Novels and Romances

Fiction in its origin is with difficulty separated from myth—myth, however, being unconscious and due to a desire to give concrete form to various beliefs that spring up in the primitive mind; while fiction, as a literary motive, originates in a desire to amuse and occasionally to instruct. Hence, the earliest form of fiction is the Beast Fable, which is found in every quarter of the earth and at every period of history. A papyrus dating from 1200 BC gives an Egyptian version of the Aesopic fable of the Lion and Mouse; the inscribed Babylonian bricks afford examples of the same thing, and the Hindus probably originated most of the fables which (perhaps not the author's name), whose romance Ποιμενικὰ τὰ κατὰ Δάφνιν καὶ Χλόην, usually called Daphnis and Chloë, is one of the most original and pleasing things in ancient literature. Its theme is the growth of the sexual instinct in two children, a boy and a girl, who have been brought up together in a state of perfect innocence. Its physico-psychological motive makes it unique in the history of early fiction, and the warmth and beauty of its descriptions of nature are also very striking. It has been many times translated into all the modern languages, and is the original of Bernardin de St. Pierre's Paul et Virginie, of Allan Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd, and of many other less important works.

The Romans have left us only two specimens of true prose fiction—the Satiricon of Petronius Arbiter and the Metamorphoses of Apuleius; but these are in many ways superior to anything of their kind in Greek. The Satiricon, in fact, though incomplete, is one of the first great novels of our time, and is remarkable for its modern tone, its subtle touches of character, its wit, its vivid pictures of life in the Roman provincial towns, and for the grace and elegance of its style. It also gives us some of the best existing specimens of the sermo plebeius, the colloquial Latinity of uneducated men. (See Petronius; Sermo Plebeius.) The Metamorphoses of Apuleius is based upon the Metamorphoses of Lucius of Patrae, and possibly upon the Λούκιος ἢ Ὄνος of Lucian, the contemporary of Apuleius; but it is more likely that both Apuleius and Lucian drew independently from the earlier writer. The novel of Apuleius, which is in eleven books, tells the story of one Lucius, who, by a mistake, swallowed a magic potion which turned him into an ass, in which form he passed through a maze of curious and amusing adventures, until at last he regained his natural shape. The novel is highly diverting and is told with much cleverness, though often with a disregard for even an elemental sense of propriety. Among its episodes is the very famous one giving the story of Cupid and Psyché, one of the most exquisite things in literature and one that has inspired innumerable works of art. See Apuleius; Psyché.

In the Middle Ages, when the knowledge of ancient literature and history became lost to Western Europe, confused recollections of them still existed in the minds of men, and, together with many Teutonic folk-tales, became blended into a curious collection of stories known as the Gesta Romanorum, which were told and retold in many forms by the mediaevals. They mingle together the characters of antiquity in a most remarkable way, having no chronological or historical accuracy, but reproducing the legends of the past in a sort of literary mirage. Vergil, Homer, Alexander the Great, the Roman emperors, and Hercules, Romulus, and Remus, appear and reappear side by side with knights and wizards and dragons; but the tales have a certain value in literary history as forming the connecting link between the fiction of Greece and Rome and the fiction of modern times, which took its early themes largely from those monkish legends.

The ancient novel is far inferior to the modern, because

(1) it was developed only after literature had entered upon its decline;

(2) because of the difference in the social spirit of antiquity which made impossible the modern romantic treatment of the relations of men and women; and

(3) because the true fiction of the Greeks was to be found, not in prose, but in the great epics which more perfectly represented the highest manifestation of the Hellenic imagination.