the oddities of manners and morals, require. It became bright,
if a little hard, easy, if a little undistinguished, capable of
slyness, of innuendo, of "malice," but not quite so capable as it had
been of the finer and vaguer suggestions and aspirations.

[Sidenote: _And on narrative._]

Above all, these _fabliaux_ served as an exercise-ground for the
practice in which French was to become almost if not quite supreme,
the practice of narrative. In the longer romances, which for a century
or a century and a half preceded the _fabliaux_, the art of narration,
as has been more than once noticed, was little attended to, and indeed
had little scope. The _chansons_ had a common form, or something very
like it, which almost dispensed the _trouvere_ from devoting much
pains to the individual conduct of the story. The most abrupt
transitions were accustomed, indeed expected; minor incidents received
very little attention; the incessant fighting secured the attention of
the probable hearers by itself; the more grandiose and striking
incidents--the crowning of Prince Louis and the indignation of William
at his sister's ingratitude, for instance--were not "engineered" or
led up to in any way, but left to act in mass and by assault.

[Sidenote: _Conditions of_ fabliau-_writing._]

The smaller range and more delicate--however indelicate--argument of
the _fabliaux_ not only invited but almost necessitated a different
kind of handling. The story had to draw to point in (on an average)
two or three hundred lines at most--there are _fabliaux_ of a thousand
lines, and _fabliaux_ of thirty or forty, but the average is as just
stated. The incidents had to be adjusted for best effect, neither too
many nor too few. The treatment had to be mainly provocative--an
appeal in some cases by very coarse means indeed to very coarse
nerves, in others by finer devices addressed to senses more tickle o'
the sere. And so grew up that unsurpassed and hardly matched product
the French short story, where, if it is in perfection, hardly a word
is thrown away, and not a word missed that is really wanted.

[Sidenote: _The appearance of irony._]

The great means for doing this in literature is irony; and irony
appears in the _fabliaux_ as it had hardly done since Lucian. Take,
for instance, this opening of a piece, the rest of which is at least
as irreverent, considerably less quotable, but not much less
pointed:--

"Quant Dieus ot estore lo monde,