Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/875

Rh FABLE 839 Belin the Earn, he is victorious by uniting violence with cunning ; Bruin, the dull, strong, formidable Bear, is humbled by having greater power than his own enlisted against him ; and the most dangerous of all the fox s enemies, Isengrim, the obstinate, greedy, and implacable Wolf, after being baffled by repeated strokes of malicious ingenuity, forces Reynard to a single combat, but even thus is not a match for his dexterous adversary. The knavish fox has allies worthy of him in Grimbart the watchful badger, and in his own aunt Dame Rukenawe, the learned She-ape ; and he plays at his pleasure on the simple credulity of the Lion-King, the image of an im potent feudal sovereign. The characters of these and other brutes are kept up with a rude kind of consistency, which gives them great liveliness ; many of the incidents are devised with much force of humour; and the sly hits at the weak points of medieval polity and manners and religion are incessant and palpable. It is needless, as has already been said, to attempt tracing the appearance which fables, or incidents borrowed from them, make so frequently as incidental ornaments in the older literature of our own country and others. Nor is there here fit occasion for dwelling minutely on the culti vation of the apologue in modem times, as a special form of poetical composition. It has appeared in every modern nation of Europe, but has nowhere become very important, and has hardly ever exhibited much originality either of spirit or of manner. In our own language, Prior indicated the possession of much aptitude for it ; but neither the fables of Moore, nor even the much more lively ones of Gay, possess any distinguished merit. To Dryden s spirited remodellings of old poems, romances, and fabliaux, the name of fables, which he was pleased to give them, is quite inapplicable. In German, Hagedorn and Gellert are quite forgotten ; and even Lessing s fables are read by few but schoolboys. In Spanish, Yriarte s fables on literary subjects are sprightly and graceful. A spirited version of the best appeared in Blackwood s Magazine, 1839. Among Italians Pignotti is famous for versatility and command of rhythm, as amongst Russians is Kriloff for his keen satire on Russian society. He has been translated into English by Mr Ralston. France alone in modern times has attained any pre eminence in the fable, and this distinction is almost entirely owing to one author. Marie de France in the 13th cen tury, Gilles Corrozet, Guillaume Haudent, and Guillaume Gudroult in the ICth, are now studied only 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 h fablier. Referring for fuller details to the article LA FOXTAIXE, we must content ourselves here with briefly indicating his chief characteristics. He is a true poet; his verse is exquisitely modulated ; his love of nature often reminds us of Virgil, as does 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 &quot; plays around the heart.&quot; 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 &quot; une ample comddie k, cent actes divers.&quot; The fables of Lessing represent the reaction against the French school of fabulists. &quot; With La Fontaine himself,&quot; says Lessing, &quot; I have no quarrel, but against the imitators of La Fontaine I enter my protest.&quot; 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 &quot; Fabelu,&quot; 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 value c&amp;gt;f the work is infinitely enhanced by the monograph on the essence of the fable which appeared at the same time, and as an illustration of which the fables were written. Much of the essay is taken up with the refutation of the theories of contemporary fabulists, De la Motte, Richer, Breittinger, Batteux, who only survive in Lessing s pages like the fly in amber. Passing over this negative criticism we may briefly state the results of Lessing s investigation. According to Lessing the ideal fable is that of ^Esop. All the elabora tions and refinements of later authors, from Pha^drus 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 : &quot; 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.&quot; We may notice in passing a problem in connexion with the fable which had long been debated, but never satisfac torily resolved till Lessing took it in hand, Why should animals have been almost universally chosen as the chief dramatis personal ? 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 ^Esop 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