uring the vogue of the
historical novel some years ago this mode of narration was ridden to
death simply because it lessens for the writer the labor of catching
what he conceives to be the tone of the particular society he is
portraying. As to the general matter of tone, Stevenson refers, in a
letter, to "The Ebb Tide," as "a dreadful, grimy business in the third
person, where the strain between a vilely realistic dialogue and a
narrative style pitched about (in phrase) 'four notes higher' than it
should have been has sown my head with grey hairs." Had the story been
told by one of the characters there would have been no difficulty of the
sort.

"The Ebb Tide" probably could not have been told effectively in the
first person, for much of its power derives from the way in which
Stevenson limns the lovely South Pacific scenes through which its poor
lost derelicts of people move. Their speech is "vilely realistic"
because they are common men, sea captain and clerk and middle-class
Englishman, and the lips of no one of them could have been made to state
effectively without distortion what his eyes saw. Any story has certain
matters which must be brought out justly if the whole is to have due
effect, and if first person narration renders it impossible to treat
such matters justly that mode of narration cannot be used. The example
of "The Ebb Tide" shows that in estimating the availability of narration
in the first person the writer must consider that the very nature and
being of a character may seal his eyes to many matters. Moreover, the
reader will not readily accept in a narrating character the literary
power that is even expected in the author writing in the third person. A
story is a whole, its people existing subject to the limitations of its
necessities, and the mode of narration must function naturally with the
rest, and not demand impossibilities.

One difficulty of first person narration is not so much fictional as
psychological. If the story demands emphasis upon the good qualities of
the narrator, his bravery, devotion, love, generosity, or a thousand
others, a reader will soon weary of the eternal I. It is safe to say
that if a character must be shown in a strongly favorable light, let it
be done by the author or some other character, not by himself, unless
the moral perfection of the person is a matter solely of inference from
his acts.

The very complicated plot can rarely be handled well in the first
pers