y had admitted it, how could a retrospect
have given Raskolnikov thus bodily into the reader's possession? There
could have been no conviction in his own account comparable with the
certainty which Dostoevsky has left to us, and left because he neither
spoke for himself (as the communicative author) nor allowed
Raskolnikov to speak, but uncovered the man's mind and made us look.

It seems, then, to be a principle of the story-teller's art that a
personal narrator will do very well and may be extremely helpful, so
long as the story is only the reflection of life beyond and outside
him; but that as soon as the story begins to find its centre of
gravity in his own life, as soon as the main weight of attention is
claimed for the speaker rather than for the scene, then his report of
himself becomes a matter which might be strengthened, and which should
accordingly give way to the stronger method. This I take to be a
general principle, and where it appears to be violated a critic would
instinctively look for the particular reason which makes it
inapplicable to the particular case. No reflection, no picture, where
living drama is possible--it is a good rule; do not let the hero come
between us and his active mind, do not let the heroine stand in front
of her emotions and portray them--unless for cause, for some needful
effect that would otherwise be missed. I see the reason and the effect
very plainly in Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, to take a casual example,
where the point of the whole thing is that the man should give himself
away unknowingly; in Jane Eyre, to take another, I see neither--but it
is hard to throw such a dry question upon tragic little Jane.

If it should still be doubted, however, whether the right use of
autobiography is really so limited, it might be a good answer to point
to Henry James's Strether, in The Ambassadors; Strether may stand as a
living demonstration of all that autobiography cannot achieve. He is
enough to prove finally how far the intricate performance of thought
is beyond the power of a man to record in his own language.
Nine-tenths of Strether's thought--nine-tenths, that is to say, of the
silvery activity which makes him what he is--would be lost but for the
fact that its adventures are caught in time, while they are
proceeding, and enacted in the book. Pictured by him, as he might
himself look back on them, they would drop to the same plane as the
rest of the scene, the picture of the other