The use of the first person, no doubt, is a source of relief to a
novelist in the matter of composition. It composes of its own accord,
or so he may feel; for the hero gives the story an indefeasible unity
by the mere act of telling it. His career may not seem to hang
together logically, artistically; but every part of it is at least
united with every part by the coincidence of its all belonging to one
man. When he tells it himself, that fact is serviceably to the fore;
the first person will draw a rambling, fragmentary tale together and
stamp it after a fashion as a single whole. Does anybody dare to
suggest that this is a reason for the marked popularity of the method
among our novelists? Autobiography--it is a regular literary form, and
yet it is one which refuses the recognized principles of literary
form; its natural right is to seem wayward and inconsequent; its charm
is in the fidelity with which it follows the winding course of the
writer's thought, as he muses upon the past, and the writer is not
expected to guide his thought in an orderly design, but to let it
wander free. Formlessness becomes actually the mark of right form in
literature of this class; and a novel presented as fictitious
autobiography gets the same advantage. And there the argument brings
us back to the old question; fiction must _look_ true, and there is no
look of truth in inconsequence, and there is no authority at the back
of a novel, independent of it, to vouch for the truth of its apparent
wilfulness.
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