I knew of the trickster fox—for which, or rather whom, I had at some point learned the name Reynard—from Aesop, from Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, and from La Fontaine’s matchless versified fables, especially “The Crow and the Fox”:

                  Le Corbeau et le Renard

        Maître Corbeau, sur un arbre perché,
                Tenoit en son bec un fromage.
        Maître Renard, par l’odeur alléché,
                Lui tint à peu près ce langage:
        «Hé! bonjour, Monsieur du Corbeau,
Que vous êtes joli! que vous me semblez beau!
                Sans mentir, si votre ramage
                Se rapporte à votre plumage,
Vous êtes le phénix des hôtes de ces bois.»
A ces mots le Corbeau ne se sent pas de joie;
                Et, pour montrer sa belle voix,
Il ouvre un large bec, laisse tomber sa proie.
Le Renard s’en saisit, et dit: «Mon bon Monsieur,
                    Apprenez que tout flatteur
        Vit aux dépens de celui qui l’écoute.
Cette leçon vaut bien un fromage, sans doute.»
                Le Corbeau, honteux et confus,
Jura, mais un peu tard, qu’on ne l’y prendroit plus.

Translations can be found online. (There is also a notable version (not a translation) by Krylov, Ворона и Лисица, the first of his fables, see e.g. here.)

In the Middle Ages many tales of Reynard were told in Latin, French, German, Dutch, and English (at least), and assembled into collections (the Roman de Renart has 80,000 lines). I have only recently learned that there is an established long story of that fox, printed first in Flemish (1479), thence in German and in English (Caxton, 1481). I will comment on two modern English versions of that story.

First is the new prose retelling by Anne Louise Avery, Reynard the Fox (Bodleian Library, 2020). She explains: “Its core or skeleton is essentially my own close translation of Caxton; … However, whilst a few passages are kept almost exactly the same, I have also extensively fleshed out and feathered and furred each section, adding new and detailed descriptions of landscapes, castles, cities, rivers and villages, and expositions of characters’ backgrounds, families, motivations and occupations.” All of that is well done, and she sprinkles her text with old English words, which lend an agreeable flavor while hardly interfering; there is a glossary for the curious. But the tale so told is very long; good as it was, I found myself wishing for less flesh on the bones. Probably it ought to be read in installments over some time.

From Avery I learned of Goethe’s version, Reineke Fuchs (1794), an epic poem of twelve cantos (Gesänge) in German hexameters. I looked around for an English translation, and was lucky enough to find a beautiful edition of the one by Thomas James Arnold, a London police magistrate, writer, and translator from Greek, Latin, and German (at least), whose version (1853 and 1855), says the editor’s introduction to it, “remains the simplest, most forceful, and most faithful.” My edition is that published by The Heritage Press in 1954, with magnificent woodcuts by Fritz Eichenberg; inexpensive good copies are available. Arnold turns Goethe’s unrhymed hexameters into heroic couplets (rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter). It goes like lightning, and has fun along the way: thus having gulled the powerful King and his court with the promise of a pilgrimage, the fox proposes that his family flee their home, but is persuaded by his dear wife to brave it out:

So be it as you wish. I stay at home;
For what on earth have I to do at Rome?
And for my promised journey to Jerusalem,
I only named the project to bamboozle ‘em.
Nor if, instead of the one oath I swore,
I’d sworn a dozen, would I go the more.
With you and my dear Children will I stay,
And get out of my scrape as best I may.

Now this translates the following lines. Goethe’s hexameters, I may mention, were first criticized by classicists as not Greek enough, and later by nationalists as not German enough. As far as I can tell, which is not far at all, the poet knew what he was doing; and he sticks to the essential story.

Wie Ihr gesagt habt, soll es geschehen. Ich bleibe zu Hause.
Wenig hab ich fürwahr in Rom zu suchen, und hätt ich
Zehen Eide geschworen, so wollt ich Jerusalem nimmer
Sehen; ich bleibe bei Euch und hab es freilich bequemer;
Andrer Orten find ichs nicht besser, als wie ich es habe.

Hexameters, it must be admitted, do not go like lightning. Yet I believe that Goethe’s verses move rather better than the remarkably literal rendering of John Storer Cobb (1902):

It then shall be done as you say, and I will continue at home.
But little I have, of a truth, to look for in Rome, and if I
Myself by ten pledges had bound, I should never Jerusalem see;
I mean to remain with you here, as is certainly most to my mind;
Other places I do not regard as better than that which I have.

Had I come across that instead of Arnold, vulpine wiles would have tried me in vain.

Reynard plays tricks and spins lies to gain food, to protect himself, to retaliate upon his enemies,—and for the sheer devilry of the thing. He manages to dispense more suffering than is exacted from him; but this takes all his wit, for he lives in a harsh world, where cruelty finds the unwary. A distant cousin of his, a stranger to cruelty, is the “gentle grafter” of O. Henry, who is merely after money (the means of life), which he seeks to extract from those who best deserve to part with it. He is a class: Jeff Peters, Andy Tucker, Parleyvoo Pickens, and others fill it up. Their ingenuity is no less than Reynard’s; their predicaments are less dire, and more preposterous. But what raises them to immortality is their English, I mean American, which exhibits the self-will of Humpty Dumpty and the confidence of Mrs. Malaprop.

In general, O. Henry is a master of language, whose power shows everywhere in his stories; among other places, in the kind of speech that his grafters and their victims find themselves using, which skirts incoherence while producing meaning out of words the dictionary never intended for the chosen purpose. He has learned from Mark Twain; he has not imitated him. Says Andy, “I am going to test my theory, ‘Once a farmer, always a come-on,’ in spite of the veneering and the orifices that a spurious civilization has brought to him.” At another time Jeff observes, “Now, to work this scheme we’ve got to be able to produce bodily a charming widow or its equivalent with or without the beauty, hereditaments and appurtenances set forth in the catalogue and writ of errors, or hereafter be held by a justice of the peace.” And: “ ‘Patience,’ says I. ‘You’ll have to climb higher in the profession before you can taste the laurels that crown the footprints of the great captains of industry.’ “ Oh, just one more: a certain Murkison declares, “I’ll fry some fat out of this ignis fatuus or burn a hole in the skillet.”

A few of O. Henry’s tales are in the anthologies—”The Gift of the Magi,” “The Ransom of Red Chief,” etc.—but he is disdained by some as little more than the inventor of the “O. Henry story,” the kind with a twist at the end; he wants profundity of complexity, they like to say, or some such thing. Let them. He knows place and type; sharp observation serves his concentrated attention; he captures authenticity and absurdity, pathos and glee, with a brisk economy of style. Like Baudelaire’s peintre de la vie moderne, he pictures a particular time, and that is gone; yet his stories have aged well, because they treat of permanent things. He was a hard-working artist, consistently fertile of invention, who held himself to a high standard; he studied again and again the possibility of escape by the skin of one’s teeth. He was a fox.