The Royal Road of Fiction by Agnes Repplier

"A tale," says that charming scholar and critic, M. Jusserand, "is the first key to the heart of a child, the last utterance to penetrate the fastnesses of age. " And what is true of the individual is true also of the race. The earliest voice listened to by the nations in their infancy was the voice of the story-teller. Whether he spoke in rude prose or in ruder rhyme, his was the eloquence which won a hearing everywhere. All through the young world's vigorous, ill-spent manhood it found time mid wars, and pestilence, and far migrations to cherish and cultivate the first wild art of fiction. We, in our chastened, wise, and melancholy middle age, find still our natural solace in this kind and joyous friend. And when mankind grows old, so old we shall have mastered all the knowledge we are seeking now, and shall have found ourselves as far from happiness as ever, I doubt not we shall be comforted in the twilight of existence with the same cheerful and deceptive tales we hearkened to in childhood. Facts surround us from the cradle to the grave. Truth stares us coldly in the face, and checks our unmeaning gayety of heart. What wonder that we turn for pleasure and distraction to those charming dreams with which the story-teller, now grown to be a novelist, is ever ready to lure us away from everything that it is comfortable to forget.

And it was always thus. From the very beginning of civilization, and before civilization was well begun, the royal road of fiction ran straight to the hearts of men, and along it traveled the gay and prosperous spinners of wondrous tales which the world loved well to hear. When I was a little girl, studying literature in the hard and dry fashion then common in all schools, and which was not without its solid advantages after all, I was taught, first that "Pamela" was the earliest English novel; then that "Robinson Crusoe" was the earliest English novel; then that Lodge's "Rosalynde" was the earliest English novel. By the time I got that far back, I began to see for myself, what I dare say all little girls are learning now, that the earliest English novel dates mistily from the earliest English history, and that there is no such thing as a firm starting-point for their uncertain feet to gain. Long, long before Lodge's "Rosalynde" led the way for Shakespeare's "Rosalind" to follow, romantic tales were held in such high esteem that people who were fortunate enough to possess them in manuscript -- the art of printing not having yet cheapened such precious treasures -- left them solemnly by will to their equally fortunate heirs. In 1315, Guy, Earl of Warwick, bequeathed to Bordesley Abbey in Warwickshire his entire library of thirty-nine volumes, which consisted almost exclusively, like the library of a modern young lady, of stories, such as the "Romaunce de Troies," and the "Romaunce d'Alisaundre. " In 1426, Thomas, Duke of Exeter, left to his sister Joan a single book, perhaps the only one he possessed, and this too was a romance on that immortal knight and lover, Tristram.