o 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.

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 which, at the outset, was largely lacking in
her mind. To many readers who are not without appreciation of the
importance and profundity of her understanding of human nature, her
stories are wearisome and unalluring, because she told them with
labor, not with ease. She does not seem to have had a good time with
them, as Stevenson had with "Treasure Island," a story in other ways
of comparative unimportance. And surely it is not frivolous to state
that the most profound and serious of thoughts are communicated best
when they are communicated with the greatest interest.

It could hardly be hoped that a person entirely devoid of the
narrative sense should acquire it by any amount of labor; but nearly
every one possesses it in at least a rudimentary degree, and any
one possessing it at all may develop it by exercise. A simple and
common-sensible exercise is to seize hold of some event th