His Majesty Baby and Some Common People — A Reader’s Guide

e stories, and each a success, is surely a record even in your experience.”

“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.”

“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 will take years to perfect, just as I am told by clergymen that a sermon only begins to go after it has been preached twenty times.”

“You have been working on that Shakespeare bit, by the way; I noticed at least one new touch this evening which was excellent.”

“Now that is very gratifying,” and Bevan was evidently pleased; “it is a great satisfaction to have one's work appreciated in an intelligent manner; perhaps you are the only one present who saw any difference.

“What I think I like best”--and he tapped his snuff-box in a meditative way--“is to get an old, decayed, hopeless story, and restore it. Breaking out a window here, adding a porch there, opening up a room, and touching up the walls--it is marvellous what can be done. Besides new drains,” he added, with significance, “the sanitary state of some of those old stories is awful. You feel the atmosphere at the door--quite intolerable, and indeed dangerous.”

“Then you do not think that indecency...?”

“No, nor profanity. Both are bad art; they are cheap expedients, like strong sauces to cover bad cooking. It sounds like boasting, but I have redeemed one or two very unpleasant tales, which otherwise had been uninhabitable, if I may trifle again with my little figure, and now are charming.”

“You rather lean, one would gather, to old tales, while some of the younger men are terrified of telling a 'chestnut,' always prefacing, 'This must be well known, but it is new to me; say at once if you have heard it.'”