s. You 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.
Mr. 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.

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 break-down 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.

Mr. Henry James and Mr. Kipling exhibit, in their several ways,
extraordinary mastery of point of