riter of real literary merit--the work of people like Hanbury
Williams and Hall Stevenson being mostly mere pornography--could hardly
have managed such a piece as "Le Sot Chevalier"--a riotously "improper"
but excessively funny example--without running the risk of losing that
recommendation of being "a lady's book" with which Johnson rather
capriciously tempered his more general undervaluation. Sometimes, on the
other hand, the joke is trivial enough, as in the English-French
word-play of _anel_ for _agnel_ (or _-neau_), which substitutes "donkey"
for "lamb"; or, in the other, on the comparison of a proper name,
"Estula," with its component syllables "es tu la?" But the important
point on the whole is that, proper or improper, romantic or trivial,
they all exhibit a constant improvement in the mere art of telling; in
discarding of the stock phrases, the long-winded speeches, and the
general _paraphernalia_ of verse; in sticking and leading up smartly to
the point; in coining sharp, lively phrase; in the co-ordination of
incident and the excision of superfluities. Often they passed without
difficulty into direct dramatic presentation in short farces. But on the
whole their obvious destiny was to be "unrhymed" and to make their
appearance in the famous form of the _nouvelle_ or _novella_, in regard
to which it is hard to say whether Italy was most indebted to France
for substance, or France to Italy for form.

[Sidenote: The rise of the _nouvelle_ itself.]

It was not, however, merely the intense conservatism of the Middle Ages
as to literary form which kept back the prose _nouvelle_ to such an
extent that, as we have seen, only a few examples survive from the two
whole centuries between 1200 and 1400, while not one of these is of the
kind most characteristic ever since, or at least until quite recent
days, of French tale-telling. The French octosyllabic couplet, in which
the _fabliaux_ were without exception or with hardly an exception
composed, can, in a long story, become very tiresome because of its want
of weight and grasp, and the temptations it offers to a weak rhymester
to stuff it with endless tags. But for a short tale in deft hands it can
apply its lightness in the best fashion, and put its points with no lack
of sting. The _fabliau_-writer or reciter was not required--one imagines
that he would have found scant audiences if he had tried it--to spin a
long yarn; he had got to come to his jokes and his business