SOURCE: Margaret Blount, "Folklore and Fable," in Animal Land: The Creatures of Children's Fiction, William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1975, pp. 23-41.

[In the following excerpt, Blount compares the Aesopic fable to folktale and fairytale, and describes the effect that illustrating fables has on the interpretation of a fable.]

'Long ago, when the animals could speak.' The golden age is somewhere in the past—perhaps in Eden or before the Flood, perhaps nearer, just beyond the memory of the oldest story teller; and in that time the gulf between animals and men had not been opened, the distinctions were not so sharp, magic was all about. As youthful things and creatures are always more alike than adult ones, as seeds are always more similar than plants and animals that grow more like themselves and so more different from each other every day, so in tales that belong to this youthful time animals and people were more alike, could communicate, have equal stature and often a similar moral life.

Folklore and myth bring animals nearer to men while fables and satire, while apparently doing the same thing, do the opposite; they are divisive and put animals in their place—further off.

The folklore story abounds in talking animals, clever animals that have an ambiguous or helpful role, or even appear to have private lives and families on the human model while co-existing with human masters, owners, or acquaintances. No one knows the origins of such stories, apart from the obvious racial strains which make a Japanese story different from an African, Danish, Scottish or English one. Talking animals seem to be as old as Man; and folklore tales read like Man's remote dreams, related by someone with dramatic and narrative flair but little imagination. Things are seldom described, they just are so, in a bright shadowless world just beyond the present where anything can happen and it may be any time at all. As large as life and quite as natural the animals come and go, changing their shapes and offering help—or vengeance—setting up home together like the Mouse, The Bird and The Sausage, working in the kitchen like Tittymouse and Tattymouse, usually on friendly terms with humans. Function and character can become delightfully, mysteriously, blurred. In such a story as 'All Gone' (English Fairy Tales, Joseph Jacobs collection, 1890) which concerns a friendship between a cat and a mouse, the cat uses as an excuse for its absence, 'I have a favourite cousin who has brought a small handsome son into the world, and I have been asked to be his godmother'; yet what the pair actually do is steal butter, which is animal and natural.

On the edge of life the animals are there. Reading these tales you feel that if you could go back far enough, you might have met a witch hare or a talking horse or cow; or joined the animals by being turned into one, or earned their help in impossible tasks imposed by kings or magicians such as picking up grains of sand, or choosing the right princess. Such animals are much nearer to the present climate than one imagines, from the pantomime Puss in Boots (who has changed his shape for the occasion) to Brer Rabbit, who is life-like in the same way as Paddington the bear, almost true, somewhere, as long as you don't look too closely. There is not always an obvious moral either, but usually a certain rough justice, plenty of cruelty, deaths, mutilations and revenge. The animals talk quite naturally, answering humans back and being accepted as semiequals. The cunning ones, cats and foxes, often outwit humans and the more favoured ones, dogs and horses, are not usually as intelligent—perhaps because humans, who made the stories, feared them less. Sometimes the animal kingdom is allowed—as a sort of holiday—power over the human one and a turn at having the upper hand—a recurrent theme of animal vengeance, from 'The Travelling Musicians' to Hitchcock's The Birds (based on the Daphne du Maurier story), perhaps prompted by something ever present in the human psyche; guilt at what Man has done to animals made deeper by the knowledge that animals can never 'win'. But such serious themes, leading in the end to the favourite satiric device that animals are morally superior to Man, as in Swift, or Erich Kästner's The Animals' Conference are not as common as simple comedy and magic transpositions. Until the Brothers Grimm made them respectable, folk tales were regarded, perhaps, as being rather on the level of comics—regretted by the Wife of Bath who blamed the clergy for suppressing them, compared unfavourably with Aesop and his obvious morals.

The classic 'fairy' tales are adult embellishment of folklore written in the late seventeenth century when the urbanity of the times allowed a greater toleration of fanciful tales with no particular moral uplift—though right is always rewarded and wrong punished. The Contes de Perrault are courtly romances, modified and embellished from their folklore origins, sometimes beautiful, like Madame de Villeneuve's Beauty and the Beast, or Madame d'Aulnoy's The White Cat; but often spoiled by complication. Animal help and the disguised human are favourite themes. The behaviour of the cat in Puss in Boots is that of a human in a cat's skin. He advances his master's fortune so that he wins the princess and the kingdom. He is the Clever Servant, and has all the initiative and all the ideas; he can order the peasants about, outwits the ogre and ends by enjoying his share of his master's good luck. The Beast, or the Frog Prince, are more obviously human—but, in his way, so is the Wolf in Red Riding Hood. Perrault makes this even more clear by his rhymed moral (A. E. Johnson's translation):

All wolves are not of the same sort;
There is one kind with an amenable disposition
Neither noisy, nor hateful, nor angry,
But tame, obliging and gentle,
Following the young maids
In the streets, even into their homes.
Alas! Who does not know that these gentle wolves
Are of all creatures the most dangerous.

The fairy tales of Hans Andersen are an even further development, with animal servants (The Tinder Box) and enchanted humans (The Ugly Duckling) given greater depth because their moral, and meaning, is not explicit.

A very old and rather different type of story based on animal folklore is the Beast Fable—the Animal Society theme where animals have taken the place of humans and act out human dramas. Reynard the Fox is the most famous, existing in many versions and printed by Caxton three years after The Canterbury Tales and before Aesop, Grimm's 'The Tomtit and the Bear' is a good example, dealing with an animal war in which a Fox is a valuable general. In Reynard the Fox, many strains and ideas have been developed into an animal epic in which animals are characters in a romance cycle, with plots, sub-plots, heroism, deception, trickery, humour, triumphs, victories, battles and death. In its time, the vogue for Reynard was enormous, but as entertainment for adults the style is quite dead however 'Dogland' 'Babar' and Finn Family Moomintroll are very-much-removed relations.

Aesop's Beast Fables, tongue-in-cheek human substitutions, have always been in favour. Perhaps from Caxton's time onwards, they have been regarded as the right books to give to children, recommended by educationists from Locke onwards. They are part of most people's early experience and are the very roots of that kind of humanisation which turns animals into facets of human character, and many writers have changed and revived them. Animals are here 'used' rather than presented and they point the way directly to those moral and satirical tales which were intended, from Swift to Orwell, to show the human race how it ought to behave.

The history of animal stories through these three strains—folklore, fable and romance—is one of growing seriousness; folklore animals are on the whole, a much gayer lot than those in later versions of Aesop. Perhaps the best folklore animal, and certainly the most famous, is Brer Rabbit. Though later in time than the Reynard cycle or Aesop, in treatment and essence he is earlier and more primitive and has the genuine amoral wily innocence that fairytale animals lack. Hans Andersen sometimes leaves one full of an odd, cold sadness, however delicate the allegory and beautiful the image; compared with this, Grimm's folklore tales are like tomato sauce out of a bottle, and Brer Rabbit comes out of the same jar, full of humour and rather undeserved retribution, of which Uncle Remus offers no explanation except that it was so, in the old days when the animals could talk. These African stories (Uncle Remus, Joel Chandler Harris, 1880) modified and translated into an American setting, have one or two Aesop themes such as 'The Tortoise and the Hare', The Wolf and the Lamb', The Dog and the Meat', transformed and improved on, brought to life—the folklore version being a jollier one than the fable; in 'The Tortoise and the Hare' Brer Terrapin defeats Brer Rabbit, not because the rabbit does not try, but by posting various identical members of his own family along the route and at the winning post; and in the 'Bullfrog and the Bear' (Aesop's 'Wolf and Lamb') the Bullfrog finally escapes, using a 'briar patch' ruse—the Lamb in Aesop is devoured….

The moral: that is the sombre kernel for which the animals are a covering device. Aesop, the oldest and most influential animal story teller of all, used the attractive power of animals and narrative to get at his audience in a peculiar way, and the method has been seized on, enlarged, used and copied until, in the last century, the animal moral tale becomes almost wearisome. The genius of Aesop was to use the animal as a fixative, in an unforgettable way.

Prudence pays better than greed; or, it is better to keep what one possesses than to lose it while trying to gain the unattainable. This is easy to say but horribly cumbersome to imagine. ' A man's reach should not be greater than his grasp' is easier. Easier still is 'a bird in hand is worth two in the bush', which brings with it a Bewick picture of a man with a gun and two dogs and a pheasant; most brains supply pictures which fix abstractions. What Aesop did was to reverse the process so that the image comes first, and so no one forgets the dog dropping the bone to try to grasp the one that is only a reflection. Aesop well knew the power of a story and the graphic, simplified short cut that animals made towards human attention; if the same story began with a man crossing a bridge with a piece of meat in his hand all sorts of other considerations would enter, the least of which being why the man should be silly enough to mistake his reflection for reality. In pointing this sort of moral, human psychology is irrelevant. It is only later that one begins to be dubious and to consider that greed does not pay—not because generosity is better, but because, in a harsh world, prudence is best. The whole thing can be taken two stages further by an artist like Charles Bennet (Aesop's Fables rendered into Human Nature, 1866) who draws not only the animal agent but the moral too; a valet with a dog's head is shown rejecting a simple parlourmaid in order to yearn after 'The Quality' who are having a soirée in the next room.

Aesop's fables have none of the humour of folklore, none of the warm satisfaction of fairy tale—the sudden turn of fortune before the happy ending. They have surface justice or an amused shrug. They have a resemblance to folk tale in their short, plain, factual lack of light and shade, but there the likeness ends. Aesop's animals, behaving not like animals at all but as propositions in Euclid, or, as G. K. Chesterton suggests, pieces in games of chess, are interesting because they are the very beginning of that typecasting which animals have found so difficult to shake off since; but there is a flatness about the stories, a cynical assessment of human nature at its lowest, an acknowledgement that often the good and innocent are duped and that good works often pay, not because they are good, but because nature is sometimes arranged that way.

The people in Aesop are non-figures, the farmer, a man, a boy, an old widow; their interaction with the animals does not seem to belong to any golden age when the animals could speak and people understand, and even Mr McGregor, shadowy as he is, has more character. The people, like the animals, have to be ciphers. If they had any real, complex human attributes, all kinds of chemical reactions might set in and spoil the experiment. The tendency, on reading Aesop, has been to applaud, to remember, and lastly to add one's own moral, to decide perhaps that the Fox that lost the grapes was the most sensible beast ever. 'Some men, when they are too weak to achieve their purpose, blame the times,' says the Greek; but the story also tells one not to bother about what one cannot have. Roger 1' Estrange's Aesop, 1692, pictures the Fox 'turning off his disappointment with a jest', a kindly interpretation, equally valid, and Samuel Croxall in 1722 was uneasy about the grapes for a different reason—grapes did not grow wild in England and foxes did not like them anyway.

L'Estrange was doubtful about Aesop's moral values, and thought that they might be 'more dangerous than profitable'; but Locke, in his essay on education, 1690, had no doubts at all. Aesop was the best book to offer to children to encourage them to read; because it 'may afford useful reflections to a grown man; and if his memory retain them all his life after, he will not repent to find them there, among his manly thoughts and serious business. If his Aesop has pictures in it, it will entertain him much the better.'

Although Robert Henryson in 1570 and La Fontaine in 1651 are Aesop's most notable interpreters, his illustrators have given the fables a certain depth and ambiguity. Croxall's Aesop has Bewick's beautiful woodcuts which are full of animation, the animals as natural as life, and perhaps the Fox, jumping to reach the grapes is unnatural. If you give the Fox a top hat and a cane the story becomes different, and that is what later illustrators have done, helping too to fix the animal prototypes by showing the Lion to be proud, the Fox devious and crafty. Robert Dodsley's Aesop, 1771, is interesting for its preface, which suggests this very thing—that the animals in the stories should act and speak according to their 'true' natures, perhaps thus applying the 'finishing polish, with the appearance of nature, the effect of art' which was his design in making the lion proud, the owl to speak with 'pomp of phrase', the monkey a buffoon. Literary animals have been doing this ever since, and finding it impossible to take character parts except by wrenching themselves somewhat unhappily and being a Reluctant Dragon, a Cowardly Lion (Frank L. Baum) or a Stupid Fox that is always failing to catch Clever Polly.

Walter Crane's Aesop—1887—with 'Portable Morals Pictorially Pointed' has rather violent streak—foxes and wolves have ferocious snarls, lolling tongues, and there are realistic gin traps. The fables are neatly versified in limerick form with an appended and not always obvious moral, i.e. 'the Cock and the Pearl,' which is about irony (as is much of Aesop), is interpreted as 'If he ask for bread will ye give him a stone', which is an ironic statement about something quite different.

Ernest Griset's Aesop—1869—again shows that violent streak in Victorian illustration to an unpleasant degree. These pictures are to a present-day eye, unhappy; they appear to belong to that black, sinister, ragged, rather dirty-looking world that one imagines the industrial revolution at its worst to have been happening in, a sort of de-urbanised Doré place, coal-tip countryside. The animals are beautifully drawn apart from the period convention that always makes elephants look pneumatic and lions like angry colonels. One oddity is that Griset dresses the evil animals—wolves and foxes, and seldom the others, and, as always, never birds; it is as if we see ourselves always to be guilty, never innocent or virtuous. Scenes of slaughter and death abound; in 'The Eagle and the Fox' the Eagle is hideous, but equally so are its embryonic young fledglings. And Griset turns every character into an animal, i.e. in 'The Nurse and the Wolf', Nurse and baby look and behave like monkeys and are gratuitously ugly because they are wearing clothes. Oddest of all, but pointing to an interesting sympathy of this period, is Griset's treatment of insects. 'The Ant and the Grasshopper' have great charm. The Grasshopper has a mandoline slung at its back and it, and the Ants walk upright. The haymaking ants are as human as insects can be, leaning against the stack with their rakes, mopping their brows. Insects have not had much attention in more recent years. Perhaps Max Fleisher's Mr Bug goes to Town film cartoon, 1941¹ or Don Marquis' Archy and Mehitabel are the two most notable.

Far the most interesting illustrator of Aesop is Charles Bennet, whose Fables of Aesop translated into Human Nature, 1867, both dresses the animals completely and gives them a contemporary setting which is quite thought provoking, even now; though, in a sense, what he has done is to abolish the animal stereotype. The characters in Bennet are Victorian Londoners with animal heads on, i.e. in 'The Wolf and the Lamb', the Wolf is a Bill Sykes with neckerchief and knobkerry, the Lamb is frock-coated and top-hatted and is garotted with his own gold-studded collar. There never was anything comic about this story, but perhaps there is in Bennet's 'Ass in the Lion's skin'—the Ass is shown smoking in the Mess, pretending to be a Guards officer. Social observation is witty and exact and the applications unexpected. 'The Fox and the Crow' story is given a new dimension when the Crow is a rich window, the Fox a philanderer, the Cheese not shown or mentioned; and in 'The Fox and the Grapes' a vixen relates to her friend, a parrot, over the tea cups, the story of the man she did not marry. 'The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing' is a policeman, taking supper in the basement with the cook—a sheep. They are dining, ominously, off a leg of lamb.

These animals have a sinister, stylish elegance in keeping with Aesop's message and its worldly application; an ox's horns curl upwards forming the brim of his smart top hat, a crocodile's hide is also his fur-collared, crocodile skin coat, ending in a tail; he is dressed and not dressed, the clothes a part of him. This Aesop is indeed sophisticated. The reader needs to know what Aesop wrote, what animals are like, what the London of the sixties was like, and what civilisation has done to human nature and human ethics since then. Yet this art form, seen here at its finest, is a sort of spiritual dead end. If animals have a message for us now, it is a completely different one.

The tendency to add a Christian moral to Aesop has been as irresistible as the view taken, in the Bestiaries, that animals were specially created for man's edification in symbolic form. While Robert Henryson's Aesop, 1570, written in the reign of James III of Scotland has verse only comparable with Chaucer in its delightful gaiety and wry charm, it is the moral that is important:

And als the caus that thay first began
Wes to reprief the haill misleving
Of man, be figure of ane uther thing.

The Uplandis Mous and the Burges Mous (this is always the favourite fable for treatment; perhaps it owes its popularity to the enduring appeal of mice) converse formally, yet with natural human voices, in seven-line stanzas. The country Mouse has the sort of reality of any finicky adult justifying the delicacy of his appetite by blaming a weak stomach. After expressing disappointment and disgust in no uncertain terms

This burges Mous had lytill will to sing,
Bot hevilie scho kest hir browis doun,

looking, as well as feeling, glum. In the town, the Spencer interrupts their feasting; the country mouse is chased by the cat and swoons. One should be content 'with small possession', says Henryson. The moral is so obvious that this fable, were it new today, might be interpreted as a warning about changing one's environment too abruptly. But with 'The Rat and the Frog' ('The Paddock and the Mous') though the charm of the expression is made greater by dialect, age, and gentle, mock-heroic humour, the moral is Henryson's and not Aesop's.

Ane lytill Mous came till ane river syde:
Scho micht not waid, hir schankis wer sa schort;
Scho culd not swym, scho had na hors to ryde.

The Mous agrees to cross the river tied by the leg to the Paddock although greatly worried (and who would not be?) by the Frog's runkillit cheeks, hingand brows, loggerand legs and harsky hyde; after the Mous has quoted some Latin and the Frog sworn to Jupiter, they set off, the Frog plunges down, the Mous begins to drown 'till at the last scho cryit for ane preist'. In the end, a hawk eats them both. Aesop's moral is the one about justice and the biter being bit, Henryson's are twofold: don't trust fair words, and another more complicated 'Whereby the beistis may be figurate.' The Frog is man's body, the Mouse his soul, the water is the world, and the hawk, death. The charm, and the parable, co-exist, and point directly to the animal didactic stories of the nineteenth century.

Notes

¹ This story is, in its way, about ecology, or the unhappy effect on a community of insects of the building of a new city block. It was drawn by the creator of Popeye and Betty Boop, both of whom displayed hard shells and a galvanic activity comparable with Hoppity the Cricket and Miss Honey Bee in the insect film; and many animal cartoon films have the harsh knock for knock automatism of the insect world.