collection of traditional
stories, as is the _Gesta Romanorum_, and not the creative work of a
single intellect. As might be expected, it straggles, and overlays its
climax with a too-lavish abundance of incidents; it lacks the
_harmony of values_ which results from the introduction of a unifying
purpose--_i.e_., of art. Imaginative and full of action though the
books of the _Morte D'Arthur_ are, it remained for the latter-day
artist to exhaust their individual incidents of their full dramatic
possibilities. From the eyes of the majority of modern men the
brilliant quality of their magic was concealed, until it had
been disciplined and refashioned by the severe technique of the
short-story.

By the eighteenth century the influence of Malory was scarcely felt
at all; but his imaginativeness, as interpreted by Tennyson, in
_The Idylls of the King_, and by William Morris, in his _Defence
of Guinevere_, has given to the Anglo-Saxon world a new romantic
background for its thoughts. _The Idylls of the King_ are not
Tennyson's most successful interpretation. The finest example of his
superior short-story craftsmanship is seen in the triumphant use which
he makes of the theme contained in _The Book of Elaine_, in his poem
of _The Lady of Shalott_. Not only has he remodelled and added fantasy
to the story, but he has threaded it through with _atmosphere_--an
entirely modern attribute, of which more must be said hereafter.

So much for our contention that the laws and technique of the prose
short-story, as formulated by Poe, were first instinctively discovered
and worked out in the medium of poetry.

VI

"_The Golden Ass_ of Apuleius is, so to say, a beginning of modern
literature. From this brilliant medley of reality and romance, of wit
and pathos, of fantasy and observation, was born that new art,
complex in thought, various in expression, which gives a semblance of
frigidity to perfection itself. An indefatigable youthfulness is its
distinction."[12]

[Footnote 12: From the introduction, by Charles Whibley, to the Tudor
Translations' edition by W.E. Henley, of _The Golden Ass of Apuleius_,
published by David Nutt, London, 1893. All other quotations bearing
upon Apuleius are taken from the same source.]

_An indefatigable youthfulness_ was also the prime distinction of the
Elizabethan era's writings and doings; it was fitting that such a
period should have witnessed the first translation into the English
language o