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]
PART II
Chateaubriand and Romanticism [175]
Scott and Romanticism[187]
The Romanticism of 1830 [201]
Balzac[217]
Gautier and the East[231]
Poe and the New Technique [243]
Hawthorne and Moral Romance[257]
Mérimée and Conversational Story-telling[273]
Flaubert[287]
A Note on De Maupassant [298]
Conclusion [305]
Index[313]

ILLUSTRATIONS

TO FACE PAGE
Jean de Meung[22]
Geoffrey Chaucer[38]
Giovanni Boccaccio[44]
Alain René le Sage[60]
Sir Philip Sidney[84]
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra[96]
Richard Steele and Joseph Addison[114]
John Bunyan[126]
Daniel Defoe[132]
Samuel Richardson[140]
Fanny Burney[146]
Jane Austen[150]
Henry Fielding[156]
Tobias Smollett[166]
Jean Jacques Rousseau[176]
François René de Chateaubriand[180]
Sir Walter Scott[188]
Victor Hugo[202]
Alexandre Dumas[210]
Honoré de Balzac[218]
Théophile Gautier[236]
William Godwin[244]
Edgar Allan Poe[250]
Nathaniel Hawthorne[258]
Prosper Mérimée[274]
Gustave Flaubert[288]
Guy de Maupassant[300]