"Kidnapped" (Chapter X):--

"I do not know if I was what you call afraid; but my heart beat like a
bird's, both quick and little; and there was a dimness came before my
eyes which I continually rubbed away, and which continually returned.
As for hope, I had none; but only a darkness of despair and a sort of
anger against all the world that made me long to sell my life as dear
as I was able. I tried to pray, I remember, but that same hurry of my
mind, like a man running, would not suffer me to think upon the
words; and my chief wish was to have the thing begin and be done with
it."

Now, for the sake of experiment, let us go through the passage,
substituting the pronoun "he" for the pronoun "I." Thus:--

"He was hardly what is called afraid; but his heart beat like a
bird's, both quick and little; and there was a dimness came before his
eyes which he continually rubbed away, and which continually returned.
As for hope, he had none...." and so forth. Notice how much vividness
is lost,--how much immediacy of emotion. The zest and tang of the
experience is sacrificed, because the reader is forced to stand aloof
and observe it from afar.

The point of view of the leading actor makes for vividness in still
another way. It necessitates an absolute concreteness and objectivity
in the delineation of the subsidiary characters. On the other hand, it
precludes analysis of their emotions and their thoughts. The hero can
tell us only what they said and did, how they looked in action and in
speech, and what they seemed to him to think and feel. But he cannot
enter their minds and delve among their motives. Furthermore, he
cannot, without sacrificing naturalness of mood, analyze to any great
extent his own mental processes. Consequently it is almost impossible
to tell from the hero's point of view a story in which the main events
are mental or subjective. We can hardly imagine George Eliot writing
in the first person: the "psychological novel" demands the third.

But the chief difficulty in telling a story from the leading actor's
point of view is the difficulty of characterizing the narrator. All
means of direct delineation are taken from him. He cannot write essays
on his merits or his faults; he can neither describe nor analyze
himself; he cannot see himself as others see him. We must derive our
sense of who and what he is, solely from the things he does and says,
and from his manner of telling us about them. And although it i