r respect the palm of vivid and varied narration
is with La Fontaine, but he misses something of the spirit of the
original in his portrait of Alaciel; indeed La Fontaine's weakest point
is in the comparatively pedestrian character of his treatment. He has
little romance, and in translating, not merely the Italians but such
countrymen and women of his own as the authors of the Heptameron, he
loses the poetical charm which, as has been pointed out, graces and
saves the morality or immorality of the Renaissance. Therefore, despite
the wonderful variety and vivid painting of the _Contes_, presenting a
series of pictures which for these qualities have few rivals in
literature, the disapproval with which censors more rigid than Johnson
(whose excuse of Prior will fairly stretch to Prior's original) have
visited them is not altogether unjustifiable.

The Fables, with hardly less excellence of the purely literary kind, are
fortunately free from the least vestige of any similar fault. La
Fontaine, instead of in the smallest degree degrading the beast-fable,
has, on the contrary, exalted it to almost the highest point of which it
is capable. Not many books have made and kept a more durable and solid
reputation. The few dissentient voices in the chorus of eulogy have been
those of eccentric crotcheteers like Rousseau, or sentimentalists like
Lamartine. It is, indeed, impossible to read the Fables without
prejudice and not be captivated by them. As mere narratives they are
charming, and the perpetual presence of an undercurrent of sly,
good-humoured, satirical meaning relieves them from all charge of
insipidity. La Fontaine, like Goldsmith, was with his pen in his hand as
shrewd and as deeply learned in human nature as without it he was simple
and _naif_.

Something has to be said of the form and strictly poetical value of
these two remarkable books--as remarkable, let it be remembered, for
their bulk as for their excellence, for between them they cannot contain
much less than 30,000 verses. The measure is almost always an irregular
mixture of lines of different lengths, rhyming sometimes in couplets,
sometimes in interlaced stanzas, which La Fontaine established as the
vehicle of serio-comic narration. For this, in his hands, it is
extraordinarily well fitted. As for the strictly poetic value of the
work, it is perhaps significant that though he is, taking quantity and
excellence together, the most important non-dramatic writer