Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/873

Rh F A B F A B 837 work. It seems certain, however, that Fabius wrote his Annals in Greek. Dionysius expressly asserts this to be the fact ; and Cicero s allusion to the Latin prose writer who lived between the time of Cato and that of Piso probably refers to Servius Fabius Pictor. See C. T. Cruttwell s History of Roman Literature, London, 1877, I)u Rieu s Disputatio, and especially Wagner s History of Roman Literature, 1873, translated from Teuffel s Geschichte, 1870. FABLE. With certain restrictions, the necessity of which will be shown in the course of the article, we may accept the definition which Dr Johnson proposes in his life of Gay : &quot; A fable or apologue seems to be, in its genuine state, a narrative in which beings irrational, and sometimes inani mate (arbores loquuntur, non tantum ferce), are, for the pur pose of moral instruction, feigned to act and speak with human interests and passions.&quot; Before tracing the history of the fable we may compare it with its nearest congeners in literature, the myth, the allegory, and the parable. The myth, whether, as is most commonly the case, it has its origin in some physical phenomenon, or can be traced to mistaken metaphor or distorted history, or is merely a play of the imagination, is always the unconscious product of the race, never like the fable invented expressly for a moral or didactic purpose. A closer analogy to the fable is to be found in the literary myth, the artificial product of a later ags, such, for instance, as the Amu of the Iliad, the Hesiodic legend of Pandora, or the story of Er in the Re public of Plato. Yet these allegorical myths are clearly distinguished from the fable, inasmuch as the story and the moral are intermingled throughout. Between the parable and the fable there is no clear line of distinction. Arch bishop Trench insists on two essential differences, first, that the parable teaches spiritual truths, whereas the fable never lifts itself above the earth, and secondly, that the parable never transgresses the actual order of nature. But, though the parables of the New Testament may well be set in a class by themselves, a comparative study of religious writings will show that the parable is one of the commonest forms of religious teaching, and that no hard or fast line can be drawn between moral and spiritual truths. The second difference we should regard as accidental, and it is not altogether borne out by facts. Most writers on the history of the fable are content to trace its origin to ^Esop or the Panca Tantra of the mythi cal Vishnu Sarman, and these are doubtless the oldest col lections which have been preserved irt writing ; but though we possess no earlier record, we may, from its wide diffusion, regard it as a natural growth of the imagination, and one of the most primitive forms of literature. It springs from the universal need of men to express their thoughts by con crete images and emblems, and thus is strictly parallel to the use of metaphor in language. Even now fables are made every day, and a quick-witted race like the Arabs will invent fables at every turn as the readiest form of argument. To take a familiar illustration, the wise saws and modern instances of Sam Weller would only need a slight expansion to form a very respectable book of fables. Our most familiar proverbs are often fables in miniature. With the fable, as we know it, the moral is indispensable. As La Fontaine puts it, an apologue is composed of two parts, one of which may be called the body, the other the soul. The body is the fable, the soul the morality. But if we revert to the earliest type we shall find that is no longer the case. In the primitive beast-fable, which is the direct progenitor of the yEsopian fable, the story is told simply for its own sake, and is as innocent of any moral as our fairy tales of Little Red Ridinghood and Jack and the Beanstalk. Thus, in a legend of the Flathead Indians, the Little Wolf found in cloud-land his grandsires the Spiders with their grizzled hair and long crooked nails, and they spun balls of thread to let him down to earth ; when he came down and found his wife the Speckled Duck, whom the Old Wolf had taken from him, she fled in con fusion, and this is why she lives and dives alone to this very day. Such animal myths are as common in the New World as in the Old, and abound from Finland and Kamtchatka to the Hottentots and Australasians. From the story invented, as the one above quoted, to ac count for some peculiarity of the animal world, or told as a pure exercise of the imagination, just as a sailor spins a yarn about the sea-serpent, to the moral apologue the transi tion is easy; and that it has been effected by savages un aided by the example of higher races seems sufficiently proved by the tales quoted by E. B. Tylor (Primitive Culture, vol. i. p. 411). From the beast-fables of savages we come next to the Oriental apologues which are still extant in their original form. The East, the land of myth and legend, is the natural home of the fable, and Hindustan was the birth-place, if not of the original, of these tales, at least of the oldest shape in which they still exist. The Panca Tantra, or fables of the Brahma Vishnu Sarman, have been translated into almost every language and adapted by most modern fabulists. The Kalila iva Damna (names of two jackals), or fables of Bidpai, is an Arab version made about 760 A.D. From the Hebrew version of Rabbi Joel, John of Capua produced a Latin translation about the end of the 15th century, whence all later imita tions are derived. (See Monier Williams, Indian Wisdom, p. 508.) The Hitopadesa, or &quot;friendly instruction,&quot; is a modernized form of the same work, and of it there are three translations into English by Dr Charles Wilkins, Sir William Jones, and Professor F. Johnson. The Hitopadesa is a complete chaplet of fables loosely strung together, but con nected so as to form something of a continuous story, with moral reflections freely interspersed, purporting to be written for the instruction of some dissolute young princes. Thus, in the first fable a flock of pigeons see the grains of rice which a fowler has scattered, and are about to descend on them, when the king of the pigeons warns them by telling the fable of a traveller who being greedy of a bracelet was devoured by a tiger. They neglect his warning and are caught in the net, but are afterwards delivered by the king of the mice, who tells the story of the Deer, the Jackal, and the Crow, to show that no real friendship can exist between the strong and the weak, the beast of prey and his quarry, and so on to the end of the volume. Another book of Eastern fables is well worthy of notice, Buddhaghosha s Parables, a commentary on the Dhammapada, or Buddha s Paths of Virtue, The original is in Pali, but an English translation of the Burmese version has been made by Captain T. Rogers, R.E. As the work is little known we may venture to extract a single gem. A young mother, disconsolate for the death of her first-born son, carries the dead body of her child from house to house seeking medicine to restore it. At last she is sent to Para Takem, the lord and master of the Buddhists, who promises to help her, but she must herself fetch the medicine, which is some mustard seed taken from a house where no son, husband, parent, or slave has died. Gladly the girl speeds on her errand, carrying the dead body of her son on her hip. By degrees she is taught that she is not the only mourner. In the whole of the Savetthi country everywhere children are dying, parents are dying. She leaves her dead son and returns to Para Takem, having learnt the first and last commandment of the Buddhist creed. From Hindustan the Sanskrit fables passed to China, Thibet, and Persia; and they must have reached Greece at an early age, for many of the fables which passed under the name of Maop are identical with those of the East. ^Esop to us is little more than a name, though, if we may trust.