[12] Essay: 'Of Books.'
CHAPTER IV.
FABULISTS AS CENSORS.
'Mark, now, how a plain tale shall put you down.'
Shakespeare: King Henry IV.
Fabulists as censors have always been not only tolerated, but patronized and encouraged, even in the most despotic countries, and when they have exposed wickedness and folly in high places with an unsparing hand. Æsop among the ancients, and Krilof amongst the moderns, are both striking examples of this. The fables of antiquity may indeed be truly said to have been a natural product of the times in which they were invented. In the early days, when free speech was a perilous exercise, and when to declaim against vice and folly was to court personal risk, the fable was invented, or resorted to, by the moralist as a circuitous method of achieving the end he desired to reach—the lesson he wished to enforce. The entertainment afforded by the fable or apologue took off the keen edge of the reproof; and, whilst the censure conveyed was not less pointed and severe, the device of making the humbler creatures the scapegoat of human weakness or vice mollified its bitterness. The very indirectness of the fable had the effect of making the sinner his own accuser. Whom the cap fitted was at liberty to don it.
Phædrus, in the prologue to his third book, thus gives his view of the origin and purpose of fables:
'Here something shortly I would teach
Of fables' origin. To reach
The potent criminal, a slave
To beasts and birds a language gave.
Wishing to strike, and yet afraid,
Of these his instruments he made:
For all that dove or lamb might say,
Against them no indictment lay.'[13]