The Mountain in Labour

The earliest surviving version of the tale is in the first two and a half lines of a four-line Latin poem by Phaedrus: "A mountain had gone into labour and was groaning terribly. Such rumours excited great expectations all over the country. In the end, however, the mountain gave birth to a mouse." Phaedrus then went on to say that this applies to those who make serious but empty threats.[2] But the most well-known mention of the fable appears in Horace's epistle on The Art of Poetry. Discussing what to avoid in a poem's opening, he recommends

And don’t start like the old writer of epic cycles:

‘Of Priam’s fate I’ll sing, and the greatest of Wars.’

What could he produce to match his opening promise?

Mountains will labour: what’s born? A ridiculous mouse!

(Ars Poetica, 136–9)[3][4]

A number of writers of Greek origin alluded to the fable without relating it. Plutarch described it as an "old proverb",[5] while Porphyry claimed that it was a Greek proverb that Horace had been quoting.[6]

During the Middle Ages the fable was retold many times without significant variation. The moral, however, was differently expressed and widened to specify a variety of circumstances to which it could be applied.

One of the Anglo-Latin prose collections going under the name Romulus gives a more extended interpretation, commenting that it warns one not to believe big talk, "for there are some who promise many more things than they deliver, and some who threaten much and perform least".[7] This was more or less the conclusion on which William Caxton closed his ambiguous adaptation of the story as "a hylle whiche beganne to tremble and shake by cause of the molle whiche delved hit".[8] There was, however, a closer English-language version of the fable told earlier by John Gower in his Confessio Amantis (c.1390), with the advice not to be taken in by every empty rumour.[9]

The actual line from Horace's poem (Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus) was reproduced word for word in another mediaeval compilation of fables, the Ysopet-Avionnet.[10] In this instance, however, the allusion was in connection with the different fable about Belling the cat, which has as subject the ineffectiveness of political dialogue.

Two French poets followed Horace in applying the story to literary criticism. In the case of Nicolas Boileau, he was imitating the Roman poet’s Ars Poetica in an Art Poétique (1674) of his own and made the allusion in much the same terms as had Horace.[11] The words on which he closed, La montagne en travail enfante une souris (The mountain in labour gives birth to a mouse), soon became proverbial and were applied to any great hope that came to nothing.[12] In the version of the tale published in 1668 in La Fontaine's Fables (V.10),[13] the first six lines are given to an updated relation in which it is imagined that the mountain is about to be delivered of a city bigger than Paris. That is followed by eight lines of reflection on the kind of author who promises great things although, as Norman Shapiro translates it, "What often comes to pass? – Just gas." La Fontaine’s rhymed short line at the end imitates the vowel assonance of Horace's ridiculus mus in the original Latin.[14] The title that La Fontaine gave this fable was La montagne qui accouche (The mountain giving birth), thus putting more emphasis on the situation rather than, as in Boileau, on the result.

Other poets shortly followed La Fontaine’s lead in applying the fable to boastful authors. In his Nouveau recueil des fables d'Esope mises en français, avec le sens moral en quatre vers (1678), Isaac de Benserade provided an introductory prose version of the fable, succeeded by a dismissive quatrain which ended with a repetition of Boileau’s pithy line, La montagne en travail enfante une souris.[15] A German poet too, Friedrich von Hagedorn, imitated La Fontaine’s fable in his 1738 collection Fabeln und Erzählungen. There, in Der Berg und der Poet (The Mountain and the Poet), he introduced a rhymster big with an epic idea: but "What arrives embroidered upon it? Like the mouse from a mountain, a sonnet."[16] And when Lord Byron was updating allusions in his Hints from Horace (1811), he substituted a reference to a contemporary writer of bad epics, Robert Southey, "Whose epic mountains never fail in mice".[17]

Samuel Croxall, in his prose retelling of the fable, cites "Great cry and little wool" as a parallel English proverb and applies the story to the empty promises of politicians.[18] French writers too interpreted the fable in political terms. Eugène Desmares wrote an imitation of all La Fontaine’s fables as Les métamorphoses du jour: ou, La Fontaine en 1831 in order to comment on the situation at the start of Louis Philippe I's reign. There "La Revolution qui accouche" addressed itself to disappointed expectations.[19] Following the removal of Louis Philippe in 1848 and the declaration of a French Second Republic, the new political situation was again satirised in a one-act vaudeville, titled after the fable and written by Varin and Arthur de Beauplan.[20]

• 15th-20th century book illustrations online