The novelist, therefore, returns to the third person again, but he
returns with a marked difference. He by no means resumes his original
part, that of Thackeray in Vanity Fair; for his hero's personal
narration he does not substitute his own once more. It is still the
man in the book who sees and judges and reflects; all the picture of
life is still rendered in the hero's terms. But the difference is that
instead of receiving his report we now see him in the act of judging
and reflecting; his consciousness, no longer a matter of hearsay, a
matter for which we must take his word, is now before us in its
original agitation. Here is a spectacle for the reader, with no
obtrusive interpreter, no transmitter of light, no conductor of
meaning. This man's interior life is cast into the world of
independent, rounded objects; it is given room to show itself, it
appears, it _acts_. A distinction is made between the scene which the
man surveys, and the energy within him which converts it all into the
stuff of his own being. The scene, as much as ever, is watched through
his eyes; but now there is this other fact, in front of the scene,
actually under the hand of the reader. To this fact the value of drama
has accrued.
Meredith would have sacrificed nothing, so far as I can see, by
proceeding to the further stage in Harry Richmond--unless perhaps the
story, told in the third person, might seem to lose some of its
airings of romance.
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