Fable

“ There's a fountain of Fable whose magical power Time's ravages all could repair, And replace the bowed form and the tottering step, The wrinkles and silvery hair, By the brown flowing locks and the graces of youth, Its footstep elastic and light, Could mantle the cheek with its long-vanished bloom And make the dull eye keen and bright. 'Tis only a fable—a beautiful dream, But the fable, the dream, shall come true, As thy sons, Alma Mater, assemble to-night The joys of past years to renew. ”

“ To assert that the fable is a lie or a falsehood does not fairly represent the fact. A lie is spoken with intent to deceive. A fable, in its relation, can bear no such construction, however exaggerated in its terms or fictitious in its characters. The meanest comprehension is capable of grasping the humour of the situation it creates. Even the moral that lurks in the narration is often clear to minds the most obtuse. This is at least true of the best fables. ”

“ The pride of intellect, that is thirsting in you, fashions ideal graces after a classic model. The heroines of fable are admired; and the soul is tortured with that intensity of passion which gleams through the broken utterances of Grecian tragedy.
In the vanity of self-consciousness one feels at a long remove above the ordinary love and trustfulness of a simple and pure heart. You turn away from all such with a sigh of conceit, to graze on that lofty but bitter pasturage where no daisies grow. ”

“ What is woman? What is a child? What is sleep? To our blindness, these things seem unaffecting. We make fables to hide the baldness of the fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher law of the mind. But when the fact is seen under the light of an idea, the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. ”

“ He had, within proscribed bounds, an exquisite and affectionate curiosity, like that of the Renaissance. “The invention of a fable is to me the most enviable exertion of human genius: it is the discovery of a truth to which there is no clew, and which, when once found out, can never be forgotten.” “If the world were good for nothing else, it would be a fine subject for speculation.” ”

“ Besides, instruction, as conveyed by fable, does not only lay aside its lofty mien and supercilious aspect, but appears dressed in all the smiles and graces which can strike the imagination or engage the passions. ”

“ Besides, when the moral of a fable is not very prominent and striking, a leading thought at the beginning puts the reader in a proper track. He knows the game which he pursues; and, like a beagle on a warm scent, he follows the sport with alacrity in proportion to his intelligence. ”

“ In the narrative sense of the term, a fable is a very brief invented, double-meaning story in which a lesson of every day practical morality is taught. The kind of lesson is one of the points that distinguish fable from parable and allegory. The fable never aims higher than inculcating maxims of prudential conduct—industry, caution, foresight, and the like—and these it will sometimes recommend at the expense of the higher, self-forgetting virtues. A typical fable reaches just the pitch of morality which the world will approve. In spirit the fable is often humorous, often ironical. ”

“ If one chooses to write a rational fable, where the actors are human beings, one must be careful not to write a parable. The lesson of a fable is always unsentimentally practical—not spiritual. Where the actors are gods, or gods and men, the student-writer must distinguish fable from myth. ”

“ It is a singular paradox, however, that nothing is truer than a good fable. True to intuition, true to nature, true to fact. The great virtue of fables consists in this quality of truthfulness, and their enduring life and popularity are corroboration of it. If not true in the sense of being reasonable, they are nothing, or foolish, and therefore intolerable. We instinctively feel their truth, and are encouraged, or amused, or conscience-smitten by the narration, for they deal with principles which lie at the very root of our human nature. ”

“ It pleases in order to convince, and it imprints its moral so much the deeper in proportion that it entertains; so that we may be said to feel our duties at the very instant we comprehend them.'
The humour of a good fable is a fine lubricant to the temper. Sarcasm, irony, even direct criticism, are in place in the fable, but humour is its saving grace. Without this it cannot be classed in the first order. Wanting in this quality, the fables of some writers who have attempted them are flat, stale and unprofitable. Humour in the fable is the gilding of the pill. ”

“ Three classes of fables have been noticed: (1) the rational—in which the actors and speakers are solely human beings or the gods of mythology, (2) the non-rational—in which the heroes are solely animals, trees, vegetables, or inanimate objects, (3) the mixed—in which the rational and non-rational are combined.
Classes of fables
Now what distinguishes all these from myth and legend is the presence of the evident and acknowledged didactic purpose. What distinguishes the first class, the rational fable, from a parable is the low plane of the motive. Above the utilitarian the fable never rises. ”

“ A fable is a story, like that of King Log, or the Fox and the Grapes, in which characters and plot, neither pretending to reality nor demanding credence, are fabricated confessedly as the vehicle of moral or didactic instruction. ”

“ It may pass for a farther indication of a concealed and secret meaning, that some of these fables are so absurd and idle in their narration as to show and proclaim an allegory, even afar off. A fable that carries probability with it may be supposed invented for pleasure, or in imitation of history ”

“ The fable gives an agreeable hint of the duties and relations of life, not a harangue on our want of sense or decorum. We feel none of the superiority of the fabulist, who, indeed, generally leaves us to make the application of his instructive story in our own way ”

“ The mythical poet has an end in view—that of making men good and wise; he designedly adopts the form of fable as the most appropriate and vivid method of representation; but at the same time, he is himself urged to this mode of teaching by his love of fable, by his inward impulse. ”

“ Than lies upon that truth, we live to learn.
For fable is Love's world, his home, his birth-place:
Delightedly dwells he 'mong fays and talismans,
And spirits; and delightedly believes
Divinities, being himself divine.
The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,
The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty,
That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and wat'ry depths; all these have vanish'd.
They live no longer in the faith of reason! ”

“ The fable, as a type of wisdom literature, is always short, simple, and emphatic. It always emphasizes marked human characteristics, and usually ends with a “moral” that adds to the emphasis. The influence of the fable helped to make the story short, condensed, vivid, pointed, and based on character. ”

“ The true Fable, if it rise to its high requirements, ever aims at one great end and purpose—the representation of human motive, and the improvement of human conduct, and yet it so conceals its design under the disguise of fictitious characters, by clothing with speech the animals of the field, the birds of the air, the trees of the wood, or the beasts of the forest, that the reader shall receive advice without perceiving the presence of the adviser. ”

“ However long you may live with him, however much you may love his fables, there is a trick of interpretation to be learned in voicing his philosophy which will develop the whimsical side of your sense of humor and counteract the insistent moral tone attached to every fable.
SUGGESTIVE ANALYSIS
The danger in handling a fable does not lie, as the interpreter seems so often to think, in adopting too serious a tone. ”

“ You will not find any other legend but this written upon the rocks by any hand of man. There is every type and time of fable: but there is only one moral to the fable; because there is only one moral to everything. ”

“ Such is the great mass of the old stories of wise animals or foolish men that have amused our childhood. But we should expect the fable, in company with other and more important literary forms, to be more and more loosely, or at least largely, comprehended as time went on, and so to degenerate in conception from this original type. ”

“ A fable should carry its moral without the telling; nevertheless the application is often worth supplying, because it puts, or should put, the lesson taught by the fable in a terse and impressive form. Above and beyond all, a fable should possess the quality of simplicity, and whilst easy to be understood, it should have force and appropriateness.
Fables treat of the follies and weaknesses, and also of the nobler qualities, of humankind, generally [8] through the medium of the lower animals and the members of the vegetable and natural kingdom. ”

“ A fable is a story which is not true. But, although it is not a true story, it is a very useful one, because it always teaches us a good lesson.
6. In many fables, birds and beasts are represented as speaking. Now, you know that birds and beasts cannot talk, and therefore the story, or fable, which tells us that birds and beasts, and other things, that are not alive, do talk, cannot be true. ”

“ 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 loquuntur, non tantum ferae) , are, for the purpose of moral instruction, feigned to act and speak with human interests and passions.” ”

“ Hence he is called a poet, not he which writeth in measure only, but that feigneth and formeth a fable, and writes things like the truth; for the fable and fiction is, as it were, the form and soul of any poetical work or poem. ”

“ The further our literary inquiries are extended here, the more vast and stupendous is the scene which opens to us; at the same time, that the true and false, the sublime and the puerile, wisdom and absurdity, are so intermixed, that, at every step, we have to smile at folly, while we admire and acknowledge the philosophical truth, though couched in obscure allegory and puerile fable. ”

“ I am glad you determine upon something; there is no writing I esteem more than fables, nor any thing so difficult to succeed in; which however you have done excellently well, and I have often admired your happiness in such a kind of performances which I have frequently endeavoured at in vain. I remember I acted as you seem to hint; I found a moral first, and studied for a fable, but could do nothing that pleased me, and so left off that scheme for ever. ”

“ In the second place, we object to the whole plan and conception of the fable, as turning mainly upon incidents unsuitable for poetical narrative, and brought out in the denouement in a very obscure, laborious, and imperfect manner. ”

“ From this, without doubt, sprang the fable. Man created it thus, because it was not given him to see more than himself and nature, which surrounds him; but he created it true with a truth all its own. ”

“ A fact thus standing alone, without the key of contemporary thought, may be very much more misleading than any fable. To know what word an archaic scribe wrote without being sure of what thing he meant, may produce a result that is literally mad. ”

“ There can be no good fable with human beings in it. There can be no good fairy tale without them. ”

“ Conformably to the tenor of fables of this kind we have grown, as a rule, accustomed to accept the moral of the fable as that which is of first importance, and to regard the narrative as merely an external form, and consequently an event entirely composed with a view to expound that moral. ”

“ The Æsopian fable or apologue is a short story, either fictitious or true, generally fictitious, calculated to convey instruction, advice or reproof, in an interesting form, impressing its lesson on the mind more deeply than a mere didactic piece of counsel or admonition is capable of doing. We say a short story, because if the narration is spun out to a considerable length it ceases to be a true fable in the ordinary acceptation of the term, and becomes a tale, such, for example, as a fairy tale. ”

“ The fable is one of the most ancient forms of such didactic literature; in it a story is told to enforce a lesson, and animals are made the characters, in consequence of which it has the touch of humour inseparable from the spectacle of beasts playing at being men; but the very fact that the moral is of men and the tale is of beasts involves a separation of the truth from its concrete embodiment, and besides the moral is stated by itself. ”

“ Then when the myth was gaining ground and coming into favour in Greece, poets developed from it the fable with a moral, which differs from the myth in that the latter is addressed to children and the former to men, and is designed not merely to entertain them but conveys moral exhortation besides. For the man who employs fable aims at moral exhortation and instruction, though he conceals his aim and takes care not to speak openly, for fear of alienating his hearers. ”

“ There is the same Difference between the Fable and the Action, both in Epic and Tragic Poetry, namely, the Action is an Achievement of some eminent Person, which produc'd some great and memorable Event. The Fable is the Complication of all those Incidents, Episodes, and other Circumstances, which promote the Action, and carry it to its proper Period, or else which serve to illustrate, or to embellish and adorn it. ”