"So ends my story, gentlemen; now let us have a drink to the health of the young sailor's wife, the dearest woman in the world."
"And why not the sailor's health, too?" asked one of the gentlemen.
"All right, sir, just as you please, gentlemen, for I was that sailor."
and that the intervening story is apt to be every whit as stale and conventional as its beginning and its end. Irving's "Tales of a Traveller" show how this method may be used successfully; yet it required all of Irving's art to make the extra-narrative passages readable, and it is an open question if the stories would not have been improved by isolation.
The best method of narration, the simplest and most natural, is to tell the story in the third person, as if you were a passive observer; to make the characters active and conversational; and to permit nothing, not even your own personality, to get between the reader and the story.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] "The Short Story," by Frederick Wedmore. Nineteenth Century. Mar., '98.
[32] "The Epistolary Form." Literature. Apr. 7, '99.
[33] "Magazine Fiction and How Not to Write It," by Frederick M. Bird. Lippincott's. Nov., '94.