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Like public performers everywhere, a story-teller of note always goes about with regular assistants, who act as summoners to his entertainment, and as chorus to his songs. They consist usually of a player on the native fiddle, another who keeps time on a tambourine, and a third who beats a kind of earthenware drum with his fingers.
"Faith, sir," replied the story-teller, "as to that matter, I don't believe one-half of it myself." Go, little booke, God send thee good passage, And specially let this be thy prayere, Unto them all that thee will read or hear, Where thou art wrong, after their help to call, Thee to correct in any part or all. CHAUCER'S Belle Dame sans Mercie.
There is no subject, or hardly any, which may not be treated of at the proper time, in the proper place, by the fitting person, for the right kind of listener or reader. But when the poet or the story-teller invades the province of the man of science, he is on dangerous ground. I need say nothing of the blunders he is pretty sure to make. The imaginative writer is after effects.
And so the economical procedure would be to hoard it rather, reserving it for important occasions as in Bovary, sure enough. But before I deal with the question of the novelist's drama I would follow out the whole argument that is suggested by his reflected picture of life. This, after all, is the method which is his very own, which he commands as a story-teller pure and simple.
We passed through the washerwomen. Behind the booths a story-teller had gathered a crowd; in a moment he was alone and the crowd were following me up the hill, yelling and howling with a familiarity most offensive to a sensitive stranger.
These are the familiar resources of a story-teller, which everybody uses as a matter of course. It is so natural to take advantage of them that unless we purposely keep an eye upon the writer's devices, marking them off as he turns from one to another, we hardly notice the change. He is telling a story in the ordinary way, the obvious and unconstrained.
She was, as a girl, the "story-teller" of the family, and among her companions secured a reputation for her powers of narration. This gift she turned to good account. "It was at her father's suggestion and by his advice that her first book, Ragged Life in Egypt, was published.
There are stories, and they are told with spirit and with skill. In Beatrice Signorini the story-teller does justice to the honest jealousy of a wife and to the honest love of a husband who returns from the wanderings of his imagination to the frank fidelity of his heart. Cynicism grows genial in the jest of The Pope and the Net.
"O most inconsistent Wang Yu!" cried the story-teller, "assuredly a very commendable local pride has dimmed your usually penetrating eyesight. Is not the clay pit of which you speak that in which you fashioned exceedingly unsymmetrical imitations of rat-pies in your childhood? How, then, can it be equal to those of Honan, which you have never seen?
An involuntary cry from Mysie interrupted the story-teller. He changed his tone at once. 'I beg your pardon, Miss Lindsay, for telling you such a horrid tale. Do forgive me. I didn't mean to frighten you more than a little. 'Only a case of lycanthropia, remarked Mr. Lindsay, as coolly as if that settled everything about it and lycanthropia, horror and all, at once.
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