IV
Why Stevenson should have adopted in so many instances the curious and unsatisfactory method, involving so much falseness, of the first person singular, with those man-traps, the things the narrator could never have known, supplied by leaves from other narratives, it is hard to understand. Defoe’s method was simple and laborious; but it was pure narrative, and as far as one recollects, there was none of this making up by interpolated passages. The person of the narrator was maintained all the time. So with the picaresque romances. The narrative, used by Dickens and Wilkie Collins, does indeed offer some analogy; but never a very happy example of what is at best a broken and unbelievable stratagem. Stevenson, of course, used it in a marked way in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; and in Treasure Island one cheerfully accepts the convention (only protesting that the Doctor’s interference causes a break both irritating and, technically, unscrupulous). With the exception that the Doctor’s portion is somehow brought in about the middle of the book, the way the story came to be written is not allowed to worry us after the first sentence. Treasure Island is not, therefore, a great offender. Kidnapped starts in a similarly abrupt way, and this book and Catriona are kept fairly closely to the convention. But in The Master of Ballantrae and in The Wrecker there are several inter-narratives which, even if in the earlier book they provide certain keys, do seriously affect the form of the story.
The disadvantage of the narrator is manifest enough. Every step outside his probable knowledge must be elaborately explained, or he will become uncomfortably superhuman; he can never be in danger which deprives him of speech or the power to write, but has often lived to a green and unromantic old age by the time his marvellous faculty for remembering things leads him to “take up the pen.” (“They might easily take it in their heads to give us chase,” says the Chevalier de Burke, “and had we been overtaken, I had never written these memoirs.”) If he is the hero he risks being a prig or a braggart (in St. Ives he is, somehow, for all his gentility, not a gentleman); and he often succeeds in being rather a ninny, albeit a courageous ninny. It is this fact, possibly, that accounts for Mr. Stanley Weyman’s “gentlemen of France” and the deplorable “heroes” of many another costume romance inspired by Stevenson’s examples. If he is the good old retainer,—as is Mackellar in The Master—he must overcome one’s distrust of his sleek literary craft. These are side issues of the main one—which is that such narratives are improbable. Their apparent virtue, which in itself is a snare, lies in the fact that they keep the reader’s eye focussed upon the narrator, and seem thus to give homogeneity to a book. They enable the author to refuse detachment and to mingle with his characters, tapping them upon the arm so that the reader receives their full glance, or bidding them give some little personal exhibition for the naturalness of the book. Stevenson saw, perhaps, that such a method solved some of his difficulties. He loved ease of demeanour. He could use his Covenanting style at will, with the quaint, shrewd twists of language which do not fail to strike us impressively as we read; and he could throw off the task of creating a hero whom we should recognise as such in spite of all things, as we recognise Don Quixote or Cousin Pons or Prince Myshkin. Also, the use of the “I” probably made the tale better fun for himself. It was perhaps part of the make-belief. It avoided formality; it brought him nearer his canvas; it saved him the need of focussing the whole picture. That, constructively, was, as I have suggested earlier in another way, his prime weakness as a novelist. He could not see a book steadily and see it whole. Partly it may have been that by putting himself in the frame he made the picture a panorama—“the reader is hurried from place to place and sea to sea, and the book is less a romance than a panorama” is Stevenson’s own admission in the case of The Wrecker—but most influentially, I think, it was that he had really not the physical strength and the physical energy to grasp a book entire, or to keep his invention and imagination at any extreme heat for any length of time. Whatever may be the case of this, however, it seems clear that the first person singular is a difficult and a tricky method to employ, abounding in risk of accident, and much inclined to make for improbability, unless the writer is content absolutely to limit the narrator’s knowledge to things experienced, with details only filled out from hearsay, and unless he has superhuman powers of detachment. One is inclined to suppose that Stevenson for a considerable time fought shy of the objective male central character after his failure with Prince Otto, where the use of the first person might, indeed, have been distinctly amusing as an illuminant. At any rate, fully half of his romantic tales are personally narrated; and in only one of them, where the narrator is a real character and only partially a “combatant,” does the power of detachment powerfully appear.