tlook is hardly possible to the finite mind of man;
and though it is often assumed by the writer of fiction in the telling
of his tale, it can seldom be consistently maintained. It is therefore
safer to acknowledge that the absolute truth of a story, whether
actual or fictitious, can never be entirely told; that the same train
of incidents looks different from different points of view; and that
therefore the various points of view from which any story may be
looked upon should be studied carefully for the purpose of determining
from which of them it is possible, in a given case, to approach most
nearly a clear vision of the truth.

=Two Classes, The Internal and the External.=--The points of view from
which a story may be seen and told are many and various; but they may
all be grouped into two classes, the internal and the external. A
story seen internally is narrated in the first person by one of its
participants; a story seen externally is narrated in the third person
by a mind aloof from the events depicted. There are, of course, many
variations, both of the internal and of the external point of view.
These in turn must be examined, for the purpose of determining the
special advantages and disadvantages of each.

=I. Subdivisions of the First Class: 1. The Point of View of the
Leading Actor.=--First of all, a story may be told by the leading
actor in its series of events,--the hero, as in "Henry Esmond," or the
heroine, as in "Jane Eyre." This point of view is of especial value in
narratives in which the element of action is predominant. The
multifarious adventures of Gil Blas sound at once more vivid and more
plausible narrated in the first person than they would sound narrated
in the third. When what is done is either strange or striking, we
prefer to be told about it by the very man who did it. "Treasure
Island" is narrated by Jim Hawkins, "Kidnapped" by David Balfour; and
much of the vividness of these exciting tales depends upon the fact
that they are told in each case by a boy who stood ever in the
forefront of the action. The plausibility of "Robinson Crusoe" is
increased by the convention that the hero is narrating his own
personal experience: in fact Defoe, in all his fictions, preferred to
write in the first person, because what he sought primarily was
plausibility of tone.

This point of view is also of supreme advantage in recounting personal
emotion. Consider for a moment the following paragraph from