Æsop Dress'd; Or A Collection Of Fables

Bernard Mandeville's first extant book in English, Some Fables after the Easie and Familiar Method of Monsieur de la Fontaine, was published in 1703; it reappeared with additional fables in 1704 as Aesop Dress'd.[1] Neither title reveals that, except for two original fables by Mandeville, the book consists entirely of verse translations from the twelve books of La Fontaine's Fables (1668-1694). It is the first book-length translation from these poems into English.

The only previous translations from Fables into English verse appear to have been those made ten years earlier by John Dennis. Miscellanies in Verse and Prose (1693) was a curious volume of Pindaric odes, imitations of Horace, Juvenal, and Boileau, and letters that the young Dennis had written during his travels in France and Italy, including the well-known account of the "delightful horrour" and "terrible Joy" that he had experienced while crossing the Alps; there were, finally, ten fables in octosyllabic couplets—all of them translations from La Fontaine. A word about Dennis's fables may help to put Mandeville's into perspective.

Their resemblance to the French originals is slight. Not La Fontaine, but Samuel Butler, presides over Dennis's fables; indeed, when Dennis discusses them in the Preface to Miscellanies, he fails to mention La Fontaine, although he devotes a large proportion of his remarks to a defense of Butler's burlesque verse, which he acknowledges as his model.[2] Many people were writing Hudibrastics in the 1680's and 1690's: the propensity of Butler's couplet for arousing laughter had made it a fad.[3] With its jog-trot meter, insinuating swiftness, and jarring double and triple rhymes, the Hudibrastic couplet was ideally suited to the mockery performed by low burlesque. All burlesque works by an incongruity between subject and style; the particular function of low burlesque is to debase an elevated subject by treating it in an undignified manner.[4] So it was that Butler, with the assistance of a crazy style, had exploited the gap between the high pretensions and the ridiculous performances of a Puritan knight and his squire.

But of the hordes of scribblers that followed in the wake of Hudibras, scarcely any possessed Butler's sense of satiric propriety. Where his success had been founded on the discrepancy between subject and style that is essential to burlesque, they employed his style with no regard for its suitability to their subjects. Ordinary narrative poems with no satiric intent were decked in Hudibrastic couplets for the sake of a superficial cleverness.[5] Dennis followed the fashion. His ten verse-fables are filled with outrageous Butlerisms:

Whatever the intentions of the poet, it seems to be the property of the Hudibrastic couplet inevitably to denigrate its subject. While it is probable that Dennis intended his fables to be clever and modish, and nothing more, they turn out to be travesties of La Fontaine.

Dennis was attempting to impose on the animal fable an alien style. From Aesop to Thurber, the chief strength of the fabulist has been his humility: by selecting animal stories as the guise for his moral lessons, he has hoped to disarm his readers into accepting the truth. This strategy would seem to rule out the style of low burlesque, for the impulse to this style—a dignified subject to be mocked out of its dignity—does not exist in the animal fable. In particular the Fables of La Fontaine, perhaps the most graceful, concise, and witty ever written, do not respond well to the ferocious manner of Dennis. Dennis translating La Fontaine resembles a bull in a china shop.

While Mandeville is no gazelle either, he has better manners than Dennis. The Butlerisms are still present, but they are not everywhere and they are not so grotesque. The difference between Dennis and Mandeville may be merely the interval of ten years, during which the influence of Butler had faded; but this seems unlikely, since Bond cites many examples of the continuing vogue of Hudibras, even well into the 1730's.[7] A more probable explanation for the difference is that, whereas Dennis was an avowed imitator of Butler who happened to be translating the Fables of La Fontaine, Mandeville seems to have been in this work chiefly a translator of La Fontaine who was, incidentally, writing at a time when the impulse to copy Butler's superficial qualities was almost irresistible. The total number of Hudibrastic couplets in Aesop Dress'd comes to only a handful:

Even these few unmistakable instances are less distracting than the ones in Dennis. Mandeville's verse is much like his prose: straightforward, downright, even in tone. Here are the first ten lines of Mandeville's "The Fox and Wolf":

La Fontaine has this:

Dennis had inserted these lines in the pseudo-erudite Butlerian manner:

Nearly all Mandeville's translations are, like "The Fox and Wolf," longer than their originals. The added length is partly explained by meter: Mandeville's octosyllabic line is less capacious, as a rule, than La Fontaine's flexible one. Thus, even though "The Wolf and the Lamb" moves with a speed comparable to "Le Loup et l'Agneau," Mandeville takes 34 lines to La Fontaine's 29.[10] More often, Mandeville's translations are longer than their originals because Mandeville is not able to match La Fontaine's wit and point. "La Lice et sa Compagne," an exercise in light-footed elegance, begins this way:

In translating, Mandeville expands these four lines to ten without special gain:

Perhaps it is Mandeville's plainspokenness, his determination to say all that must be said, which causes him to state explicitly things that La Fontaine left implicit. "La Cigale et la Fourmi," contrasting an irresponsible grasshopper and a provident ant, implies but subdues a contrast between art and life. Mandeville makes the contrast explicit:

"The Lyon and the Gnat" is fairly close to its original in length (46 lines to La Fontaine's 39) and in spirit; but Mandeville does not improve his fable by supplying the adjective "silly" ("silly Spider") where La Fontaine had written "une araignée," or by inserting a line about the gnat's pride, "Puffed up and blinded with his glory," where La Fontaine expected his readers to discern the gnat's pride for themselves.[13] Another translation that sticks close to the French in its sense is "The Dog and the Ass," in which an ass refuses food to a hungry dog and is in turn abandoned by the dog and killed by a hungry wolf. Mandeville adds the judgment that La Fontaine excluded. The wolf attacks:

The italicized words, entirely added by Mandeville, apparently represent his conviction that the irony of La Fontaine's fable would be intensified by the dog's sardonic comment and the translator's "serves him right." Other examples might be cited of Mandeville's explicitness.

The characterizing details of some of the great fables, however, disappear in Mandeville's English. Although "The Plague among the Beasts" is faithful to the original, the tragic overtones of "Les Animaux malade de la Peste" are not recaptured; they are perhaps unrecapturable. The ironies of La Fontaine's characterization are ignored: the lion's "L'histoire nous apprend," for instance, by which the unscrupulous politician poses as a deep-browed savant; the description of the other beasts as "petits saints," and of the wolf who condemns the innocent ass as "quelque peu clerc"—these disappear.[15] "L'Ivrogne et sa Femme" meets the same fate. Mandeville retains the outlines of the original but treats the details perfunctorily, as though he had given up trying to re-create the comic terror of La Fontaine's little masterpiece. "A drunkard" is not an adequate equivalent for "un suppôt de Bacchus"; "very drunk" is not the same as "plein du jus de la treille"; entire sentences are left out, such as "Là les vapeurs du vin nouveau / Cuvèrent à loisir"; and the ending of the poem suffers from the alteration of details and from an awkward inversion for the sake of a rhyme:

Of the many differences between La Fontaine and Mandeville, those noticed up to this point may be blamed on the latter's incapacity. Some of the other changes may be partially justified on the grounds that through them Mandeville was deliberately trying to alter the tone of the poem, to give it an earthiness of spirit congruent with his temperament. La Fontaine's "Le Lion malade et le Renard" begins with hushed dignity:

Mandeville's translation begins:

The gout is a standard comic disease which Mandeville gives to his lion to make him comically undignified. La Fontaine's lion remains dignified and restrained throughout. (The two versions of this fable are also instances of the relative capabilities of the French and the English four-stress lines.) In another fable, a tonal difference appears in some lines describing the meeting of a haggard wolf and a well-fed dog:

The tone of polite gravity is gone; what remains is less succinct, but more specific, and in its way effective. When Mandeville's invention is working well, as it does in "The Wolf and Dog," it provides, in its colloquial heartiness, an adequate substitute for La Fontaine's refinement of tone and subtlety of detail. On the whole, his fables are close to their originals, especially when compared to those of Dennis, even though "the easie and familiar method of Monsieur de La Fontaine" is something that, despite his professions, Mandeville fails to reproduce.

Only two years intervened between Mandeville's translations from La Fontaine (1703) and The Grumbling Hive (1705), the 433-line fable that, through the years, would grow into that great repository of social, political, and economic nonconformity, The Fable of the Bees. It is not surprising that many of the fables which Mandeville chose to translate anticipate the themes of his great work. Among these are "The Milk Woman," on the self-flatery of the egoistic dream; "The Frogs asking for a King," on the instability of human desires; "The Wolves and the Sheep," on political self-deception; "Hands, Feet, and Belly," on social interdependence; and "The Lyon grown Old," on the ultimate blow to pride.[19]

Since Mandeville would give so much space in The Fable of the Bees to his analysis of pride,[20] it is appropriate that pride engaged his attention in this early book of fables. "The Frog" is notable chiefly because Mandeville lengthened La Fontaine's moral of four lines to fourteen in order to glance at the social and economic implications of pride:

Two of the 39 fables in the collection are original productions: "The Carp" and "The Owl and the Nightingale." Both poems focus upon pride. "The Carp" tells the story of a young and inexperienced English carp who swims into foreign waters to learn "manners and arts." Warned by a herring to go home and learn first about his own country, the carp rebuffs this honest advice, takes up with fops, and is drawn into ruin before he finally returns home "as vain and ignorant, / As e'er he was before he went." The subject of the moral reflections at the end is self-delusion in the particular form of sophisticated vanity.[22] The other poem, "The Owl and the Nightingale" (the longest poem in the collection, at 181 lines), also concerns pride. The Eagle, having looked unsuccessfully among the birds of his court for a singing night-watchman, sends out a general letter. The nightingale realizes with excitement that he will easily win the competition; but he coyly refuses to go to court until sent for, makes elaborate self-depreciations in the eagle's presence, and hold out, obviously, for more recognition and reward. While he delays, an owl has been persuaded by friends to try for the position and has a hearing. Although he sings unskillfully, he manages to stay awake. When the nightingale returns to court the next day, he is infuriated to learn that an owl is competing against him and that the eagle has ordered the two birds to perform against one another that night. The nightingale protests so loudly and treasonably that he is kicked out of court, and the owl, dull but faithful, is declared the winner. The moral follows:

In some respects this poem looks forward to The Fable of the Bees. Mandeville subjects the nightingale to a brief psychological analysis and looks on his failure with a blend of detached pity and satiric mordancy; he strips away the sophisticated defenses that hide the basic emotions, recommending honesty with oneself and with others; he identifies the personal interests of the members of society with the interests of the state. It remains to point out that neither here nor elsewhere in this collection does Mandeville assert that private vices are public benefits.

Washington University

For each of Mandeville's fables except "The Carp" and "The Nightingale and Owl," which are originals, I have indicated below the original in La Fontaine's Fables by title, book, and number.

The text of Aesop Dress'd here
reprinted is that in the Harvard
University Library.

LONDON:

Sold at Lock's-Head adjoyning to Ludgate.
Price One Shilling.

Prefaces and Cuts are commonly made use of much to the same Purpose; to set off, and to explain. The latter, being too expensive, are pretty well out of date, in an Age, where there are abundance of fine things to be bought besides Books. But the first by wicked Custom, are become so necessary, that a Volume would look as defective without one, as if it wanted the very Title Page. Though it is hard I should be compelled to talk to my Reader, whether I have any thing to say to him or not. Nay, what is worse, every Body thinks a Man should be more lavish here of his Skill and Learning, than anywhere else: Here they would have him shew his Airs, and therefore most Authors adorn their Prefaces, as if they were triumphal Arches; there's nothing empty to be seen about 'em, and from top to bottom they are to be crowded with Emblems and pretty Sayings, judiciously interwoven with Scraps of Latin; though they should borrow 'em from the Parson of the Parish. These, I say, are the Entertainments where they love to glut us with Wit and fine Language; though they starve us for ever after: Which makes some of 'em look like a rich piece of Fillegrew Work over the Door of an empty Parlour. But I am resolved my Portico shall suit with the rest of the House, and, as every thing is plain within, nothing shall be carv'd or gilt without: Besides, I hate formality, Good Reader, and all my Business with you is to let you know, that I have writ some Fables in Verse, after the Familiar Way of a Great Man in France, Monsieur de la Fontaine. I have confin'd my self to strict Numbers, and endeavour'd to make 'em free and natural; if they prove otherwise, I'm sorry for it. Two of the Fables are of my own Invention; but I am so far from loving 'em the better, that I think they are the worst in the Pack: And therefore in good Manners to my self I conceal their Names. Find 'em out, and welcome. I could wish to have furnish'd you with something more worthy your precious time: But as you'll find nothing very Instructive, so there's little to puzzle your Brain. Besides, I desire every Body to read 'em at the same Hours I writ 'em, that's when I had nothing else to do. If any like these Trifles, perhaps I may go on; if not, you shall be troubled with no more of 'em: And so fare ye well Reader.

1948-1949

15. John Oldmixon, Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to Harley ... (1712) and A. Mainwaring's The British Academy ... (1712).

17. Nicholas Rowe, Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespeare (1709).

1949-1950

22. Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and two Rambler papers (1750).

23. John Dryden, His Majesties Declaration Defended (1681).

1950-1951

26. Charles Macklin, The Man of the World (1792).

1951-1952

31. Thomas Gray, An Elegy Wrote in a Country Churchyard (1751); and The Eton College Manuscript.

1960-1961

85-6. Essays on the Theatre from Eighteenth-Century Periodicals. 90. Henry Needler, Works (1728).

1961-1962

93. John Norris, Cursory Reflections Upon a Book Call'd, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1960)

94. An. Collins, Divine Songs and Meditacions (1653).

95. An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding (1751).

96. Hanoverian Ballads.

1962-1963

97. Myles Davies, Selections from Athenae Britannicae (1716-1719).

98. Select Hymns Taken Out of Mr. Herbert's Temple (1697).

99. Simon Patrick, A Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude Men (1662).

100. Simon Patrick, A Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude Men (1662).

101-2. Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762).

1963-1964

103. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript.

104. Thomas D'Urfey, Wonders in the Sun, or, the Kingdom of the Birds (1706).

105. Bernard Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn (1725).

106. Daniel Defoe, A Brief History of the Poor Palatine Refugees (1709).

107-8. John Oldmixon, An Essay on Criticism (1728).

1964-1965

109. Sir William Temple, An Essay upon the Original and Nature of Government (1680).

110. John Tutchin, Selected Poems (1685-1700).

111. Anonymous, Political Justice. A Poem (1736).

112. Robert Dodsley, An Essay on Fable (1764).

113. T. R., An Essay Concerning Critical and Curious Learning (1680).

114. Two Poems Against Pope: Leonard Welsted, One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope (1730); Anonymous, The Blatant Beast (1740).

The Society's purpose is to publish reprints (usually facsimile reproductions) of rare seventeenth and eighteenth century works. All income of the Society is devoted to defraying costs of publication and mailing.

Correspondence concerning subscriptions in the United States and Canada should be addressed to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2205 West Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. Correspondence concerning editorial matters may be addressed to any of the general editors. The membership fee is $5.00 a year for subscribers in the United States and Canada and 30/- for subscribers in Great Britain and Europe. British and European subscribers should address B. H. Blackwell, Broad Street, Oxford, England. Copies of back issues in print may be obtained from the Corresponding Secretary.

PUBLICATIONS FOR 1965-1966

Thomas Traherne, Meditations on the Six Days of the Creation (1717). Introduction by George Robert Guffey.

Charles Macklin, The Covent Garden Theatre [manuscript] (1752). Introduction by Jean B. Kern.

Roger L'Estrange, Citt and Bumpkin (1680). Introduction by B. J. Rahn.

Daniel Defoe and Others, Accounts of the Apparition of Mrs. Veal (ca. 1705). Introduction by Manuel Schonhorn.

Henry More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (1662). Introduction by M. V. DePorte.

Bernard Mandeville, Aesop Dress'd or a Collection of Fables Writ in Familiar Verse (1704). Introduction by John S. Shea.

ANNOUNCEMENT:

The Society announces a special publication, a reprint of John Ogilby, The Fables of Aesop Paraphras'd in Verse (1668), with an Introduction by Earl Miner. Ogilby's book is commonly thought one of the finest examples of seventeenth-century bookmaking and is illustrated with eighty-one plates. Publication is assisted by funds from the Chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles. Price: to members of the Society, $2.50; to non-members, $4.00.

Make check or money order payable to The Regents of the University of California.