making, in Thackeray's
manner--attempting to summarize an impression of social life among the
Veneerings, of official life among the Barnacles--his touch is wild
indeed. Away from a definite episode in an hour prescribed he is
seldom at ease.

But though the actual presentation is thus dramatic, his books are in
fact examples of the pictured scene that opens and spreads very
gradually, in order to make a valid world for a drama that could not
be precipitated forthwith, a drama that would be naked romance if it
stood by itself. Stevenson happened upon this point, with regard to
Dickens, in devising the same method for a story of his own, The
Wrecker, a book in which he too proposed to insinuate an abrupt and
violent intrigue into credible, continuous life. He, of course, knew
precisely what he was doing--where Dickens followed, as I suppose, an
uncritical instinct; the purpose of The Wrecker is clearly written
upon it, and very ingeniously carried out. But I doubt whether
Stevenson himself noticed that in all his work, or nearly, he was
using an artifice of the same kind. He spoke of his habitual
inclination towards the story told in the first person as though it
were a chance preference, and he may not have perceived how logically
it followed from the subjects that mostly attracted him. They were
strongly romantic, vividly dramatic; he never had occasion to use the
first person for the effect I considered a while ago, its enhancement
of a plain narrative. I called it the first step towards the
dramatization of a story, and so it is in a book like Esmond, a
broadly pictured novel of manners. But it is more than this in a book
like The Master of Ballantrae, where the subject is a piece of
forcible, closely knit action. The value of rendering it as somebody's
narrative, of placing it in the mouth of a man who was there on the
spot, is in this book the value of working the drama into a picture,
of passing it through a man's thought and catching his reflection of
it. As the picture in Esmond is enhanced, so the drama in Ballantrae
is toned and qualified by the method of presentation. The same method
has a different effect, according to the subject upon which it is
used; as a splash of the same grey might darken white surface and
lighten a black. In Esmond the use of the first person raises the book
in the direction of drama, in Ballantrae it thrusts the book in the
other direction, towards the pictured impression. So it wou