The time of faults is the time for fables.  When we blame the guilty under the cover of a story we instruct without offending him; and he then understands that the story is not untrue by means of the truth he finds in its application to himself.  The child who has never been deceived by flattery understands nothing of the fable I recently examined; but the rash youth who has just become the dupe of a flatterer perceives only too readily that the crow was a fool.  Thus he acquires a maxim from the fact, and the experience he would soon have forgotten is engraved on his mind by means of the fable.  There is no knowledge of morals which cannot be acquired through our own experience or that of others.  When there is danger, instead of letting him try the experiment himself, we have recourse to history.  When the risk is comparatively slight, it is just as well that the youth should be exposed to it; then by means of the apologue the special cases with which the young man is now acquainted are transformed into maxims.

It is not, however, my intention that these maxims should be explained, nor even formulated.  Nothing is so foolish and unwise as the moral at the end of most of the fables; as if the moral was not, or ought not to be so clear in the fable itself that the reader cannot fail to perceive it.  Why then add the moral at the end, and go deprive him of the pleasure of discovering it for himself.  The art of teaching consists in making the pupil wish to learn.  But if the pupil is to wish to learn, his mind must not remain in such a passive state with regard to what you tell him that there is really nothing for him to do but listen to you.  The master’s vanity must always give way to the scholars; he must be able to say, I understand, I see it, I am getting at it, I am learning something.  One of the things which makes the Pantaloon in the Italian comedies so wearisome is the pains taken by him to explain to the audience the platitudes they understand only too well already.  We must always be intelligible, but we need not say all there is to be said.  If you talk much you will say little, for at last no one will listen to you.  What is the sense of the four lines at the end of La Fontaine’s fable of the frog who puffed herself up.  Is he afraid we should not understand it?  Does this great painter need to write the names beneath the things he has painted?  His morals, far from generalising, restrict the lesson to some extent to the examples given, and prevent our applying them to others.  Before I put the fables of this inimitable author into the hands of a youth, I should like to cut out all the conclusions with which he strives to explain what he has just said so clearly and pleasantly.  If your pupil does not understand the fable without the explanation, he will not understand it with it.