they all exhibit a constant improvement in the mere art of telling; in discarding of the stock phrases, the long-winded speeches, and the general _paraphernalia_ of verse; in sticking and leading up smartly to the point; in coining sharp, lively phrase; in the co-ordination of incident and the excision of superfluities. Often they passed without difficulty into direct dramatic presentation in short farces. But on the whole their obvious destiny was to be "unrhymed" and to make their appearance in the famous form of the _nouvelle_ or _novella_, in regard to which it is hard to say whether Italy was most indebted to France for substance, or France to Italy for form. [Sidenote: The rise of the _nouvelle_ itself.] It was not, however, merely the intense conservatism of the Middle Ages as to literary form which kept back the prose _nouvelle_ to such an extent that, as we have seen, only a few examples survive from the two whole centuries between 1200 and 1400, while not one of these is of the kind most characteristic ever since, or at least until quite recent days, of French tale-telling. The French octosyllabic couplet, in which the _fabliaux_ were without exception or with hardly an exception composed, can, in a long story, become very tiresome because of its want of weight and grasp, and the temptations it offers to a weak rhymester to stuff it with endless tags. But for a short tale in deft hands it can apply its lightness in the best fashion, and put its points with no lack of sting. The _fabliau_-writer or reciter was not required--one imagines that he would have found scant audiences if he had tried it--to spin a long yarn; he had got to come to his jokes and his business pretty rapidly; and, as La Fontaine has shown to thousands who have never known--perhaps have never heard of--his early masters, he had an instrument which would answer to his desires perfectly if only he knew how to finger it. At the same time, both the lover of poetry and the lover of tale must acknowledge that, though alliance between them is not in the least an unholy one, and has produced great and charming children, the best of the poetry is always a sort of extra bonus or solace to the tale, and the tale not unfrequently seems as if it could get on better without the poetry. The one can only aspire somewhat irrelevantly; the other can never attain quite its full development. So it was no ill day when the prose _nouvelle_ came to its own in France. [Sidenote: _Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles._]