II.  The Animal Tale

The animal tale includes many of the most pleasing children’s tales.  Indeed some authorities would go so far as to trace all fairy tales back to some ancestor of an animal tale; and in many cases this certainly can be done just as we trace Three Bears back to Scrapefoot.  The animal tale is either an old beast tale, such as Scrapefoot or Old Sultan; or a fairy tale which is an elaborated development of a fable, such as The Country Mouse and the City Mouse or the tales of Reynard the Fox or Grimm’s The King of the Birds, and The Sparrow and His Four Children; or it is a purely imaginary creation, such as Kipling’s The Elephant’s Child or Andersen’s The Bronze Pig.

The beast tale is a very old form which was a story of some successful primitive hunt or of some primitive man’s experience with animals in which he looked up to the beast as a brother superior to himself in strength, courage, endurance, swiftness, keen scent, vision, or cunning.  Later, in more civilized society, when men became interested in problems of conduct, animals were introduced to point the moral of the tale, and we have the fable.  The fable resulted when a truth was stated in concrete story form.  When this truth was in gnomic form, stated in general terms, it became compressed into the proverb.  The fable was brief, intense, and concerned with the distinguishing characteristics of the animal characters, who were endowed with human traits.  Such were the Fables of AEsop.  Then followed the beast epic, such as Reynard the Fox, in which the personality of the animals became less prominent and the animal characters became types of humanity.  Later, the beast tale took the form of narratives of hunters, where the interest centered in the excitement of the hunt and in the victory of the hunter.  With the thirst for universal knowledge in the days following Bacon there gradually grew a desire to learn also about animals.  Then followed animal anecdotes, the result of observation and imagination, often regarding the mental processes of animals.  With the growth of the scientific spirit the interest in natural history developed.  The modern animal story since 1850 has a basis of natural science, but it also seeks to search the motive back of the action, it is a psychological romance.  The early modern animal tales such as Black Beauty show sympathy with animals, but their psychology is human.  In Seton Thompson’s Krag, which is a masterpiece, the interest centers about the personality and the mentality of the animal and his purely physical characteristics.  Perhaps it is true that these physical characteristics are somewhat imaginary and over-drawn and that overmuch freedom has been used in interpreting these physical signs.  In Kipling’s tales we have a later evolution of the animal tale.  His animals possess