The fable is a very old type of narrative, so old that critics are not sure of the place of its origin. Some think that it rose at the court of Crœsus with Æsop and spread eastward and westward. Others maintain that it came from India to the court of the Lydian king, and was adopted by Æsop, the king's state orator, as a most convenient device for impressing political lessons on a restless people in a scattered empire. Others say that there never was a man Æsop at all. But legend goes into detail to the effect that this ancient politician was once a slave and that he rose from his servile condition to be the counsellor of kings by the sheer force of his brains and an appreciation of practical problems (much as our self-made men of today have risen). Once even, when sent as a royal messenger to a rebellious and distant part of the empire, he quelled a mob and saved his own life by his ready wit in telling a story and applying the moral. He wrote nothing himself, legend goes on to admit, but he scattered his practical narratives far and wide, and they were finally collected as a distinct species of literature.
Other early fabulists
Whatever the truth of the legend may be, it is certain that there were in the Greek language early collections of fables called "Æsop." More than three hundred years before Christ, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle translated stories from "Æsop." Plutarch and Lucian, in the second century after Christ, remade them. In the thirteenth century Marie de France versified a hundred of them, using an old English source which we cannot now find. She called her collection Ysopet, or "Little Æsop." Finally in 1447, Planudes, a monk of Constantinople, put forth in prose a collection of about three hundred stories, which bears the name of "Æsop."
Hitopadesa and Panchatantra
The East never stopped to cavil about the source of fables. It has always loved the type. The Hindoos have two very ancient Sanscrit collections of fable-like discourses—the "Panchatantra" (Five Books), written in prose, and the "Hitopadesa" (Friendly Instruction), in verse. These differ from ordinary sets of fables in having the principle of connection throughout and in being, instead of mere brief tales, rather romantic and dramatic dialogues and expositions designed as text-books for the instruction of princes and those called to govern. Many selections, however, have been taken out, translated, modified, and used either as whole stories or as elements of larger ones.
Reynard the Fox and beastiaries
The very widely read and extensively translated eleventh century "Reynard the Fox" is a beast-epic, and not a fable in the technical sense of the term. As likewise the bestiaries are not fables. Those quaint medieval collections of false lore, modeled probably on some earlier Greek or Latin physiologus, were meant as doctrinal expository allegories rather than zoological treatises or than narratives which would fall within our present classification. Yet they are allied to this group in that they are symbolic and didactic and permit unnatural natural history.
Some more writers of fables
There have always been men who wrote of their own times original satires in the form of fables, exposing vice and folly. Phædrus, a freedman of Augustus, wrote five such books in the reign of Tiberius. Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Poggio knew and used the type. The greatest name in modern literature in connection with the fable is that of the Frenchman Jean de la Fontaine, who lived at the court of Louis Fourteenth. He expressed in exquisite verse-narrative very high social maxims. Many of our finest well-known fables are paraphrases of his lines. His own favorite was the "Oak and the Reed." He is supposed to have drawn his inspirations from Phædrus. Our own English writers, Gay and Pope, Addison and Prior, Steele and Dodsley, Moore, Goldsmith, Cowper, and others, wrote fables both in prose and verse. Indeed, worthy old Henryson, of "Robin and Makyne" fame, wrote in the fifteenth century a book of "Morall Fables of Esope the Phrygian" in Chaucerian stanzas. One of these poems he calls the "Uplondish Mous and the Berger Mous." Kriloff, the Russian fabulist, who died in the middle of the nineteenth century, disputes the highest place with La Fontaine in the minds of many critics, especially for his originality. A twentieth century humorous set of rational apologues is George Ade's "Fables in Slang."
The popular "Uncle Remus" stories are negro animal-myths rather than fables. Though Kipling's first "Jungle Book" narratives are in effect sui generis, they belong with fable typically if anywhere, as the unnatural very natural beast philosophy evinces. "His Majesty's Servant," the last of the volume, is easily classified. Some of the later tales are animal-myths, however—to wit, "How Fear Came" and "How the Camel Got His Hump;" and some, like "The Miracle of Purun Bhagat," are legends; but the talk and actions of the animals in all are fable-wise. The French, it seems, have lately pushed the type the farthest, though in a logical direction. They have retained the animal talk and the satire, but have cast away the narrative. Under the patronage of Rostand, Sir Chanticler has come before the footlights. This play happens to be an anomalous union of the two old distinct meanings of the word "fable"—one, the undelying story of a drama; the other, a symbolic, usually satiric, didactic tale.