Fables Author:Jean de La Fontaine Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ESTIMATE OF LA FONTAINE'S LITERARY CHARACTER, § I. WHY NOTHING OF LA FONTAINE'S FABLES IS LOST. La Fontaine ranged himself among the dramatists by his c... more »onception of the fables ; he calls them "A drama of a hundred acts." His mind was essentially dramatic. All his works, to speak only of such as are excellent, are narratives in action. The subject is the same as in the works of Racine and Moliere ; it is man just as he is. The apparently most dreamy poet of that time never dreams. Revery, as a genus, is unknown to the seventeenth century. It sometimes glides into the charming narratives of La Fontaine ; it is like a voluptuousness of his thought, in which he indulges for a moment; but he soon resumes the thread ; the poet considered himself a moment, only the better to read the hearts of others. La Fontaine's little theatre has been more fortunate than the grander one of his two friends ; nothing is out of fashion, nothing lost. If this stage is humbler, it is not subject to theatrical servitude. You do not see the shop. There are no confidants either to bring out the actors, or to take the place of important characters who do not appear ; no long monologues for the popular actor of the day. Love is not there forced to affect the transient form which it receives from the manners, the fancy of the time, or the example of the prince ; it is here neither pompous nor finespun. The fabulist excitesneither the perhaps popular broad laugh, nor the tear doomed soon to dry. Reason alone smiles or is moved. La Fontaine was as sensible as any of his contemporaries of the grandeur of his epoch ; but he was duped neither by exaggeration nor by etiquette. His immoral life, no worse than that of the rest, but which, either from indolence, or from his deeming innocent what he felt n...« less