e lived, if he
did live, about the sixth century before Christ, in the time of that
Croesus whose story we love and suspect like everything else in
Herodotus. There are also stories of deformity of feature and a ready
ribaldry of tongue: stories which (as the celebrated Cardinal said)
explain, though they do not excuse, his having been hurled over a high
precipice at Delphi. It is for those who read the Fables to judge
whether he was really thrown over the cliff for being ugly and
offensive, or rather for being highly moral and correct. But there is
no kind of doubt that the general legend of him may justly rank him
with a race too easily forgotten in our modern comparisons: the race
of the great philosophic slaves. AEsop may have been a fiction like
Uncle Remus: he was also, like Uncle Remus, a fact. It is a fact that
slaves in the old world could be worshipped like AEsop, or loved like
Uncle Remus. It is odd to note that both the great slaves told their
best stories about beasts and birds.

But whatever be fairly due to AEsop, the human tradition called Fables
is not due to him. This had gone on long before any sarcastic freedman
from Phrygia had or had not been flung off a precipice; this has
remained long after. It is to our advantage, indeed, to realise the
distinction; because it makes AEsop more obviously effective than any
other fabulist. Grimm's Tales, glorious as they are, were collected by
two German students. And if we find it hard to be certain of a German
student, at least we know more about him than We know about a Phrygian
slave. The truth is, of course, that AEsop's Fables are not AEsop's
fables, any more than Grimm's Fairy Tales were ever Grimm's fairy
tales. But the fable and the fairy tale are things utterly distinct.
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. 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