true, namely, that it is only when one has overcome the mechanical
difficulties that one can "let one's self go" in the dramatic interest
of the story.

By the expert story-teller I do not mean the professional 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
gatherings. The difference between the stilted reciter and the simple
story-teller is perhaps best illustrated by an episode in Hans Christian
Andersen's 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 disastrously, and while the artificial Nightingale is singing 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 her the
comparison with the nightingale breaks down) it is a simplicity which
comes after much training in self-control, and much hard work in