Krilof and His Fables/The Ass and the Nightingale
The Ass and the Nightingale.
An Ass happened to see a Nightingale, one day, and said to it,
"Listen, my dear. They say you have a great mastery over song. I have long wished very much to hear you sing, and to judge as to whether your talent is really so great."
On this the Nightingale began to make manifest its art—whistled in countless ways, sobbed, sustained notes, passed from one song to another; at one time let her voice die away, and echoed the distant murmur of the languishing reed; at another, poured through the wood a shower of tiny notes. Then all listened to the favourite singer of Aurora. The breezes died away; the feathered choir was hushed; the cattle lay down on the grass. Scarcely breathing, the shepherd revelled in it, and only now and then, as he listened to it, smiled on the shepherdess.
At length the singer ended. Then the Ass, bending its head towards the ground, observed,
"It's tolerable. To speak the truth, one can listen to you without being bored. But it 's a pity you don't know our Cock. You would sing a great deal better if you were to take a few lessons from him."
Having heard such a judgment, our poor Nightingale took to its wings and flew far away.
[It is said that Krilof wrote this fable after an interview with some great man (Count Razumofsky or Prince A. N. Galitzin, perhaps), who had asked him to read him some of his fables. After hearing them, the noble patron of letters said, "That is very good; but why don't you translate, as Dmitrief does?" "I cannot," modestly answered the poet, who returned home, and straightway wrote down the grandee an ass.
M. Fleury ranks this piece among the imitations; and it is true that the same subject has been admirably treated by Diderot. But the idea may easily have occurred to Krilof without his having read Diderot's excellent fable.]
