Tale

“ To the tale-teller, you must understand, the telling of the tale is the cutting of the natal cord. When the tale is told it exists outside oneself and often it is more living than the living man from whom it came. ”

“ I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me: To him my tale I teach. ”

“ All fine emotional effects arise from truth. The tale must hold the mirror and show an image of life. It must select and combine facts which will suggest emotion but the facts must be a true expression of human nature. The tale, whether it is realistic in emphasizing the familiar, the commonplace, and the present, or romantic in emphasizing the strange, the heroic, and the remote, must be idealistic to interpret truly the facts of life by high ideals. ”

“ He left the name, at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral, or adorn a tale. ”

“ The telling of the tale is a distinct art governed by distinct principles because the life of the story must be transmitted and rendered into voice.
Story-telling is one of the most ancient and universal of arts. ”

“ The thing that first made itself known as a little tale, usually salacious, dealing with conventionalized types and conventionalized incidents, has proved itself possibly the most flexible of all the literary forms in its adaptation to the needs of the mind that wishes to utter itself, inventively or constructively, upon some fresh occasion, or wishes briefly to criticise or represent some phase or fact of life. ”

“ As the message is the chief worth of the tale, the message should dominate the telling and pervade its life. A complete realization of the message of the tale will affect the minutest details giving color and tone to the telling, and resulting so that what the child does with the story will deepen the impression of the message he receives. ”

“ There are many such,—dramas on the stage of history, life scenes that are pictures in action, tales pathetic, stirring, enlivening, full of the element of the unusual, of the stuff the novel and the romance are made of, yet with the advantage of being actual fact. ”

“ Comedy, tragedy, character, plot—there seemed nothing in life but the writing of tales—watching, listening, dreaming, finding, then becoming deeply excited, feeling them grow inside of you, planning them out and writing them off, then working them over and over and over, little by little building them up. ”

“ Tales, at first told of ‘Somebody,’ get new names attached to them, and obtain a new local habitation, wherever they wander. ‘One of the leading personages to be met in the traditions of the world is really no more than—Somebody. ”

“ Character, situation, incident, humour, pathos, tragic force, are all in abundance; words alone are at a minimum. Of course these are "plain" tales, lightning-flash tales. A gleam, and there the whole tragedy or comedy is before you—elaborate it for yourself afterwards." ”

“ This historic value of the tales, however, great as it is to the student of manners, is secondary to their poetic value, which lies in the sentiment, feeling, and pathos with which the experience of life embodied in them, the workings of simple human nature, in however debased surroundings, is set forth. ”

“ The delights of conversation—so nearly, alas, a lost art!—consist chiefly in the exchange of varied views on single topics. So, when we note how the few primal story-themes and plot developments of all time were handled by those who first told the tales in literate form, the satisfaction is proportionate. ”

“ They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. ”

“ There is no home like the home of our infancy, no remembrances like those of our youth; the old trees whose topmost boughs we have climbed, the hedge containing that prize a bird's nest, the fairy tale we heard by the fireside, are things of deep and serious interest in maturity. The heart, crushed or hardened by its intercourse with the world, turns with affectionate delight to its early dreams. ”

“ The narrative may take on a high degree of complexity, involving many well-differentiated characters and a well-developed art of conversation, and in some instances, especially in revenge, trickster, or recognition motives, approaching plot tales in our sense of the word. ”

“ If the book of fate, dear lady, could be laid open before your eyes, it would appear to you only full of darkness and contradictions, unless you could perceive all the myriads of fine links and intricate threads which unite event and event together. ”

“ Many will prefer to drop hero-tales and romances in favor of more modern stories. Such a group of stories is suggested introducing the stories that call for interpretation, and the apprehending of a secondary meaning. ”

“ From their whispering leaves comes wafted across the noise of populous centuries a solemn and mysterious sound, which to them is the voice of the Soul of the World. All nature has become spiritualized and transfigured; and, wrapt in beautiful, vague dreams of the real and the ideal, they live in this green world, like the little child in the German tale, who sits by the margin of a woodland lake, and hears the blue heaven and the branches overhead dispute with their reflection in the water, which is the reality and which the image. ”

“ And if, in tales our fathers told, the songs our mothers sung, Tradition wears a snowy beard, Romance is always young. ”

“ Is it necessary to add that the echoes of many characteristic tales, dating from that picturesque time, still linger about here in more or less fragmentary form, to be caught by the attentive ear? Some of them I have repeated; most of them I have forgotten; one I have never repeated, and assuredly can never forget. ”

“ Among these, accordingly, much discoursing with spirits went on—and it did a world of good which never became manifest. ”

“ The abundance and the vividness of character-presentation; the liveliness and the abundance of the staging of that character; the variety of scene and incident—all most properly connected with the plot, but capable of existing and of being felt without it; the human dialogue; the admirable phrase in that dialogue and out of it, in the digressions, in the narrative, above, and through, and about, and below it all—these things and others (for it is practically impossible to exhaust the catalogue) fill up the cup to the brim, and keep it full, for the born lover of the special novel-pleasure. ”

“ These are the epic poem, the drama, and the novel. Each purports to be, in some sort, a reflex of human life and action, as obeying certain laws and tending to a certain end. In each men are represented, not as at rest, or in contemplative isolation, but in co-operation or collision. In each there is a combination of two elements, an outer element of incident, an inner of passion and character. ”

“ The passionate intensity and moral ardor of imagination which we feel to vibrate and penetrate through every turn and every phrase of the dialogue would suffice to enforce upon our belief a more nearly incredible revolution of nature or revulsion of the soul. ”

“ We must suppose, therefore, either that all wits jumped and invented the same romantic series of situations by accident, or that all men spread from one centre, where the story was known, or that the story, once invented, has drifted all round the world. ”

“ I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch the materials; it is the play of thought, and sentiment, and language, the weaving in of characters, lightly yet expressively delineated; the familiar and faithful exhibition of scenes in common life ”

“ One single simple incident, a pleasantly naïve or even silly word, a blunder, a paradox, a clever remark, personal singularities or habits, nay, a peculiar expression, and whatever else would occur in a gay and bustling life—took the form of a dialogue, a catechism, a passing scene, or a drama,—often in prose, but oftener in verse. ”

“ Well, but life is full, also, of endings, of the results in concrete action of character, of completed dramas. And we expect and give, in the stories we hear and tell in ordinary intercourse, some point, some outcome, an end of some sort. If you interest me in the preparations of two persons who are starting on a journey, and expend all your ingenuity in describing their outfit and their characters, and do not tell me where they went or what befell them afterwards, I do not call that a story. ”

“ The manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in indignations and enthusiasms, in judgments—and even in love. The manner in which, as in the features and character of a human face, the inner truth is foreshadowed for those who know how to look at their kind. ”

“ There is romance of love, mystery, plot, and fighting, and a breathless dash and go about the telling which makes one quite forget about the improbabilities of the story; and it all ends in the old-fashioned healthy American way. ”

“ This was the experience, then, of ‘distinct pre-eminence’ in whose recollection his mind was ‘nourished and invisibly repaired.’ It is in such a moment that the soul’s strength is shown; when common objects evoke what he calls the imagination, the reality, of which they are a suggestion. ”

“ Tell it, if possible, with a sense of bestowing a blessing, and a delicate perception of the reception it meets in the group before you, and the pleasure and interest it arouses in them, so that in the telling there is that human setting which is a quickening of the spirit and a union of ideas, which is something quite new and different from the story, yet born of the story. ”

“ Not till the story is ended, not till the effect of it has been thoroughly absorbed and digested, does the reader even perceive the simple and natural absence of any grosser element, any hint or suggestion of a baser alloy in the ingredients of its human emotion than in the splendour of lightning or the roll of a gathered wave. ”

“ Such material story as there is, apart from the spiritual history embodied in the sonnets, seems more visible now, and the reader has a clearer revelation of a young, aspiring, candid mind shadowed by stern conventions of thought, dogma, and formula, but breaking loose from the environment which smothered it. ”

“ The World is ours till sunset,
Holly and fire and snow;
And the name of our dead brother
Who loved us long ago.
The grown folk mighty and cunning,
They write his name in gold;
But we can tell a little
Of the million tales he told. ”

“ Illustrated.
"The narrative is pervaded by a fine poetical spirit that is alive to the subtle graces of character, as well as to the tender influences of natural scenes. . . . Its chief merits must be placed in its graphic and expressive portraitures of character, its tenderness and delicacy of sentiment, its touches of heartfelt pathos, and the admirable wisdom and soundness of its ethical suggestions."—N. Y. Tribune. ”

“ In return the stories gave pleasure and knowledge and, at times, sadness, to the peoples of the world. Stories try to give those who listen carefully an understanding of how the Lord of the Sky means for the world to be. ”

“ The story that belongs to them is one long since taken to the warm hearts of the people, and cherished as among the most touching in all the history of the realm—a realm rich in stories of a peculiarly heart-compelling kind. ”

“ Maud however was full of vagueness. "What great fact?"
"The fact of a relation. The adventure's a relation; the relation's an adventure. The romance, the novel, the drama are the picture of one. The subject the novelist treats is the rise, the formation, the development, the climax and for the most part the decline of one. ”

“ Yet, my Lord, our Tragedies may be read with great Advantage to Style and Language, if we can bring them down to our calmer Thoughts, and the stiller Scenes of Life, and only use them to be better acquainted with the Nature, Violence, Degrees, and Expression of all the various Passions that exercise and distract the Mind of Man. ”

“ And so, when we come across some particularly popular word like reason in eighteenth-century literature, we are sometimes tempted to lay down the book, while imagination goes groping vainly round the impenetrable fringe of that mysterious no-man’s-land which lies between words and their meanings. ”

“ Of the origin and essence of the romantic I treated in my first Lecture, and I shall here, therefore, merely briefly mention the subject. The ancient art and poetry rigorously separate things which are dissimilar; the romantic delights in indissoluble mixtures; all contrarieties: nature and art, poetry and prose, seriousness and mirth, recollection and anticipation, spirituality and sensuality, terrestrial and celestial, life and death, are by it blended together in the most intimate combination. ”

“ All beauties of language, all flights of poetry, all particular scenes and speeches, powerful and impressive as they may be, are merely subordinate. No character, how exquisitely or elaborately soever conceived and finished, is drawn for itself ”