ay be colored in the telling
favorably or unfavorably to the persons concerned. A coarse instance is
afforded by a prosecution for crime. In making their final arguments to
the jury, prosecuting attorney and attorney for the defense alike deal
with the same facts in evidence, but on the lips of one the defendant
will be a glorified and persecuted saint. A more delicate instance is
afforded by Stevenson's "The Ebb Tide," previously mentioned. Robert
Herrick commits all the criminal acts committed by Huish, the cockney
clerk, except to attempt murder, but the reader pities Herrick while
hating Huish. This is so because Stevenson writes of Herrick with a
measure of sympathy, and tells the story, though in the third person,
almost entirely from his point of view. But of Huish we have only his
acts and words. The treatment of him is wholly objective.

The story which develops a chain of events tending to show a character
or group of characters in a strongly unfavorable light should not be
told too objectively, or the reader will be repelled by its uniform
ugliness, a matter which must be considered in choosing a mode of
narration. It is not a point of morals, but one of contrast. If the
writer has no sympathy for one or some of his people, or writes in such
manner that he cannot express any predilection, they will appear all of
a piece to a reader, with a consequent loss of interest. In this very
real sense the story whose characters are uniformly repellent may be
said to be bad art.

Generally, therefore, the writer must consider the necessities of his
story in determining the mode of narration, and must also consider his
own attitude toward its people and their doings. Its appeal to him may
lie in his sympathy for some person or persons, and unless that sympathy
be given expression in some way the story may not have an equal appeal
to a reader. The perfect fiction is a congruous expression of a phase of
life, and in it the more subtle matters of life, sympathy and
predilection have their place.

STYLE

The term style has been so exclusively used to denote an author's style
in general, rather than the style of some particular work, unlike the
styles of others by the same hand, that it is apt to suggest something
different from what is meant by its use here. To show the distinction I
cannot do better than to quote from Stevenson's "A Note on Realism."

"Usually in all works of art that have been conceived from within