In this lesson, we will study Aesop’s Fable, “The Cock and the Jewel”.
I. THE FABLE
Read the fable below carefully. Read it aloud if you are able to do so. Then read it a second time, slowly, before you go on to the rest of the lesson. The rest of the lesson will make little sense to you unless the story itself is clear in your mind first.
A brisk young Cock scratching for something with which to entertain his favourite hens, happened to turn up a jewel. Feeling quite sure that it was something precious, but not knowing well what to do with it, he addressed it with an air of affected wisdom as follows: — “You are a very fine thing, no doubt, but you are not at all to my taste. For my part, I would rather have one grain of dear delicious barley than all the jewels in the world.”
II. LITERAL SENSE
Before we can find the lesson in this fable, we must be sure we understand the story itself, plainly and in order. A lesson cannot be built on a story the reader has not grasped. So let us go through the fable piece by piece.
First, the Cock. A cock is a full-grown male chicken. In a farmyard a cock does not simply live among the hens; he watches over them, leads them, and calls them when he finds food. The fable calls him “brisk,” which means lively, quick, full of energy. It also calls him “young,” which matters, because a young cock is still learning his place and is more likely to put on airs than an old one who has settled into quiet habits. This cock was “scratching for something with which to entertain his favourite hens.” Chickens scratch at the ground with their feet because that is how they find their food. Seeds, insects, and grains often lie hidden just under the surface of the dirt, and a chicken cannot see them from above. So a chicken scrapes the earth away with its claws, again and again, until whatever is hidden is uncovered. This cock was not digging for himself alone. He was digging to find some tasty thing to bring to his hens, the way a cock in a farmyard often does, calling them over with a special sound when he finds something good.
Second, the jewel. A jewel is a precious stone, cut or polished, valued by people for its beauty and its rarity. A jewel has no smell, no taste that anyone would want, and gives no nourishment to any creature. Its whole worth, for a man, lies in its being rare and beautiful, so that it can be worn as an ornament or traded for a great deal of money. Notice that a jewel is exactly the kind of thing a man prizes and a chicken cannot use at all. This is the detail on which the whole fable turns, and we will return to it.
Third, some words in the fable that are older or used in an older way. “Affected wisdom” means wisdom that is only put on, like a costume, and not real. To affect something is to pretend to it, to act as though you had it when you do not. When Aesop tells us the Cock spoke “with an air of affected wisdom,” he is warning us plainly, before the Cock says a single word, that what follows will only sound wise. It will not be wise. “Barley” is a grain, a kind of cereal crop, much like wheat or oats, that has been grown and fed to animals and to people for thousands of years. It is a plain, common, everyday food, nothing rare or beautiful about it, but it truly nourishes whoever eats it. “Dear,” in the phrase “dear delicious barley,” is an old use of the word meaning precious or highly valued, not the same as calling a person “dear.”
Fourth, the setting. This story takes place in a farmyard, the open ground around a farmhouse where chickens are kept and allowed to walk about freely, scratching and pecking as they please. A farmyard has bare dirt, scraps of old straw, and the kind of loose soil that hides small things, which is exactly the kind of ground where a jewel, once dropped or buried, might lie waiting to be turned up by a scratching claw.
Now let us set the events in order, and see how one follows from another. The Cock was scratching in the dirt, because that is how a cock searches for food. Because he was scratching, and not looking for anything in particular except food, he happened to turn up a jewel, a thing he was not looking for and did not expect. Because the jewel was shining and unlike anything he had scratched up before, he felt “quite sure” it was something precious. But because he is a cock, and not a man, he did not know what a jewel is for, and so he did not know “well what to do with it.” And because he did not want to appear foolish or ignorant in front of it, or perhaps in front of his hens, he spoke to it “with an air of affected wisdom,” as though he had carefully weighed its worth and found it lacking. He told the jewel it was fine, no doubt, but not to his taste, and that he himself would rather have one grain of barley than all the jewels in the world.
That is where the fable ends. We are never told what the Cock did next. We do not know whether he left the jewel lying in the dirt and went back to his scratching, or whether some person later came along and picked it up. Aesop stops the story the moment the Cock finishes speaking. The speech itself is the whole point, and we will see why later.
Here is the misunderstanding a child is most likely to fall into. It would be easy to hear this fable and think that the Cock is being wise and humble, truly content with plain, simple things instead of coveting riches, and that Aesop wants us to imitate him exactly as he is. But Aesop has already told us, before the Cock opens his mouth, that his manner is “affected wisdom,” meaning pretended wisdom, not real wisdom. The Cock is not shown to us as a model of true contentment. He is shown to us as a creature who does not understand the thing in front of him at all, and who covers over his own ignorance with grand-sounding words, as though he had judged the whole matter of jewels and barley for all the world, when in truth he has only found one stone he cannot eat.
III. MORAL LESSON
The principal lesson of this fable is that we must not judge the worth of a thing only by whether it satisfies our own immediate wants, and we must not speak as though our own narrow judgment settles a question we have not truly examined.
The fault on display here has a name. It is a kind of false wisdom, sometimes called affectation, which means the putting-on of an appearance one does not truly possess. Affectation is not a virtue but a kind of pretending. To understand it, we must first understand what a virtue is. A virtue is a good habit of the soul. A habit is a settled readiness to act in a certain way, built up in us by doing the same kind of act again and again, until it becomes almost second nature. Wisdom, when it is real, is the settled readiness of the mind to see things as they truly are and to speak of them truly. Affected wisdom is the opposite: it is speech dressed up to sound like this settled readiness, when the speaker has not actually done the work of understanding the thing he speaks about.
Let us separate, as we should with any story like this, what the Cock wanted from how he went about getting it, or in this case, from how he spoke about what he found. What the Cock wants, all through the fable, is good food for himself and his hens. That desire is not faulty at all. A cock ought to want nourishment, since nourishment is truly necessary for his life and the life of his hens. If the Cock had simply looked at the jewel, seen that it was no use to him, and gone back to scratching for barley without saying a word, there would be no fault in the story at all, only good sense. His fault is not in preferring barley for himself. A grain of barley truly does serve a cock’s good better than a jewel does, since a jewel cannot feed him or his hens no matter how long he stares at it. His fault lies entirely in his manner of speaking about the jewel.
Look closely at his words. He does not say, “I do not know what this is for,” which would have been true and humble. He says, “you are not at all to my taste,” which is only a statement about his own liking. Then he goes much further. He says he would rather have one grain of barley “than all the jewels in the world.” Notice what has happened here. He began by speaking of his own taste, which he does know. He ends by pronouncing judgment on all the jewels in the whole world, which he cannot possibly know anything about. He has slipped from an honest report of his own preference into a grand claim that sounds like wisdom but is really only his hunger speaking in borrowed robes.
Here is where the doctrine of judging an act helps us see the fault clearly. We judge any act, including an act of speech, by three things: by what is done, by why it is done, and by the circumstances surrounding it. What the Cock does is pronounce the jewel worthless compared to barley, for the whole world and not merely for himself. Why he does it seems to be a kind of pride, an unwillingness to be caught not knowing what a fine, shining thing is for, so that he covers his ignorance with a confident speech instead. The circumstance that matters most is this: he is a cock, speaking about a jewel, a thing entirely outside a cock’s understanding and use. Given that circumstance, his confident tone is exactly backward. The less a creature understands a thing, the less it should speak of that thing as though it had weighed and settled its worth for everyone.
Now let us name the fault that stands opposite this one, so that the true virtue can be seen standing in the middle. On one side stands the fault the Cock falls into: dismissing what one does not understand, and speaking as though one’s own narrow experience were the measure of a thing’s worth to the whole world. On the other side stands a different fault: chasing after a thing that does not suit one’s own true good, simply because it is fine, rare, or admired by others. A creature that starved itself while staring at a jewel, refusing plain nourishing food because the jewel looked grander, would be foolish in the opposite direction. The middle way, where the true virtue stands, is this: to recognize honestly what serves your own good, as the Cock rightly does in preferring barley for himself, while also admitting honestly the limits of your own understanding, instead of pronouncing final judgment on things that lie outside it. The Cock keeps half of this balance and loses the other half. He is right about the barley. He is wrong to speak of “all the jewels in the world.”
We might ask whether the Cock’s choice, once made, could be undone. He has not leapt into a well, as in some fables, and there is nothing here that traps him. He may pick the jewel back up later if he wishes, or leave it forever; nothing forces his hand. But notice that his words are a different matter from his actions. A spoken boast, once said aloud before others, is harder to call back than a step is to retrace. If a wiser creature had been listening, and later saw the Cock proven a fool about some other fine thing he did not understand, the Cock’s earlier words would be remembered against him. This is a small but real rule: speech that claims more knowledge than we have is a debt we may later be asked to pay, even when the action behind it could easily have been undone.
Aesop was a pagan and did not have the light of faith, and yet natural reason alone, without any teaching from revelation, can see that a creature who speaks with more confidence than his understanding warrants is behaving foolishly. Any thinking person, of any time or place, can see this once it is pointed out. The Church, teaching more fully than Aesop could, calls humility the foundation upon which the other virtues are built, and she teaches that pride is precisely this fault grown large: the claiming of a fuller and surer knowledge, or a fuller and surer goodness, than we in truth possess. A Christian, weighing his words and his judgments with the whole of his life set before God, learns to say plainly “I do not understand this” when that is the truth, rather than dressing his ignorance in words that only sound wise.
IV. AESOP’S CHOICES
Aesop was a teacher, and this brief fable is the deliberate work of a teacher. Every part of it was chosen for a reason, and it is worth our time to ask why.
Why a cock, and not some other bird or beast? A cock scratches the ground for his food, which is exactly the kind of searching that could turn up something buried and unexpected, such as a jewel dropped long ago and covered over by dirt. A creature that simply grazes on grass growing above the ground, or one that hunts by sight alone, would have far less reason to stumble upon a buried stone. But there is a second reason, just as important. A cock, among the creatures of the farmyard, is known for holding himself proudly, for crowing loudly, and for leading the hens as though he were a small lord over his own yard. A creature already given to a certain self-importance is exactly the sort of creature who would slip easily into speaking with an air of wisdom he did not truly have. A meeker, more silent creature would not have made the fault so visible.
Why a jewel, of all the things he might have turned up? A jewel is the very type of a thing that is precious to men and worthless, as food, to a bird. Its hardness, its coldness, its complete inability to be eaten or used by a chicken, stand in the sharpest possible contrast to a soft, warm grain of barley that a chicken can peck up and swallow at once. Had Aesop chosen some other buried object, an old coin, perhaps, or a broken tool, the contrast would not have been nearly so complete, since a coin at least has some shape a bird might peck at out of curiosity, and a jewel has nothing at all to recommend it to a hungry mouth.
Why barley, rather than some other food? Barley is about as plain and common a grain as could be named, food for fowl and cattle and for poor men besides, cheap, ordinary, and unremarkable to look at. Set beside a gleaming jewel, one grain of barley could hardly look more humble. And yet it is the thing that truly nourishes the Cock, while the jewel, for all its fineness, nourishes him not at all. The plainness of the barley makes the Cock’s true, sound preference for it entirely believable, even while his grand manner of announcing that preference remains foolish.
Why does the fable end the instant the Cock finishes speaking, without telling us what became of the jewel afterward? Because the whole lesson lies in the speech itself, not in any action that follows it. If Aesop had told us the Cock walked away and never thought of the matter again, or that a man came later and took the jewel home and grew rich from it, our attention would be pulled toward the fate of the stone rather than toward the folly of the words. By stopping exactly where he does, Aesop leaves the Cock’s boast ringing in our ears, and lets us judge it for ourselves. The shortness of the whole fable serves the same end. There is nothing here to distract us: a cock, some dirt, a jewel, one short speech. A short fable holds one picture clearly, where a long one would blur it.
Now let us ask why a story is used here at all, instead of a bare rule. Aesop might simply have written, “Do not scorn what you do not understand, and do not speak with more confidence than your knowledge allows.” That is a true statement, and it is also the kind of statement that slides out of a listener’s mind almost as soon as it has entered.
Here is the reason a story does what a bare rule cannot. All that we come to know begins in the senses. We first learn by seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling particular things, one at a time. From many particular things taken in through the senses, the mind gradually draws out what is true of many such things, and at last what is true always, in every case. A child has never seen “affected wisdom” itself, walking about in the world, because affected wisdom is not a thing that can be seen with the eyes. But a child can easily see, in his mind’s eye, a proud young rooster standing over a shining stone, puffing himself up, and announcing to it, as though passing judgment for the whole world, that he prefers his barley. Once that picture is fixed in the mind, the mind can travel outward from it to the general truth about every puffed-up, pretended kind of wisdom a person might put on.
This is not a turning away from the visible, ordinary world toward some finer world of pure ideas. It is exactly the opposite. The fable teaches through a thing a child can picture, precisely because picturing is the road along which human understanding naturally travels. We are made to learn this way, beginning always from what can be seen, and rising from there to what cannot.
V. APPLICATION
A lesson you cannot use in your own days is a lesson you will not keep, so let us bring the Cock and his jewel into your own life.
Consider your words first. Suppose a friend shows you something he has made, or found, or is simply proud of, a drawing, perhaps, or a rock he thinks is remarkable, or some small thing he collected. If it does not interest you, the Cock’s fault would be to say, at once and with a knowing air, “that is a silly, worthless thing,” as though your own lack of interest proved something true about the object itself for everyone. The honest and better answer is to say plainly, “I don’t care for that myself, but I can see it matters to you,” which admits the truth, that your own taste is not the measure of a thing’s worth to the whole world.
Consider next your work and the things others value that you do not share. Perhaps a brother or sister has a book, a game, or some small treasure that means nothing to you and everything to them. The faulty act, again the Cock’s own act, is to declare loudly that the thing is useless or foolish, simply because it does not serve your own purposes. The right act is closer to what the Cock should have said and did not: to notice honestly that this thing is not for you, without pretending that your own narrow view settles what it is worth in itself or to someone else.
Consider third your schoolwork, since this is where the fable strikes closest to home for you. There will be lessons that seem, at first, to be no more use to you than a jewel is to a hungry cock: a rule of grammar, a passage of poetry to memorize, a point of arithmetic whose purpose you cannot yet see. The Cock’s fault, exactly, is to declare such a lesson worthless because you cannot presently eat it, so to speak, because it does not satisfy some immediate want the way a game or a meal does. But a thing’s true worth does not depend on whether you can already see its use. The jewel was truly precious, even lying in the dirt of a farmyard where no cock could make anything of it. A rule of grammar or a passage of poetry may be truly precious in the same way, its worth waiting for a use and an understanding you have not yet grown into. The better and more honest thing to say, when a lesson seems useless to you, is not “this is worthless,” but “I do not yet see what this is for,” which is the very thing the young Cock, in his pride, could not bring himself to say.
Here is why this fable will help you remember, long after a bare rule would have faded. A rule such as “do not judge things beyond your understanding” is easy to hear and easy to forget, because there is nothing in it for your mind to hold onto. But a picture stays with you. You can see the bare dirt of the farmyard, scratched up by quick claws. You can see the jewel lying there, catching the light. You can see the young Cock drawing himself up, addressing the stone as though he were passing judgment for the whole world, and declaring that he would rather have his one grain of barley than all the jewels there are.
That picture will return to you before any rule does, at the very moment you need it. Someday you will be about to dismiss, with a confident and knowing air, some fine thing you do not yet understand, whether it is a lesson, a book, or another person’s treasure. And in that moment, before the rule comes to mind, the Cock will come to mind first, standing over his jewel, and his foolish, confident words will remind you to ask instead, honestly, what you do not yet know.
Carry the lesson in one sentence: Do not call a thing worthless only because it is not to your taste.
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