Chaucer in
England told his stories in verse and added the charm of humor and
well defined characters to the development of story-telling.
In the seventeenth century Cervantes gave the world its first great
novel, _Don Quixote_. Cervantes was careless in his work and did not
write short-stories, but tales that are fairly brief. Spain added to
the story a high sense of chivalry and a richness of character that
the Greek romance and the Italian novella did not possess. France
followed this loose composition and lack of beauty in form. Scarron
and Le Sage, the two French fiction writers of this period,
contributed little or nothing to the advancement of story-telling.
Cervantes' _The Liberal Lover_ is as near as this period came to
producing a real short-story.
The story-telling of the seventeenth century was largely shaped by the
popularity of the drama. In the eighteenth century the drama gave
place to the essay, and it is to the sketch and essay that we must go
to trace the evolution of the story during this period. Voltaire in
France had a burning message in every essay, and he paid far greater
attention to the development of the thought of his message than to the
story he was telling. Addison and Steele in the _Spectator_ developed
some real characters of the fiction type and told some good stories,
but even their best, like _Theodosius and Constantia_, fall far short
of developing all the dramatic possibilities, and lack the focusing of
interest found in the nineteenth century stories.
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