Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/216

Rh 198 E A B R A B 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 un- familiar with early French literature. The form of his book was above all things popular, and the popular French literature of the Middle Ages as distinguished from the courtly and literary litera- ture, which was singularly pure, can hardly be exceeded in point of coarseness. The fabliaux, the early burlesque romances of the Audigier class, the farces of the 15th century, equal (the grotesque iteration and amplification which is the note of Gargantua and Pantagruel being allowed for, and sometimes without that allow- ance) the coarsest passages of Rabelais. His coarseness, moreover, disgusting as it is, has nothing of the corruption of refined voluptu- ousness about it, and nothing of the sniggering indecency which disgraces men like Pope, like Voltaire, and like Sterne. It shows in its author a want of reverence, a want of decency in the proper sense, a too great readiness to condescend to the easiest kind of ludicrous ideas and the kind most acceptable at that time to the common run of mankind. The general taste having been consider- ably refined since, Rabelais has in parts become nearly unreadable, the worst and most appropriate punishment for his faults. As for those who have tried to make his indecency an argument for his laxity in religious principle, that argument, like another men- tioned previously, hardly needs discussion. It is notoriously false as a matter of experience. Rabelais could not have written as he has written in this respect and in others if he had been an earnestly pious person, taking heed to every act and word, and studious equally not to offend and not to cause offence. But no one in his senses would dream of claiming any such character for him. This brings us to the last point what his religious opinions were. He has been claimed as a freethinker of all shades, from undogmatic theism to atheism, and as a concealed Protestant. The last of these claims has now been very generally given up, and indeed Erasmus might quite as reasonably be claimed for the Reformation as Rabelais. Both disliked and attacked the more crying abuses of their church, and both at the time and since have been disliked and attacked by the more imprudent partisans of that church. But Rabelais, in his own way, held off from the Reformation even more distinctly than Erasmus did. The accusa- tion of freethinking, if not of directly anti-Christian thinking, has always been more common and has recently found much favour. It is, however, remarkable that those who hold this opinion never give chapter and verse for it, and it may be said confidently that chapter and verse cannot be given. The sayings attributed to Rabelais which colour the idea (such as the famous "Je vais chercher un grand peut-etre," said to have been uttered on his death-bed) are, as has been said, purely apocryphal. In the book itself nothing of the kind is to be found. Perhaps the nearest approach to it is a jest at the Sorbonne couched in the Pauline phrase about " the evidence of things not seen," which the author removed from the later editions. But irreverences of this kind, as well as the frequent burlesque citations of the Bible, whether commendable or not, had been, were, have since been, and are common in writers whose orthodoxy is unquestioned ; and it must be remembered that the later Middle Age, which in many respects Rabelais represents almost more than he does the Renaissance, was, with all its unquestioning faith, singularly reckless and, to our fancy, irreverent in its use of the sacred words and images, which were to it the most familiar of all images and words. On the other hand, there are in the book, in the description of Gargantua's and Pantagruel's education, in the sketch of the abbey of Thelema, in several passages relating to Pantagruel, expressions which either signify a sincere and unfeigned piety of a simple kind or else are inventions of the most detestable hypocrisy. For these passages are not, like many to be found from the Renaissance to the end of the 18th century, obvious flags of truce to cover attacks, mere bowings in the house of Rimmon to prevent evil consequences. There is absolutely no sign of the tongue in the cheek. They are always written in the author's highest style, a style perfectly elo- quent and unaffected ; they can only be interpreted (on the free- thinking hypothesis) as allegorical with the greatest difficulty and obscurity, and it is pretty certain that no one reading the book without a thesis to prove would dream of taking them in a non- natural sense. It is not, indeed, to be contended that Rabelais was a man with whom religion was in detail a constant thought, that he had a very tender conscience or a very scrupulous orthodoxy. His form of religious sentiment was not evangelical or mystical, any more than it was ascetic or ceremonial or dogmatic. As regards one of the accepted doctrines of his own church, the excellence of the celibate life, of poverty, and of elaborate obedience to a rule, he no doubt was a strong dissident ; but the evidence that, as a Christian, he was unorthodox, that he was even an heretical or latitudinarian thinker in regard to those doctrines which the various Christian churches have in common, is not merely weak, it is practically non-existent. The counter testimony is, indeed, not very strong and still less detailed. But that is not the point. It is sufficient to say that there is absolutely nothing within the covers of Rabelais's works incompatible with an orthodoxy which would be recognized as sufficient by Christendom at large, leaving out of the question those points of doctrine and practice on which Christians differ. Beyond this no wise man will go, and short of it hardly any unprejudiced man will stop. The dates of the original editions of Rabelais's works have been given where possible already. The earlier books were repeatedly reissued during the author's life, and always with some correction. What may be called the first complete edition appeared in 1567 at Lyons, published by Jean Martin. It is computed that no less than sixty editions were printed before the close of the 16th century. A very considerable time, however, elapsed before the works were, properly speaking, edited. Huet devoted much pains to them, but his results were .not made public. The first edition which calls for notice, except in a complete bibliography, is that of Le Duchat (Amsterdam, 1711). Le Duchat was a very careful student, and on the whole a very efficient editor, being perhaps, of the group of students of old French at the beginning of the 18th century, which included La Monnoye and others, the most sober, critical, and accomplished. But at that time the knowledge of the period was scarcely far enough advanced. The next important date in the bibliography of Rabelais is 1823, in which year appeared the most elaborate edition of his work yet published, that of Esmangart and Johanneau (9 vols.), including for the first time the "Songes Drolatiques," a spurious but early and not uninteresting collection of grotesque figure-drawings illustrating Gargantua and Pantagruel, and the second edition of M. de 1'Aulnaye, containing a bad text but a useful glossary. From this time the editions have been very numerous. Among them may be mentioned those illustrated by Gustave Dore, first on a small scale (1854), afterwards more elabo- rately (1870) ; that of the Collection Diclot by Burgaud des Marets and Rathery (1859, second edition 1870) ; the Bibliotheque Elzevir- ienne edition by MM. Lacour and A. de Montaiglon ; that of the Nouvelle Collection Jannet (seven small volumes, 1867-74), com- pleted by M. Moland ; and lastly, the edition of M. Marty-Laveaux in the Collection Lemerre (1868-81), which is unfortunately not yet completed, but which when finished will undoubtedly be the handsomest, the most accurate, and the most complete in the scholarly sense yet published. At present the most really useful edition which combines a handsome fonn with cheapness is that of the Nouvelle Collection Jannet, though that of MM. Burgaud des Marets and Rathery is not to be despised. Commentaries on Rabelais, independent of editions, have been especially numerous of late years ; the work of MM. Reville, Noel, Mayrargues, and Gebhart may be mentioned. But the best recent book on the sub- ject in French is that of M. J. Fleury (2 vols., Paris, 1876), which, though deficient in exactitude as to many points of detail, and sacrificing something to a desire of presenting Rabelais as a great social philosopher, is, on the whole, veiy sensible and complete. Rabelais was very early popular in England. There are possible allusions to him in Shakespeare, and the current clerical notion of him is very unjustly adopted by Marston in the words "wicked Rabelais"; but Bacon described him better as the great jester ol France, and a Scot, Sir Thomas Urquhart, translated the earlier books in 1653. This was not worthily completed till the luckless Motteux, or, as his compatriots call him, Le Motteux, finished it with an extensive commentary. Criticism of a scattered kind on Rabelais in English is abundant, that of Coleridge being the most important, while the constant evidence of his influence in Southey's Doctor is also noteworthy. But he was hardly treated as a whole before Mr Besant's book on the subject in the Foreign Classics for English Readers (1879), which the author has since followed up with Readings from Rabelais (1883). Mr Besant has too readily adopted (probably from Michelet) the apocryphal scandals as to the difference between Rabelais and the poets of the Pleiade, and is committed (it is not quite clear why) to a view of Rabelais as a non - Christian thinker and preacher for which it is impossible to discover solid justification. But otherwise his books form the best introduction possible for a modern English reader to this great author. (G. SA. ) RABENER, GOTTLIEB WILHELM (1714-1771), German satirist, was born in 1714 near Leipsic, and after studying law at that city entered the civil service, in which he continued for many years. He died on 22d March 1771. The papers which he published in the Brevier Beitrdge were subsequently collected into a Sammhing satirischer Schriflen (2 vols., 1751), to which two volumes were after- wards added. The work passed through numerous edi- tions. Rabener's Freundschaftliche Brief e were published posthumously by C. F. Weisse with a biography. (See GERMANY, vol. x. p. 533.)