osition in the
society in which it moves. It is a newcomer in the literary world; and
it has the self-assertiveness and the touchiness natural to the
situation. It brags of its descent, although its origins are obscure.
It has won its way to the front and it has forced its admission into
circles where it was formerly denied access. It likes to forget that
it was once but little better than an outcast, unworthy of recognition
from those in authority. Perhaps it is still uneasily conscious that
not a few of those who were born to good society may look at it with
cold suspicion as though it was still on sufferance.

Story-telling has always been popular, of course; and the desire is
deep-rooted in all of us to hear and to tell some new thing and to
tell again something deserving remembrance. But the novel itself, and
the short-story also, must confess that they have only of late been
able to claim equality with the epic and the lyric, and with comedy
and tragedy, literary forms consecrated by antiquity. There were nine
Muses in Greece of old, and no one of these daughters of Apollo was
expected to inspire the writer of prose-fiction. Whoever had then a
story to tell, which he wished to treat artistically, never dreamed of
expressing it except in the nobler medium of verse, in the epic, in
the idyl, in the drama. Prose seemed to the Greeks, and even to the
Latins who followed in their footsteps, as fit only for pedestrian
purposes. Even oratory and history were almost rhythmic; and mere
prose was too humble an instrument for those whom the Muses cherished.
The Alexandrian vignettes of the gentle Theocritus may be regarded as
anticipations of the modern short-story of urban local color; but this
delicate idyllist used verse for the talk of his Tanagra figurines.

Even when the modern languages entered into the inheritance of Latin
and Greek, verse held to its ancestral privileges, and the brief tale
took the form of the ballad, and the longer narrative called itself a
_chanson de geste_. Boccaccio and Rabelais and Cervantes might win
immediate popularity and invite a host of imitators; but it was long
after their time before a tale in prose, whether short or long,
achieved recognition as worthy of serious critical consideration. In
his study of Balzac, Brunetiere recorded the significant fact that no
novelist, who was purely and simply a novelist, was elected to the
French Academy in the first two centuries of its existence