VII.—A RACONTEUR 

YOU must excuse me the gaucherie of a compliment,” I said to Bevan in the smoking-room, after a very pleasant dinner, “but you have never been more brilliant. Five stories, and each a success, is surely a record even in your experience.”  

Y

 “It is very good of you to appreciate my poor efforts so highly. I felt it a distinct risk to attempt five in one evening—six is the farthest limit sanctioned by any raconteur of standing. You can always distinguish an artist from a mere amateur by his severe reserve. He knows that an anecdote is a liqueur, and he offers it seldom; but the other pours out his stuff like vin ordinaire, which it is, as a rule, the mere dregs of the vine. Did you ever notice how a man will come back from Scotland in autumn, and bore companies of unoffending people with a flood of what he considers humorous Scottish stories? It is one of the brutalities of conversation. What irritates me is not that the material is Scottish, for there are many northern stories with a fine flavour; it is the fellow's utter ignorance of the two great principles of our art.”  

 “Which are?”  

 “Selection and preparation,” said Bevan, with decision. “One must first get good stuff, and then work it into shape. It is amazing how much is offered and how little is of any use. People are constantly bringing me situations that they think excellent, and are quite disappointed when I tell them they are impossible for the purposes of art. Nothing can be done with them, although of course another artist in a different line might use them. Now I have passed several 'bits' on to Brown-Johnes, who delivers popular lectures. The platform story is scene-painting, the after-dinner miniature.”  

 “May I ask whether you are ever taken in, as it were, with your material, and find it 'give' after it has been manufactured, like rotten yarn or unseasoned wood?”  

 “Rarely; one's eye gets to be trained so that you know a promising subject at sight, but then comes the labour. I've heard a man bore a dinner-table to the yawning point with a story that had some excellent points in it, but he had taken no trouble, perhaps had no insight.”  

 “And you succeeded with it...?”  

 “It is, in my humble judgment, as good a story of its kind now as you would wish to hear, and it bears improvement, which is a good sign. A really high-class story 

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