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Updated: June 8, 2025
A hearty laugh followed this satire of La Fontaine's, and the duchess indulged in so much mirth thereat, that her eyes sparkled like the brilliants on her person, and her cheeks flushed until they rivalled the deepest hues of her pink dress. "Go on, go on, fabulist!" cried Marianna, laughing.
Whence, then, arose the errors of his tale? Less excusably than La Fontaine, the Greek fabulist wrote of the Cigale of the books, instead of interrogating the living Cigale, whose cymbals were resounding on every side; careless of the real, he followed tradition.
They howl, and answer: Faithful she is, but she forsakes: And fond, yet endless woe she makes: And fair! but with this curse she's cross'd; To know her not till she is lost! "Then the doleful party march off in single file solemnly, and the fabulist pursues: 'She hath a palace in the West: Bright Hesper lights her to her rest: And him the Morning Star awakes Whom to her charmed arms she takes.
We have to fall back upon conjecture, as our fabulist does when he has nothing more substantial to work with.
Surely the peacock, with its incomparable parade of glorious colour and the scannel voice of it issuing forth, as in mockery, from its painted throat, must, like my landlady's butterflies at Great Missenden, have been invented by some skilful fabulist for the consolation and support of homely virtue: or rather, perhaps, by a fabulist not quite so skilful, who made points for the moment without having a studious enough eye to the complete effect; for I thought these melting greens and blues so beautiful that afternoon, that I would have given them my vote just then before the sweetest pipe in all the spring woods.
To jump at conclusions on no other authority than their own ignorant assumption, and to Deify errors on no other authority than their own heated imagination, has in all ages been the practice of Theologians. Of that practice they are proud, as was the mouse of our Fabulist. Clothed in no other panoply than their own conceits they deem themselves invulnerable.
But the fabulist now seeks analogies where before he merely sought humorous situations. There will be now a logical nexus between the moral expressed and the machinery employed to express it. The machinery, in fact, as this change is developed, becomes less and less fabulous.
'Might always has the best of the argument, said La Fontaine, to the great scandal of the peace-lovers. The exigencies of verse, rhyme and rhythm, carried the worthy fabulist further than he intended: he meant to say that, in a fight between mastiffs and in other brute conflicts, the stronger is left master of the bone. He well knew that, as things go, success is no certificate of excellence.
Moreover, there lay, perhaps, at the bottom of this primitive sort of fable, a humanity, a tenderness of rough truths; so that at the end of some story, in which vice or folly had met with its destined punishment, the fabulist might be able to assure his auditors, as we have often to assure tearful children on the like occasions, that they may dry their eyes, for none of it was true.
It was the fashion at one time to have dwarfs noted for their wit and wisdom. Philos of Cos, tutor of Ptolemy Philadelphus, was a dwarf, as were Carachus, the friend of Saladin; Alypius of Alexandria, who was only 2 feet high; Lucinus Calvus, who was only 3 feet high, and aesop, the famous Greek fabulist. Later in the Middle Ages and even to the last century dwarfs were seen at every Court.
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