transcript from actual life that is not
deliberately arranged and logically patterned is therefore likely not
to be a narrative. A passage from a diary, for instance, which states
events in the order of their happening but makes no attempt to present
them as links in a chain of causation, is not, technically speaking,
narrative in method. To illustrate this point, let us open at random
the diary of Samuel Pepys. Here is his entry for April 29, 1666:--

"To Church, where Mr. Mills, a lazy sermon upon the Devil's having no
right to anything in this world. To Mr. Evelyn's, where I walked
in his garden till he come from Church, with great pleasure reading
Ridley's discourse, all my way going and coming, upon the Civil and
Ecclesiastical Law. He being come home, he and I walked together in
the garden with mighty pleasure, he being a very ingenious man; and,
the more I know him, the more I love him. Weary to bed, after having
my hair of my head cut shorter, even close to my skull, for coolness,
it being mighty hot weather."

There is no logical continuity in the worthy diarist's faithful
chronicle of actuality. What occasioned the weariness with which he
went to bed? It could not have been the company of Mr. Evelyn, whom
he loved; it could hardly have been the volume on the civil and
ecclesiastical law, though its title does suggest the soporific. Was
his strength, like Samson's, shorn away with the hair of his head;
or can it be that that lazy sermon of Mr. Mills' got in its deadening
effects at bed-time? We notice, at any rate, that the diarist's
remarks need considerable re-arrangement to make them really
narrative.

Yet it is just in this way that commonly event succeeds event in the
daily life of every one. It is only in the great passionate crises of
existence that event treads upon event in uninterrupted sequence of
causation. And here is the main formal difference between life as
it actually happens and life as it is artistically represented in
history, biography, and fiction. In every art there are two steps:
first, the selection of essentials, and secondly, the arrangement
of these essentials according to a pattern. In the art of narration,
events are first selected because they suggest an essential logical
relation to each other; and they are then arranged along the lines of
a pattern of causation. Let us compare with the haphazard passage from
Pepys a bit of narrative that is artistically patterned. Here is the