The fuller (or cloth cleaner) and the charcoal burner (or collier) is one of Aesop's Fables and numbered 29 in the Perry Index.[1]
The fable
A charcoal burner proposed to his friend the fuller that they share quarters in the same house, but the fuller replied, "That would be impossible, for whatever I whitened, you would immediately blacken again".[2] The story is from an ancient Greek situational fable involving human characters which teaches that opposites are incompatible.[3] Cicero later seems to draw a political moral from the fable in one of his letters, in which he discusses the irreconcilability between republicans and supporters of Julius Caesar.[4] And in the Victorian era, the preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon applied what he called "the well-worn fable" to religious difference.[5]
In Renaissance times there were 16th century poetic versions of the fable in Neo-Latin by Gabriele Faerno[6] and by Hieronymus Osius.[7] The latter concludes with the sentiment that
- Difference is far from such accord
- That only likeness will afford.
An English version of the story appeared in the 1692 fable collection of Roger L'Estrange with the very broad application that "Tis a necessary Rule in Alliances, Matches, Societies, Fraternities, Friendships, Partnerships, Commerce, and all manner of civil dealings and Contracts, to have a strict Regard to Humour, the Nature, and the Disposition of those we have to do withal."[8] Samuel Croxall also featured it in 1722 under the title of "The Collier and the Fuller"[9] and Thomas Bewick with the same title in 1784.[10]
References
- ^ Aesopica site
- ^ Aesop's Fables (1867), by George Fyler Townsend, fable 5
- ^ Francisco Rodriguez Adrados, History of the Graeco-Latin Fable 3, Brill, 2003, pp. 41-2
- ^ D. R. Shakleton Bailey, Cicero's Letters to Atticus, vol. 6, p. 383, note 7
- ^ Faith in All Its Splendour, "Faith essential in pleasing God", p.35
- ^ Fabulae Centum 63, Fullo et carbonarius, p. 145
- ^ Phryx Aesopus, fable 55, "Carbonarius et fullo"
- ^ Aesop's Fables, fable 67
- ^ The Fables of Aesop with Instructive Applications, pp. 107-8
- ^ Select Fables of Aesop and Others p. 216
External links
This page was last edited on 26 April 2024, at 20:57