The common sentiment, as we
have seen, resents it even as it resents lack of guidance elsewhere.
After all, the novelist is bound to give guidance: he is an authority in
his own world, where he is an autocrat indeed; and can work out issues as
he pleases, even as the Pope is an authority in the Roman Catholic world:
he abdicates his functions when he declines to lead: we depend on him
from the human point of view to guide us right, according to the heart,
if not according to any conventional notion or opinion. Stevenson's
pause in individual presentation in the desire now to raise our sympathy
for the one, and then for the other in _The Master of Ballantrae_, admits
us too far into Stevenson's secret or trick of affected self-withdrawal
in order to work his problem and to signify his theories, to the loss and
utter confusion of his aims from the point of common dramatic and human
interest. It is the same in _Catriona_ in much of the treatment of James
Mohr or More; it is still more so in not a little of the treatment of
_Weir of Hermiston_ and his son, though there, happily for him and for
us, there were the direct restrictions of known fact and history, and
clearly an attempt at a truer and broader human conception unburdened by
theory or egotistic conception.

Everywhere the problem due to the desire to be overjust, so to say,
emerges; and exactly in the measure it does so the source of true
dramatic directness and variety is lost. It is just as though
Shakespeare were to invent a chorus to cry out at intervals about Iago--"a
villain, bad lot, you see, still there's a great deal to be said for
him--victim of inheritance, this, that and the other; and considering
everything how could you really expect anything else now." Thackeray was
often weak from this same tendency--he meant Becky Sharp to be largely
excused by the reader on these grounds, as he tries to excuse several
others of his characters; but his endeavours in this way to gloss over
"wickedness" in a way, do not succeed--the reader does not carry clear in
mind as he goes along, the suggestions Thackeray has ineffectually set
out and the "healthy hatred of scoundrels" Carlyle talked about has its
full play in spite of Thackeray's suggested excuses and palliations, and
all in his own favour, too, as a story-wright.

Stevenson's constant habit of putting himself in the place of another,
and asking himself how would I have borne myself here or there, thus
li