Rabelaisian

“ As for the extreme theory of the anti-Rabelaisians, that Rabelais was a “ dirty old blackguard ” who liked filth and wallowed in it from choice, that hardly needs comment. His errors in this way are of course, looked at from an absolute standard, unpardonable. But judged relatively there are several, we shall not say excuses, but explanations of them. In the first place, the comparative indecency of Rabelais has been much exaggerated by persons unfamiliar with early French literature. ”

“ Rabelais was set down as the first wit and scholar of his age.
The character of the book we have noticed cannot be defended. Its irreverent use of scripture quotations, and loose wit, are not to be overlooked, but there was no advocacy of atheism in it. Indeed we must look upon Rabelais as acting the part of a reformer. If he had sought simply popularity and the favor of the court and church, he would certainly not have written a book which is a scathing attack upon pope, prelate, and monk. ”

“ Rabelais was in principle a reformer, but of a humour {Pg 33} too light and careless to embark seriously in the great cause.
No writer has had more contemptuous depreciators and enthusiastic admirers: his book has been called a farrago of impurity, blasphemy, and trash; a masterpiece of wit, pleasantry, erudition, and philosophy, composed in a charming style. An unqualified judgment for or against him would mislead. The most valuable opinions of him are those of his own countrymen, since the French language and literature have attained their highest cultivation. ”

“ It is safe to say that never, no, not even in the boundless license of the comedy of Aristophanes, was more flagrant indecency, and indecency proportionately more redundant in volume, perpetrated in literature, than was done by Rabelais. Indecency, however, it is, rather than strict lasciviousness. Rabelais sinned against manners more than he sinned against 33 morals. But his obscenity is an ocean, without bottom or shore. Literally, he sticks at nothing that is coarse. ”

“ If any offered to hide himself amongst the thickest of the vines, he laid him squat as a flounder, bruised the ridge of his back, and dashed his reins like a dog. If any thought by flight to escape, he made his head to fly in pieces by the lamboidal commissure, which is a seam in the hinder part of the skull. If anyone did scramble up into a tree, thinking there to be safe, he rent up his perinee, and impaled him in at the fundament. If any of his old acquaintance happened to cry out, Ha, Friar John, my friend Friar John, quarter, quarter, I yield myself to you, to you I render myself! ”

“ Rabelais, whose wit prodigiously was made, All men, professions, actions to invade, With so much furious vigour, as if it Had lived o’er each of them, and each had quit, Yet with such happy sleight and careless skill, As, like the serpent, doth with laughter kill, So that although his noble leaves appear Antic and Gottish, and dull souls forbear To turn them o’er, lest they should only find Nothing but savage monsters of a mind,— No shapen beauteous thoughts ”

“ By the memory of the decretals, said Friar John, tell us, I pray you, what you honest men here live on? Could not a man take a chirping bottle with you to taste your wine? I can see nothing among you but parchment, ink-horns, and pens. We live on nothing else, returned Double-fee; and all who live in this place must come through my hands. How, quoth Panurge, are you a shaver, then? Do you fleece 'em? Ay, ay, their purse, answered Double-fee; nothing else. By the foot of Pharaoh, cried Panurge, the devil a sou will you get of me. ”

“ You love mutton, I see; you will run at sheep. I know you by that same nose and hair of yours, though I never saw your face before. Alas! alas! how kind you are! And would you indeed damn your precious soul? Our decretals forbid this. Ah, I wish you had them at your finger’s-end. Patience, said Friar John; but, si tu non vis dare, praesta, quaesumus. Matter of breviary. As for that, I defy all the world, and I fear no man that wears a head and a hood, though he were a crystalline, I mean a decretaline doctor. ”

“ The sows in the styes when they lie-in (saving the honour of this good company) are fed only with orange-flowers. But, said Panurge, drive a bargain with me for one of them, and I will pay you for't like a king, upon the honest word of a true Trojan; come, come, what do you ask? Not so fast, Robin, answered the trader; these sheep are lineally descended from the very family of the ram that wafted Phryxus and Helle over the sea since called the Hellespont. A pox on't, said Panurge, you are clericus vel addiscens! ”

“ Double-fee perceiving that Pantagruel was taken up with contemplating those things, Let us go further, sir, said he to him; all this is nothing yet. Nothing, quotha, cried Friar John; by the soul of my overheated codpiece, friend Panurge and I here shake and quiver for mere hunger. I had rather be drinking than staring at these ruins. Pray come along, sir, said Double-fee. He then led us into a little wine-press that lay backwards in a blind corner, and was called Pithies in the language of the country. You need not ask whether Master John and Panurge made much of their sweet selves there ”

“ Prithee, tell me, then, rude fellow, what are so many sheared sheep doing here? Who sheared them, if thou didst not?"
"Thou art a rogue; and I will kill thee as I would a ram!" shrieked the sheep-seller, while trying to draw his sword; but the blade stuck close to the scabbard, as often happens on sea, from the rust caused by salt-water. Panurge, who was not armed, and who, from his cradle, had been a coward, ran for safety towards Pantagruel, who was not looking at what was going on. But Friar John, always on the watch, with his strong arm caught hold of Dindeno. ”

“ Thou wilt be soundly peppered, my good, honest fellow, I warrant thee. I will be? answered Panurge. A plague rot thee, thou old fool and doting sot, how graceless and unpleasant thou art! When all cuckolds shall be at a general rendezvous, thou shouldst be their standard-bearer. But whence comes this ciron-worm betwixt these two fingers? This Panurge said, putting the forefinger of his left hand betwixt the fore and mid finger of the right, which he thrust out towards Herr Trippa, holding them open after the manner of two horns, and shutting into his fist his thumb with the other fingers. ”

“ The detractors of Rabelais's book may be more easily justified than his {Pg 34} admirers. The favour which it obtained in his lifetime, and the popularity which it has maintained through three centuries, may be ascribed to other causes besides its merits. It had the attraction of satire, malice, and mystery, which all were at liberty to expound at their pleasure; and many, doubtless, read it for its ribald buffooneries. There is in it, at the same time, a fund of wit, humour, and invention—a rampant, resistless gaiety, which gives an amusing and humorous turn to the most outrageous nonsense. ”

“ A great moral teacher. Yes. But it would have been better for France if his book, tied to a millstone, had been hurled into the sea. . . . He destroyed effectually, perhaps for centuries yet to come, earnestness in France. He found men craving for a better faith, believing that it was to be found, and left them doubting whether any system in the world could give it. Great and noble as are many of the passages in Rabelais, profoundly wise as he was, I do believe that no writer who ever lived has inflicted such lasting injury on his country. ”

“ Friar John began to paw, neigh, and whinny at the snout's end, as one ready to leap, or at least to play the ass, and get up and ride tantivy to the devil like a beggar on horseback.
Methinks, said Pantagruel, a man might have been more out of danger near the white of which Gymnast spoke than was formerly Diogenes near another. How is that? asked Homenas; what was it? Was he one of our decretalists? Rarely fallen in again, egad, said Epistemon, returning from stool; I see he will hook his decretals in, though by the head and shoulders. ”

“ Thou never sawest so many damned souls since thou wast born; and so fair, so bewitching they seem, that one would swear they are Stygian ambrosia. I thought at first, God forgive me! that they had been English souls; and I don't know but that this morning the isle of Horses, near Scotland, was sacked, with all the English who had surprised it, by the lords of Termes and Essay.
Friar John, at the approach of Panurge, was entertained with a kind of smell that was not like that of gunpowder, nor altogether so sweet as musk ”

“ So don't I, quoth Panurge; poor pilgarlic is fain to make everybody's time his own; if they have time, I find time. Come, then, let us go drink, if you will. Now this is something like a tansy, said Aedituus; you begin to talk somewhat like; still speak in that fashion, and I'll secure you from being thought a heretic. Come on, I am of your mind.
As we went back to have t'other fuddling bout, we spied an old green-headed bish-hawk, who sat moping with his mate and three jolly bittern attendants, all snoring under an arbour. ”

“ From all the other world, returned Aedituus, if you except some part of the northern regions, who of late years have stirred up the jakes. Mum! they may chance ere long to rue the day they did so; their cows shall have porridge, and their dogs oats; there will be work made among them, that there will. Come, a fig for't, let's drink. But pray what countrymen are you? Touraine is our country, answered Panurge. Cod so, cried Aedituus, you were not then hatched of an ill bird, I will say that for you, since the blessed Touraine is your mother ”

“ Ay, ay, trust to that, and hang me, quoth Panurge; yours is a very pretty fancy. Ods-fish! did I not give you a sufficient account of the elements’ transmutation, and the blunders that are made of roast for boiled, and boiled for roast? Alas! here ‘tis; I’ll go hide myself below. We are dead men, every mother’s son of us. I see upon our main-top that merciless hag Atropos, with her scissors new ground, ready to cut our threads all at one snip. Oh! how dreadful and abominable thou art; thou hast drowned a good many beside us, who never made their brags of it. ”

“ With this he cried out, By the devil's maker, master, there's roguery in the case; they put tricks upon travellers here more than anywhere else, and would make us believe that a t--d's a sugarloaf. What damned cozening, gulling, and coney-catching have we here! Do you see this madge-howlet? By Minerva, we are all beshit. Odsoons, said Aedituus, speak softly, I tell you. It is no madge-howlet, no she-thing on my honest word; but a male, and a noble bird.
May we not hear the pope-hawk sing? asked Pantagruel. I dare not promise that, returned Aedituus; for he only sings and eats at his own hours. ”

“ Panurge!"
"That can I, your majesty," cried Panurge, stepping briskly forward. "The Giant Widenostrils died from having too many cocks and hens and foxes in his stomach. I heard in his stomach, with my own ears,—which are pretty sharp ones,—as he lay stretched out in the meadow, cocks crowing, hens cackling, foxes yelping, and by my faith, I thought the foxes were getting the better of the cocks and the hens."
"Thank Heaven! We can build our dear windmills again, and we shall not die," cried the King, who at once sent his herald to announce the good news through the island. ”

“ Democritus the laugher seems to have been a philosopher yet more subtle than Heraclitus the weeper, and our fore- most scientific men are reviving his theories after more than two millenniums; and Aristophanes, I suppose, had at least as much imaginative genius as RABELAIS 37 Euripides. Now, Rabelais is essentially a laughing philosopher, endowed with the inestimable boon of high animal spirits, ardent and quenchless, not varied by fits of deep and gloomy depression, as in so many cases; his wisdom is always steeped in drollery, his imagination revels in riotous burlesque. ”

“ In the chaotic conditions belonging to this epoch lived Rabelais. We are not surprised that, in the midst of this society, corrupt from its debaucheries and tottering on its foundations, and being witness to such ruin and devastation, the genius of this wonderful man prompted him to reveal, by means of withering sarcasm, the frightful past of the Middle Ages, the effects of which were still felt in his own century, which looked back upon that past with horror. ”

“ The extraordinary horse-play of pleasantry, which makes Rabelais unreadable for the general public of to-day, begins so promptly, affecting the very prologue, that we could not present even that piece of writing entire in our extract. We are informed that the circulation in England of the works of Rabelais, in translation, has been interfered with by the English government, on the ground of their indecency. We are bound to admit, that, if any writings whatever were to be suppressed on that ground, the writings of Rabelais are certainly entitled to be of the number. ”

“ Nothing can be more uncertain, or indeed more improbable. The simple fact, that of two the most copious and diligent commentators of Rabelais,—Motteux and Duchat,—one has identified Rabelais's personages with the D'Albrets of Navarre, Montluc bishop of Valence, &c., whilst the other has discovered in Grandgousier, Garagantua, Pantagruel, Panurge, friar John, the characters of Louis XII., Francis I., Henry II., cardinal Lorraine, cardinal du Bellay. ”