pt in dramatic moments when the motives are self-evident from the
action, may miss the human purport of the scene.

=Two Tones of Narrative, Impersonal and Personal: 1. The Impersonal
Tone.=--In employing every phase of the external point of view except
the one which has been last discussed, the author is free to choose
between two very different tones of narrative,--the impersonal and the
personal. He may either obliterate or emphasize his own personality as
a factor in the story. The great epics and folk-tales have all been
told impersonally. Whatever sort of person Homer may have been, he
never obtrudes himself into his narrative; and we may read both the
"Iliad" and the "Odyssey" without deriving any more definite sense of
his personality than may be drawn from the hints which are given us by
the things he knows about. No one knows the author of "Beowulf" or of
the "Nibelungen Lied." These stories seem to tell themselves. They are
seen from nobody's point of view, or from anybody's--whichever way we
choose to say it. Many modern authors, like Sir Walter Scott,
instinctively assume the epic attitude toward their characters and
incidents: they look upon them with a large unconsciousness of self
and depict them just as any one would see them. Other authors, like
Mr. William Dean Howells, strive deliberately to keep the personal
note out of their stories: self-consciously they triumph over self in
the endeavor to leave their characters alone.

=2. The Personal Tone.=--But novelists of another class prefer to
admit frankly to the reader that the narrator who stands apart from
all the characters and writes about them in the third person is the
author himself. They give a personal tone to the narrative; they
assert their own peculiarities of taste and judgment, and never let
you forget that they, and they alone, are telling the story. The
reader has to see it through their eyes. It is in this way, for
example, that Thackeray displays his stories,--pitying his characters,
admiring them, making fun of them, or loving them, and never letting
slip an opportunity to chat about the matter with his readers.

Mr. Howells, in Section XV of his "Criticism and Fiction," comments
adversely on Thackeray's tendency "to stand about in his scene,
talking it over with his hands in his pockets, interrupting the
action, and spoiling the illusion in which alone the truth of art
resides"; and in a further sentence he condemns him as "a wri