ts fatuity on
every audience to which I gave it. The case is very clear.

Equally clear have been some happy instances where I have found audiences
responding to a story I myself greatly liked, but which common
appreciation usually ignored. This is an experience even more persuasive
than the other, certainly more to be desired.

Every story-teller has lines of limitation; certain types of story will
always remain his or her best effort. There is no reason why any type of
story should be told really ill, and of course the number of kinds one
tells well increases with the growth of the appreciative capacity. But
none the less, it is wise to recognise the limits at each stage, and not
try to tell any story to which the honest inner consciousness says, "I do
not like you."

Let us then set down as a prerequisite for good story-telling, _a genuine
appreciation of the story_.

Now, we may suppose this genuine appreciation to be your portion. You have
chosen a story, have felt its charm, and identified the quality of its
appeal.

You are now to tell it in such wise that your hearers will get the same
kind of impression you yourself received from it. How?

I believe the inner secret of success is the measure of force with which
the teller wills the conveyance of his impression to the hearer.

Anyone who has watched, or has himself been, the teller of a story which
held an audience, knows that there is something approaching hypnotic
suggestion in the close connection of effort and effect, and in the
elimination of self-consciousness from speaker and listeners alike.

I would not for a moment lend the atmosphere of charlatanry, or of the
ultra-psychic, to the wholesome and vivid art of story-telling. But I
would, if possible, help the teacher to realise how largely success in
that art is a subjective and psychological matter, dependent on her
control of her own mood and her sense of direct, intimate communion with
the minds attending her. The "feel" of an audience,--that indescribable
sense of the composite human soul waiting on the initiative of your own,
the emotional currents interplaying along a medium so delicate that it
takes the baffling torture of an obstruction to reveal its
existence,--cannot be taught. But it can and does develop with use. And a
realisation of the immense latent power of strong desire and resolution
vitalises and disembarrasses the beginner.

That is, undoubtedly, rather an intangible beginni