The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

O The beast fable. In these, the actors have animals' bodies but human consciousness. Sometimes the intention is simply amusing entertainment, but more often it is educative. The fable may be a mythical explanation of how things came to be as they are, and the beast in it may be a folk-culture hero whose qualities of courage or cunning are to be imitated. Or again, though this is a later historical development, the fable may be satirical. What prevents man, individually and col­lectively, from behaving reasonably and morally is not so much ignorance as a self-blindness induced by some passion or desire. In a satirical beast fable, the beast has the desires of his kind which are different from those which govern man, so that we can view them with detachment and cannot fail to rec­ognize what is good or bad, sensible or foolish behavior. In a beast fable, the descriptions of animal life cannot be realistic, for its basic premise of a self-conscious speaking animal is fantastic. If a human being is introduced into a beast fable, as Mr. MacGregor is introduced into Peter Rabbit, he appears not as a man but as a God.

2) The animal simile. This can be expressed in the form:

as an a behaves so acted N

where a is a species of animal with a typical way of behaving and N

is the proper name of a human individual, mythical or historical, acting in a historical situation. The description of animals in an epic simile is more realistic than it is in the beast fable, but what is described is the behavior considered typical for that animal; everything else about it is irrelevant.

Homer's animal similes are more than merely ways of catching a mood or an impression, more than attempts to place an event in greater relief by stressing external sim­ilarities. WTien Homer has someone go against his ene­mies "like a lion," we must take him at his word. The warrior and the lion are activated by the same force; on more than one occasion this force is expressly stated to be the menos, the forward impulse. The animals of the Homeric similes are not only symbols, but the particular embodiments of universal vital forces. Homer has litde regard for anything except the forces in them, and that is the reason why animals are more prominent in the similes than in the narrative itself. By themselves they hold next to no interest for him.

In the clearly defined, the typical forms within which nature has allocated her gifts among the beasts, men find the models for gauging their own responses and emotions; they are the mirror in which man sees himself. The sentence: "Hector is as a lion," besides constituting a comparison, besides focussing the formlessness of human existence against a characteristic type, also signalises a factual connection, (bruno snell,

The Discovery of Mind.)

3) The animal as an allegorical emblem. The significance of an emblem is not, like a simile, self-evident. The artist who uses one must either assume that his audience already knows the symbolic association—it is a legend of the culture to which he belongs—or, if it is his own invention, he must explain it. A Buddhist, for instance, looking at a painting of the Christ Child in which there is a goldfinch, may know enough ornithology to recognize it as a goldfinch and to know that it eats Cor used to be thought to eat) thorns, but he cannot pos­sibly understand why the bird is there unless it is explained to him that Christians associate thorns, the goldfinch's sup­posed diet, with the crown of thorns Christ wore at his cruci­fixion; the painter has introduced the goldfinch into his picture of the Christ Child to remind the spectator that Christmas, an occasion for rejoicing, is necessarily related to Good Friday, an occasion for mourning.

The painter may have represented the bird as natural is tically as possible in order that the spectator shall not mistake it for some other bird, a woodpecker, for instance, which, because it bores holes in trees, is an emblem for Satan who undermines human nature, but correct identification is all that matters; there is no visual resemblance between the emblem and its meaning. In poetry, the mere name would be sufficient.