By the expert story-teller I do not mean the pro-
fessional elocutionist. The name, wrongly enough,
has become associated in the mind of the public with
persons who beat their breast, tear their hair, and
declaim blood-curdling episodes. A decade or more
ago, the drawing-room reciter was of this type, and
was rapidly becoming the bugbear of social gather-
ings. The difference between the stilted reciter and
the simple story-teller is perhaps best illustrated by
an episode in Hans Christian Andersen immortal
"Story of the Nightingale." The real Nightingale
and the artificial Nightingale have been bidden by
the Emperor to unite their forces and to sing a duet
at a Court function. The duet turns out most dis-
astrously, and while the artificial Nightingale is sing-
ing his one solo for the thirty-third time, the real
Nightingale flies out of the window back to the green
wood -- a true artist, instinctively choosing his right
atmosphere. But the bandmaster -- symbol of the
pompous pedagogue -- in trying to soothe the outraged
feelings of the courtiers, says, "Because, you see,
Ladies and Gentlemen, and, above all, Your Imperial
Majesty, with the real nightingale you never can tell
what you will hear, but in the artificial nightingale
everything is decided beforehand. So it is, and so
it must remain. It cannot be otherwise."

And as in the case of the two nightingales, so it is
with the stilted reciter and the simple narrator: one
is busy displaying the machinery, showing "how the
tunes go"; the other is anxious to conceal the art.
Simplicity should be the keynote of story-telling, but
(and here the comparison with the nightingale breaks

-xviii-