A History of Story-telling: Studies in the development of narrative

by Arthur Ransome

CONCLUSION

My table is covered with a green cloth, and on it, under the lamplight, are two bowls of roses. One is full of the rich garden flowers, whose hundred folded petals hold in their depths the shadows of their colourings—cream, crimson, and the rose and orange of an autumn sunset. In the other are three or four wild roses from the hedge on the far side of the lane. I scarcely know which give me greater pleasure. In comparing them I seem to be setting Aucassin and Nicolete by the side of La Morte Amoureuse. How many flowers must represent the gradual growth of one into the other. How large a collection would be necessary to illustrate every stage of the transformation of the simple beauty of the wild blossoms into the luxuriant loveliness, majesty, and variety of the roses in the opposite bowl. I have attempted such a task in this book; not the impossible one of collecting every flower in any way different from those that had opened before it, but of bringing together a score or so to make the difference between first and last a little less tantalising and obscure.

Genius a stationary quality.

I had thought I was tracing a progress of the art itself; but I no longer think so. Century after century has laid its gift before the story-teller, its gift of a form, an unworked vein, a point of view. He has learnt to hold us with an episode, and also, evening after evening, to keep us interested in the lives of a dozen different people whose adventures in the pages of a book he makes no less actual than our own. In this last century of the art we have seen men looking back to all the ages before them, and bringing into modern story-telling the finest qualities of the most ancient, recreating it, and winning for it the universal acknowledgment that is given to painting, poetry, or music. Much seems to have been done, and yet, who would dare assign to a modern story-teller, however excellent a craftsman, a place above Boccaccio? Who says that his digressions make old Dan Chaucer out of date? Art does not progress but in consciousness of its technique and in breadth of power. Genius is a stationary quality. Techniques and the conditions of production, qualified the one by the other, and modified by genius, move past it side by side, like an endless procession before a seated king. The works they carry between them are not to be judged by their place in the cavalcade, but by the spirit before whom they pass, who wakes from time to time to give them life and meaning.

None the less, there is a kind of imperfect contemporariness in the art that lets the finest works of all times remain side by side to be imitated or compared. And this power of survival that belongs to works of genius accounts for two phenomena, which give genius itself a spurious air of progress. The one is an ever clearer consciousness of technique, the other an ever wider range of possibilities, both due to the increasing number of works of art that are ready for comparison or imitation.

The dissociation of forms.

In the latter half of my book, and particularly in the chapters on Poe, Mérimée, Hawthorne, and Flaubert, we have been partly busied in remarking the later stages of self-conscious craftsmanship. There remains to be discussed the dissociation of one form from another that naturally accompanied this more observant technique. I want to distinguish here between the short story, the nouvelle, and the novel, which are not short, middle-sized, and lengthy specimens of the same thing, but forms whose beauties are individual and distinct. They demand quite different skills, and few men have excelled in more than one of them. Before proceeding to closer definition, let me name an example of each, to keep in our minds for purposes of reference while considering their several moulds. Balzac's Père Goriot is a novel; Gautier's La Morte Amoureuse is a nouvelle; de Maupassant's La Petite Ficelle is a short story.

The novel.

The novel was the first form to be used by men with a clear knowledge of what it allowed them to do, and what it expected of them in return. Smollett's is its simplest definition. 'A novel,' he says, 'is a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purpose of a uniform plan and general occurrence, to which every individual figure is subservient.' It is, as near as may be, a piece of life, and one of its similarities to ordinary existence is perhaps the characteristic that best marks its difference from the nouvelle. The novel contains at least one counterplot, the nouvelle none. Life has as many counterplots as it has actors, as many heroes and heroines as play any part in it at all. No man is a hero to his valet, because in that particular plot the valet happens to be a hero to himself. The novelist does not attempt so equable a characterisation, but by telling the adventures of more than one group of people, and by threading their tales in and out through each other, he contrives to give a conventional semblance of the intricate story-telling of life.[10]