FRANÇOIS RABELAIS

Few books have managed to draw into their pages more of the unregenerate body of the earth than have the works of François Rabelais. In truth these exultant and extravagant pages seem writ, as it were, with the actual rank sweat of our planet, with the bitter, salt sweat that for ever rises from the commons and goose-greens of the world, from those commons and goose-greens whose gay levels, for all their buttercups and daisies, are soundly chequered with round, flat, homely cow-pats.

But what perhaps especially separates this good great work from all others is the fact that amid its boisterous joviality, its sly whimsicality, its monumental and monstrous bawdry, one comes continually upon utterances of the gravest and most profound significance. The riotous earth of Rabelais’s conception rolls and rollicks it under the still, frosty light of the eternal stars like a coopered barrel of beer tumbled and jogged across the floor of the universe; and scarcely have we found time to register a protest against the acceptance of such jolly friskings, maintaining, as best we may, that life has more in it than just that, when, behold! we hear words spoken above the music of the spheres, above the hum of the outer darkness, which cause us to discover, with a sense of infinite relief, that, as a matter of fact, nobody understands better than Rabelais the desperate nature of the human situation. And undoubtedly it is this very solicitude about our fate, so vigorous and yet so tender, that to a great extent explains the hold that this work has had upon men’s minds for close upon four hundred years.

Rabelais was born near Chinon, and his earliest recollections had to do with the fat, grain-growing, grape-producing fields of Touraine. He knew what it was to keep starlings from the vineyards in springtime; to pick a pannier-full of purple mulberries in August; to thrash a walnut tree in October; and to spend long, drowsy, fireside hours sitting in the great family-kitchen during the winter months. It was doubtless the memory of one such evening, stored away in his mind for years afterwards like a cask of unforgotten wine in a rich cellar, that inspired him to write those mellow sentences which have to do with the home-life of the most good, most royal Grangousier, “who after supper warmeth his b——s by a good clear grate fire, and waiting upon the broiling of some chestnuts is very serious in drawing scratches on the hearth, with a stick burnt at one end, wherewith they did stir up the fire, telling to his wife and the rest of the family pleasant old stories and tales of former times.”

Shut away in a monastery from such happy surroundings when still only a lad, his energy for many years found expression in absorbing the new learning. But alas! these pursuits only led him into trouble. His cell was searched and was found to contain books in that language which the instinct of his ignorant fellow-monks suspected, not altogether unjustly perhaps, as being entirely inimical to the spirit of mediæval Christianity. To understand Greek with its strange, clear-cut, artistic lettering, with its lucid, uninhibited methods of reasoning, there could not but be definite evil in that! But perhaps their eccentric intellectual brother had in other ways provoked their hostility. Certain legends have come down to us concerning Rabelais’s conduct at Fontenay-le-Comte which ought to be remembered. Had he not on a certain famous festival played the devil with the lustral water in the chapel-stoups, and with even more malice on another occasion diluted their refectory-wine with some villainous aphrodisiac concoction—that same red wine which they had trodden out in the autumn and had hoped to whiff up in the winter?

Rabelais escaped further persecution at the hands of the Grey brothers by appealing to a higher authority, to no less a person than Pope Clement VII. To use influential personages as so many stalking-horses was a practice which in later life he reduced to a fine art. Until the day of his death he was content to remain a sly assailant of obscurantism, ambushed behind this or that formal potentate. It is clear he had no predilection for the stake. On every side he saw men being burnt alive for their opinions. “Now God forbid,” he cried, “that I should die this death! for I am by nature sufficiently dry already without heating myself any further.” And between Catholics and Protestants he had a hard enough time of it to keep a whole skin on his back. Orthodox churchmen would always have been glad to lay hands on him, while Robert Estienne from his refuge at John Calvin’s side kept inveighing against “the theologians of Paris for not burning Rabelais, the atheist.”

What then does Rabelais, this great modern ancient, teach? Above everything a courageous acceptance of existence for its own sake. He is no mincing idealist. He loves the hurly-burly, the large, brutal transactions of life. He feels no misgivings. He accepts the hungry, carnivorous world as he finds it, full of “jolly pugs and well-mouthed wenches,” full of “excellent godebillios of the dun ox (you know with the black streak)” and monstrous mares of “burnt sorrel hue” with “slouch ears, like the goats in Languedoc.” He likes a world in which there are forests “most horribly fertile and copious in dorflies, hornets and wasps,” and where “a pair of breeches is not so easily got; I have experience of it”; and yet at the same time where a man may sit an hour or two “at Innocents the pastry cook over against the painted wine shop at Chinon,” or go to mass with a thick-covered, breviary weighing heavy with its grease and clasps, or visit the kitchen “to see what roast meat is on the spit,” or “pass through certain meadows, or grassy places to behold the trees and plants,” or, when night is full, look out of the castle window “to see the face of the sky.”

He is intolerant of all that is false and artificial. A goose-step education, an education that is narrow, insular and standardized, exists he declares, “but to bastardize good and noble spirits and to corrupt all the flower of youth”; better to follow the good Gargantua’s example than to allow the natural philosophic temper of one’s mind to be spoiled by the adhesion of so many false, stereotyped and dead ideas; better in fact to study “some paltry half-hour with eyes fixed upon a book but with one’s mind in the kitchen,” and then go “to see a coney ferrited or caught in a gin ... or to lie tumbling in some fair meadow, unnestling of sparrows, taking of quails, and fishing for frogs and crabs.”

Hypocrites of every cast are as bitter to Rabelais’s taste as the pilgrims in his salad were to Gargantua. Of doctors he says, “a hundred devils leap into my body if there are not more old drunkards than old physicians.” As for monks, “the very shadow of the steeple of an abbey,” he declares, “is fruitful.” Picrochole, who is used by him as the exact prototype of an evil mischief-making monarch, he is content to leave as a “common porter at Lyons as testy and pettish in humor as ever he was before.” “These devilish kings which we have,” he says, “are but as so many calves; they know nothing and are good for nothing but to do a thousand mischiefs to their poor subjects, and to trouble all the world with war for their unjust and detestable pleasure.”

He is opposed to all that is mean, small, conventional; to the proprieties which are invented to restrain and hold back the free and frank expression of natural emotion.

“Never trust those men that always peep out at one hole.”

“Nor can there be any greater dotage in the world than for one to guide and direct his courses by the sound of a bell, and not by his own judgment and direction.”

The fact is that there is more in these works than Mr. John Sumner and the rest of the “rabble of great pocky loggerheads” who clamor against them are able to discern. Nobody can write of Our Lord with more devotion than can Rabelais when he is so disposed. Consider Friar John’s stout words as he sipped his wine. “O how good is God, that gives us of this excellent juice! I call him to witness, if I had been in the time of Jesus Christ, I would have kept him from being taken by the Jews in the garden of Olivet. And the devil fail me, if I should have failed to cut off the hams of those gentlemen-apostles who ran away so basely after they had well supped, and left their good master in the lurch.”

What passage in all literature could be found more truly religious than Pantagruel’s explanation of that mysterious cry, “Pan is dead,” which was heard over the waves of the Mediterranean at the time that Tiberius Cæsar sat upon the Imperial throne! Coming as it does in the very midst of such vast, grotesque, gorbellied merriment, it strikes one to the heart as might some graceful, magnanimous benediction heard unexpectedly from the lips of an heroic drunkard. We are laughing all of us “like a swarm of flies,” and suddenly we find ourselves listening to this fine, ironic tribute to that most incredible and desperate of man’s fancies which conceives as possible that the son of God actually in very truth came down to visit the high roads, the farmyards, the pantries of the earth, from beyond the familiar aura of the moon, from beyond the wide expanses of our solar system, from beyond the outer borders of the cold constellations.

For my part I understand it of that great Saviour of the faithful who was shamefully put to death at Jerusalem by the envy and wickedness of the doctors, priests and monks of the Mosaic law.... He is the good Pan.... At his death, complaints, sighs, fears and lamentations were spread through the whole fabric of the Universe, whether heavens, land, sea or hell. The time also concurs with this interpretation of mine; for this most good, most mighty Pan, our only Saviour, died near Jerusalem during the reign of Tiberius Cæsar. Pantagruel, having ended his discourse, remained silent and full of contemplation. A little while after we saw the tears flow out of his eyes as big as ostrich’s eggs.

But quite apart from Rabelais’s attitude toward Christianity, his mood with regard to all philosophic speculations seems to be penetrated with the profoundest wisdom of the ages. Panurge in referring to the heroes says, “May I never be damned if I was not so much a lobcock as to believe they had been immortal, like so many fine angels.” To which Pantagruel answers with sublime and noble simplicity, “I believe that all intellectual souls are exempted from Atropos’s scissors.”

Indeed, so strong is the underswirl of enigmatic revelation throughout these pages that one comes almost to believe that this wayward, sophisticated French monk was in some especial way conversant with the hidden secrets of the universe:

“Fate leads the willing and the unwilling draws.”

“All things tend to their end.”

“Good hope lies at the bottom.”

Finally, in full recognition of the treacherous nature of all theological conceptions, he commits his readers through the mouth of the Priestess Bacbuc into the almighty protection “of that Intellectual sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”

How we would like to have had an authentic glimpse of the old man during those last years when he was officiating as parish priest in the village near Paris! Did he also, like the honest schoolman, confess at last that he had finished with argumentations and had come to that pass when he “wanted nothing but a cup of good wine, a good bed, my back to the fire, my belly to the table, and a good deep dish”? It may well have been so, for he had passed through many dangers and up to the last must have felt himself fortunate in that he escaped the fate of Euclion’s cock, “which cock, for having by his scraping uncovered a treasure, had his neck twisted round.” From certain legendary accounts of his death, it would seem that he accepted that last experience with characteristic equanimity; and indeed who would dare to assert that there has ever lived an intellectual spirit more worthy “to receive the gentlest, the deserved, the last kind embraces of the great Alma Mater, the earth”?