This point of view is at once the most easy and the most difficult that the author may assume. Technically it is the easiest, because the writer is absolutely free in the selection and the patterning of his narrative materials; but humanly it is the most difficult, because it is hard for any man consistently to play the god, even toward his own fictitious creatures. Although George Eliot assumes omniscience of Daniel Deronda, the consensus of opinion among men of sound judgment is that she does not really know her hero. Deronda is in truth a lesser person than she thinks him; and her assumption of omniscience breaks down. In fact, unless an author is gifted with the god-like wisdom of George Meredith, he is almost sure to break down in the effort to sustain the omniscient attitude consistently throughout a complicated novel.
2. The Limited Point of View.––Therefore, in assuming a point of view external to the characters, it is usually wiser for the author to accept a compromise and to impose certain definite limits upon his own omniscience. Thus, while maintaining the prerogative to enter at any moment the minds of one or more of his characters, he may limit his observation of the others to what was actually seen and heard of them by those of whose minds he is omniscient. In such a case, although the author tells the story in the third person, he virtually sees the story from the point of view of a certain actor, or of certain actors, in it. The only phase of this device which we need to examine is that wherein the novelist’s omniscience is limited to a single character.
This special point of view is employed with consummate art by Jane Austen. In “Emma,” for example, she portrays every intimate detail of the heroine’s thoughts and feelings, entering Emma’s mind at will, or looking at her from the outside with omniscient eyes. 131 But in dealing with the other characters, the author limits her own knowledge to what Emma knew about them, and sees them consistently through the eyes of the heroine. Hence the story, although written by Jane Austen in the third person, is really seen by Emma Woodhouse and thought of in the first. Similarly, in “Pride and Prejudice,” Elizabeth Bennet is the only character that the author permits herself to analyze at any length: the others are seen objectively, merely as Elizabeth saw them. The reader is made acquainted with every step in the heroine’s gradual change of feeling toward Mr. Darcy; but of the change in Darcy’s thoughts and feelings toward Elizabeth the reader is told nothing until she herself discovers it.
Of course, in applying this device, it is possible for the author, at certain points in the narrative, to shift his limited omniscience from one of the characters to another. In such a case, although the story is told throughout consistently in the third person, one scene may be viewed from the standpoint of one of the characters, another from that of another character, and so on.
Imagine for a moment two adjacent rooms with a single door between them which is locked; and suppose a character alone in each of the rooms,––each person thinking of the other. Now an author assuming absolute omniscience could tell us what each of them was thinking at the selfsame moment: the locked door would not be a bar to him. But an author telling the story from the attitude of limited omniscience could tell us only what one of them was thinking, and would not be able to see beyond the door. Whether or not he would find himself at liberty to choose which room he should be cognizant of, would depend of course on whether he was maintaining the same point of view throughout his story or was selecting it anew for every 132 scene. In the first case, the one character whom he could see would be determined in advance: in the other, he should have to decide from the point of view of which of them that special scene could be the more effectively set forth.
The attitude of limited omniscience is more easy to maintain than that of a god-like mind intimately cognizant of all the characters at once; and furthermore, the employment of the more restricted point of view is more likely to produce the illusion of life. In actual experience, we see only one mind internally,––our own; all other people we look upon externally: and a story, therefore, which lays bare to us one mind and only one is more in tune with life itself than a story in which many minds are searched by an all-seeing eye. Also, a story told in the third person from the point of view which has been illustrated from Jane Austen’s novels enjoys nearly every advantage of a narrative told in the first person by the leading actor, without being encumbered by certain of the most noticeable disadvantages.
3. The Rigidly Restricted Point of View.––For the sake of concreteness, however, it is often advisable for the author writing in the third person to restrict his point of view still further, and, foregoing absolutely the prerogative of omniscience, to limit himself to an attitude merely observant and entirely external to all the characters. In such a case the author wears, as it were, an invisible cap like that of Fortunatus, which permits him to move unnoticed among his characters; and he reports to us externally their looks, their actions, and their speech, without ever assuming an ability to delve into their minds. This rigidly external point of view is employed frequently by Guy de Maupassant in his briefer fictions; but although it is especially valuable 133 in the short-story, it is extremely difficult to maintain through the extensive compass of a novel. The main advantage of this point of view is that it necessitates upon the part of the author an attitude toward his story which is at all moments visual rather than intellectual. He does not give a ready-made interpretation of his incidents, but merely projects them before the eyes of his readers and allows to each the privilege of interpreting them for himself. But, on the other hand, the reader loses the advantage of the novelist’s superior knowledge of his creatures: and, except 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 134 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.