Pierre Daniel Huet's Trai[t]té de l'origine des Romans (Treatise on the Origin of Novels, or Romances) can claim to be the first history of fiction. It was originally published in 1670 as preface to Marie de la Fayette's novel Zayde. The following will give extended excerpts from the English translation by Stephen Lewis published in 1715. The title page reads: Pages i-xi gave a preface by Lewis, p.[xii] added “Corrigenda”, p. 1-149 offered the translation under the short title “Original of Romances”. The excerpt is extensive and it will mainly serve students of literature interested in the scope of questions and the method of arguing the early historian of literature showed—Huet was a modern cultural historian, one could say. (The German parallel page de:Traitté de l'origine des romans offers a summary of the plot with selected quotes and might be more comprehensive):

Excerpt

The Preface by Stephen Lewis, 1715 [p.i-xi]

The beginning of romances is to be searched for in a far distant past and of interest to “the Curious in Antiquity” The treatise has found a wide audience in Latin and French translations. The new English translation is designed to attract a growing audience:

Huet's Text: The Original of Romances. [p.1-149]

What is a Romance?

"Instruction" is the next argument, yet Huet does not go into tedious details here. "Virtue" is placed against "Vice", "Disgrace" is to be avoided. The next step is the definition of "Romance" versus "Epic Poem". Both have one thing in common if one follows Aristotle's definition of Poesy: they are fictional: The differences between histories and romances are connected with the fictional status—a problem is here caused by histories full of erroneous notions: Huet excludes Histories if the authors wanted to give rue accounts and just failed and he excludes "fables":

An Ancient Practice: Religions Use Fictions to Create Secret Knowledge

The following part of the treatise touches the origin of "romances". The peoples of Asia, especially those of Egypt had, so Huet claims, proven a tendency to decipher all kinds of information. The hieroglyphs prove that. Their whole religion and all their histories were deciphered, mostly to exclude the population from further knowledge. Initiations were afforded before one would gain access to the secret cultural knowledge Egypt stored. The Greeks |<p. 17> had been extremely eager to learn from Egypt: The Arabs exploited the same cultural knowledge—their Koran is, so Huet says filled with knowledge one cannot understand without interpretation. The Arabs translated Greek fables into their language and via Arabia [p. 20] these materials finally reached Europe. This is proven by the fact that only after the occupation of Spain first romances appeared in southern France. Huet discusses Persias culture—as particularly obscure and full of secret knowledge, he mentions the Indians [p. 27] as particularly fond of poesy, before he speaks of the influence the Bible had on the western civilization and its love of fictions: Huet is extremely interested in changing tastes and in the relativity of judgments—he is far from any simple theory of cultural progress or decline. His concept is rather one of different functions knowledge and fictions can gain. Fables stood in the centre of his discussion so far. The next passages gain a wider perspective:

Novels of Luxury: Persia, Greece and Rome

The ancient world developed a high cultural standard. Luxury commodities became important. Persia was the country of highest refinement, producing perfumes and dances before the Milesians imported much of that culture: One does not have any material artefacts to prove this, yet the ancient historians help us here with their accounts. The Ionians influenced the Greeks. Alexander the Great did much to widen their cultural concepts. The Milesian Fables by Aristides of Miletus were finally translated into Latin. The book was criticized in Rome's Senate as hardly serving the purposes of a Rome involved in wars. Huet mentions names and develops a canon of texts and reaches Heliodorus who has to be compared with Jamblicus, the author of the Babylonics, which have only survived in fragments: Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon enters the canon, and Huet is uncertain about the chronology of events: Then, referring to Longos and his Daphnis and Chloe: Rome does not play more than a marginal role. Huet mentions "Sybaritian Fables" and the love fiction of Ovid, yet only Petronius wrote something like a "romance" in Latin. Ovid mentions a Roman esteem of romances, Huet's comment:

The Northern Tradition: Fictions of a Dark Age of Ignorance

The ancient authors excelled with satires and texts which are no longer extant—a history which ended in darkness with the invasion of Germanic tribes causing the fall of the Roman empire: The present age—the late 17th century—has learned to live with a differentiation between fiction and fact. The Middle Ages were marked by a completely different frame of mind. Huet reaches the stories written about king Arthur and Merlin: The term romance was now invented—to denote the Spanish and French Language these texts were written in: The idea of a tradition coming via Spain to Europe is thus balanced by a second option: [p. 108-09] Taliessin and Melkin were English heroes, Huet notes. The romances touching them must have been composed originally around 550.

Where Traditions Met: Europe and Another Theory of the Anthropology of Fiction

The development into the 17th century gives the Amadis of Gaul a central position [p. 114-16] and leads to Cervantes Don Quixote—which is rather a critic of "romances" than a romance itself. The following long passage gives Huet's picture of the intellectual network behind the rise of the modern novel—and of the traditions which now met: The whole development of fiction is thus not one of continuities—but one of different traditions and complex reasons why fictions develop. Huet reaches the present age and passes through numerous titles:

Fictions and the Modern Period

Huet has with this survey reached the end of his treatise. D'Urfee and Mademoiselle de Scudery become important here: The last lines refer to the following "history" Zayde—which will, so Huet, deserve all praise: ...which is the final sentence.