of the world,
when men lived by the chase, and gnawed the raw flesh of their prey, and
slept in lairs amid the jungle, the purely animal virtues were the only
ones they knew and exercised. They adored courage and strength, and
swiftness and endurance. They respected keenness of scent and vision,
and admired cunning. The possession of these qualities was the very
condition of existence, and they valued them accordingly; but in each
one of them they found their equals, and in fact their superiors, among
the brutes. A lion was stronger than the strongest man. The hare was
swifter. The eagle was more keen-sighted. The fox was more cunning.
Hence, so far from looking down upon the animals from the remotely
superior height that a hundred centuries of civilization have erected
for us, the primitive savage looked up to the beast, studied his ways,
copied him, and went to school to him. The man, then, was not in those
days the lord of creation, and the beast was not his servant; but they
were almost brothers in the subtle sympathy between them, like that
which united Mowgli, the wolf-nursed _shikarri_, and his hairy brethren,
in that most weirdly wonderful of all Mr. Kipling's inventions--the one
that carries us back, not as his other stories do, to the India of the
cities and the bazaars, of the supercilious tourist and the sleek Babu,
but to the older India of unbroken jungle, darkling at noonday through
its green mist of tangled leaves, and haunted by memories of the world's
long infancy when man and brute crouched close together on the earthy
breast of the great mother.

The Aesopic Fables, then, are the oldest representative that we have of
the literary art of primitive man. The charm that they have always
possessed springs in part from their utter simplicity, their naivete,
and their directness; and in part from the fact that their teachings are
the teachings of universal experience, and therefore appeal irresistibly
to the consciousness of every one who hears them, whether he be savage
or scholar, child or sage. They are the literary antipodes of the last
great effort of genius and art working upon the same material, and found
in Mr. Kipling's Jungle Books. The Fables show only the first stirrings
of the literary instinct, the Jungle Stories bring to bear the full
development of the fictive art,--creative imagination, psychological
insight, brilliantly picturesque description, and the touch of one who
is a daring master o