FABLE. With certain restrictions, the necessity of which will be shown in the course of the article, we may accept the definition of "fable" which Dr. Johnson proposes in his Life of Gay: "A fable or apologue seems to be, in its genuine state, a narrative in which beings irrational, and sometimes inanimate (arbores lo quuntur, non tantum ferae), are, for the purpose of moral in struction, feigned to act and speak with human interests and passions." The description of La Fontaine, the greatest of fabu lists, is a poetic rendering of Johnson's definition : Fables in Booth are not what they appear; Our moralists are mice, and such small deer. We yawn at sermons, but we gladly turn To moral tales, and so amused we learn.
The fable is distinguished from the myth which grows and is not made, the spontaneous and unconscious product of primitive fancy as it plays round some phenomenon of natural or historical fact. The literary myth, such as, for instance, the legend of Pan dora in Hesiod or the tale of Er in the Republic of Plato, is really an allegory, and differs from the fable in so far as it is self-inter preting; the story and the moral are intermingled throughout. Between the parable and the fable there is no clear line of de marcation. The soundest distinction is drawn by Neander. In the fable human passions and actions are attributed to beasts; in the parable the lower creation is employed only to illustrate the higher life and never transgresses the laws of its kind. There is an affinity between the fable and the proverb. A proverb is often a condensed or fossilized fable, and not a few fables are amplified or elaborated proverbs.
With the fable, as we know it, the moral is indispensable. As La Fontaine puts it, an apologue is composed of two parts, body and soul. The body is the story, the soul the morality. But in the primitive beast-fable, which is the direct progenitor of the Aesop ian fable, the story is told simply for its own sake, and is as innocent of any moral as the fairy tales of Little Red Riding Hood and Jack and the Beanstalk. Thus, in a legend of the Flat head Indians, the Little Wolf found in cloud-land his grandsires the Spiders with their grizzled hair and long crooked tails, 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 confusion, 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 Kamchatka to the Hottentots and Australasians.
From these beast-fables of savages must be derived, through some common store of primitive moralizing, the fables of Greece and India. In the form in which we have them the Greek fables are the older : there is a fable of true type in Hesiod. In the latter part of the 5th century B.C. they became connected with the name of Aesop. The first collection we hear of was made about 30o B.C. These Greek fables are best represented by the verse collection of Babrius (q.v.) made about A.D. 200. An inferior version is found in the Latin of Phaedrus (early part of the 1st century). Phae drus and a third ancient fabulist Avianus (4th century) were text books in mediaeval schools and were constantly imitated and expanded.
The oldest Indian collection, the Pancjiatantra, goes back to Buddhist sources of the 4th century or earlier. The Hitopadesa is a mediaeval form of the same work, the fables being strung to gether on a thread of narrative. As Kalilah and Dimnah or Fables of Bidpai (Pilpay) the Indian fables passed through Old Persian and Arabic into Latin, and joined the stream flowing from the Latin fabulists, thus fertilizing the rising vernacular literatures with a variety of motifs which could be used either for entertain ment or edification. One of the most successful mediaeval collec tions is that of Odo of Cheriton, a Kentish preacher of the 12th century, who published separately the fables he had used in his sermons.
Several of Odo's tales, like Chaucer's story, can be ultimately traced to the History of Reynard the Fox. This great beast-epic is known to us in three forms, Latin, French and German, each with independent episodes, but all woven upon a common basis, and it probably took shape in Picardy in the loth or 11th cen tury. The Latin form is probably the earliest, and next the Ger man versions. The French poem of more than 30,000 lines, the Roman du Renard, belongs probably to the 13th century. In 1498 appeared Reynke de Voss, almost a literal version in Low Saxon of the older Flemish poem, Reinaert de Vos. Hence the well known version of Goethe into modern German hexameters was taken. We have here no short and unconnected stories. Mate rials, partly borrowed from older apologues, but in a much greater proportion new, are worked up into one long and systematic tale. The moral, so prominent in the fable proper, shrinks so far into the background that the epic might be considered a work of pure fiction, an animal romance recounting a contest maintained suc cessfully, by selfish craft and audacity, against enemies of all sorts, in a half-barbarous and ill-organized society.
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 century, Gilles Corrozet, Guillaume Haudent and Guillaume Gueroult in the 16th, are now 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 comedie a cent actes divers." Rousseau did his best to discredit the Fables as immoral and corruptors of youth, but in spite of Emile they are studied in every French school and are more familiar to most Frenchmen than their brev iary. Among the French successors of La Fontaine the most dis tinguished is Florian : among foreigners who have worked in his vein are the Spaniard Yriarte, the Russian Krylov, and the Italian Pignotti. John Gay's Fifty-one Fables in Verse (1727) has much of the charm of La Fontaine. Dryden's Fables (1699) are adapta tions of Chaucer's and Boccaccio's tales and Ovid's Metamor phoses and are fables only in name.
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 women, 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, but he has little of La Fontaine's sly humour and lightness of touch. 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 refine ments of later authors, from Phaedrus to La Fontaine, are perver sions of this original. The fable is essentially a moral precept illus trated 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.