Fantastic Fables was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1899. The book contains over 200 fables, most of them fewer than a hundred words long — tiny parables in the manner of Aesop but stripped of Aesop’s moral earnestness and infused with Bierce’s characteristic misanthropy.
The fables follow Aesop’s form: animals and human types encounter each other, exchanges occur, and a moral is drawn. But Bierce’s morals are consistently subversive: they expose not the virtues the fable pretends to teach but the vices it cannot conceal. Politicians are liars who succeed precisely because they lie; judges are corrupt because the system rewards corruption; clergymen are hypocrites because hypocrisy is the prerequisite for religious authority; and ordinary citizens are sheep because thinking is uncomfortable.
A typical fable: “A Dog that had been long accustomed to a muzzle was at last set free. ‘How delightful,’ he said, ‘now I can snap at everybody!’ And so he did, until a Mastiff taught him the merit of discretion.” The moral Bierce would draw is not about discretion but about power: freedom is meaningless without the strength to exercise it, and most creatures who are freed discover only new forms of subjection.
The fables are best read in small doses — their relentless negativity can become monotonous in bulk — but individually, many of them achieve a perfection of compressed satire that rivals anything in The Devil’s Dictionary.
Collecting Fantastic Fables
First edition (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1899): Cloth.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $150–$400
- Very good: $60–$150