The Blind Man and the Lame
Plato the Younger states the situation in two wittily contrasting lines: The three others, who include Leonidas of Alexandria and Antiphilus of Byzantium, comment that by combining in this way the two make a perfect whole.
[1] A West Asian story based on this trope is found in a pseudo-biblical document, the Apocryphon of Ezekiel, in which the two form a partnership to raid an orchard but claim their innocence by pointing out their disabilities.
[4] In the same century a paralytic boy mounted on a blind man's shoulders appears in a fresco in Lesnovo monastery, seeking a cure for their leprosy and suggesting a similar lesson in co-operation to overcome disabilities.
Jan Sadeler's Emblemata evangelica ad XII signa coelestia (Antwerp, 1585) pictures the pair crossing a plank bridge in the lower foreground of a majestic landscape, with Latin epigraphs exhorting charity.
Combining the meaning of both, the print carries the epigraph Mutua si fuerint studia, hic servatur et illa, "Each is served where the objectives are common" (plate 46).
In his prose version, the two meet at "a difficult place in the road" and Dodsley follows Gellert in prefacing it with the comment that "the wants and weaknesses of individuals form the connections of society".
[13] But in Brooke Boothby's treatment of the story in his Fables and Satires (1809), the two meet at a ford and help each other across,[14] as also happens in Marmarduke Park's Aesop in Rhyme or old friends in a new dress (Philadelphia 1852).
The French fabulist Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian gives his story of L'aveugle et le paralytique a completely different urban setting in Asia.
William Lipscomb (1754–1842) ends with the sentiment "Your eyes to me their aid shall lend/ And I'll be hands and feet to you," suggesting that the author was acquainted with the story's origin in the epigrams from the Greek Anthology.
[18] The theme of a lame beggar riding on the back of a blind man is taken to an even further remove in The Cat and the Moon (1924), a mask play by Irish poet W. B. Yeats.
With staff in hand, striding vigorously over a rough country road, a man with sightless orbs is bearing on his back one stricken and wasted by paralysis, whose piercing and lustrous gaze gives stronger accentuation to the theme".
In it the motif of crossing a river on a narrow plank returns and an angel hovering in the background underlines the earlier Christian connotation of the emblem tradition.
[36] Honoré Daumier used Florian's fable for purposes of political satire in a caricature, "Blind system and paralytic diplomacy", published in Le Charivari in 1834.
[37] Such treatment contributed to the emergence of the French idiom, "L'union de l'aveugle et le paralytique" ("the union of the blind man and the lame"), that drew on Florian's poem but was used ironically in reference to any unpromising partnership.
This depicted Joseph Stalin riding on the back of Adolf Hitler and appeared in the magazine Marianne under the signature Marinus, the nom de plume of the Danish Jacob Kjeldgaard.
