her hand, the reader
loses the advantage of the novelist's superior knowledge of his
creatures; and, excepting in dramatic moments when the motives are
self-evident from the action, may miss the human purport of the scene.

In employing every phase of the external point of view except the one
which has been last discussed, the author is free to choose between
two very different tones of narrative,--the impersonal and the
personal. He may either obliterate or emphasize his own personality
as a factor in the story. The great epics and folk-tales have all been
told impersonally. Whatever sort of person Homer may have been, he
never obtrudes himself into his narrative; and we may read both the
"Iliad" and the "Odyssey" without deriving any more definite sense of
his personality than may be drawn from the hints which are given us by
the things he knows about. No one knows the author of "Beowulf" or of
the "Nibelungen Lied." These stories seem to tell themselves. They are
seen from nobody's point of view, or from anybody's--whichever way
we choose to say it. Many modern authors, like Sir Walter Scott,
instinctively assume the epic attitude toward their characters and
incidents: they look upon them with a large unconsciousness of self
and depict them just as any one would see them. Other authors, like
Mr. William Dean Howells, strive deliberately to keep the personal
note out of their stories: self-consciously they triumph over self in
the endeavor to leave their characters alone.

But novelists of another class prefer to admit frankly to the reader
that the narrator who stands apart from all the characters and writes
about them in the third person is the author himself. They give a
personal tone to the narrative; they assert their own peculiarities
of taste and judgment, and never let you forget that they, and they
alone, are telling the story. The reader has to see it through their
eyes. It is in this way, for example, that Thackeray displays his
stories,--pitying his characters, admiring them, making fun of them,
or loving them, and never letting slip an opportunity to chat about
the matter with his readers.

Mr. Howells, in Section XV of his "Criticism and Fiction," comments
adversely on Thackeray's tendency "to stand about in his scene,
talking it over with his hands in his pockets, interrupting the
action, and spoiling the illusion in which alone the truth of art
resides"; and in a further sentence he condemns him as