The fuller (or cloth cleaner) and the charcoal burner (or collier) is one of Aesop's Fables and numbered 29 in the Perry Index.Aesopica site
The fable
A charcoal burner proposed to his friend the fuller that they share quarters in the same house, but the fuller replied, "That would be impossible, for whatever I whitened, you would immediately blacken again".Aesop's Fables (1867), by George Fyler Townsend, fable 5 The story is from an ancient Greek situational fable involving human characters which teaches that opposites are incompatible.Francisco Rodriguez Adrados, History of the Graeco-Latin Fable 3, Brill, 2003, pp. 41–42 Cicero later seems to draw a political moral from the fable in one of his letters, in which he discusses the irreconcilability between republicans and supporters of Julius Caesar.D. R. Shakleton Bailey, Cicero's Letters to Atticus, vol. 6, p. 383, note 7 And in the Victorian era, the preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon applied what he called "the well-worn fable" to religious difference.Faith in All Its Splendour, "Faith essential in pleasing God", p. 35
In Renaissance times there were 16th century poetic versions of the fable in Neo-Latin by Gabriele FaernoFabulae Centum 63, Fullo et carbonarius, p. 145 and by Hieronymus Osius.Phryx Aesopus, fable 55, "Carbonarius et fullo" The latter concludes with the sentiment that Difference is far from such accord That only likeness will afford. An English version of the story appeared in the 1692 fable collection of Roger L'Estrange with the very broad application that "Tis a necessary Rule in Alliances, Matches, Societies, Fraternities, Friendships, Partnerships, Commerce, and all manner of civil dealings and Contracts, to have a strict Regard to Humour, the Nature, and the Disposition of those we have to do withal."Aesop's Fables, fable 67 Samuel Croxall also featured it in 1722 under the title of "The Collier and the Fuller"The Fables of Aesop with Instructive Applications, pp. 107-108 and Thomas Bewick with the same title in 1784.Select Fables of Aesop and Others p. 216
References
External links Illustrations of the fable from the 15th to 19th centuries