which were long known in fragments only, were recovered in a
MS. found by M. Minas in a monastery on Mount Athos in 1842,
now in the British Museum.[1] An inferior version of the same in
Latin iambics was made by Phaedrus, a slave of Thracian origin,
brought to Rome in the time of Augustus and manumitted by him.
Phaedrus professes to polish in senarian verse the rough-hewn
blocks from Aesop’s quarry; but the numerous allusions to
contemporary events, as, for example, his hit at 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
Phaedrus’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. Phaedrus’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 Aesop the dog with the
meat in his mouth sees his reflection 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 Aesopian fable, it is artless, simple and transparent. It affects no graces of style, and we hardly need the text with which each concludes, ὁ μῦθος δηλοῖ ὅτι, κ.τ.λ. The moral inculcated is that of Proverbial Philosophy and Poor Richard’s Almanacks. Aesop is no maker of phrases, but an orator who wishes to gain some point or induce some course of action. It is the Aesopian type that Aristotle has in view when he treats of the fable as a branch of rhetoric, not of poetry.
The Latin race was given to moralizing, and the language lent itself to crisp and pointed narrative, but they lacked the free play of fancy, the childlike “make-believe,” to produce a national body of fables. With the doubtful exception of Phaedrus, we possess nothing but solitary examples, 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 about A.D. 400 in Greek prose, and those in Latin elegiac verse by Avianus, used for centuries as a text-book in schools, form in the history of the apologue a link between classical and medieval times. In a Latin dress, sometimes in prose, sometimes in regular verse, and sometimes in rhymed stanzas, the fable 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 at once easier and safer reading than the classics. To the lazy monk they stood in place of novels; to the more industrious and gifted they furnished an exercise on a par with Latin verse composition in our public schools; the more original transformed them into fabliaux, or embodied them in edifying stories, as in the Gesta Romanorum. It is not in the Speculum Doctrinale of Vincent de Beauvais, a Dominican of the 12th century, nor in the collection of his contemporary Odo de Cerinton, an English Cistercian, nor in Planudes of the 14th century, whose one distinction is to have added to the fables a life of Aesop, that the direct lineage of La Fontaine must be traced. It is the fabliaux that inspired some of his best fables—the Lion’s Court, the Young Widow, the Coach and the Fly.
As the supremacy of Latin declined and modern languages began to be turned to literary uses, the fable took a new life. Not only were there numerous adaptations of Aesop, known as Ysopets, but Marie de France in the 13th century composed many original fables, some rivalling La Fontaine’s in simplicity and gracefulness. Later, also, fables were not wanting, though not numerous, in the English tongue. Chaucer has given us one, in his Nonne Preste’s Tale, which is an expansion of the fable Don Coc et don Werpil of Marie de France; another is Lydgate’s tale of The Churl and the Bird.
Several of Odo’s tales, like Chaucer’s story, can be ultimately traced to 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 with independent episodes, but all woven upon a common basis. The Latin form is probably the earliest, and the poems Reinardus and Ysengrinus date from the 10th or 11th 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. The French poem of more than 30,000 lines, the Roman du Rénard, belongs probably to the 13th century. 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. The poem has been well named “an unholy world Bible.” In it the Aesopian fable received a development which was in several respects quite original. We have here no short and unconnected stories. Materials, 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. The attempts to discover in it personal satire have signally failed; some critics 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 “a parody of human life.” 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 Belin the Ram, 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 impotent 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 to trace the fable, or illustrations borrowed from fables, that so frequently occur as incidental ornaments in the older literature of England and other countries. 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 English, Prior transplanted from France some of La Fontaine’s ease of narration and artful artlessness, while Gay took as his model the Contes rather than the Fables. Gay’s fables are often political satires, but some, like the Fox on his Deathbed, have the true ring, and in the Hare with many Friends there is genuine pathos. 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, both famous in their day and the latter extolled by Goethe, 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, but the critic is more than the fabulist. 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 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 century, Gilles Corrozet, Guillaume Haudent and Guillaume Gueroult in the 16th, are now
