La Fontaine

Prof S. Jagadisan

“A tale which holds children from play and old men from the chimney corner.”

According to Plato, Socrates while waiting for his death sentence to be carried out, received a message repeatedly from the Gods. The substance of the message was that he should apply himself to music before his death. He interpreted music to mean poetry which contains the elements of harmony (words falling sweetly on the ear) and fiction. He spent the last moments of his life rendering Aesop’s fables into verse, since he found in them, besides the element of fiction, the element of truth.

A fable of Aesop narrates a single incident meant to teach a lesson for the wise, proper conduct of life. The characters are mostly animals and birds endowed with speech and qualities characteristic of human beings. The ass is stupid, the fox cunning, the lamb innocent and helpless, the peacock proud etc. The animals and birds are symbolic representations of different types of human beings. Aesop’s fables are an indirect, disguised description of and commentary on human situations and human character.

Jean De La Fontaine (1621-95), the French poet and dramatist, based his fables on those of Aesop. His “Contes et Nouvelles” appeared in 1664. It was a collection of tales in the manner of fabilaux. Fabilaux (singular fabilau) are short amusing tales, often bawdy and satirical, about women, the clergy and marriage. The jealous, suspicious, stupid, miserly husband, the clever mischievous rogue, the braggart, the unfaithful wife and the corrupt monk are the stock characters.

Fontaine’s Fables were published between 1668-1694. He said that animal fables appeal to different age groups for different reasons. The children enjoy the story. The connoisseur appreciates the narrative art. The grownups respond to the reflections on life and character found in them. The apologue (fable), said Fontaine, is composed of two parts – one the body and the other the soul. The body is the fable, the story part and the soul is the moral underlying it. The moral may be explicit or implicit. The fable may be regarded as an “acted out moral”. “They (the fables) instruct us in the different properties and characters of animals, and thereby in our own as well, since we are an epitome of all that is good and evil in the non-rational creatures” (from La Fontaine’s Preface).

Fontaine’s collection has 239 fables in verse form divided into twelve books. The characters are, besides the animals, figures from Greek legend – Jupiter, Mercury, Ulysses, etc. The focus is always on the moral. “I use the animals to teach mankind”. (Fontaine). “Aesop’s fables which are pretty allegories stealing under the formal tales of beasts, make many, more beastly than beasts, begin to hear the sound of virtue from those beasts”. (Philip Sidney).

The moral stated at the beginning is followed by the illustrative fable or it is drawn at the end of the fable. The fables are not concerned with abstract truths. They provide maxims for practical, everyday life. “It is unwise to judge an adversary by his size”. “Even the mightiest may need the help of the lowliest”. “An astronomer measuring the stars, may fall into the ditch”. “It is perilous to be a copy cat”. “Circumstances alter cases”. “Peace in itself is a good thing, but not with a perfidious foe”. “Be careful of a silent foe. The noisy crowd maybe ignored”. “Do not open your mouth, when you should keep it shut”. “A flatterer thrives at the expense of the listener”. Many such basic, useful lessons (which we often tend to forget) are driven home in the fables.

Each fable is a miniature human drama. There is a delightful, meaningful mingling of two worlds – the human and the animal. The language is simple, direct and free from rhetorical flourish. The fables appeal at once to the young and the old. Is not every adult also a child?

(La Fontaine’s Fables: Translated into English verse by Sir Edward Marsh: Every Man’s Library)