o, no doubt; too much has happened in a year to be wholly acted,
as I call it, in the movement of the man's thought. He must
narrate--he must make, that is to say, a picture of the events as he
sees them, glancing back. Now if he speaks in the first person there
can, of course, be no uncertainty in the point of view; he has his
fixed position, he cannot leave it. His description will represent the
face that the facts in their sequence turned towards _him_; the field
of vision is defined with perfect distinctness, and his story cannot
stray outside it. The reader, then, may be said to watch a reflection
of the facts in a mirror of which the edge is nowhere in doubt; it is
rounded by the bounds of the narrator's own personal experience.

This limitation may have a convenience and a value in the story, it
may contribute to the effect. But it need not be forfeited, it is
clear, if the first person is changed to the third. The author may use
the man's field of vision and keep as faithfully within it as though
the man were speaking for himself. In that case he retains this
advantage and adds to it another, one that is likely to be very much
greater. For now, while the point of view is still fixed in space,
still assigned to the man in the book, it is free in _time_; there no
longer stretches, between the narrator and the events of which he
speaks, a certain tract of time, across which the past must appear in
a more or less distant perspective. All the variety obtainable by a
shifting relation to the story in time is thus in the author's hand;
the safe serenity of a far retrospect, the promising or threatening
urgency of the present, every gradation between the two, can be drawn
into the whole effect of the book, and all of it without any change
of the seeing eye. It is a liberty that may help the story
indefinitely, raising this matter into strong relief, throwing that
other back into vaguer shade.

And next, still keeping mainly and ostensibly to the same point of
view, the author has the chance of using a much greater latitude than
he need appear to use. The seeing eye is with somebody in the book,
but its vision is reinforced; the picture contains more, becomes
richer and fuller, because it is the author's as well as his
creature's, both at once. Nobody notices, but in fact there are now
two brains behind that eye; and one of them is the author's, who
adopts and shares the _position_ of his creature, and at the same time