Transcriber's note.
Minor punctuation inconsistencies have been silently repaired. Variable
spelling has been retained. Sidenotes are presented [within square
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A HISTORY OF STORY-TELLING
EDITED BY ARTHUR RANSOME
THE WORLD'S STORY-TELLERS
EACH volume contains a selection of complete stories, an Introductory
Essay by ARTHUR RANSOME, and a Frontispiece Portrait by J. GAVIN.
List of volumes already published:--
GAUTIER
HOFFMANN
POE
HAWTHORNE
MÉRIMÉE
BALZAC
CHATEAUBRIAND
THE ESSAYISTS
CERVANTES
Others in preparation
_In cloth, 1s. net; cloth gilt, gilt top, 1s. 6d. net per vol._
LONDON AND EDINBURGH
T. C. AND E. C. JACK
[Illustration: JEAN DE MEUNG]
A HISTORY OF
STORY-TELLING
STUDIES IN THE
DEVELOPMENT OF NARRATIVE
BY
ARTHUR RANSOME
Editor of 'The World's Story-Tellers'
[Illustration: ALIENI TEMPORIS FLORES]
WITH 27 PORTRAITS BY J. GAVIN
LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
16 HENRIETTA STREET, W.C.
1909
TO MY WIFE
PREFACE
THIS is a spring day, and I am writing in a flood of sunlight in front
of a brown French inn. Above my head there is the dusty branch of a
tree stuck out of a window, the ancient sign that gave point to the
proverb, 'Good wine needs no bush.' Good books, I suppose, need no
prefaces. But honest authors realise that their books are never as good
as they had planned them. A preface, put on last and worn in front, to
show what they would have liked their books to be, is the pleasantest
of their privileges. And I am not inclined to do without it.
A book that calls itself a history of a subject with as many byeways
and blind alleys as exist in the history of story-telling, is precisely
the kind of book that one would wish one's enemy to have written.
Everybody who reads it grumbles because something or other is left
out that, if they had had the writing of it, would have been put in.
And yet in the case of this particular book (how many authors have
thought the same!) criticism of omissions is like quarrelling with a
guinea-pig because it has not got a tail. It is not the guinea-pig's
business to have a tail, and it is not the business of this book to be
a chronicle, full of facts, and admirable for reference. That place
is already filled by Dunlop's _History of Fiction_, and, in a very
delightful manner, by Professor Raleigh's _English Novel_. The word
history can be used in a different sense. The French say that such an
one makes a history of a thing when he makes a great deal of talk about
it. That is what I set out to do. My business was not to be noting down
dates and facts--this book was published in such a year and this in the
year preceding. I was to write with a livelier imp astride my pen. The
schoolmaster was to be sent to steal apples in the orchard. I was to
write of story-telling as a man might write of painting or jewellery
or any other art he loved. I was to take here a book and there a book,
and notice the development of technique, the conquests of new material,
the gradual perfecting of form. I would talk of old masters and modern
ones, and string my chapters like beads, a space between each, along
the history of the art.
Well, I have _fait une histoire_, suggested mainly by the masterpieces
that I love, and without too much regard for those that happen to be
loved by other people. And now that it is done, I think of it sadly
enough. It should have been so beautiful. When I see an old church,
like the priory church at Cartmel, standing grey and solemn in the mist
above the houses, or hear an old song, like 'Summer is icumen in,' or
see a browned old picture, like Poussin's 'Bergers d'Arcadie,' I feel
that these things have meant more to man than battles. These are his
dreams and his ideals, resting from age to age, long after the din of
fighting has died and been forgotten, recorded each in its own way,
in stone, in melody, in colour, and in the tales also that, changing
continually, have 'held children from play and old men from the
chimney-corner,' the dreams lie hid. What a tapestry they should have
made. For the story of this art, or indeed of any art, is the story
of man. Looking back through the years, as I sit here and close my
eyes against the sunlight, I see the hard men and fierce women of the
Sagas living out their lives in the cold and vigorous north--Pippin,
the grandfather of Charlemagne, sticking his sword indifferently
through the devil, Beaumains and his scornful lady riding through the
green wood. In the dungeon of the tower sits Aucassin sorrowing for
Nicolete his so sweet friend. Among the orange-trees on the Italian
slope the gold-haired Fiammetta watches for her lover. With battered
armour and ascetic face Don Quixote, upright in his saddle, rides on
the bare roads of Spain, dreaming of Dulcinea del Toboso. Gil Blas
swindles his way through life and comes out top as an honest rascal
will. Clarissa sits in her chamber blotting with tears her interminable
correspondence. Tom Jones draws blood from many meaner noses. My Uncle
Toby looks, not in the white, for the mote in the Widow Wadman's
eye. Mrs. Bennet begs her husband, to 'come and make Lizzy marry Mr.
Collins.' Old Goriot pawns his plate and moves to cheaper and yet
cheaper rooms to keep his daughters in their luxury. Raphael, nearing
death, watches the relentless shrinking of the morsel of shagreen.
There falls the House of Usher. There floats the white face of Marie
Roget down the waters of the Seine. Quasimodo leers through the rosace;
Mateo Falcone feels the earth with the butt of his gun and finds it
not too hard for the digging of a child's grave; Clarimonde throws her
passionate regard across the cathedral to the young novice about to
take his vows; and, with a clatter of hoofs, the musketeers ride off
for the reputation of the Queen of France.
A tapestry indeed.
I turn over my chapters, torn rags of colour loosely patched together,
and then look back to my dream, that gorgeous thing that for these
five years past has glittered and swung before me. I look from one to
the other and back again, and am almost ready to tear up the book in
order to regain the delightful possession of the dream. It was a task
to be taken up reverently and with love; and indeed these are the only
qualifications I can honestly claim. But it needed far more. Now that I
have done my best, I look at the result and am afraid. I hate, like I
hate the tourists in Notre Dame, impertinent little books on splendid
subjects. With my heart in my mouth I ask myself if I have made one.
* * * * *
Impertinent or no, my book is very vulnerable, and since it is my own I
must defend it, so far as that is possible, by defining my intentions.
The chapters are, as I meant them be, threaded like beads along the
history of the art, and it is very easy to quarrel not only with the
beads, but also with the spaces between them. There is no one who
reads the book who will not find somewhere a space where he would have
had a gleaming bead, a bead, where he would have had a contemptuous
space. I could not put everything in; but have left material for many
complementary volumes. It would perhaps be possible, writing only of
authors I have not considered, to produce a history of story-telling
no more incomplete than this. But it will be found, and the fact is
perhaps my justification, that few of my omissions have been made by
accident. In order to have the satisfaction of coming to an end at
all, I had to seek the closest limits, and those limits, once chosen,
barred, to my own surprise, more than one great story-teller from any
detailed discussion.
My object not being an expanded bibliography of story-telling, but
rather a series of chapters that would trace the development of the
art, many admirable writers, who were content with the moulds that
were ready made to their hands, fell outside my range, however noble,
however human was the material they poured into the ancient matrices.
Dickens and Thackeray, for example, pouring their energy and feeling
and wit and humour into the moulds designed by the eighteenth century,
had, economically, to be passed over, since across the channel and in
America men were writing stories, not necessarily greater, nor of wider
appeal to mankind, but of more vital interest to their fellow artists.
Throughout the book we hunt, my readers and I, with the hare. Always
we discuss the art in those examples that seem the most advanced of
their time. Just as with the Romantic movement I pass over from England
to France, though the book contains no survey of French fiction, so
when Cervantes is the leading story-teller, the artist nearest our own
time, I shall be in Spain, though Spanish literature does not make a
continuous thread in the history. I shall think more of the art than
of my own country, or indeed of any country, and shall neglect all
literatures in turn when they are producing nothing that is memorable
in the progress of the technique of story-telling, however freely they
may be contributing great or brilliant tales to the world's resources
of amusement.
Then too, it will be noticed that I neglect my opportunities.
What a semblance of erudition I might have made by discussing,
among the origins of story-telling, the Greek and Latin specimens
of narrative. But it seemed desirable, since it was possible, to
trace the development of the art entirely in the literatures of our
own civilisation. French and English, the two greatest European
literatures, contain, grafted on their national stocks, every flower
of the art that was cultivated by Greece or Rome. I have used for
discussion only the books known and made by our own ancestors, and
when, at the Renaissance, they lifted forms out of Antiquity and
filled them with imitations of classical matter, I have considered
the imitations rather than the originals, if only because any further
influence they may have had on the development of the art was exerted
not by the classical writers but by the Englishmen, Frenchmen,
Spaniards, and Italians who made their manners and materials their own.
The book represents many years of reading, and two of writing where it
should have taken ten. It has travelled about with me piecemeal, and,
if I dated my chapters from the places where I wrote them, they would
trace a very various itinerary. In France, in England, and in Scotland
it has shared my adventures, and indeed it is a wilful, rambling thing,
more than a little reminiscent of its infancy. Do not expect it to be
too consistent. There is, I fear, no need for me to ask you not to read
it all at once.
ARTHUR RANSOME.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE vii
PART I
ORIGINS 5
'THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE' 19
CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO 31
THE ROGUE NOVEL 51
THE ELIZABETHANS 67
THE PASTORAL 81
CERVANTES 93
THE ESSAYISTS' CONTRIBUTION TO STORY-TELLING 107
TRANSITION: BUNYAN AND DEFOE 125
RICHARDSON AND THE FEMININE NOVEL 139
FIELDING, SMOLLETT, AND THE MASCULINE NOVEL 155
A NOTE ON STERNE 169