very
difficult thing to do well, and it would be absurd to pretend that any
of the foregoing examples is done thoroughly well. The Italian _novella_
had to come and show the way.[79] But the short story, even of the
rudimentary sort which we have been considering, cannot help being a
powerful schoolmaster to bring folk to good practice in the larger kind.
The faults and the merits of that kind, as such, appear in it after a
fashion which can hardly fail to be instructive and suggestive. The
faults so frequently charged against that "dear defunct" in our own
tongue, the three-volume novel--the faults of long-windedness, of otiose
padding, of unnecessary episodes, etc., are almost mechanically or
mathematically impossible in the _nouvelle_. The long book provides
pastime in its literal sense, and if it is not obvious in the other the
accustomed reader, unless outraged by some extraordinary dulness or
silences, goes on, partly like the Pickwickian horse because he can't
well help it, and partly because he hopes that something _may_ turn up.
In the case of the short he sees almost at once whether it is going to
have any interest, and if there is none such apparent he throws it
aside.

Moreover, as in almost every other case, the shortness is appropriate to
_exercise_; while the prose form does not encourage those terrible
_chevilles_--repetitions of stock adjective and substantive and verb and
phrase generally--which are so common in verse, and especially in
octosyllabic verse. It is therefore in many ways healthy, and the space
allotted to these early examples of it will not, it is hoped, seem to
any impartial reader excessive.

FOOTNOTES:

[75] The position of "origin" assigned already to the sacred matter of
the Saint's Life may perhaps be continued here as regards the Sermon. It
was, as ought to be pretty generally known, the not ungenial habit of
the mediaeval preacher to tell stories freely. We have them in AElfric's
and other English homilies long before there was any regular French
prose; and we have, later, large and numerous collections of
them--compiled more or less expressly for the use of the clergy--in
Latin, English, and French. The Latin story is, in fact, very
wide-ranging and sometimes quite of the novel (at least _nouvelle_)
kind, as any one may see in Wright's _Latin Stories_, Percy Society,
1842.

[76] This is one, and one of the most glaring, of the _betises_ which at
some times have been urged