communicates its color to the less vivid.

Two other purely literary questions are discussed in _The Veil of the
Temple_, the first of these being as follows. One of the speakers calls
attention to a criticism which is often and justly made with reference
to many, and even to the best of novels, that, while the minor
characters are drawn with the utmost skill, the heroes (such as most of
Scott's) have often no characters at all. The reason, he says, is that,
in most cases, the hero is not so much an individual, with
characteristics peculiar to himself, as a certain point of view, from
which all the other characters and incidents of the story are drawn. Or
else, if some of these are, as very often happens, not drawn from the
point of view of the hero, they are drawn from the point of view of some
other ideal spectator, on whose position, moral or local, the whole
perspective of the story, mental or ocular, depends. Let us take, for
example, a typical opening scene of a kind proverbially frequent in the
novels of G. P. R. James. Such scenes were proverbially described very
much as follows: "To the right lay a gray wall, which formed, to all
appearance, the boundary of some great sheep tract. To the left was a
wood of larches. Between these was a road, showing so few signs of use
that it might have been a relic of some almost forgotten world.
Proceeding along this road on a late October evening might have been
seen three horsemen, of imperfectly distinguishable, yet vaguely
sinister, aspect." In the absence of an ideal spectator, who is tacitly
identified with the novelist, his hero, or his reader, such a
description would mean very little more than nothing. There would be no
left or right unless for a supposed spectator standing in a particular
place and looking in a particular direction. The aspect of the horsemen
could not be sinister or indistinguishable unless there were an assumed
man whose eyes were unable to distinguish it.

The argument here in question will carry us on to certain kindred
problems, connected likewise with the novelist's art, which are these:
The necessary assumption of the author as ideal spectator being given, a
question arises with regard to the range of vision which, in his
capacity of spectator, the novelist professes to possess. Many novelists
mar the effect of their work--and among these Thackeray is notable--by
adopting an attitude which in this respect is constantly vacillating.
Sometime