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If there is no personal prince to find the Sleeping Beauty she

will simply sleep. Fables repose upon quite the opposite idea;

that everything is itself, and will in any case speak for itself.

The wolf will be always wolfish; the fox will be always foxy.

Something of the same sort may have been meant by the animal

worship, in which Egyptian and Indian and many other great

peoples have combined. Men do not, I think, love beetles or cats

or crocodiles with a wholly personal love; they salute them as

expressions of that abstract and anonymous energy in nature which

to any one is awful, and to an atheist must be frightful. So in

all the fables that are or are not Aesop's all the animal forces

drive like inanimate forces, like great rivers or growing trees.

It is the limit and the loss of all such things that they cannot

be anything but themselves: it is their tragedy that they could

not lose their souls.