Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/874

Rh 838 FABLE a passing notice in Herodotus (ii. 134), he must have lived in the 6th century B.C. Probably his fables were never written down, though several are ascribed to him by Xeuophon, Aristotle, Plutarch, and other Greek writers, and Plato represents Socrates as beguiling his last days by versifying such as he remembered. Aristophanes alludes to them as merry tales, and Plato, while excluding the poets from his ideal republic, admits JEsop as a moral teacher. Of the various versions of jEsop s Fables, by far the most trustworthy is that of Babrius or Babrias, a Greek of the 1st century A.D., who rendered them in choliambic verse. These, which were long known in fragments only, were recovered in a MS. found by M. Minas in a monastery on Mount Athos in 1842, and have been edited by Sir G. C. Lewis. 1 An inferior version of the same in Latin iambics was made by PliEedrus, a slave of Thracian origin, brought to Rome in the time of Augustus, and manumitted by him, who tells us that he published in senarian verse the rude materials produced by ^Esop ; but the numerous allusions to contem porary events, as, for example, that to Sejanus in the Frogs and the Sun, which brought upon the author disgrace and imprisonment, show that many of them are original or free adaptations. For some time scholars doubted as to the genuineness of Phsedrus s fables, but their doubts have been lately dispelled by a closer examination of the MSS. and by the discovery of two verses of a fable on a tomb at Apulum in Dacia. Pheedrus s style is simple, clear, and brief, but dry and unpoetical ; and, as Lessing has pointed out, he often falls into absurdities when he deserts his original. For instance, in ^Esop the dog with the meat in his mouth sees his reflexion in the water as he passes over a bridge; Phaedrus makes him see it as he swims across the river. To sum up the characteristics of the ^Esopian fable, it is artless, simple, and transparent. It affects no graces of style, and we hardly need the moral with which each concludes, 6 /AU$OS 8rjol on, K. T. X. The moral inculcated is that of wordly wisdom and reasonable self-interest. ^Esop is no make/ of phrases, but an orator who wishes to gain some point or induce some course of action. It is the ^Esopian type that Aristotle has in view when he treats of the fable as a branch of rhetoric, not of poetry. If we consider their striking gift of narrative and their love of moralizing, it is strange that the Romans should have produced no body of national fables. But, with the doubtful exception of Pha3clrus, we possess nothing but solitary fables, such as the famous apologue of Menenius Agrippa to the Plebs, and the exquisite Town Mouse and Country Mouse of Horace s Satires. The fables of the rhetorician Aphthonius in Greek prose, and those in Latin elegiac verse attributed to Avianus or Avienus, make, in the history of the apologue, a sort of link between the classical and the dark ages. In that overflow ing chaos which constitutes the literature of the Middle Ages, the fable reappears in several aspects. In a Latin dress, sometimes in prose, sometimes in regular verse, and sometimes in rhymed stanzas, it contributed, with other kinds of narratives, to make up the huge mass of stories which has been bequeathed to us by the monastic libraries. These served more uses than one. They were always easier reading, and were often held to be safer and more instructive reading also, than the difficult and slippery classics, for those monks who cared for reading at all, and were not learned enough for any pursuit deserving the name of study. For those who were a little more active- minded, they aided the Gesta Romanorum and other collec- 1 M. Minas professed to have discovered under the same circum stances another collection of ninety-four fables by Babrius. This second part was accepted by Sir G. C. Lewis, but J. Couington has conclusively proved that it is spurious, and probably a forgery. See article BABIUUS. tions of fabliaux or short novels, in suggesting illustrations available for popular preaching. Among those mediaeval fables in Latin, very little of originality is to be detected. The writers contented themselves with working up the old fables into new shapes, with rendering from prose into verse, or from verse into prose, a species of attempts which had its merits in such hands as those of Babrius or Phsedrus, but from which no fruit could be expected to be gathered in the convents. The few monks who could have performed such a task well aimed wisely at something higher. It might be enough to name, among the monkish fabulists, Vincent of Beauvais, a Dominican of the 12th century, in whose Speculum Doctrinale are a good many prose fables, more than half of them from Pha?drus. About the end of the same century, too, a considerable number of fables, some of which have been printed, were compiled by an English Cistercian monk, Odo de Cerinton. Nor was this the only collection that arose in England. As the modern languages became by degrees applicable to literary use, fables began to appear in them. A good many still exist in Norman-French, of which may be noted the fables called those of Ysopet, and those composed by Marie de France, the authoress of the well-known fabliaux. Later, also, they were not wanting, though not numerous, in our own tongue. Chaucer has given us one, in his Nonne Preste s Tale, which is an expansion of the fable &quot; Don Coc et don Werpil &quot; of Marie of France ; another is Lidgate s tale of The Churl and the Bird. But the course of the short and isolated fables through the Middle Ages is not here worth prosecuting. Several of Odo s tales, like Chaucer s story, can be ultimately traced to a work, or series of works, for the sake of which chiefly the mediaeval history of the apologue is interesting the History of Reynard the Fox. This great beast-epic has been referred by Grimm as far back as the 10th century, and is known to us in three forms, each having independent episodes, but all woven upon a common basis. The Latin form is probably the earliest, and the poem Reinardus et Ysengrinus dates from the 10th or llth century. Next come the German versions. The most ancient, that of a minnesinger Heinrich der Glichesaere (probably a Swabian), was analysed and edited by Grimm in 1840. In 1498 appeared Reynke de Voss, almost a literal version in Low Saxon of the Flemish poem of the 12th century, Reinaert de Vos. Hence the well-known version of Goethe into modern German hexameters was taken. It was written in 1793, during the siege of Mainz, and the philosophic poet sought, in the study of animal nature and passions, to divert his thoughts from the bloody scenes of the Reign of Terror. The poem has been well named &quot; an unholy world bible.&quot; In it the ^Esopian fable received a development which was in several respects quite original. We have here no short and un connected stories. Materials, partly borrowed from older apologues, but in a much greater proportion new, are work ed up into one long and systematic tale, so as to form what has been quaintly called an animal-romance. The moral, so prominent in the fable proper, shrinks so far into the background, that the work might be considered as a mere allegory. Indeed, while the suspicion of its having con tained personal satires has been convincingly set aside, some writers deny even the design to represent human conduct at all ; and we can scarcely get nearer to its signification than by regarding it as being, in a general way, what Carlyle has called &quot; a parody of human life.&quot; It represents a contest maintained successfully, by selfish craft and audacity, against enemies of all sorts, in a half-barbarous and ill-organized society. With his weakest foes, like Chaunteclere the Cock, Reynard uses brute-force ; over the weak who are protected, like Kiward the Hare and