Beastfable

Beast-fable, -tale, -story, or -saga, a name for any story in which the lower animals are represented as endowed with reason and speech. Such stories must have originated at a very early period in the development of the human race, when man saw nothing incongruous in attributing "discourse of reason" to the beasts of the field and to the objects of the chase. By observations and experience primitive man knew that the birds he snared and the beasts he shot possessed vital energy similar to that which animated him and his fellows, and that the flint-headed arrow which pierced and killed the enemy of his tribe dealt a similar fate to them. And since these lower animals lived a similar life to man, like him perished from hunger or were slain by violence, and also like him were seen in dreams, and therefore possessed some kind of soul, what more natural than to conclude that they shared his higher nature, and possessed faculties similar in kind if not in degree? Through this stage every race has passed in its progress from savagery to civilisation, and through it every child passes in the present day, though in the vast majority of cases the remembrance of such a stage is lost long before full mental vigour is reached. Most persons have seen a child playing with a cat or a clog, talking to it gravely, and positively puzzled by the fact that the beast did not obey the commands laid upon it, or reply to the questions put to it. Few, however, stay to ponder on such incidents; nevertheless, in the mental condition that renders such incidents possible is to be found the reason for the genesis and continued existence of the Beast-fable.

From the foregoing it will be seen that it is impossible to fix the origin in time or space of this form of literature, since it is, so to speak, the common property of races or individuals in a certain mental condition. Wherever any race is in this mental condition the Beast-fable pure and simple flourishes; when the race advances mentally the Beast-fable is gradually transformed into an apologue and fitted with a "moral," as in AEsop's fables. Sometimes it passes through a third stage and is spiritualised. The mendicant friars did this with such stories in the Middle Ages, and specimens may be seen in the Gesta Romanorum. As a sample of the first kind the following African story is abridged from Tylor: - "The great Engena-monkey offered his daughter to be the bride of the champion who should drink a whole barrel of rum. The elephant, the leopard, and the boar tasted the spirit, and retreated. Then the tiny Telenga-monkey, who had hidden thousands of his fellows in the long grass, came and took his first sip, and went away, sending another and another in his stead till the barrel was emptied, and then he walked off with the king's daughter. But the elephant and the leopard attacked him, and he took refuge in the top of the trees, vowing never more to live on the ground and suffer such violence and injustice." Traces of these stories may be found in the Scriptures. Two of the things which were "too wonderful" for Solomon - "the way of an eagle in the air, the way of a serpent upon a rock," apparently refer to stories which have not come down to us, though they may not improbably be connected with a legend about an eagle and a snake preserved in the cuneiform inscriptions of Assur-bani-pal's library. In Eccles. xi. 20 there is an allusion to the belief that some birds possess the power of speech - "a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter." This constantly appears in Oriental tales, and we ourselves still use the expression, "A little bird told me." But there are far more weighty examples to be quoted. In the 148th Psalm "beasts and all cattle, creeping things, and flying fowl" are invoked to "praise the Lord;" and in the Benedicite - which forms part of the liturgy of the Anglican and Roman Churches - the "whales and all that move in the waters," the "fowls of the air," and "beasts and cattle," are called on to "bless the Lord" and to "praise and exalt Him above all for ever." These last two instances suggest the thought that possibly primitive man may have "builded better than he knew" when he ascribed community of nature to man and the lower animals, especially when one remembers that one of the foremost evolutionists of the present day is professor at a Roman Catholic university (Louvain) and that the Bishop of Durham, in his recent book (Essays in the History of Religious Thought in the West), summarises with what a reviewer calls "indirect recommendation" the teaching of Origen as to the pre-existence of souls.