Page images
PDF
EPUB

PART II

STORIES IN PROSE

We should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal. our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand colored pictures to the eye.

-Stevenson.

[graphic][merged small]
[graphic][subsumed][merged small]

In this part of our book we pass from stories in verse to stories in prose. These are of various kinds, the romance, the novel, and the short story. Like epic, ballad, and metrical romance, stories in prose are very ancient in their origin. Some of the earliest in point of time are the fables, such as those supposed to have been written by Esop, who lived about six centuries before the Christian era. These, as you know, are short stories in which animals are generally the characters, each fable ending with a little moral applicable to human life. Somewhat like them are the parables of the Bible, little stories about Nature or simple life with a parallel story which relates them to the experiences of men and women. Even history, especially in ancient times, was a form of prose story, while the epic was regarded as a form of history written in verse. The Greeks also had beautifully written prose romances somewhat like the romances of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper.

Nevertheless, the development of prose as a mode of expression for highly imaginative stories was much slower than that of poetry. Before the coming of printed books, it was easier to preserve stories that were in the form of verse and could therefore be quickly memorized, than it would have been if they had been in prose. Again, the courtly society that sprang up in France in the twelfth century and in Italy and England a little later, preferred the richly adorned metrical romances to the more commonplace prose of ordinary life. In the fourteenth century, a series of wonderful prose romances, none of them very long, was written by an Italian

named Boccaccio, and from that time on prose fiction was as popular as epic and metrical romance. In England little prose story of distinction was composed until Sir Thomas Malory wrote his long story of King Arthur, near the end of the fifteenth century. During the age of Shakespeare, the sixteenth century, many prose romances and short stories were written, some of which were used by the great dramatist as sources of his plays. For the novel and the short story as we understand them, however, we must come much nearer our own time.

The word novel first came into use about the time of Shakespeare. It came from French and Italian sources, from a word that meant "news." This word came to be applied to a short story that was true, or was supposed to be true. Thus from the very beginning a distinction grew up, slowly at first and by no means always observed, between an imaginative story, or romance, and a novel. The first, full of supernatural or other wonderful adventures, and dealing with an unreal world, was called a "romance." The second dealt with real people in real situations. The distinction is a useful one. It will become clearer as we go on. Quentin Durward, for example, or Ivanhoe, or The Last of the Mohicans, may be classed as romances. Silas Marner, on the other hand, is a novel. Short stories may be either romantic or realistic, dealing with an ideal world, a dream world in which anything may happen, or with the everyday world. Some stories and some novels combine the two characteristics.

Prose fiction in England began to develop very rapidly about the middle of

the eighteenth century. Defoe had written Robinson Crusoe a little earlier than that, a wonderful example of a romance treated so realistically that it seems true. Addison and Steele, in the first part of the century, had written short realistic sketches of everyday life, not exactly short stories, but showing some of the things the short story and the novel might do. Then came a succession of great novelists, chief of them Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, in whose works the long prose story acquired the qualities that we recognize today as necessary. The plot became more definite, and was organized, instead of being a sprawling succession of adventures as in the old romances. Writers learned how to make their characters stand out clearly, like real people. Character was revealed through action and dialogue, just as in the drama, instead of through description. And finally, writers found that story interest may be gained from people and scenes of everyday life quite as easily as through lords and knights of high degree, with their splendid trappings and their journeys on strange quests.

Examples of the three main types of prose fiction will be found in this section: romance, novel, short story. All the examples are drawn from English and American literature within the last century, but they represent a chronological development. In the early part of the nineteenth century the tendency of both poetry and prose was romantic. There was a great revival of interest in medieval subjects; the romances in prose and verse of Sir Walter Scott are examples. Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes" is another example.

Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" imitates the ballad and introduces many medieval elements. This aspect of romance was of course not confined to a few brief years or a few authors. Tennyson and Morris, selections from whose poetry you have recently read, appealed to the continuing love that we have for stories of what one of the romantic poets called

Old, unhappy, far-off things And battles long ago.

Our first selections are from Scott, master of romance in English literature, and Hawthorne, who gives an imaginative interpretation of Colonial America. These two great writers are very different from each other in many ways, but they are alike in that they look on life not directly but as modified by the glamor of romance. These points of likeness and difference will be brought out more fully in the special Introductions and in the topics suggested for study.

Following these studies in prose romance you will read one of the great novels of the nineteenth century, George Eliot's Silas Marner. The contrast between this realistic study of English life and the stories of Scott and Hawthorne is so clearly drawn that you will learn much about the two modes of interpreting life that we call realism and romance.

Finally, a group of short stories, some of them written only recently, will give you an opportunity to study the form of prose fiction that is most popular today, and to apply to this study what you have learned about the short story in the first book of this series.

SCOTT'S "QUENTIN DURWARD"

AN INTRODUCTION

In modern days the story-teller is likely to use prose. A few authors are as proficient in verse as in prose. Certainly Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), greatest of all modern English romancers, seemed as able in one as the other. He began in verse. You probably know at least one of his good verse tales, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, The Lady of the Lake. The reading public of Great Britain seized' upon these with amazing relish. But soon after this Lord Byron, one of whose poems is contained in this volume, published some narratives in verse; these were so well received that Scott's poetic romances, though still read, fell off in popularity, so he quite naturally and wisely turned from verse to prose.

Several years before, Scott had started a prose story, but had cast it aside. He completed this, and with the title Waverley, published it in 1814. It was an assured success. Scott tried again with Guy Mannering, written in six weeks! Then followed a long series of books extending over eighteen years.

You are familiar with Scott's material. Its background is the historic past. His stories touch a thousand years of development, his scenes are nearly all of western Europe. Having selected some period which in itself is stimulating to the most sluggish imagination, he places before us some actual historical story. In Ivanhoe it is the return of the captured Richard Cœur de Lion. In The Talisman it is one of the Crusades in the Holy Land. Having chosen such a historical pageant, the author had apparently tied his hands and fettered his imagination. History was history—the story could proceed only as the world already knew the tale. does the general public know so much of past events? Only in the broadest outlines, merely as great splashes of color. The author could change some events to

But

serve his purpose. If a certain effect in a book suggested the killing of a woman, Scott could contrive a murder so convincing to the readers that it would supplant in persons' minds actual facts of her natural death years later. If you visit Kenilworth Castle in England you will be shown the room from which, according to Scott, Amy Robsart was cast to her death. Time might be telescoped, events suppressed, characters omitted, and a score of other literary devices introduced to enhance the story. The greatest difficulty, however, that confronts the writer of historical romance, comes from the fact that his chief personages are apt to be great men and that the general courses of their lives and their endings are unalterable. So Scott very wisely does not make his story depend on the changes of fortune which befall the well-known persons of history; he could not violate too flagrantly the circumstances of their careers. But near them, about them, he could place imagined characters whose lives depended upon the actions, successes, and failures of the actual characters from history. In Ivanhoe Richard could be nothing more than King of England, but the youth, disowned at the opening of the story by his father, could act like a hero of fiction and win a hero's reward, the hand of the harassed heroine.

Scott chose for Quentin Durward a stirring period of French history. In the latter part of the fifteenth century there was bitter enmity between Charles the Bold of Burgundy and Louis XI of France. Louis XI was calm, deliberate, and crafty, while Charles was reckless. Nevertheless Charles was continually growing in independence, thus endangering the dominions of Louis. So much Scott tells you in the first chapter. Keeping this in mind, you may begin your reading of Chapter II.

« PreviousContinue »