pawn; it must not allow for what Balzac called "the revolt of a sheep"
The fairy tale, on the other hand, absolutely revolves on the pivot
of human personality. If no hero were there to fight the dragons, we
should not even know that they were dragons. If no adventurer were
cast on the undiscovered island--it would remain undiscovered. If the
miller's third son does not find the enchanted garden where the seven
princesses stand white and frozen--why, then, they will remain white
and frozen and enchanted. If there is no personal prince to find the
Sleeping Beauty she will simply sleep. Fables repose upon quite the
opposite idea; that everything is itself, and will in any case speak
for itself. The wolf will be always wolfish; the fox will be always
foxy. Something of the same sort may have been meant by the animal
worship, in which Egyptian and Indian and many other great peoples
have combined. Men do not, I think, love beetles or cats or crocodiles
with a wholly personal love; they salute them as expressions of that
abstract and anonymous energy in nature which to any one is awful, and
to an atheist must be frightful. So in all the fables that are or are
not Æsop's all the animal forces drive like inanimate forces, like
great rivers or growing trees. It is the limit and the loss of all
such things that they cannot be anything but themselves: it is their
tragedy that they could not lose their souls.

This is the immortal justification of the Fable: that we could not
teach the plainest truths so simply without turning men into chessmen.
We cannot talk of such simple things without using animals that do
not talk at all. Suppose, for a moment, that you turn the wolf into a
wolfish baron, or the fox into a foxy diplomatist. You will at once
remember that even barons are human, you will be unable to forget
that even diplomatists are men. You will always be looking for that
accidental good-humour that should go with the brutality of any brutal