no more died out than curiosity, or than the passion of love. The truth
is not that stories are not demanded, but that the born raconteur and
story-teller is a rare person. The faculty of telling a story is a much
rarer gift than the ability to analyze character and even than the
ability truly to draw character. It may be a higher or a lower power, but
it is rarer. It is a natural gift, and it seems that no amount of culture
can attain it, any more than learning can make a poet. Nor is the
complaint well founded that the stories have all been told, the possible
plots all been used, and the combinations of circumstances exhausted. It
is no doubt our individual experience that we hear almost every day--and
we hear nothing so eagerly--some new story, better or worse, but new in
its exhibition of human character, and in the combination of events. And
the strange, eventful histories of human life will no more be exhausted
than the possible arrangements of mathematical numbers. We might as well
say that there are no more good pictures to be painted as that there are
no more good stories to be told.

Equally baseless is the assumption that it is inartistic and untrue to
nature to bring a novel to a definite consummation, and especially to end
it happily. Life, we are told, is full of incompletion, of broken
destinies, of failures, of romances that begin but do not end, of
ambitions and purposes frustrated, of love crossed, of unhappy issues, or
a resultless play of influences. Well, but life is full, also, of
endings, of the results in concrete action of character, of completed
dramas. And we expect and give, in the stories we hear and tell in
ordinary intercourse, some point, some outcome, an end of some sort. If
you interest me in the preparations of two persons who are starting on a
journey, and expend all your ingenuity in describing their outfit and
their characters, and do not tell me where they went or what befell them
afterwards, I do not call that a story. Nor am I any better satisfied