Something is lost if it is represented solely by his account of it.
Meredith may enable Harry to give an account so brilliant that the
defect is forgotten; that is not the point. But could he have done
more? I think so; only it would have meant the surrender of the method
of autobiography.
Here then, I conclude, the dramatizing force of the first person gives
out. It is very useful for enhancing the value of a picture, where
none but the pictorial method is available, where we are bound to rely
upon an intervening story-teller in some guise or other; it is much
more satisfactory to know who the story-teller is, and to see him as a
part of the story, than to be deflected away from the book by the
author, an arbitrary, unmeasurable, unappraisable factor. But when the
man in the book is expected to make a picture of himself, a searching
and elaborate portrait, then the limit of his capacity is touched and
passed; or rather there is a better method, one of finer capacity,
then ready to the author's hand, and there is no reason to be content
with the hero's mere report. The figure of the story-teller is a
dramatic fact in Meredith's book, and that is all to the good; but the
story-teller's inner history--it is not clear that we need the
intervention of anybody in this matter, and if it might be dramatized,
made immediately visible, dramatized it evidently should be.
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