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The popular traditions of the simpler peoples recognize a certain community of nature between man, brute animals, and even plants; and this serves to explain why the apologue or fable, which ascribes the power of speech and the faculty of reason to birds, quadrupeds, insects, flowers, and trees, is one of the earliest forms of literary composition.
In the apologue of the Three Reverences in Meister the master indulges in humanitarian rhapsody and, unlike his pupil, verges on sentimental paradox, declaring through the lips of the Chief in that imaginary pedagogic province which here and there closely recalls the New Atlantis that we must recognise "humility and poverty, mockery and despite, disgrace and suffering, as divine nay, even on sin and crime to look not as hindrances, but to honour them, as furtherances of what is holy."
But though the French Revolution is not to be accepted as historical authority, it is profoundly stimulating and instructive, when we look on it as a lyrical apologue. It is an historical phantasmagoria which, though hardly more literally true than Aristophanes' Knights or Clouds, may almost be placed beside these immortal satires for its imagination, wisdom, and insight.
Their voyage was full of danger as they slowly retraced their way along the track by which they reached the memorable Ice Haven, once more doubling the Cape of Desire and heading for the Point of Consolation landmarks on their desolate progress, whose nomenclature suggests the immortal apologue so familiar to Anglo-Saxon ears.
And in my opinion this sort of writing and composition is of the same species as the fables they call the Milesian, nonsensical tales that aim solely at giving amusement and not instruction, exactly the opposite of the apologue fables which amuse and instruct at the same time.
While an inspector of the Beaux-Arts, who had hurried to the spot, with his uniform all awry, and bald to the middle of his back, explained to Mohammed the apologue of "The Dog and the Fox," as told in the catalogue, with this moral: "Suppose that they meet," and the note: "The property of the Duc de Mora," the bulky Hemerlingue, puffing and perspiring beside his Highness, had great difficulty in persuading him that that masterly production was the work of the lovely equestrian they had met in the Bois the day before.
And had he presumed to exact it on pretense of defending them, would he not have immediately received the answer in the apologue? What worse treatment can we expect from an enemy? It is therefore past dispute, and indeed a fundamental maxim of political law, that people gave themselves chiefs to defend their liberty and not be enslaved by them.
In the absence of history, we must fall back on that branch of hypothetics which is known as prehistoric science. We must reconstruct the Romance of the First Radical from the hints supplied by geology, and by the study of Radicals at large, and of contemporary savages among whom no Radical reformer has yet appeared. In the following little apologue no trait of manners is invented.
It is said that he had, artistically, the allegorizing temperament, and he in fact did use all those forms of imagery the fable, apologue, parable which belong to this mode of presentation; but in his most effective work the allegory is more subtly embodied, it exists in suggestion, and its appeal is as much emotional as didactic.
In the apologue of Dives and Lazarus the dead appear still in their human forms and talk to each other across the gulf, apparently narrow, which divides the abode of the damned from that of the blessed. This clearly is the work of imagination.
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