will seek in vain, in studying the
fictitious people of Guy de Maupassant, for any indication of the
author's approval or disapproval of them; and there is something very
admirable in this absolute impassiveness of art. But on the other
hand, there is a certain salutary humanness about an author who loves
or hates his characters just as he would love or hate the same sort of
people in actual life, and writes about them with the glow of personal
emotion. Sir James Barrie often disapproves of Tommy; sometimes he
feels forced to scold him; but he loves him for a' that: and we feel
instinctively that the hero is the more truthfully delineated for
being represented by a friend.

=The Point of View as a Factor in Construction.=--It will be gathered
from the foregoing discussion of the various points of view in
narrative that no one of them may be pronounced absolutely better than
the others. But this much may be said dogmatically: there is always
one best point of view from which to tell any given short-story; and
although in planning a novel the author works with far less technical
restriction, there is almost always one best point of view from which
to tell a given novel. Therefore, it is advisable for the author to
determine as early as possible, from a studious consideration of his
materials, what is the best point of view from which to tell the story
he is planning, and thereafter to contemplate his narrative from that
standpoint and that only. Furthermore, the interest of art demands
that the point of view selected shall, if possible, be maintained
consistently throughout the telling of the story. This, however, is a
very difficult matter; and only in very recent years have even the
best writers grown to master it. The novels which have been told
without a single violation of this principle are very few in number.
But the fact remains that any unwarrantable breakdown in the point of
view selected diseconomizes the attention of the reader. It is
unfortunate, for instance, that Thomas Bailey Aldrich, in "Marjorie
Daw," should have found it necessary, after telling almost the entire
tale in letters, to shift suddenly to the external point of view and
end the story with a few pages of direct narrative. Such an unexpected
variation of method startles and to some extent disrupts the attention
of the reader, and thereby detracts from the effect of the thing to be
conveyed.

Henry James and Mr. Kipling exhibit, in their seve