Fables and Fabulists: Ancient and Modern

CHAPTER V

LESSONS TAUGHT BY FABLES

In the earlier ages of the world's history fables were invented for the edification of men and women. This was so in the palmiest days of Greek, Roman and Arabian or Saracenic civilization. In these later days fables are generally assumed to be more for the delectation of children than adults. This change of auditory need not be regretted; it has its marked advantages. The lesson which the fable inculcates is indelibly stamped on the mind of the child, and has an influence, less or more, on his or her career during life.

Jean Jacques Rousseau is the only writer of eminence who has inveighed against this use of the fable, but his remarks are by no means convincing. He accounted them lies without the 'medicinable quality,' and reprobated their employment in the instruction of youth. 'Fables,' says Rousseau, 'may amuse men, but the truth must be told to children.' His animadversion had special reference to the fables of La Fontaine, and doubtless some of these, and the morals deduced from them, are open to objection; but to condemn fables in general on this account is surely the height of unreason.

A greater than Rousseau had, long before, given expression in cogent language to the worth of the fable as a vehicle of instruction for youth. Plato, whilst excluding the mythical stories of Hesiod and Homer from the curriculum of his 'Republic' – that perfect commonwealth, in depicting which he lavished all the resources of his wisdom and genius – advised mothers and nurses to repeat selected fables to their children, so as to mould and give direction to their young and tender minds.

Phædrus, again, in the prologue to his fables, says —

so that his view of the question also was just the very antipodes of that of the French philosopher.

Quintilian urges17 that 'boys should learn to relate orally the fables of Æsop, which follow next after the nurse's stories.' True, he recommends this with a view to initiating them in the rudiments of the art of speaking; but he would not have inculcated the use of fables for children for even this secondary purpose, if he had dreamt for a moment they would have had a bad effect on their minds.

Rousseau, with all his knowledge of human character and his power of imagination, had a matter-of-fact vein running through his mind, which led him to entertain the mistaken view that the influence of fables on the juvenile mind was objectionable. Cowper, who was no mean writer of fables himself, with his clear common sense, broad natural instincts, and mother wit – in which Rousseau was lacking – saw the unwisdom of the philosopher's conclusions, and satirized his views in the well-known lines:

It is no exaggeration to assert that the effect which fables and their lessons have had on the people is incalculable. They have been read and rehearsed and pondered in all ages, and by thousands whom no other class of literature could attract. The story and its moral (in the Æsopian fable at least) are obvious to the dullest comprehension, and they cling to the memory like the limpet to the rock, and find their application in all the concerns of daily life.

But it is not the illiterate alone that have profited by the fable; all classes have been affected by its lesson. We are all apt scholars when the fable is the schoolmaster. There is no class of the community that has not come under its sway. It has penetrated to the highest stratum of society equally with the humblest, and may be credited with an influence as wide and far-reaching as the sublimest moral treatise which the human intellect has produced.

The epic and the novel (fables of a kind), like some paintings, cover a wide canvas, and the details are not always easily grasped and remembered; but the true fable is a story in miniature which we take in at a glance, and stow away for after use in a small corner of our memory.

We have the 'successful villain' in the fable as sometimes on the stage; and it may be a question whether the tendency of this is not rather to encourage dissimulation in certain ill-constituted minds, than to inculcate virtue. One of Northcote's fables, The Elephant and the Fox, will exemplify what we mean.

'A grave and judicious elephant entering into argument with a pert fox, who insisted upon his superior powers of persuasion, which the elephant would not allow, it was at length agreed between them that whichever attracted the most attention from his auditors by his eloquence should be deemed the victor. At a certain appointed time a great assembly of animals attended the trial, and the elephant was allowed to speak first. He with eloquence spoke of the high importance of ever adhering with strictness to justice and to truth; also of the happiness which resulted from controlling the passions, of the dignity of patience, the inhospitable and hateful nature of selfishness, and the odiousness of cruelty and carnage.

'The pert fox, perceiving the audience not to be much amused by the discourse of the elephant, made no ceremony, but interrupted the oration by giving a farcical account of all his mischievous tricks and hairbreadth escapes, the success of his cunning, and his adroit contrivances to extricate himself from harm – all which so delighted the assembly, that the elephant was soon left, in the midst of his wise advice, without a single auditor near him; for they one and all with eagerness thronged to hear the diverting follies and knaveries of the fox, who, of course, was in the end declared the victor.'

It might almost appear that a fable of this kind is an error of judgment, and that it is calculated to do harm rather than good, inasmuch as it exhibits the triumph of duplicity and the defeat of wisdom. True, the author of the fable tries to recover the lost ground in the application, by mildly holding up the fox to reprobation, thus:

'Application: The effect these two orators had on the perceptions of their audience was exactly the reverse one to the other. That of the elephant touched the guilty, like satire, with pain and reproach; even the most innocent was humbled, as none were wholly free from vice, and all felt themselves lowered even in their own opinion, and heard the admonition as an irksome duty, but still with little inclination to undergo the difficult task of amendment. But when the fox began, all was joy; the innocent felt all the gratification which proceeds from the consciousness of superiority, and the guilty to find their vices and follies treated only as a jest; for we all have felt how much more pleasure we enjoy laughing at a fool than in being scrutinized by the sage. From this cause it is that farce of the most grotesque and absurd kind is tolerated and received, and not without some degree of relish, even by the good and the wise, as we all want comfort.'

In spite of the application – nay, rather to some extent by reason of it, for the anti-climax is extraordinary in a fable – it may be doubted whether our sympathies are not with the fox rather than with the elephant. We feel that the latter, with all his wisdom and good advice, is somewhat of a bore; whilst the fox, rake and wastrel though he be, has that touch of nature that makes him kin.

Æsop's well-known fable of The Fox and the Crow is also an example of the success of the scoundrel, but mark the difference: here there is the obvious reproof of the vain and silly bird, deceived by flattering words, till, in attempting to sing, she drops into the mouth of the fox the savoury morsel she held in her beak! Here our verdict is: 'Served her right!' In Northcote's fable, clever though it is as a narration, this climax is altogether wanting.

It has been suggested that there is a closer natural affinity than at first sight appears between man and the lower animals, and that the recognition of this contact at many points would suggest the idea of conferring the power of speech upon the latter in the fable. In the higher reason and its resultant effects they differ fundamentally; mere animals are wanting discourse of reason, but the purely animal passions of cunning, anger, hatred, and even revenge and love of kind, and the nobler characteristics of faithfulness and gratitude prevail in the dispositions of both. These similarities would strike observers in the pastoral ages of the world with even greater force than in later times.

The ineradicable impression which certain fables have made upon the mind through uncounted generations by their self-evident appropriateness and truth, is well exemplified in The Wolf and the Lamb; The Fox and the Grapes; The Hare and the Tortoise; The Dog and the Shadow; The Mountain in Labour; The Fox without a Tail; The Satyr and the Man, who blew hot and cold with the same breath, and others. It is safe to assert that nothing in literature has been more quoted than the fables named. We could not afford to lose them; their absence would be a distinct loss – literature and life would be the poorer without them; and, such being the fact, we are justified in holding those writers in esteem who have contributed to the instruction and entertainment of mankind in the fables they have invented.

CHAPTER VI

ÆSOP

Æsop is justly regarded as the foremost inventor of fables that the world has seen. He flourished in the sixth century before Christ. Several places, as in the case of Homer, are claimed as his birthplace – Sardis in Lydia, Ammorius, the island of Samos, and Mesembra, a city of Thrace; but the weight of authority is in favour of Cotiæum, a city of Phrygia in the Lesser Asia,19 hence his sobriquet of 'the Phrygian.'

Whether he was a slave from birth is uncertain, but if not, he became such, and served three masters in succession. Demarchus or Caresias of Athens was his first master; the next, Zanthus or Xanthus, a philosopher, of the island of Samos; and the third, Idmon or Jadmon, also of Samos. His faithful service and wisdom so pleased Idmon that he gave Æsop his freedom.

Growing in reputation both as a sage and a wit, he associated with the wisest men of his age. Amongst his contemporaries were the seven sages of Greece: Periander, Thales, Solon, Cleobulus, Chilo, Bias and Pittacus; but he was eventually esteemed wiser than any of them. The humour with which his sage counsels were spiced made these more acceptable (both in his own and later times) than the dull, if weighty, wisdom of his compeers.

He became attached by invitation of Crœsus, the rich King of Lydia, to the court at Sardis, the capital, and continued under the patronage of that monarch for the remainder of his life. Crœsus employed him in various embassies which he carried to a successful issue. The last he undertook was a mission to Delphi to offer sacrifices to Apollo, and to distribute four minæ20 of silver to each citizen. To the character of the Delphians might with justice be applied the saying of a later time: 'The nearer the temple and the farther from God.' Familiarity with the Oracle, as is the case in smaller matters, bred contempt, for the meanness of their lives was due to the circumstance that the offerings of strangers coming to the temple of the god enabled them to live a life of idleness, to the neglect of the cultivation of their lands.

Æsop upbraided them for this conduct, and, scorning to encourage them in their evil habits, instead of distributing amongst them the money which Crœsus had sent, he returned it to Sardis. This, as was natural with persons of their mean character, so inflamed them against him that they conspired to compass his destruction. Accordingly (as the story goes), they hid away amongst his baggage, as he was leaving the city, a golden goblet taken from the temple and consecrated to Apollo. Search being made, and the vessel discovered, the charge of sacrilege was brought against him. His judges pronounced him guilty, and he was sentenced to be precipitated from the rock Hyampia. Immediately before his execution he delivered to his persecutors the fable of The Eagle and the Beetle,21 by which he warned them that even the weak may procure vengeance against the strong for injuries inflicted. The warning was unheeded by his murderers. The shameful sentence was carried out, and so Æsop died, according to Eusebius, in the fourth year of the fifty-fourth Olympiad, or 561 years before the Christian era. The fate of poor Æsop was like that of a good many other world-menders!

According to ancient chroniclers, the death of Æsop did not go unavenged. Misfortunes of many kinds overtook the Delphians; pestilence decimated them; such of their lands as they tried to cultivate were rendered barren, with famine as the result, and these miseries continued to afflict them for many years. At length, having consulted the Oracle, they received as answer that which their secret conscience affirmed to be true, that their calamities were due to the death of Æsop, whom they had so unjustly condemned. Thereupon they caused proclamation to be made in all public places throughout the country, offering reparation to any of Æsop's representatives who should appear. The only claimant that responded was a grandson of Idmon, Æsop's former master; and having made such expiation as he demanded, the Delphians were delivered from their troubles.

Not only was Æsop unfortunate in his death: his personal appearance has suffered disparagement. The most trustworthy chroniclers in ancient times describe him as a man of good appearance, and even of a pleasing cast of countenance; whereas in later years he has been portrayed both by writers and in pictures as deformed in body and repellent in features. Stobæus, it is true, who lived in the fifth century A.D., had written disparagingly of 'the air of Æsop's countenance,' representing the fabulist as a man of sour visage, and intractable, but he goes no farther than that.

It is to Maximus Planudes, a Constantinople monk of the fourteenth century, nearly two thousand years after the time of Æsop, that the burlesque of the great fabulist is due. Planudes appears to have collected all the stories regarding Æsop current during the Middle Ages, and strung them together as an authentic history. Through ignorance, or by intention, he also confounded the Oriental fabulist, Locman,22 with Æsop, and clothed the latter in all the admitted deformities of the other. He affirmed him as having been flat-faced, hunch-backed, jolt-headed, blubber-lipped, big-bellied, baker-legged, his body crooked all over, and his complexion of a swarthy hue. Even in recent years, accepting the description of the monk, Æsop has been thus depicted in the frontispiece to his fables. This writer is untrustworthy in other respects, for in his pretended life of the sage he makes him speak of persons who did not exist, and of events that did not occur for eighty to two hundred years after his death.

That the story of Æsop's hideous deformity is untrue is clear from evidence that is on record. Admitted that this evidence is chiefly of a negative kind, it is sufficiently strong to refute the statements of the monk. In the first place, Planudes, as we have seen, is an untrustworthy chronicler in other respects, and an account of Æsop, written after the lapse of two thousand years, could only be worthy of credence issuing from a truthful pen, and based on documentary or other unquestionable evidence. Of such evidence the Constantinople monk had probably none.

Again, it is related that during the years of his slavery Æsop had as mate, or wife, the beautiful Rhodope,23 also a slave – an unlikely circumstance, assuming him to have been as repulsive in bodily appearance as has been asserted. At all events, any incongruous association of this kind would have been remarked and commented on by earlier writers.

Further, none of Æsop's contemporaries, nor any writers that immediately followed him, make mention of his alleged deformities. On the contrary, the Athenians, about two hundred years after his death, in order to perpetuate his memory and appearance, commissioned the celebrated sculptor Lysippus to produce a statue of Æsop, and this they erected in a prominent position in front of those of the seven sages, 'because,' says Phædrus,24 'their severe manner did not persuade, while the jesting of Æsop pleased and instructed at the same time.' It is improbable that the figure of a man monstrously deformed as Æsop is said to have been would have proved acceptable to the severe taste of the Greek mind. An epigram of Agathia, of which the following is a translation,25

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1

'Plato and Platonism,' by Walter Pater. London: Macmillan and Co., 1893, p. 225.

2

Aphthonius flourished at Antioch, at what time is uncertain. Forty of his Æsopian fables, with a Latin version by Kimedoncius, were printed from a MS. in the Palatine Library at the beginning of the seventeenth century. 'The Æsopian Fable,' by Sir Brooke Boothby, Bart. Edinburgh: Constable and Co., 1809. Preface, p. xxxi.

3

'Even trees speak, not only wild beasts.' – Phædrus, Book i., Prologue.

4

'Essay on Fable.'

5

'Fables Original and Selected,' by G. Moir Bussey. London: Willoughby and Co., 1842.

6

'The Fables of Æsop,' as first printed by William Caxton in 1484. London: David Nutt, 1889, vol. i., p. 204.

7

'The Tatler,' No. 147, vol. iii., p. 205.

8

2 Samuel xii. 1-7.

9

Quoted from James's 'Fables of Æsop.' Murray, 1848.

10

Preface, 'Fables,' 1668.

11

'History of the Æsopic Fable,' p. 148.

12

Essay: 'Of Books.'

13

Boothby's translation.

14

G. Moir Bussey: Introduction to 'Fables.'

15

'Essay on Fable.'

16

Swift: Preface to 'The Battle of the Books.'

17

'Institutes of Oratory,' book i., chap. ix.

18

'Pairing Time Anticipated.'

19

Suidas.

20

The mina was twelve ounces, or a sum estimated as equal to £3 15s. English.

21

See post, p. 76.

22

Spelt variously Locman, Lôqman, Lokman.

23

This woman is notorious in history as a courtesan who essayed to compound for her sins by votive offerings to the temple at Delphi. She is also said to have built the Lesser Pyramid out of her accumulated riches, but this is denied by Herodotus, who claims for the structure a more ancient and less discreditable foundation, being the work, as he asserts, of Mycerinus, King of Egypt (Herod., ii. 134).

24

Phædrus, Epilogue, book ii.

25

Boothby, Preface, p. xxxiv.