This is the way in which the English gentleman told it:—
“I say, don’t you know, Dr. Chalmers called tunes lucid intervals. Wasn’t that deuced good? Lucid intervals, by Jove! He heard a lady sing, don’t you know, and that’s what he said. He didn’t mean all tunes of course; but she’d been playing things, you know, and putting in instrumental fal-lals and crazy things on the keys, and finally came to a song. I call that devilish witty, don’t you know!”
It is hardly necessary to give examples of this fault, and this seems absurd and extravagant. It came so providentially, however, at the very time when I was writing these lectures, that it was not to be resisted.
It is excellent practice for the student to write out stories or incidents which come under his observation, and good things which he hears said or told. There are few exercises in which it is more easily possible to interest an ordinary class in composition than work of this sort, and it may be made of a good deal of value. To be really of use it is necessary that the story be told and retold until it is in the best possible form that the student can compass. It should be done as carefully as if it were a great and complete narrative.
I said in another talk that I am not willing to concede that conversation is an art which comes by nature, and the justice of this must be especially felt by one who listens when story-telling is the order of the day. Those who succeed in telling a story well are those who have taken the trouble to learn how. It is a mistake to suppose that the carelessly spoken anecdote which is so felicitously put that it seems to be the thought of the moment has cost the narrator nothing. He has consciously labored to attain the art of telling things well; and while here as everywhere natural gifts count, the man who cultivates a small talent can generally outshine him who leaves a great talent to take care of itself.
I have perhaps spoken so as to give the impression that a story makes itself. I mean nothing of the sort. It is true that the first germ of a fiction is often caught in the mind as a plumy-winged seed of the wild clematis is caught in the cranny of a wall. Sometimes a chance word, the sight of a face in the crowd, a bit of information or talk, will become the suggestion from which a story will grow. It must be nurtured, however, if its growth is to be vigorous or symmetrical. It must be brooded over and watched; it must be nourished and tended. When a story is well formed in the mind and the characters are well defined, it will grow and develop spontaneously, but it must be given a good start first. In other words, the theme must be dwelt upon until it is so completely a part of the thought that the mind will carry it forward unconsciously, and the tale will seem to be going on of itself.
It is customary to say that all narrative has four elements: first, what happened,—the plot or story; second, what persons were concerned,—the characters; third, the situation, which is both in time and space,—in other words the when and the where; fourth, the central motive,—the thing of interest or significance for which the whole is told. These elements seem to me to be likely to come to the writer in the order in which I have named them. Sometimes he is aware of the central purpose first, especially in fiction written with a declared motive; but this does not appear to be the natural order in the case of fiction really imaginative. An author must of course have a comprehension of the central motive before he begins to write, but he deduces it from his plot rather than forms a plot to embody the idea. All this analysis is of more value in revision of work or in criticism than in actual composition. The writer who is really alive and interested in what he is doing thinks of his story as a story and as a transcript from life, not as a combination of four elements.
In this same line of criticism and revision it is well to note that Narration is necessarily specific, progressive, and cumulative. It is specific in that it deals with facts rather than with theories, with incidents rather than with deductions, with events rather than with reflections. It is progressive in that the interest must move forward, and the theme must advance with the incidents. A collection of incidents does not make a narrative any more than a pile of lumber makes a house. There must be a sequence of events related to each other by the tie of cause and effect. Narration is cumulative because this chain of cause and effect must lead to some conclusion, some climax, some end. Even in the relation of the most trifling anecdotes these three qualities are to be found, and in their perfection lies the secret of the greatest works of literature. The theorists who excuse inartistic and unsymmetrical fiction by the theory that a novel should be a piece cut out of life and having neither beginning or end, forget that that which is comely and fit, so long as it is part of the living tree-trunk, becomes an unsightly block when it is chopped out. It must be shaped and finished to be again beautiful. The story which has by relation been taken from its place in actual life must be worked and polished by art; it must become a whole in itself or it is forever an uncomely log, crudely disfiguring the landscape and fit only to be used as material for work or to feed the fire.