on which the little plot revolves.
But the fabulist now seeks analogies where before he merely sought
humorous situations. There will be now a logical nexus between the moral
expressed and the machinery employed to express it. The machinery, in
fact, as this change is developed, becomes less and less fabulous. We
find ourselves in presence of quite a serious, if quite a miniature
division of creative literature; and sometimes we have the lesson
embodied in a sober, everyday narration, as in the parables of the New
Testament, and sometimes merely the statement or, at most, the
collocation of significant facts in life, the reader being left to
resolve for himself the vague, troublesome, and not yet definitely moral
sentiment which has been thus created. And step by step with the
development of this change, yet another is developed: the moral tends to
become more indeterminate and large. It ceases to be possible to append
it, in a tag, to the bottom of the piece, as one might write the name
below a caricature; and the fable begins to take rank with all other
forms of creative literature, as something too ambitious, in spite of
its miniature dimensions, to be resumed in any succinct formula without
the loss of all that is deepest and most suggestive in it.

Now it is in this widest sense that Lord Lytton understands the term;
there are examples in his two pleasant volumes of all the forms already
mentioned, and even of another which can only be admitted among fables
by the utmost possible leniency of construction. "Composure," "Et
Caetera," and several more, are merely similes poetically elaborated. So,
too, is the pathetic story of the grandfather and grandchild: the child,
having treasured away an icicle and forgotten it for ten minutes, comes
back to find it already nearly melted, and no longer beautiful: at the
same time, the grandfather has just remembered and taken out a bundle of
love-letters, which he too had stored away in years gone by, and then
long neglected; and, behold! the letters are as faded and sorrowfully
disappointing as the icicle. This is merely a simile poetically worked
out; and yet it is in such as these, and some others, to be mentioned
further on, that the author seems at his best. Wherever he has really
written after the old model, there is something to be deprecated: in
spite of all the spirit and freshness, in spite of his happy assumption
of that cheerful acceptation of things as they are, whic