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On Teaching English; With Detailed Examples, and an Enquiry Onto the Definition of Poetry
On Teaching English With Detailed Examples and an Enquiry Onto the Definition of Poetry Author:Alexander Bain General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1887 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: Chapter II. HIGHER ENGLISH TEACHING. PLURALITY OF THREADS. T T is very common to talk of Narrative as one of the easiest efforts of composition. The elementary manuals usually dispose of it in'a few pages. The whole art, it is commonly said, consists in following the order of events. In this, there are several oversights of enormous magnitude. The first oversight is the fact, that very few narratives are confined to"a single thread of events. The usual case is to have several trains of actions proceeding simultaneously. In a history, for example, there may be no less than ten or twelve different concurring streams. The second oversight is, that, in a narrative, events are not only stated, but explained. The Prussians came up at Waterloo at a particular moment, and the fact may be brought forward in its order; but then the narrator introduces an explanatory narrative to show why they did not come sooner. But such explanations carry the narrative backward, or up the stream of time, instead of down. Moreover, all explanations and reasons break the narrative and distract the attention, and so interfere with the reader's conception of the events. Take, again, Description. If we are giving the impressions that occur to us in marching through a town or a country, we may be said to be following a single thread; but if we attempt, PLURALITY IN DESCRIPTION AND EXPOSITION. 9 as we often do, to give a coup d'xil, we have to state a great many simultaneous impressions. But, for this, language is seemingly incompetent; we cannot express more than one thing at a time. A similar difficulty occurs in Exposit...« less