permission of Charles Scribner's Sons.

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

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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

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