The Great English Short-Story Writers - The Original Classic Edition. Brown John

York.]

       He argues from this that "prose seemed to the Greeks, and even to the Latins who followed in their footsteps, as fit only for pedestrian purposes." It is more probable that, as regards prose-fiction, they did not realize that they were called upon to explain the omission of the tenth muse. Her exclusion was based on no reasoned principle, but was due to a sensuous art-instinct: the Greeks felt that the unnatural limitations of the poetic medium were more in keeping with the unnatural[10] brevity of a story which must be short. The exquisite prose tales which have been handed down to us belong to the age of their decadence as a nation; in their great period their tellers of brief tales unconsciously cast their rendering in the poetic mould.[11] In natures of the highest genius the most arduous is instinctively the favorite task.

       [Footnote 10: "The short-story is artificial, and to a considerable degree unnatural. It could hardly be otherwise, for it takes out of our complex lives a single person or a single incident and treats that as if it were complete in itself. Such isolation is not known to nature."--Page 22 of Short-Story Writing, by Charles Raymond Barrett, published by the Baker & Taylor Co., New York.]

       [Footnote 11: For example, the story told by Demodocus of The

       Illicit Love of Ares for Aphrodite, and the Revenge which Hephaestus

       Planned--Odyssey, Bk. VIII.]

       Chaucer, by reason of his intimate acquaintance with both the poetry and prose-fiction of Boccaccio, had the opportunity to choose

       between these two mediums of short-story narration; and he chose the former. He was as familiar with Boccaccio's poetic method,

       as exemplified in the Teseide, as with his prose, as exemplified at much greater length in the Decameron, for he borrowed from them

       both. Yet in only two instances in the Canterbury Tales does he relapse into prose.

       The Teseide in Chaucer's hands, retaining its poetic medium, is converted into the Knight's Tale; while the Reeve's Tale, the Frank-lin's, and the Shipman's, each borrowed from the prose version of the Decameron, are given by him a poetic setting. This preference for poetry over prose as a medium for short-story narration cannot have been accidental or unreasoned on his part; nor can it be altogether accounted for by the explanation that "he was by nature a poet," for he did experiment with the prose medium to the extent of using it twice. He had the brilliant and innovating precedent of the Decameron, and yet, while adopting some of its materials, he abandoned its medium. He was given the opportunity of ante-dating the introduction of technique into the English prose short-story by four hundred and fifty years, and he disregarded it almost cavalierly. How is such wilful neglect to be accounted for? Only by his instinctive feeling that the technique, which Boccaccio had applied in the Decameron, belonged by right to the realm of poetry, had been learned in the practising of the poetic art, and could arrive at its highest level of achievement only in that medium.

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       That in Chaucer's case this choice was justified cannot be disputed; the inferiority of the short-story technique contained in his two prose efforts, when compared with that displayed in the remainder of the Canterbury Tales, is very marked. Take, for instance, the Prioress' Tale and apply to it the five short-story tests established by Poe, as a personal discovery, four and a half centuries later; it survives them all. It attains, in addition, the crowning glory, coveted by Stevenson, of appearing typical. There may never have been

       a Christian child who was martyred by the Jews in the particularly gruesome way described--probably there never was; but, in listening to the Prioress, it does not enter into our heads to doubt her word--the picture which she leaves with us of how the Christian regarded the Jew in the Middle Ages is too vivid to allow any breathing-space for incredulity. No knowledge of mediaeval anti-Jewish legislation, however scholarly, can bring us to realize the fury of race-hatred which then existed more keenly than this story of a little over two thousand words. By its perusal we gain an illuminating insight into that ill-directed religious enthusiasm which led men on frenzied quests for the destruction of the heretic in their own land and of the Saracen abroad, causing them to become at one and the same time unjust and heroic. In a word, within the compass of three hundred lines of verse, Chaucer contrives to body forth his age--to give us something which is typical.

       The Morte D'Arthur of Malory is again a collection of traditional stories, as is the Gesta Romanorum, and not the creative work

       of a single intellect. As might be expected, it straggles, and overlays its climax with a too-lavish abundance of incidents; it lacks the harmony of values which results from the introduction of a unifying purpose--i.e., of art. Imaginative and full of action though the books of the Morte D'Arthur are, it remained for the latter-day artist to exhaust their individual incidents of their full dramatic

       possibilities. From the eyes of the majority of modern men the brilliant quality of their magic was concealed, until it had been disci-plined and refashioned by the severe technique of the short-story.

       By the eighteenth century the influence of Malory was scarcely felt at all; but his imaginativeness, as interpreted by Tennyson, in The Idylls of the King, and by William Morris, in his Defence of Guinevere, has given to the Anglo-Saxon world a new romantic background for its thoughts. The Idylls of the King are not Tennyson's most successful interpretation. The finest example of his superior short-story craftsmanship is seen in the triumphant use which he makes of the theme contained in The Book of Elaine, in his poem of The Lady of Shalott. Not only has he remodelled and added fantasy to the story, but he has threaded it through with atmosphere--an entirely modern attribute, of which more must be said hereafter.

       So much for our contention that the laws and technique of the prose short-story, as formulated by Poe, were first instinctively discovered and worked out in the medium of poetry.

       VI

       "The Golden Ass of Apuleius is, so to say, a beginning of modern literature. From this brilliant medley of reality and romance, of wit and pathos, of fantasy and observation, was born that new art, complex in thought, various in expression, which gives a semblance of frigidity to perfection itself. An indefatigable youthfulness is its distinction."[12]

       [Footnote 12: From the introduction, by Charles Whibley, to the Tudor Translations' edition by W.E. Henley, of The Golden Ass of

       Apuleius, published by David Nutt, London, 1893. All other quotations bearing upon Apuleius are taken from the same source.]

       An indefatigable youthfulness was also the prime distinction of the Elizabethan era's writings and doings; it was fitting that such a period should have witnessed the first translation into the English language of this Benjamin of a classic literature's old age.

       Apuleius was an unconventional cosmopolitan in that ancient world which he so vividly portrays; he was a barbarian by birth, a Greek by education, and wrote his book in the Romans' language. In his use of luminous slang for literary purposes he was Rudyard Kipling's prototype.

       "He would twist the vulgar words of every-day into quaint unheard-of meanings, nor did he deny shelter to those loafers and footpads of speech which inspire the grammarian with horror. On every page you encounter a proverb, a catchword, a literary allusion, a flagrant redundancy. One quality only was distasteful to him--the commonplace."

       There are other respects in which we can trace Mr. Kipling's likeness: in his youthful precocity--he was twenty-five when he wrote his Metamorphoses; in his daring as an innovator; in his manly stalwartness in dealing with the calamities of life; in his adventurous note of world-wideness and realistic method of handling the improbable and uncanny.

       Like all great artists, he was a skilful borrower from the literary achievements of a bygone age; and so successfully does he borrow that we prefer his copy to the original. The germ-idea of Kipling's Finest Story in the World is to be found in Poe's Tale of the Rag-ged Mountains; Apuleius's germ-plot, of the man who was changed by enchantment into an ass, and could only recover his human shape by eating rose-leaves, was taken either from Lucian or from Lucius of Patrae. In at least three of his interpolations he remark-

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       ably foreshadows the prose short-story method, upon which we are wont to pride ourselves as being a unique discovery of the past eight decades: these are Bellepheron's Story;