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Nope, I'm expressing my disdain for writers who are only able to give depth to their characters by laying all their cards on the table (since, like it or not, I believe that method to be less difficult and less artistic).
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Whilst I agree with you that a writer who has to look into their characters' heads all the time in order to achieve depth probably won't make it into any list of great authors, I don't think that describing a character's thoughts is inherently any less artistic than other means of framing them.
Great novels use a subtle blend of various techniques to frame character: access to other characters' impressions of them, for example, or brief flashes of their own thoughts as well as their own words and actions (or lack of them). Really it's horses for courses. Tolkien wasn't trying to write a psychological study, but he was able to make his characters seem like real people. A quite different contemporary novel is
Nineteen Eighty-Four, which explores themes of psychological manipulation. As such it makes sense to use the internal method of characterisation to a heightened degree. With Orwell's novel the reader needs direct access to the protagonist's thoughts, both because so many of his scenes are solitary ones and because we are intended to share his misery and horror. To show us a character's thoughts is a classic technique when we are intended to identify ourselves with that character. Jane Austen uses it in
Pride and Prejudice to dupe the reader into sharing Elizabeth's opinions of Darcy and Wickham, the inaccuracy of which are part of the central theme of the novel. Stella Gibbons uses it in
Cold Comfort Farm, completely transforming the dour and forbidding Starkadders into comic figures by giving us access to the heroine's impressions of them. Given a different auctorial slant, the same characters could form the cast of a tragedy.
Tolkien uses internal characterisation too: he shows us glimpses into the heads of Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin at various times in the story, and this is because they share the role of Winston Smith in
1984 and Elizabeth Bennett in
Pride and Prejudice, that of mediator between the reader and the story (Tolkien needed more mediators because of the scale of his narrative). He uses the external method so extensively because we are intended to get to know all of the other characters through the hobbits. Why do we never see Sauron? Because none of the hobbits see Sauron and nobody who has describes him to them. Why do the Elves seem ethereal and mysterious? Because that's how they would seem to a hobbit. I doubt that an account by Gandalf would echo Sam's doting enthusiasm for all things Elven, but an angelic emissary would make a poor mediator given that the reader is intended not to have a comprehensive insight into the matters that are being described. Some people might prefer his viewpoint, but for that they would have to find a different writer. Tolkien would not have had the temerity to try to describe the workings of an angel's mind.
Incidentally: nice one, Lush. Very entertaining.
<font size=1 color=339966>[ 6:21 AM December 06, 2003: Message edited by: The Squatter of Amon Rûdh ]