y apart from them; but now he may mingle with the
rest, engage in talk with them, and his presence and his talk are no
more to the fore than theirs. As soon as some description or
discussion of them is required, then, of course, the seer must resume
his part and unseal his mind; but meanwhile, though the reader gets no
direct view of him, still he is there in the dialogue with the rest,
his speech (like theirs) issues from a hidden mind and has the same
dramatic value. It is enough, very likely, to harden our image of him,
to give precision to his form, to save him from dissipation into that
luminous blur of which I spoke just now. For the author it is a
resource to be welcomed on that account, and not on that account
alone.

For besides the greater definition that the seer acquires, thus
detached from us at times and relegated to the plane of his
companions, there is much benefit for the subject of the story. In the
tale that is quite openly and nakedly somebody's narrative there is
this inherent weakness, that a scene of true drama is impossible. In
true drama nobody _reports_ the scene; it _appears_, it is constituted
by the aspect of the occasion and the talk and the conduct of the
people. When one of the people who took part in it sets out to report
the scene, there is at once a mixture and a confusion of effects; for
his own contribution to the scene has a different quality from the
rest, cannot have the same crispness and freshness, cannot strike in
with a new or unexpected note. This weakness may be well disguised,
and like everything else in the whole craft it may become a positive
and right effect in a particular story, for a particular purpose; it
is always there, however, and it means that the full and unmixed
effect of drama is denied to the story that is rigidly told from the
point of view of one of the actors. But when that point of view is
held in the manner I have described, when it is open to the author to
withdraw from it silently and to leave the actor to play his part,
true drama--or something so like it that it passes for true drama--is
always possible; all the figures of the scene are together in it, one
no nearer than another. Nothing is wanting save only that direct,
unequivocal sight of the hero which the method does indeed absolutely
forbid.

Finally there is the old, immemorial, unguarded, unsuspicious way of
telling a story, where the author entertains the reader, the minstrel
draws his a