epresents, the
type, in less exaggerated form, is very common; and everybody will
agree that the average man, who has never taken pains to train
himself in narrative, is not able in his ordinary conversation to
tell with ease a logically connected story.

=The Joy of Telling Tales.=--The better sort of narrative sense is
not merely an abstract intellectual understanding of the relation
of cause and effect subsisting between events often disparate in
time; it is, rather, a concrete feeling of the relation. It is an
intuitive feeling; and, being such, it is possessed instinctively
by certain minds. There are people in the world who are natural
born story-tellers; all of us have met with them in actual life:
and to this class belong the story-telling giants, like Sir Walter
Scott, Victor Hugo, Dumas pere, Stevenson, and Mr. Kipling.
Narrative is natural to their minds. They sense events in series;
and a series once started in their imagination propels itself with
hurrying progression. Some novelists, like Wilkie Collins, have
nothing else to recommend them but this native sense of narrative;
but it is a gift that is not to be despised. Authors with something
important to say about life have need of it, in order that the
process of reading their fiction may be, in Stevenson's phrase,
"absorbing and voluptuous." In the great story-tellers, there is a
sort of self-enjoyment in the exercise of the sense of narrative;
and this, by sheer contagion, communicates enjoyment to the reader.
Perhaps it may be called (by analogy with the familiar phrase, "the
joy of living") the joy of telling tales. The joy of telling tales
which shines through "Treasure Island" is perhaps the main reason for
the continued popularity of the story. The author is having such a
good time in telling his tale that he gives us necessarily a good
time in reading it.

=The Missing of This Joy.=--But many of the novelists who have had
great things to say about human life have been singularly deficient in
this native sense of narrative. George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, for
example, almost never evidence the joy of telling tales. George
Eliot's natural habit of mind was abstract rather than concrete; she
was born an essayist. But, largely through the influence of George
Henry Lewes, she deliberately decided that fiction was the most
effective medium for expressing her philosophy of life. Thereafter she
strove earnestly to develop that sense of narrative whi