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Rh studied mainly as the precursors of La Fontaine, from whom he may have borrowed a stray hint or the outline of a story. The unique character of his work has given a new word to the French language: other writers of fables are called fabulistes, La Fontaine is named le fablier. He is a true poet; his verse is exquisitely modulated; his love of nature often reminds us of Virgil, as do his tenderness and pathos (see, for instance, The Two Pigeons and Death and the Woodcutter). He is full of sly fun and delicate humour; like Horace he satirizes without wounding, and “plays around the heart.” Lastly, he is a keen observer of men. The whole society of the 17th century, its greatness and its foibles, its luxury and its squalor, from Le grand monarque to the poor manant, from his majesty the lion to the courtier of an ape, is painted to the life. To borrow his own phrase, La Fontaine’s fables are “une ample comédie à cent actes divers.” Rousseau did his best to discredit the Fables as immoral and corruptors of youth, but in spite of Émile they are studied in every French school and are more familiar to most Frenchmen than their breviary. Among the successors of La Fontaine the most distinguished is Florian. He justly estimates his own merits in the pretty apologue that he prefixed to his Fables. He asks a sage whether a fabulist writing after La Fontaine would not be wise to consign his work to the flames. The sage replies by a question: “What would you say did some sweet, ingenuous Maid of Athens refuse to let herself be seen because there was once a Helen of Troy?”

The fables of Lessing represent the reaction against the French school of fabulists. “With La Fontaine himself,” says Lessing, “I have no quarrel, but against the imitators of La Fontaine I enter my protest.” His attention was first called to the fable by Gellert’s popular work published in 1746. Gellert’s fables were closely modelled after La Fontaine’s, and were a vehicle for lively railings against the fair sex, and hits at contemporary follies. Lessing’s early essays were in the same style, but his subsequent study of the history and theory of the fable led him to discard his former model as a perversion of later times, and the “Fabeln,” published in 1759, are the outcome of his riper views. Lessing’s fables, like all that he wrote, display his vigorous common sense. He has, it is true, little of La Fontaine’s curiosa felicitas, his sly humour and lightness of touch; and Frenchmen would say that his criticism of La Fontaine is an illustration of the fable of the sour grapes. On the other hand, he has the rare power of looking at both sides of a moral problem; he holds a brief for the stupid and the feeble, the ass and the lamb; and in spite of his formal protest against poetical ornament, there is in not a few of his fables a vein of true poetry, as in the Sheep (ii. 13) and Jupiter and the Sheep (ii. 18). But the monograph which introduced the Fabeln is of more importance than the fables themselves. According to Lessing the ideal fable is that of Aesop. All the elaborations and refinements of later authors, from Phaedrus to La Fontaine, are perversions of this original. The fable is essentially a moral precept illustrated by a single example, and it is the lesson thus enforced which gives to the fable its unity and makes it a work of art. The illustration must be either an actual occurrence or represented as such, because a fictitious case invented ad hoc can appeal but feebly to the reader’s judgment. Lastly, the fable requires a story or connected chain of events. A single fact will not make a fable, but is only an emblem. We thus arrive at the following definition:—“A fable is a relation of a series of changes which together form a whole. The unity of the fable consists herein, that all the parts lead up to an end, the end for which the fable was invented being the moral precept.”

We may notice in passing a problem in connexion with the fable which had long been debated, but never satisfactorily resolved till Lessing took it in hand—Why should animals have been almost universally chosen as the chief dramatis personae? The reason, according to Lessing, is that animals have distinct characters which are known and recognized by all. The fabulist who writes of Britannicus and Nero appeals to the few who know Roman history. The Wolf and the Lamb comes home to every one whether learned or simple. But, besides this, human sympathies obscure the moral judgment; hence it follows that the fable, unlike the drama and the epos, should abstain from all that is likely to arouse our prejudices or our passions. In this respect the Wolf and the Lamb of Aesop is a more perfect fable than the Rich Man and the Poor Man’s Ewe Lamb of Nathan.

Lessing’s analysis and definition of the fable, though he seems himself unconscious of the scope of his argument, is in truth its death-warrant. The beast-fable arose in a primitive age when men firmly believed that beasts could talk and reason, that any wolf they met might be a were-wolf, that a peacock might be a Pythagoras in disguise, and an ox or even a cat a being worthy of their worship. To this succeeded the second age of the fable, which belongs to the same stage of culture as the Hebrew proverbs and the gnomic poets of Greece. That honesty is the best policy, that death is common to all, seemed to the men of that day profound truths worthy to be embalmed in verse or set off by the aid of story or anecdote. Last comes an age of high literary culture which tolerates the trite morals and hackneyed tales for the sake of the exquisite setting, and is amused at the wit which introduces topics and characters of the day under the transparent veil of animal life. Such an artificial product can be nothing more than the fashion of a day, and must, like pastoral poetry, die a natural death. A serious moralist would hardly choose that form to inculcate, like Mandeville in his Fable of the Bees, a new doctrine in morals, for the moral of the fable must be such that he who runs may read. A true poet will not care to masquerade as a moral teacher, or show his wit by refurbishing some old-world maxim. Yet Taine in France, Lowell in America, and J. A. Froude in England have proved that the fable as one form of literature is not yet extinct, and is capable of new and unexpected developments.

—Pantschatantrum, ed. Kosegarten (Bonn, 1848); Hitopadesa, ed. Max Müller (1864); Silvestre de Sacy, Calilah et Dimna, ou Fables de Bidpai, en Arabe, précédées d’un mémoire sur l’origine de ce livre (Paris, 1816), translated by the Rev. Wyndham Knatchbull (Oxford, 1819); Comparetti, Ricerche intorno al Libro di Sindebād (Milan, 1869); Max Müller, “Migration of Fables,” Chips from a German Workshop, vol. iv. (1875); Keller, Untersuchungen über die Geschichte der griechischen Fabel (Leipzig, 1862); Babrius, ed. W. G. Rutherford, with excursus on Greek fables (1883); L. Hervieux, Les Fabuiistes latins (1884); Jakob Grimm, Reinhart Fuchs (Berlin, 1834); A. C. M. Robert, Fables inédites des XIIe, XIIIe, et XIVe siècles, &c. (Paris, 1825); Taine, Essai sur les fables de La Fontaine (1853); Saint-Marc Girardin, La Fontaine et les fabulistes (Paris, 1867).

 FABLIAU. The entertaining tales in eight-syllable rhymed verse which form a marked section of French medieval literature are called fabliaux, the word being derived by Littré from fablel, a diminutive of fable. It is a mistake to suppose, as is frequently done, that every legend of the middle ages is a fabliau. In a poem of the 12th century a clear distinction is drawn between songs of chivalry, war or love, and fabliaux, which are recitals of laughter. A fabliau always related an event; it was usually brief, containing not more than 400 lines; it was neither sentimental, religious nor supernatural, but comic and gay. MM. de Montaiglon and Raynaud, who have closely investigated this class of literature, consider that about 150 fabliaux have come down to us more or less intact; a vast number have doubtless disappeared. It appears from a phrase in the writings of the trouvère, Henri d’Andeli, that the fabliau was not thought worthy of being copied out on parchment. The wonder, then, is that so many of these ephemeral compositions have been preserved. Arguments brought forward by M. Joseph Bédier, however, tend to show that we need not regret the disappearance of the majority of the fabliaux, as those which were copied into MSS. were those which were felt to be of the greatest intrinsic value. As early as the 8th century fabliaux must have existed, since the faithful are forbidden to take pleasure in these fabulas inanes by the Paenitentiale of Egbert. But it appears that all the early examples are lost.

In the opinion of the best scholars, the earliest surviving fabliau is that of Richeut, which dates from 1159. This is a rough and powerful study of the coarse life of the day, with little plot, but engaged with a realistic picture of manners.