Analyzing Aesop
G K CHESTERTON
Continued from April 27
There are many elements of difference; but the plainest is plain
enough. There can be no good fable with human beings in it. There can be
no good fairy tale without them.
Aesop, or Babrius (or whatever his name was), understood that, for a
fable, all the persons must be impersonal.
They must be like abstractions in algebra, or like pieces in chess.
The lion must always be stronger than the wolf, just as four is always
double of two.
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Aesop |
The fox in a fable must move crooked, as the knight in chess must
move crooked. The sheep in a fable must march on, as the pawn in chess
must march on.
The fable must not allow for the crooked captures of the pawn; it
must not allow for what Balzac called “the revolt of a sheep” The fairy
tale, on the other hand, absolutely revolves on the pivot of human
personality. If no hero were there to fight the dragons, we should not
even know that they were dragons.
If no adventurer were cast on the undiscovered island—it would remain
undiscovered. If the miller’s third son does not find the enchanted
garden where the seven princesses stand white and frozen—why, then, they
will remain white and frozen and enchanted. If there is no personal
prince to find the Sleeping Beauty she will simply sleep. Fables repose
upon quite the opposite idea; that everything is itself, and will in any
case speak for itself.
The wolf will be always wolfish; the fox will be always foxy.
Something of the same sort may have been meant by the animal worship, in
which Egyptian and Indian and many other great peoples have combined.
Men do not, I think, love beetles or cats or crocodiles with a wholly
personal love; they salute them as expressions of that abstract and
anonymous energy in nature which to any one is awful, and to an atheist
must be frightful. So in all the fables that are or are not Aesop’s all
the animal forces drive like inanimate forces, like great rivers or
growing trees. It is the limit and the loss of all such things that they
cannot be anything but themselves: it is their tragedy that they could
not lose their souls.
This is the immortal justification of the Fable: that we could not
teach the plainest truths so simply without turning men into chessmen.
We cannot talk of such simple things without using animals that do not
talk at all. Suppose, for a moment, that you turn the wolf into a
wolfish baron, or the fox into a foxy diplomatist. You will at once
remember that even barons are human, you will be unable to forget that
even diplomatists are men.
You will always be looking for that accidental good-humour that
should go with the brutality of any brutal man; for that allowance for
all delicate things, including virtue, that should exist in any good
diplomatist. Once put a thing on two legs instead of four and pluck it
of feathers and you cannot help asking for a human being, either heroic,
as in the fairy tales, or un-heroic, as in the modern novels.
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