II

Probably the first stories of mankind were _true stories_, but the
true story is rarely good art. It is perhaps for this reason that few
true stories of early times have come down to us. Mr. Cable, in his
_Strange True Stories of Louisiana_, explains the difference between
the fabricated tale and the incident as it occurs in life. "The
relations and experiences of real men and women," he writes, "rarely
fall in such symmetrical order as to make an artistic whole. Until
they have had such treatment as we give stone in the quarry or gems in
the rough, they seldom group themselves with that harmony of values
and brilliant unity of interest that result when art comes in--not
so much to transcend nature as to make nature transcend herself." In
other words, it is not until the true story has been converted into
fiction by the suppression of whatever is discursive or ungainly,
and the addition of a stroke of fantasy, that it becomes integral,
balanced in all its parts, and worthy of literary remembrance.

In the fragments of fiction which have come down to us from the days
when books were not, odd chapters from the Fieldings and Smollets of
the age of Noah, remnants of the verbal libraries which men repeated
one to the other, squatting round "the savage camp-fire," when
the hunt was over and night had gathered, the stroke of fantasy
predominates and tends to comprise the whole. Men spun their fictions
from the materials with which their minds were stored, much as we do
to-day, and the result was a cycle of beast-fables--an Odyssey of the
brute creation. Of these the tales of Aesop are the best examples. The
beast-fable has never quite gone out of fashion, and never will so
long as men retain their world-wonder, and childishness of mind.
A large part of Gulliver's adventures belong to this class of