e best-developed fiction it has grown to be entirely
co-ordinate with the elements of character and action. Novelists have
come to consider that any given story can happen only in a given set
of circumstances, and that if the setting be changed the action must
be altered and the characters be differently drawn. It is therefore
impossible, in the best fiction of the present day, to consider the
setting as divorced from the other elements of the narrative. There
was a time, to be sure, when description for its own sake existed in
the novel, and the action was halted to permit the introduction of
pictorial passages bearing no necessary relation to the business of
the story,--"blocks" of setting, as it were, which might be removed
without detriment to the progression of the narrative. But the
practice of the best contemporary novelists is summed up and expressed
by Mr. Henry James in this emphatic sentence from his essay on "The
Art of Fiction":--"I cannot imagine composition existing in a series
of blocks, nor conceive, in any novel worth discussing at all, of a
passage of description that is not in its intention narrative."

CHAPTER VII

THE POINT OF VIEW IN NARRATIVE

We have now examined in detail the elements of narrative, and must
next consider the various points of view from which they may be seen
and, in consequence, be represented. Granted a given series of events
to be set forth, the structure of the plot, the means of character
delineation, the use of setting, the entire tone and tenor of the
narrative, are all dependent directly on the answer to the question,
Who shall tell the story?

For a given train of incidents is differently seen and judged,
according to the standpoint from which it is observed. The evidence in
most important murder trials consists mainly of successive narratives
told by different witnesses; and it is very interesting to notice, in
comparing them, how very different a tone and tenor is given to the
same event by each of the observers who recounts it. It remains for
the jury to determine, if possible, from a comparison of the various
views of the various witnesses, what it was that actually happened.
But this, in many cases, is extremely difficult. One witness saw the
action in one way, another in another; one formed a certain
judgment of the character of the accused, another formed a judgment
diametrically different; each has his separate sense of the train
of causation that c