Beast-fables, stories in which animals play human parts, a widely-spread primitive form of literature, often surviving in more or less developed forms in the more advanced civilisations. No better example of its simplest form could be found than those stories of the negroes within the Southern States of America, which, through Harris's Uncle Remus, are now so well known to the reading public in England as well as America. The primitive natives of many parts of Africa still tell stories similar to these, and indeed they have acquired no very exalted notions of the inherent superiority of the human race, and admit without difficulty that the wisdom of the lower animals may be equal to their own. 'It is not a little curious,' says Sayce, 'to find that the chief home of the beast-fable should be Africa, and especially those backward tribes of Southern Africa whose languages contain in their clicks the bridge that marks the passage of inarticulate cries into articulate speech. It seems as if the same conservatism which has preserved the animal sounds out of which language was developed, has preserved also a sympathy with the animal world, a memory of the close ties which unite us with it. A striking instance of the naturalness of this form to the negro mind is seen in the fact that when the Vái tribe of Mandinguan negroes in Liberia had developed a system of writing (1830-40), their first essays in composition were rude fables about beasts. Even in the advanced civilisation of ancient Egypt, the beast-fable held an important place; indeed, it is not improbable that here it may have made its first appearance, and that its popularity may have been in large measure due to the deep respect of the ancient Egyptian for the unerring instinct of animals, which went side by side with the animal-worship that was so marked a characteristic of his religion. We find the 'Lion and the Mouse' in a papyrus dating from 1200-1166 B.C.—the days of Rameses III. (Rhampsinitus) or Hak On—not as a rude and early attempt, but in a finished form postulating a much more ancient origin. Sir Richard Burton points out that from Kemi, the Black-land, it was but a step to Phoenicia, Judæa, Phrygia, and Asia Minor, whence a ferry led over to Greece. Here the apologue found its populariser in Aisōpos, whose name, involved in myth, possibly connects with Aithiops. The fabulist's era may be taken as contemporary with Solon (570 B.C.), about a century after Psammetichus (Psamethik I.) threw Egypt open to the restless Greek. From Africa, too, the fable would spread eastwards, and find a new home in the second great focus of civilisation in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley; while in later days the conquests of Alexander and his successors Hellenised the eastern world, and carried with their victorious arms every form of literature that had been fostered by the western peoples. Whether or no we can accept this historical chain as explaining the transmission of the beast-fable, at least it must be admitted that it is highly reasonable as a theory, and finds here and there strange verification. Even the Lokman of Arabian and Persian fable has a more than superficial likeness to the Æsop of history in his ugliness and his servile condition.
To us the allegory in such fictions seems fundamental, but it was not so to the primitive mind. To the savage the beast-fable is not nonsense, for he ascribes to the lower animals the power of speech and a nature resembling his own, and believes readily in transmigration and metamorphosis. Savage mythology is full of metamorphoses, and these happen still as contemporary events in Samoa and Sarawak. The belief in the affinity between man and animals in which primitive man has so nearly anticipated the would-be conclusions of certain advanced evolutionists belongs even now to half mankind, and most students of comparative religion maintain that in the other half the worship of animals represented an earlier stage in the religious evolution. The Australians, Kamchadales, Polynesians, North-American Indians, Basques, and Transylvanian Gipsies at the present day tell beast-fables into which as yet no moral lesson has entered. They have not yet reached the stage which Grimm, with the contempt of the true folklorist, describes as 'fables thinned down to mere moral and allegory,' and 'a fourth watering of the old grapes of an insipid moral infusion.' Among the Zulus and Hottentots we find the same stories, informed with the true Æsopic humour. Indeed it is, as has been seen, among the Bushmen, that pure beast-fables still exist in their simplest and fullest form, and it is among them also that the art of drawing animals with considerable skill has been cultivated from time immemorial, as is evidenced by the rock-paintings of Southern Africa. In the Bushmen's beast-fables, the hare, as among the American negroes, the rabbit, plays much the same clever part as the fox in our European examples, and 'fables that illustrate the superior cunning of the hare can be traced,' says Sayce, 'from the Bari of Central Africa through Malagasy, Swahili, Kafir, and Hottentot, back to the Bushmen, where he is associated with what Dr Bleek calls "a most unpronounceable click," not otherwise found in the language.' But indeed we find the beast-fable in all parts of the world. Thus in Mr Gill's Myths and Songs from the South Pacific, a shark speaks and acts like a man, and Mr Ridley tells us the Australians ascribe human speech and action to the pelican and the musk-duck. The question need not now be raised whether these fables are really an indigenous native literature—it is sufficiently striking and significant to find here stories almost identical with those found among widely different people in widely distant regions. In our civilised world the animal-story lingered long after the moral beast-fable had become predominant. The crows of Æsop had croaked their wisdom through the medium of Babrius and Phædrus for a thousand years before the genuine beast-epic reached its highest development in Reynard the Fox (q.v.), belonging to the 12th century, but containing matterials of a far earlier date. It is not a didactic poem, nor essentially even a satirical poem. Its charm lies in the admirable manner in which the characters of the various animals are sustained. Its influence in the middle ages may be partly understood from the fact that our common names Reynard, Bruin, and Chanticleer were originally the names of the characters in the great beast-fable.
Beast-fables, resembling more particularly the African, have been found in the cuneiform inscriptions of Babylonia. Four excellent examples have been preserved among the fragmentary records of Assur-bani-pal's library: the first narrating the actions of an eagle and a serpent; the second, of a fox and jackal; the third gives a discussion between a horse and an ox; while in the fourth a calf speaks. Jotham's story in the Book of Judges makes the trees talk to one another. So in the Izdubar legends of Babylonia, the trees answer Hea-bani.
Stories of the same nature are equally common farther east in Asia. Perhaps no book has been more widely popular than the fables of Bidpai (q.v.), translated first into Pehlevi or ancient Persian from an old Indian original, in part represented now by the Panchatantra (q.v.). The Indian fables differ from the Æsopic in this: in the former, animals act as men in form of animals; in the latter, animals are allowed to act as animals. Benfey ascribes this peculiarity of Indian conception to the belief in Metempsychosis (q.v.), and the exclusively didactic nature of Indian tales. All tales, therefore, in which animals play the part of human beings are Indian. As to the ultimate origin of beast-fables, Benfey's conclusion is that most fables about animals are western or Æsopic; that, on the contrary, the tales are Indian. In all our folktales the relations between the heroes and animals are usually kind or helpful. Nothing is more common than for the hero to do some kindness to a suffering animal, who afterwards shows his gratitude by some signal service to his benefactor at the moment of his own perplexity. Beasts and birds often carry grave secrets to favoured individuals, and so save them from unhappiness and danger. If this feeling for animals is not of Buddhist origin, it is at least, as Cosquin points out, a prevailing Indian idea, and is certainly derived from the belief in metempsychosis, which effaces the distinction between man and the animal, and which in every living thing sees a brother. Benfey throws out the hint that metempsychosis may have come from Egypt. It does not occur in any of the Indo-European races save the Indians themselves, and undoubtedly intimate relations once existed between the Indus and the Nile. The Phoenicians were active intermediaries of commerce, and just as it is very probable they carried writing to India, they may have carried and re-carried many other elements of civilisation. Sir Richard Burton will have none of Benfey's refinement of distinction between the Æsopic and the Hindu apologue, and adds: 'The essence of the beast-fable is a reminiscence of Homo primigenius, with erected ears and hairy hide, and its expression is to make the brother brute behave, think, and talk like him with the superadded experience of ages. To early man the "lower animals," which are born, live, and die like himself, must have seemed quite human enough and on an equal level to become his substitutes. The savage, when he begins to reflect, would regard the carnivore and the serpent with awe, wonder, and dread; and would soon suspect the same mysterious potency in the brute as in himself: so the Malays still look upon the Uran-utan, or Wood-man, as the possessor of superhuman wisdom. The hunter and the herdsman, who had few other companions, would presently explain the peculiar relations of animals to themselves by material metamorphosis, the bodily transformation of man to brute, giving increased powers of working him weal or woe. A more advanced stage would find the step easy to metempsychosis, the beast containing the Ego (alias soul) of the human: such instinctive belief explains much in Hindu literature, but it was not wanted at first by the apologue.' There are many apologues in the Arabian Nights, but these are much longer and more involved in circumstance than the straightforward fables of Æsop, with their single event and simple moral. But these, despite their monumental antiquity, Burton regards as the offspring of a comparatively civilised age, when a jealous despotism or a powerful oligarchy threw difficulties and dangers in the way of speaking plain truths. He adds: 'A hint may be given, and a friend or foe can be lauded or abused as Belins the sheep, or Isengrin the wolf, when the author is debarred the higher enjoyment of praising them or dispraising them by name. And, as the purposes of fables are twofold, the speaking of brute-beasts would give a piquancy and a pleasantry to moral design as well as to social and political satire.' The danger of attempting openly to administer plain reproof to absolute Asiatic potentates may well have led to the invention of fables in which the lessons intended to be imparted were veiled under ingenious fictions of animals. Mr Clouston quotes the following story from an oriental historian of a tyrannical monarch having been reclaimed by such means. 'A wise and prudent vazir once related the following fable to his royal master: There was an owl in El-Basra and an owl in El-Mosul. And the owl of El-Basra said to the other one day: "Give me thy daughter in marriage to my son." Quoth the owl of El-Mosul, "I consent, on condition that thou give me as her dowry a hundred ruined villages." "That," replied the owl of El-Basra, "I cannot do at present; but if Allah spare the sultan another year, I will do what thou requirest." The sultan, deeply impressed by this simple fable, at once caused all the ruined towns and villages to be rebuilt, and henceforward studied to promote the well-being of his subjects, and to render his rule easy and acceptable to them.'
See Benfey's masterly introduction to his translation of the Panchatantra (Leip. 1859); Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871); Sayce's Science of Language (2d ed. 1883); Keith-Falconer's Fables of Bidpat, with its learned introduction (1885); Clouston's Popular Tales and Fictions (1887); Cosquin's Contes populaires de Lorraine (2 vols. 1886); the 'Terminal Essay' of Burton's Thousand Nights and a Night (vol. x. 1886); Leclerc's Bestiaire (ed. Reinsch, 1890); Goldstaub and Wendriner's Venetian Bestiarius (1892); Nover's Thiersage (1893); and books cited at ANIMALS (WORSHIP OF), FABLE, FOLKLORE, REYNARD THE FOX, and TOTEM. Also compare Rudyard Kipling's own beast-fables in his Jungle Books (1894 and 1895).