seer, may even be tiresomely obvious. But the
resource of which I speak is of a finer sort.

It gives to the author the power of imperceptibly edging away from the
seer, leaving his consciousness, ceasing to use his eyes--though still
without substituting the eyes of another. To revert for a moment to
the story told in the first person, it is plain that in that case the
narrator has no such liberty; his own consciousness must always lie
open; the part that he plays in the story can never appear in the same
terms, on the same plane, as that of the other people. Though he is
not visible in the story to the reader, as the others are, he is at
every moment _nearer_ than they, in his capacity of the seeing eye,
the channel of vision; nor can he put off his function, he must
continue steadily to see and to report. But when the author is
reporting _him_ there is a margin of freedom. The author has not so
completely identified himself, as narrator, with his hero that he can
give him no objective weight whatever. If necessary he can allow him
something of the value of a detached and phenomenal personage, like
the rest of the company in the story, and that without violating the
principle of his method. He cannot make his hero actually
visible--there the method is uncompromising; he cannot step forward,
leaving the man's point of view, and picture him from without. But he
can place the man at the same distance from the reader as the other
people, he can almost lend him the same effect, he can make of him a
dramatic actor upon the scene.

And how? Merely by closing (when it suits him) the open consciousness
of the seer--which he can do without any look of awkwardness or
violence, since it conflicts in no way with the rule of the method.
That rule only required that the author, having decided to share the
point of view of his character, should not proceed to set up another
of his own; it did not debar him from allowing his hero's act of
vision to lapse, his function as the sentient creature in the story to
be intermitted. The hero (I call him so for convenience--he may, of
course, be quite a subordinate onlooker in the story) can at any
moment become impenetrable, a human being whose thought is sealed from
us; and it may seem a small matter, but in fact it has the result that
he drops into the plane of the people whom he has hitherto been seeing
and judging. Hitherto subjective, communicative in solitude, he has
been in a categor