Fabliau

“ But truth is always injured by the slightest connexion with fable. The moment I begin to read one of the animated speeches of a hero or a senator, which were never composed, delivered or written, till the historian arose, I feel myself instantly transported from the real theatre of human life into a fairy region. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Can any contrast be greater or more striking between the inspired narrative, composed for the purpose of ministering to godly life and practice, and such legendary fables as this, invented to gratify mere human curiosity, or to secure a temporary controversial triumph? The Divine narrative shrouds in thickest darkness details which have no spiritual significance, no direct bearing on the work of man's salvation. The human fable intrudes into the things unseen, and revels with a childish delight in the regions of the supernatural and miraculous. ”

“ The Last Judgment is not fable, or allegory, but vision. Fable, or allegory, is a totally distinct and inferior kind of poetry. Vision, or imagination, is a representation of what actually exists, really and unchangeably. Fable, or allegory, is formed by the daughters of Memory. Imagination is surrounded by the daughters of inspiration, who, in the aggregate, are called Jerusalem. Fable is allegory, but what critics call the fable is vision itself. The Hebrew Bible and the Gospel of Jesus are not allegory, but eternal vision, or imagination, of all that exists. ”

“ Jean de Meun added an “art of love,” exposing with brutality the vices of women, their arts of deception, and the means by which men may outwit them. Jean de Meun embodied the mocking, sceptical spirit of the fabliaux. He did not share in current superstitions, he had no respect for established institutions, and he scorned the conventions of feudalism and romance. His poem shows in the highest degree, in spite of the looseness of its plan, the faculty of keen observation, of lucid reasoning and exposition, and it entitles him to be considered the greatest of French medieval poets. ”

“ THE MORAL AND APPLICATION OF FABLES.
'Come, sir, lend it your best ear.'
Ben Jonson: Love Freed.
Thus La Fontaine: [10] 'The fable proper is composed of two parts, of which one may be termed the body and the other the soul. The body is the subject-matter of the fable and the soul is the moral.'
On the origin of the added morals to fables, Mr. Joseph Jacobs [11] has the following appropriate remarks: 'The fable is a species of the allegory, and it seems absurd to give your allegory, and then give in addition the truth which you wish to convey. ”

“ We have regarded them as fables, but there was never a fable that did not arise out of truth—not, of course, the outside truth of facts, but from that inward truth of the life and thought of a people, which is what really matters. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Almighty God, as has been said, has given us reason to distinguish truth from falsehood, imposture from revelation, delusion from inspiration; and when we quit that light we must wander through endless mazes and dark labyrinths, and ramble where-ever fancy, imagination, or fraud leads us. ”

“ And in truth two Things do compose it, which are as it were its two essential Parts. The one is Truth, which serves as a Foundation to it; and the other is Fiction, which Allegorically disguises this Truth, and gives it the Form of a Fable.
The Truth lies conceal'd; and is that piece of Morality the Poet would teach us. The Romans made use of this very Expression, when they said to [3] Teach Fables and Tragedies, instead of saying to Act and Represent them. The Fiction is the Action or the Words, whereby these Instruction are veil'd. ”

“ For all those which they mention by name, in which each lied, are read in those books in which not only words but many deeds of a figurative meaning are recorded, because it was also in a figurative sense that they were done. But in figures that which is spoken as a seeming lie, being well understood, is found to be a truth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But, however mingled and marred, the inevitable truth is imbedded in all the forms of fable, and, under an invariable law of mind, the inspirations of fancy correspond in essentials to the oracles of revelation, just because human nature is one, and its relations to all truth are fixed and universal. ”

“ The stage has been reached which discerns fact from fable; the myths which to an earlier age seemed the highest embodiment of truth, are now mere graceful ornaments, or at most faint images of hidden realities. ”

“ Why did history degenerate into fable? Why did words lose their power of expression? Why were ages of external greatness and magnificence attended by all the signs of decay in the human mind which are possible? ”

“ Where the greatest pains have been lavished on that sort of research, little knowledge has been gained; and the most diligent inquirers have been compelled either to confess that they were baffled, or rather than own their disappointment, to substitute fable for fact, and pass the fictions of imagination for historical truths. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How false are all the ancient and modern allegories, invented to afflict man with the knowledge that his days are rapidly passing away! How foolish is that wisdom that mourns over our fugitive years as being nothing but a few short minutes! I would give all my fortune to be able to write the Hora Fugit of the poet, and offer for the first time to man these two words as an axiom of immutable truth. ”

“ If the gospel be, what they say it is, a cunningly devised fable, which has its origin, not in the records of truth, but in the invention of man, it is a fable which is eminently conducive to human happiness; and I should consider that man my enemy, who would even attempt to expose its fallacy. ”

“ How many Experiments have been made in the Memory of Man, both in Religion, and in State, to mend Matters, upon pretence that they were Uneasie, by making them Intolerable, And whence is This, but from a Mistaken Opinion of the Present, and as False a Judgment of the Future! ”

“ We see, as knowledge dawns upon it, truth and error strangely commingled; here, a bright spot illuminated by truth-and there, one darkened and distorted by error; and the state of such a soul may be compared to a landscape at early dawn, where the sun is seen superbly gilding some objects, and causing others to send forth their lengthened, distorted, and sometimes hideous shadows. ”

“ Let him who reads forgive the intrusion of a dream into a history of fact. But it came so home to me—I saw it all so clear in a moment, as it were; and, besides, who shall say what proportion of fact, past, present, or to come, may lie in the imagination? What is imagination? Perhaps it is the shadow of the intangible truth, perhaps it is the soul’s thought. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It was, indeed, an axiom unhesitatingly enunciated and frequently repeated by their writers, that "there are many truths with which it is useless for the people to be made acquainted, and many fables which it is not expedient that they should know to be false." ”

“ The fable moves on the plane of the prudential virtues, the parable on the plane of the higher self-forgetting virtues. Because of that difference there is in the parable "no jesting nor raillery at the weakness, the follies, or the crimes of men." All is deeply earnest, befitting its high spiritual point of view. ”

“ The truth is always divine. What difference does it make whether the one who utters it be human or [pg. 115] divine, bond or slave, Æsop or Marcus Aurelius? the truth remains the same. A fable is only another name of a parable. ”

“ I suppose that the fable is simply fancy’s method of the great fact, and that its doctrinals are the natural intuitives and inevitable theory of the human mind concerning the mystery of life, the great epochal experiences of the human family, their final fortunes, and the interests and sympathies of other worlds included; for such conceptions as these are general and common among all men. ”

“ At the first glance of the eye they seize the false shade, the confusion of ideas or of words; they redress at once the illusive perspective created by the mirage of a lying style. The fascinations of error excite in them only a smile of pity or of contempt. ”

“ The first requisites in a healthy, well-developed Imagination are truth and distinctness. To those who deem Imagination but another name for fiction and falsehood, it may seem a contradiction in terms to talk of a true Imagination; but it is not so. Works of fiction charm us always in proportion as they seem true, and it is the morbid Imagination only that delights in falsehood. We sometimes see persons who, without apparent intention of falsehood, seem incapable of speaking the truth. ”

“ I said nothing of the innumerable and one would think inimitable, traits of nature and sincerity in the narrative of those who record these miracles, and which, if simulated by such liars, would be almost a miracle itself; a narrative, in which majestic indifference to human criticism is everywhere exhibited ”

“ Could I bring myself to be false to my principles as a scribe, and draw upon my fancy for my facts, and, through a prostitution of my art, so sickly o'er my plot with the pale cast of realism as to hoodwink my readers into believing what I know to be false, the task were easy. ”

“ Consider now the spreading gospel of despair, and marvel at the power of words—noises in the air, marks upon paper. Let us wonder to see how little wit is needed to twist and distort truth that it may set forth a lie. ”

“ If you wish to know the spiritual fact, you can Truth by inversion discover it by reversing the material fable, be the fable pro or con, — be it in accord with your preconceptions or utterly contrary to them. ”

“ In the justifying of the paradox, in the extricating of the real truth from the apparent falsehood of the statement, in the answer to the appeal made here to the imagination,—an appeal and challenge which, unless it be responded to, the proverb must remain unintelligible to us,—in all this there is a process of mental activity, oftentimes so rapidly exercised as scarcely to be perceptible, yet not the less carried on with a pleasurable excitement. ”

“ The people choose pleasing fables, which do not disturb them in their sins, rather than the reproving, searching declarations of the word of God. They love to be deceived by the teachings of false prophets, and “say to the seers, See not; and to the prophets, Prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ To seduce their souls he invented a fable which, although not so ingenious as the myths wherewith we have surrounded the spirits of our disciples of old, could, nevertheless, influence those feebler intellects which are to be found everywhere in great masses. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I still possess notes of the cogitations of these solitary evenings, ample enough to show that they were extraordinary combinations of the false and the true; but I at the same time hold them sufficiently in memory to remember, that I scarce, if at all, distinguished between what was false and true in them at the time. The literature of almost every people has a corresponding early stage, in which fresh thinking is mingled with little conceits, and in which the taste is usually false, but the feeling true. ”