To our immediate purpose they are germane solely as indicating the desire--the necessity--that humanity has always experienced for fiction of one kind or another, if merely as an expedient for clarifying the mind. The mediaeval European intellect seems to have been able to appreciate these crystallizing shocks only in smallish doses, and in Europe it was not until sixteenth-century Spain that humanity seems to have been able to sustain its interest for the course of a long tale--a series of rambling incidents in the life of one or of one or two central characters. And again it was not until the middle nineteenth century in France and the very late nineteenth or early twentieth that in England the mind of the public could be expected to take in the rendering--not the narrating--of a work whose central character was not an individual of slightly superhuman proportions. Still less could it take in an Affair whose participants, as befits a democratic age, if not all exactly equal in the parts they play in the Affair’s development, are at least nearly all as normally similar in aspirations, virtues and vices as is usual in one’s surrounding humanity. Let us for a moment consider the difference--if difference there be--between the apparently artless tale and the novel that fulfils my definition of the functions of the work of fiction in the modern body politic. The artless tale, then, is nothing but a _conte_--a thing told to keep the hearers gasping or at least engrossed. Told verbally it is usually short, but professional story-tellers have been found--as in the case of the group-authors of the _Arabian Nights_--to make them very long indeed. And the habit of telling very long tales that are practically serials still persists in Eastern bazaars. You may say that listening to tales for the mere purpose of being thrilled or engrossed has nothing to do with the gaining of vicarious experience, so that the stories of the _Decameron_ or the ordinary novels of commerce were and are of no value to the body politic, but a little reflection will show that the reverse is the case in practice. Human experience is built up by the averaging out of a great many cases--some inclining, as it were, to the extreme right, some to the extreme left, and the majority probably approaching the normal.