[In the following essay, Baldwin informs the reader that the moral in the fables of the Spanish Aesop under consideration is usually presented as a negative warning of punishment in a direct statement outside the story directed toward peasants more often than toward the aristocracy.]

The first collection of fables to appear in Spain, made up primarily but not exclusively of fables attributed to Aesop, was printed at Zaragoza in 1489, and was given the title: La Vida del Ysopet con sus fabulas historiadas. This collection is available to us in a facsimile reproduction, with a prologue by Emilio Cotarelo y Mori, published by the Real Academia at Madrid in 1929. Although the Zaragoza edition is a translation of a volume printed in Germany, it occupies an important place in Spanish literary history for two reasons: first, it was probably one of the most widely read books of the time, judging from the large number of editions: second, it is the first known Spanish version of these fables, and served as model for a series of collections of Aesopic fables, having a popularity in Spain lasting almost down to the present time.

Cotarelo's valuable prologue is the lone twentieth-century study, and the only other detailed treatment is Alfred Morel-Fatio's "L'Isopo Castillan," which appeared in volume XXIII of Romania in 1894. The stories of the collection have been classified according to the Stith Thompson Motif Index by John E. Keller and James Johnson;¹ the most complete and up-to-date bibliographical work done on the volume appears in Michael Stern Pincus' An Etymological Lexicon of the Ysopete historiado, an unpublished doctoral dissertation of the University of North Carolina, 1961.

The fable bears stylistic resemblance to the most popular form of literary expression of the Middle Ages, the exemplum, a brief narration made for the purpose of illustrating in specific, concrete form the truth of an abstract moral expressed in more general terms. In like manner, the fable, an exemplum which usually employs animals as subjects rather than human beings, utilizes terse illustration to drive home the main point of an abstract principle (it should be understood that in stressing didacticism here we refer primarily to format, and intend no denial of the entertainment value of the fable).

There are two basic requirements for the successful fable: the physical events of the story must be based on characteristic traits and habits of the animals involved, and a logical connection must exist between those traits and some important abstract truth. In the common fable of the tortoise and the hare, for example, the traits are the slowness of the tortoise and the speed of the hare, and the facts of the narration have a clear relation with the abstract truth that persistent dedication to a cause can overcome the effects of unequal distribution of talent. The abstract truth must exist prior to the illustrative story, because the story is of interest only in that it illustrates the truth of the abstraction. On the other hand, the expression of the abstraction has no literary interest apart from its dramatic illustration by the facts of the story; the two are truly inseparable.

Most of the interesting traits and habits of the animal world had already been utilized in the most ancient of the Aesopic fables, composed by very astute observers of animal nature. Persistent efforts to invent different animal stories were made by the various composers of the 163 stories in the Ysopet, with the result that many of their fables were dull in subject matter, uninspired in plot, and tenuous in relation of story to moral (eventually their inventive efforts led them to extend the subject matter to include plants, inanimate objects, and human beings, just as writers of fables did in the Middle Ages and in antiquity).

Every story in this collection is told for the purpose of teaching the reader certain truths, with the possible exception of the well-known "Widow of Ephesus" story, which perhaps may be considered as lacking a moral, unless the antifeminism implicit in the tale (like such tales in the Disciplina Clericalis and the Libro de los enganos which attack the virtue of women) can be regarded as weakly moralistic. From the medieval collections of exempla down to Cervantes' novelas, the brief narration has no autonomous artistic existence; it always serves a larger purpose, to which the individual story is secondary in importance. In the italianate story, the larger purpose is fairly consistently to furnish entertainment during a period of time which otherwise promises to hold boredom for those present. In the medieval exemplum, the larger purpose is to illustrate a moral lesson; this tradition continues throughout the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, down to, and even through, the time of Cervantes. The morals of the exempla of Pedro Alfonso's Disciplina Clericalis are mostly not expressed, but they are clearly implied; many of the short stories of Cervantes carry the same kind of implicit moral (in the case of the stories in the text of the Quijote, the morals are explicit), and it was because of their didactic features, proceeding directly from the historical line of such stories, that Cervantes chose to call his short stories novelas ejemplares. The comments about the "larger purpose" refer to the general framework and format in which the stories are told. This does not mean that sober moralization pervades all of the stories; a story can be told ostensibly to illustrate a moral, while its real purpose is to entertain. It is now held by many scholars that the medieval exempla were didactic in form only, without any serious intent to teach, and that the tongue-in-cheek deference to didactic tradition constituted a part of the humorous appeal of the stories for the medieval audience. Scholars have traced this tongue-in-cheek tradition back from the medieval exempla to the tales related and written in Islam in the tradition of the Arabic adab, which can, in turn, be traced back to a similar tradition among the Persians and Hindus. It is not the purpose of this article to investigate the extent to which the stories in the Ysopet are soberly didactic or primarily recreational and entertaining, but further study along these lines is almost certain to yield interesting results.

Reasonable arguments can be made in support of the opinion that the Ysopet was directed toward the lower classes. Such an assertion is based in part on observa tion of the social level of the principal human characters in the fables; of the stories having as their subjects human beings, the overwhelming majority deals with peasants—farmers, shepherds, fishermen, charcoal makers, etc.

But the strongest supporting evidence lies within the morals themselves; even the most casual examination will reveal that the morals express truths of a type that would be of practical use to underlings, rather than to lords. Of the 163 stories, no less than thirty deal in some way with the admonition that one should accept his state in life and be satisfied with it. On the other hand, some nine or ten morals express the opinion that lords should always treat their inferiors with kindness and consideration. In the last section of the Ysopet, one story criticizes the wasteful recreation of the rich. Finally, there are many morals which preach the general theme that, if a person of low degree wishes to survive in a difficult world, he must be on guard against those who wish him evil and keep his wits about him.

The morals are without exception concerned with practical advice for getting along in life, often with overtones of stoicism highly appropriate and useful to those of low degree. Such morals express these opinions: reason is useless in the face of evil strength; don't fight when you can't win; endure suffering patiently; take the lesser of two evils; avoid evil company; always suspect a person who has done evil. The morals cited above have to do with defense against evil and represent an essentially negative point of view (the Golden Rule is expressed in negative form in several places, with words to the effect that one ought to refrain from doing evil to others, in order that others might likewise refrain from evil).

Since such morals as we have described above are concerned with precisely the same kind of subject matter treated in the proverbs of the people, and because glosses on proverbs in the form of illustrative stories were very popular later, it should be considered strange that the composers of the various morals should not have utilized that vast store of proverbs as a source of succinctly expressed practical morality. The still very popular Spanish proverb "Más vale pájaro en la mano que buitre volando" appears as the moral of one of the fables of Avianus,² but such an example, if not unique, is quite rare. We can also observe that the sort of homespun metaphor which is the very heart of the folk proverb is uniformly absent from the morals as they are expressed in the Ysopet.

In general, methods of expressing the moral are divided into two groups: direct statement outside of the story proper, and inclusion of the moral within the story, usually in the final speech of the character most concerned with the lesson. The latter alternative is by far the less satisfactory of the two alternatives, because it interferes with the unity of the action of the story.

There are many morals in the Ysopet illustrated by what are actually not stories at all, a feature shared by fabulistic lore of earlier ages, principally the Spanish Middle Ages. Number 11 of the first book (of the fables attributed to Aesop) can be completely summarized as follows: an ass made fun of a lion, but the lion declined to take vengeance, saying that he would not spoil his teeth on such "vana sangre"; there is really no story, and most of the narrative is devoted to the lion's statement of his refusal to take vengeance. A large number of other fables display a tenuous relation between the story and the illustrated moral: the normal story of the "dog in a manger" states as its moral that it is difficult to rid oneself of envy; another story tells of a man who both warms his hands and cools his drink by blowing on them, and the pertinent lesson is said to be that one should beware of two-faced people. Both of these examples can be seen to have some vague connection with their respective stories, but they are dull and colorless. This feature supports the views of scholars who emphasize the entertainment value of such collections; the misfit moral may even have contributed to the humor for the fifteenth century audience. Furthermore, such tenuous relations between story and moral were widespread in medieval literature.

The most vivid example of a misfit moral is the one applied to the story of the man who caught a weasel along with a number of rats, and determined to kill them all. The weasel's valid protests that he actually helped, not hurt the man were rejected on the grounds that it had not been the weasel's intention to help him. The man then proceeds to kill the weasel, and the moral lesson is that motives behind acts are of great importance.

There are several instances in which the composer of the story has committed artistic error in the construction of his fable. Two stories in the collection are told to illustrate the moral that weak and small persons frequently have exalted opinions of themselves. These fables tell of flies that brazenly threaten to bite a bald man and a mule, respectively; in each case the story ends with a speech to the effect that the fly is wrong to have such an exalted opinion of his own importance. The moral lesson would be much more forcefully taught, and the artistic interests of the story served, if in each case the fly were in actual fact punished for his impertinence; to have him only warned lacks the force necessary to the artistic success of the fable. This same general criticism that the narrative does not fulfill its obligation to the moral holds truefor the fable of the man who catches a small fish: the fish protests to the man that he is too small to do him any good, and says that the man should throw him back until he grows up, at which time the fish will come back and be caught again by the fisherman. The fisherman states that he is too smart to be taken in by such a ruse, and the story ends; the lesson would be much more dramatically communicated if the story had as its end the mocking laughter of the fish as he swam away. Then the moral, that one ought not to give up that which is certain for that which is doubtful, would fit much more smoothly into the literary unity of the fable.

Briefly, these are the points stressed here: that the morals are concerned with practical advice for getting along in the world; that they are mostly directed toward lower class people, and are usually expressed from a negative point of view, stressing the prospect of punishment for imprudent acts: that the morals are stated either within the story proper or outside it, with the former alternative being the less desirable, artistically; that the story-moral format is frequently only traditional and that serious didactic purpose is therefore not an absolute requirement for the fable; that among the many fables presented in the Ysopet many fail to fulfill both basic requirements (presentation of characteristic traits of the animals, and relation of those traits to some important abstract truth) and exhibit shortcomings in the form of poor construction and of dull, tenuous, or completely inapplicable morals.

Aside from the implications one finds in Cotarelo's history (cited in the first paragraph), the impact of the Ysopet on the literature of the Siglo de Oro and subsequent times has not to date received the attention it deserves. Detailed study of the fabulistic material found in the various literary genres—short stories, plays, novels, etc.—would certainly produce enlightening and valuable results.

Notes

¹Southern Folklore Quarterly, XXVIII, No. 2 (1954), 85-117.

² Latin poet of the 4th or 5th century A.D., author of 42 Aesopic fables.