Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/215

Rh RABELAIS 197 what this means. It is, in plain English, humour. The definition of humour is a generally acknowledged crux, and till it is defined the definition of Pantagruelism will be in the same position. But that it consists in the extension of a wide sympathy to all human affairs together with a comprehension of their vanity may be said as safely as anything else. Moroseness and dogmatism are as far from the Pantagruelism of Rabelais as maudlin sentimentality or dilettantism. Perhaps the chief things lacking in his attitude are, in the first place, reverence, of which, however, from a few passages, it is clear he was by no means totally devoid, and an appreciation of passion and poetry. Here and there there are touches of the ' latter, as in the portrait of Quintessence, but passion is everywhere absent an absence for which the comic structure and plan of the book does not by any means supply a complete explanation. For a general estimate of Rabelais's literary character and influ- ence the reader may be referred to the article FRANCE (vol. ix. p. 652). But some detailed remarks must be given here. The life and works of Rabelais, despite the considerable number of publica- tions of which they have been the subject, have hitherto been less fully and satisfactorily treated than the life and works of any author who occupies an equally important place. As will have been seen from the foregoing attempt to give the actual facts, a whole legend has grown up round the scanty details recorded of him, and many, if not all, of the particulars of that legend can be shown to be false. But no one hitherto has undertaken in a satisfactory fashion the construction of a rigorously critical life. In the same way there are many questions in reference to his main work which have never been thoroughly and finally sifted by a critical intelligence equal to the task. Limits of space, to say no more, prevent any such attempt being made here ; but there are three questions with- out the discussion of which this notice of one of the foremost writers of the world would not be worthy of its present place. These are What is the general drift and purpose of Gargantua and Panta- gruel, supposing there to be any ? What defence can be offered, if any defence is needed, for the extraordinary licence of language and imagery which the author has permitted himself? What was his attitude towards the great questions of religion, philosophy, and politics ? These questions succeed each other in the order of reason, and the answer to each assists the resolution of the next. There have been few more remarkable instances of the lues com- mentatoria than the work of the editors of Rabelais. Almost every one appears to have started with a Rabelais ready made in his head, and to have, so to speak, read that Rabelais into the book. Those who have not done this, like Le Duchat, Motteux, and Esmangart, have generally committed the error of tormenting themselves and their author to find individual explanations of personages and events. The extravagance of the last-named commentator takes the form of seeing elaborate allegories ; that of some others devotes itself chiefly to identifying the characters of the romance with more or less famous historical persons. But the first blunder, that of forming a general hypothetical conception of Rabelais and then adjusting interpretation of the work to it, is the commoner. This conception, however, has singularly varied. According to some expositors, among whom the latest and not the least respectable is M. Fleury, Rabelais is a sober reformer, an apostle of earnest work, of sound education, of rational if not dogmatic religion, who wraps up his morals in a farcical envelope partly to make them go down with the vulgar and partly to shield himself from the consequences of his reforming zeal. According to others, of whom we have had in England a distinguished example in Mr Besant, Rabelais is all this but with a difference. He is not religious at all ; he is more or less anti-religious ; and his book is more or less of a general pro- test against any attempt to explain supematurally the riddle of the earth. According to a third class, the most distinguished re- cent representative of which was M. Paul Lacroix, the Rabelaisian legend does not so much err in principle as it invents in fact. Rabelais is the incarnation of the " esprit Gaulois," a jovial careless soul, not destitute of common sense or even acute intellectual power, but first of all a good fellow, rather preferring a broad jest to a fine-pointed one, and rollicking through life like a good-natured undergraduate. Of all these views it may be said that those who hold them are obliged to shut their eyes to many things in the book and to see in it many which are not there. The religious part of the matter will be dealt with presently ; but it is impossible to think that any unbiassed judge reading Rabelais can hold the grave philosopher view or the reckless good fellow view without modifications and allowances which practically deprive either of any value as a sufficient explanation of the book and its writer. Those who, as it has been happily put, identify Rabelais with Pantagruel, strive in vain on any view intellectually consistent or morally respectable to account for the vast ocean of pure or impure laughter and foolery which surrounds the few solid islets of sense and reason and devotion. Those who in the same way identify Rabelais with Panurge can never explain the education scheme, the solemn apparition of Gargantua among the farcical and fantastic variations on Panurge's wedding, and many other passages ; while, on the other hand, those who insist on a definite propaganda of any kind must justify themselves by their own power of seeing things invisible to plain men. But these vagaries are not only un- justifiable ; they are entirely unnecessary. No one reading Rabelais without parti pris, but with a good knowledge of the history and literature of his own times and the times which preceded him, can have much difficulty in appreciating his book. He had evidently during his long and studious sojourn in the cloister (a sojourn which was certainly not less than five-and-twenty years, while it may have been five-and-thirty, and of which the stud iousuess rests not on legend but on documentary evidence) acquired a vast stock of learning. He was, it is clear, thoroughly penetrated with the instincts, the hopes, and the ideas of the Renaissance in the form which it took in France, in England, and in Germany, a form, that is to say, not merely humanist but full of aspirations for social and political improvement, and above all for a joyous, varied, and non-ascetic life. He had thoroughly convinced himself of the abuses to which monachism lent itself. Lastly, he had the spirit of lively satire and of willingness desipere in loco which frequently goes with the love of books. It is in the highest degree improbable that in beginning his great work he had any definite purpose or intention. The habit of burlesquing the romans d'aventures was no new one, and the form lent itself easily to the two literary exercises to which he was most disposed, apt and quaint citation from and variation on the classics and satirical criticism of the life he saw around him. The immense popularity of the first two parts induced him to con- tinue them, and by degrees (the genuineness of the fifth book at any rate in substance is here assumed) the possibility of giving the whole something like a consistent form and a regular conclusion presented itself to him. The voyage in particular allowed the widest licence of satirical allusion, and he availed himself of that licence in the widest sense. Here and there persons are glanced at, while the whole scenery of his birthplace and its neighbourhood is curiously worked in ; but for the most part the satire is typical rather than individual, and it is on the whole a rather negative satire. In only two points can Rabelais be said to be definitely polemic. He certainly hated the monkish system in the debased form in which it existed in his time ; he as certainly hated the brutish ignorance into which the earlier systems of education had suffered too many of their teachers and scholars to drop. At these two things he was never tired of striking, but elsewhere, even in the grim satire of the Ghats fourres, he is the satirist proper rather than the reformer. It is in the very absence of any cramping or limiting purpose that the great merit and value of the book consist. It holds up an almost perfectly level and spotless mirror to the temper of the earlier Renaissance. The author has no universal medicine of his own (except Pantagruelism) to offer, nor has he anybody else's universal medicine to attack. He ranges freely about the world, touching the laughable sides of things with kindly laughter, and every now and then dropping the risibile and taking to the rationale. It is not indeed possible to deny that in the Oracle of the Bottle, besides its merely jocular and fantastic sense, there is a certain "echo," as it has been called, "of the conclusion of the preacher, " a certain acknowledgment of the vanity of things. But in such a book such a note could hardly be wanting unless the writer had been a fanatic, which he was not, or a mere voluptuary, which he was not, or a dullard, which he was least of all. It is, after all, little more than a suggestion, and is certainly not strengthened by anything in the body of the work. Rabelais is, in short, if he be read without prejudice, a humourist pure and simple, feeling often in earnest, thinking almost always in jest. He is distinguished from the two men who alone can be compared to him in character of work and force of genius combined Lucian and Swift by very marked characteristics. He is much less of a mere mocker than Lucian, and he is entirely destitute, even when he deals with monks or pedants, of the ferocity of Swift. He neither sneers nor rages ; the rire immense which distinguishes him is altogether good-natured ; but he is nearer to Lucian than to Swift, and Lucian is perhaps the author whom it is most neces- sary to know in order to understand him rightly. If this general view is correct (and it may at least claim to be founded on nothing but the reading of Rabelais himself without prejudice and with a tolerable apparatus) it will probably condition to some extent the answer to be given to the two minor questions stated above. The first is connected with the great blemish of Gargantua and Pantagruel, their extreme coarseness of language and imagery. It is somewhat curious that some of those who claim Rabelais as an enemy of the supernatural in general have been the loudest to condemn this blemish, and that some of them have made the exceedingly lame excuse for him that it was a means of wrapping up his propaganda and keeping it and himself safe from the notice of the powers that were. This is not complimentary to Rabelais, and, except in some very small degree, it is not likely to be true. For as a matter of fact obscenity no less than impiety was charged against him by his ultra-orthodox enemies, and the obscenity no less than the supposed impiety gave them a handle against him before such bodies as the Sorbonne and the parliaments. As for the extreme theory of the anti-Rabelaisians, that Rabelais