문학작품을 구연 이야기하는 역사의책.The Book of A History of Story-telling, by Arthur Ransome

PREFACE
THIS is a spring day, and I am writing in a flood of sunlight in front of a brown
French inn. Above my head there is the dusty branch of a tree stuck out of a
window, the ancient sign that gave point to the proverb, 'Good wine needs no
bush.' Good books, I suppose, need no prefaces. But honest authors realise that
their books are never as good as they had planned them. A preface, put on last
and worn in front, to show what they would have liked their books to be, is the
pleasantest of their privileges. And I am not inclined to do without it.
A book that calls itself a history of a subject with as many byeways and blind
alleys as exist in the history of story- telling, is precisely the kind of book that one
would wish one's enemy to have written. Everybody who reads it grumbles
because something or other is left out that, if they had had the writing of it, would
have been put in. And yet in the case of this particular book (how many authors
have thought the same!) criticism[ viii] of omissions is like quarrelling with a
guinea- pig because it has not got a tail. It is not the guinea- pig's business to
have a tail, and it is not the business of this book to be a chronicle, full of facts,
and admirable for reference. That place is already filled by Dunlop's History of
Fiction, and, in a very delightful manner, by Professor Raleigh's English Novel.
The word history can be used in a different sense. The French say that such an
one makes a history of a thing when he makes a great deal of talk about it. That
is what I set out to do. My business was not to be noting down dates and facts―
this book was published in such a year and this in the year preceding. I was to
write with a livelier imp astride my pen. The schoolmaster was to be sent to steal
apples in the orchard. I was to write of story- telling as a man might write of
painting or jewellery or any other art he loved. I was to take here a book and there
a book, and notice the development of technique, the conquests of new material,
the gradual perfecting of form. I would talk of old masters and modern ones, and
string my chapters like beads, a space between each, along the history of the
art.