Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.")/Rabelais
BIOGRAPHICAL AND
CRITICAL STUDIES
RABELAIS
I
François Rabelais was born about 1483 (the date is not certain), at Chinon, in Touraine, that fat and quiet province of subtle-witted, easy-going people, whose character has been so sympathetically described by the great Balzac (as in L'Illustre Gaudissart); for Balzac, like Descartes and Paul Louis Courier, was a son of the same soil, and, like Rabelais and Paul Louis, copiously illustrated his native province. Rabelais calls Touraine the garden of France, and Chinon a most famous, noble, and ancient town, the first in the world; and in Book v., chap. xxxv. of his great work, we read: 'This made me say to Pantagruel that this entry put me in mind of the painted cellar, in the oldest city in the world, where such paintings are to be seen, and in as cool a place. 'Which is the oldest city in the world?' asked Pantagruel. 'It is Chinon, sir, or Cainon, in Touraine,' said I. 'I know,' returned Pantagruel, 'where Chinon lies, and the painted cellar also, having myself drunk there many a glass of cool wine; neither do I doubt but that Chinon is an ancient town—witness its blazon. I own it is said twice or thrice —
"Chinon,
Little town,
Great renown,
On old stone
Long has stood;
There's the Vienna, if you look down;
If you look up, there's the wood."
But how,' continued he, 'can you make out that it is the oldest city in the world? Where did you find this written?'—'I have found it in the Sacred Writ,' said I, 'that Cain was the first that built a town; we may then reasonably conjecture that he the first from his own name named it Cainon; as, following his example, all other founders of cities have named them after themselves.'" An etymology as clear as Swift's tracing of bees and cobblers to the Hivites and the Shuites. The father kept an hotel called the "Lamprey," in which was the painted cellar (or cellar of pints, in one reading) so lovingly referred to, and had also a vineyard famous for its white wine; so that the jolliest of men was born amidst congenial surroundings. Being the youngest of several sons, he was destined for the Church, and his education was begun in the Benedictine abbey of Sevillé or Seuillé, close at hand. He was afterwards removed to the convent of La Basmette at Angers, where he rapidly progressed in learning, and made friends who were to stand him in good stead throughout his life, including Andre Tiraqueau, afterwards lieutenantgeneral of the bailiwick of Fontenay-le-Comte; Geoffroi d'Estissac, who became Bishop of Maillezais; and the four brothers du Bellay, who rose to high rank in the Church and State, one of them being made cardinal. When old enough for the novitiate, he unfortunately left the learned Benedictines for the ignorant and bigoted Franciscans, entering their convent of Fontenay-le-Comte in Lower Poitou, where he took priest's orders in 1511. He carried on his studies with the passionate ardour which distinguished the great scholars of the Renaissance, having but one friend in the convent, Pierre Amy, who shared them with him, and who, like himself, corresponded in Greek with Budæus. The other monks regarded with profound distrust and antagonism this devotion to profane learning, and especially to the diabolical Greek; and at last the superiors made a visit of inquisition to the cells of the two students, and the chapter confiscated their Greek books and manuscripts. Then, it is said. Amy was frightened or won over to be the accuser of Rabelais, though of what he accused his old friend is not recorded—perhaps of heresies uttered confidentially. It is certain that soon afterwards Rabelais was put in pace—that is to say, condemned to imprisonment for life in an underground dungeon of the monastery, on a diet of bread and water: the Church had always such honey-sweet names for its most atrocious cruelties! Thus, when an heresiarch like Giordano Bruno was handed over to the secular power to be burnt alive, the ecclesiastical formula ran: "To be punished as gently as possible, and without effusion of blood." Many reasons have been given for the 4 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES terrible sentence passed on Rabelais, in addition to whatever may have been betrayed by Amy ; but they are all legendary rather than historical, and seem to have been suggested by the drolleries of his great work, not begun till long afterwards, rather than by anything known of him during these years of solitary and strenuous study. Thus, he is said to have mingled with the wine of the monks certain anti- aphrodisiacs, or, on the contrary, certain aphrodisiacs ; to have got drunk at a village festival and preached debauchery to the peasants, giving them a fearful example by songs and dances and lewd antics ; to have posed himself in the place of the statue of St. Francis in the porch of the church of the convent, and by suddenly laughing and gesticulating, made the poor people kneeling before him cry out, " A miracle ! " — " On ajoute qtiil poussa V irreverence et le sacrilege Jusqu' d. les asperger d'une eaii qtd n^etait rien inoins que bhiite," He was rescued from this living burial by some of his powerful friends, particularly Andre Tiraqueau, who by his office had a certain authority over the convent, and who had to force the gates in order to release him. By the mediation of the same staunch friends he obtained, in 1524, an indulgence from Clement VII., permitting him to pass into the order of St. Benedict, to enter the Abbey of Maillezais under his friend Geoffroi d'Estissac, to assume the habit of a regular canon, and, notwithstanding his previous vow of poverty, to hold any Church livings he might obtain as a Benedictine. He was now forty years of age, and the best years of his life, all his young manhood, had been immured amongst the RABELAIS 5 most superstitious, fanatical, unlettered, and inert of monks. One shudders to think of what that great intellect and genial heart must have endured in such society. Only his unquenchable thirst for knowledge and his marvellous animal spirits could have sus- tained him. We shall not be surprised to read in his books the most bitter contempt and abhorrence for monks and monkery. Released thus, at length, he soon threw off the regular habit and assumed that of a secular priest, attaching himself to d'Estissac, who allotted him the income of a secretaryship, and undertook to provide him with a benefice when occasion should offer. He could now pursue his studies in peace (not in pace), with the advantages of a select society of liberal scholars and scholarly men of the world. He soon made the acquaintance of the leading thinkers and writers more or less in sympathy with the Reformation, or in revolt against the old orthodoxy, such as Calvin, Clement Marot, and Bonaventure des Periers. He could not long remain on good terms with Calvin, who was just as bigoted and dogmatical, in his own way, as any of the most narrow-minded doctors of the Church. Rabelais was not the man to free himself from one set of dogmas in order to involve himself in another as stringent. He was essentially a sceptic and free- thinker, enthusiastic for all erudition and science, hating all intolerance. Henry Etienne, the famous printer and scholar, echoing Calvin, said : " Though Rabelais seems to be one of us, he often flings stones into our garden." Father de St. Romuald reports : "Some said he turned Lutheran, others that he turned Atheist." And Mr. Besant, in his article on 6 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Rabelais in the " French Humourists," well remarks : " The controversies of the time, the endless disputes of the schools, the differences of churches — what were they to men who could feed on Plato, and roam over the flowery fields of ancient philosophy ? What was it to them whether the bigot of Geneva, or the bigot of Rome, conquered ? . . . The spirit of priest- hood — that had been the enemy of philosophy in old times, and was its enemy in the new times ; its fanaticism, its blind fear of knowledge, were their natural foes; the long chain of custom, the fetter which bound men's souls to decaying forms, was what they would fain, but could not, remove. Life might be cheered by the intercourse of scholars; but life with the common herd, with the so-called religious or so-called learned, was intolerable, ludi- crous, stupid. As for the doctrines of the Church — well, they are good for the common people. Mean- while, the great God reigns : He is like a sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference no- where. The ministers of religion are its worst enemies : he who is wise will be tied by as few dogmas as may be, but he will possess his soul in patience." And again: "Some men there are who seem too great for creeds. If they remain in the Church wherein they were born, it is because in no other would they find relief from the fetters of doc- trine, and because the main things which underlie Articles are common to all Churches, in which the dogmas are the accidents of time and circumstance." After six free and happy years, divided between his native town of Chinon, where he had his home and the excellent vineyard of La Devini^re, and the RABELAIS 7 Chateau de Leguge of his patron and friend d'Estissac, where he had his httle chamber for study, Rabelais found it advisable to make a move. The clergy had prevailed on the Parliament of Paris to order rigorous measures against those holding, or suspected of hold- ing, the new doctrines. Clement Marot, accused specifically of eating lard in Lent, and generally of want of faith, was imprisoned in the chatelet, which m one of his poems he describes as a hell, and a very foul one. Bonaventure des Periers was denounced as an atheist by an Abbe Sagon, for words spoken, in chat with other gentlemen, of Marguerite of Navarre, and narrowly escaped. Louis de Berquin, accused by the Sorbonne headed by Beda, in spite of the favour of the king and the vigorous defence of Buda, was condemned as a relapsed heretic, and first strangled in consideration of his noble birth, and then burnt along with his books in the Place de Greve, in 1529. Rabelais went off to Montpellier to pursue his studies in medicine, which he had already by himself carried much further than most doctors of the age, Montpellier being then the most famous medical school in Europe. Thus, a contemporary of Rabelais, Andrew Boorde, writes : " At last I dyd stay at Muntpilior, which is the noblest universite of the world for phisicions and surgeons." (English Text Society; Extra Series, x.) He inscribed him- self on the register, i6th September 1530, being then forty-seven years old, and, on account of the vast knowledge he brought with him, was received bachelor on the ist November following. He lectured to large audiences on Hippocrates and Galen, correcting the Latin version in use by colla8 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES tion with a Greek MS. of his own. He had his amusements with, his fellow-bachelors. In "Panta- gruel " (iii., xxxiv.), Panurge says to Carpalim : " I have not seen you since you played at Montpellier, with our old friends, Anthony Saporta, Guy Bourg- nier, Balthazar Noyer, Tolet, John Quentin, Francis Robinet, John Perdrier, and Francis Rabelais, the moral comedy of him who married a dumb wife." And Epistemon having sketched the plot, which was worked up by Moliere in his Medecin Malgre Lui, adds : " I never laughed so much in my life as at that buffoonery" {pa'elinage, from the celebrated farce of Patelin, to which Rabelais frequently alludes). Some of those who acted with him became among the most eminent doctors of the university. Though but a bachelor, he was selected to plead with Chan- cellor Duprat for the privileges of Montpellier, which had been restricted. Arriving at Paris, he could not obtain an audience of the great man. Clothing him- self in a long green gown and an Armenian bonnet, with spectacles attached to it, and with a huge ink- stand at his girdle, he marched solemnly up and down in front of the Chancellor's residence. A crowd soon gathered, and the attention of Duprat was called to the outlandish masquerader. One of the household was sent to ask him who he was, and he answered, " I am the flayer of calves." A page was sent out to ask him what brought him to Paris ; he replied in Latin. One of the gentlemen who knew I^tin being brought, Rabelais answered him in Greek ; and so with one after another, in Spanish, Italian, German, English, Hebrew, &c., just as he has made Panurge do in " Pantagruel," ii- 9- At length the Chancellor ordered that he should be brought in, when he spoke so eloquently and wisely on the subject of his mission that all he asked for Montpellier was granted. His memory has been conserved there by a custom said to be still observed. They kept his collegiate dress, a gown of red cloth, with large sleeves and black velvet collar, bearing his initials embroidered in gold; and the bachelors put on this robe to pass their fifth examination, and when they took it off each retained a small piece as a relic. At the beginning of the seventeenth century it had become so short that it only reached to the waist, and a fresh one was substituted in 1610, which was again renewed in 1720.
Early in 1532 he quitted Montpellier without taking his doctor's degree, although he was thoroughly qualified, and afterward practised, and went to Lyons, where he assisted Etienne Dolet in bringing out various classical works. Here he published the second volume of the medical letters of Manardi, as well as a revised and corrected edition of the Latin version of various treatises of Hippocrates and Galen, and two forged Latin documents, by which he was deceived. Tradition says that he was incited to begin his burlesque "Gargantua" by the complaints of his bookseller that the medical books would not sell; but this is very doubtful, as it is recorded that they were several times re-published. At any rate, the first edition, or, rather, version of the "Gargantua" (for the second had important and, indeed, radical variations) appeared in 1532, under the imposing title of "The great and inestimable Chronicles of the great and enormous giant Gargantua, containing the genealogy, the greatness and strength of his body; also lO BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES the marvellous deeds of arms he wrought for King Arthur, as you will see in the sequel ; newly printed." Three hundred years elapsed before this book was definitively recognised for the first draft of the " Gar- gantua," as it appears in his works. The author called himself Alcofribas Nasier, an anagram of Francois Rabelais, Abstracter of Quintessence ; a pseudonym still preserved in the heading of the first and second books. Like " Don Quixote," his great work was begun simply as an extravagant burlesque of the romances of chivalry, very popular under Francis I., and, as with the masterpiece of Cervantes, the scope and intention of the book continually widened as it proceeded. This first part became at once immensely popular ; as he tells us himself in the prologue to Book ii., more copies had been sold in a couple of months than would be bought of the Bible in nine years. As to the manner in which it was written, he says : " In the composition of this lordly book I never wasted or employed any more or any other time than that allotted to my bodily refection, that is, to my drinking and eating." Early in 1533 appeared the first edition (also unknown to bibliographers until 1834) of what is now the second book, under the title of " Pantagruel : the horrible and terrific deeds and prowesses of the most renowned Pantagruel, King of Dipsodes, son of the great giant Gargantua. Newly composed by Master Alcofribas Nasier." At least three editions of this were published at Lyons in the same year, to one of which he added the " Pantagrueline prognostication, certain, verit- able, and infallible, for the year 1533," burlesqueing the judicial astrology which had then multitudes of RABELAIS II believers. This he followed up by an Almanac for the same year, written with the same intent, and to which he put his own name, calling himself doctor of medicine and professor of astrology. He com- posed other Prognostications and Almanacs for subsequent years, of which but a few fragments are known. In January 1534, Jean du Bellay, then Bishop of Paris, passed through Lyons on his way to Rome, having been called from England, where he was ambassador, in order to attempt a reconciliation be- tween Henry VHI. and the Pope. He offered to take Rabelais as his physician, and the offer was joy- fully accepted, Rabelais having long desired to see Italy and Rome, and being specially glad to go there in the suite of his old friend and college-mate, one of the most able and liberal-minded prelates of the period. Many doubtful stories are told of Rabelais' sayings and doings at Rome, and, indeed, no man has had more drolleries fathered on him. One of the many is, probably, grounded on fact. Cle- ment VII. having promised to grant him any petition, he begged to be excommunicated, thus explaining the motive of his strange request : " Holy Father, I am French, and of a small town named Chinon, con- sidered very subject to the faggot ; they have already burnt there many worthy people, relatives of mine. Now, if your Holiness will excommunicate me, I shall never burn, and for this reason : In coming to Rome we stopped, on account of the cold, in a wretched hut ; an old woman who tried to kindle a faggot for us and could not succeed, said it must have been excommunicated by the Pope's own mouth, 12 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES since it would not burn." He remained but six months in Rome, being recalled, as he states, by the king, perhaps as the bearer of some important communica- tion from the ambassador. But during his short stay- he had managed to learn the Arabic from a bishop, and to make considerable progress in collecting materials for a work on the topography and monu- ments of ancient Rome. On his return, it is related that he was brought to a stop at an inn at Lyons, for want of money to pay his bill and proceed, a sort of embarrassment which has become proverbial as the quarter of an hour of Rabelais. Wishing to remain unknown, in the interest of his errand, he disguised himself, and caused it to be declared to the chief doctors of the town that an eminent physician, having returned from long travels, desired to communicate his observations. Many came, to whom he discoursed long and learnedly. All at once, with a mysterious air, he secured the doors, and announced that he would reveal his great secret. " Here," said he, " is a most subtle poison that I have procured in Italy to deliver you from that tyrant the king and his family." He was seized, placed in a litter with a strong guard, and marched off to Paris — treated liberally on the way, at the public expense, as a prisoner of the highest importance. Led before Francis I., he threw off his disguise, resuming his natural voice and expression, and was immediately recognised by the king, who, thanking the Lyons notables for their zeal, graciously dismissed them, and kept Rabelais to supper, where he drank heartily to the health of the king and the prosperity of the loyal city of Lyons. RABELAIS 13 II Rabelais soon returned to Lyons, which he called the seat of his studies. Here, in 1534, he issued an edition of Marliani's " Topography of Ancient Rome," abandoning his own projected work on the subject. It was his last publication of simple and serious scholarship; thenceforward he devoted his pen al- together to the sublime mysteries of Pantagruelism. He was appointed physician to the Grand Hopital, and pursued his studies in astronomy and anatomy, on one occasion dissecting and lecturing upon the corpse of a criminal before a large number of persons. In 1535 he brought out another satirical "Almanack and Pantagruelian Prognostication," and, of far more importance, the third and definite redaction of " Gar- gantua," in which he retained nothing of the first except the names, some few events, and a score of comic phrases or ideas. It was now entitled, " The inestimable Life of the great Gargantua, father of Pantagruel, composed of yore by the Abstracter of Quintessence; book full of Pantagruelism." What Pantagruelism is he tells us in the New Prologue to Book iv. : " Cest certaine gayete (Tesperit conficte en mepris des choses fortuites" which the English version renders : " a certain jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune." It has been thought that Rabelais founded a secret society of Pantagruelists, with the twofold object of spreading the Reformation among the common people, and Epicureanism among the higher classes ; while an eminent French scholar thinks that he was 14 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Lutheran in the first book, and Epicurean only in the fifth, pubhshed after his death. If he did found a secret society, it was probably only as a club for wit and revelry, not for propagandism of any kind. It must be remembered that he was now over fifty years of age, and had outlived all his illusions, and the belief in such a propaganda would be a very youthful illusion indeed. The abbey of The'leme, so magnificently described in the last " Gargantua " (Book i., as we have it now), and in which all the arrangements are in direct contradiction to those of ordinary convents, is supposed to represent this new philosophy as conceived by Rabelais, Etienne Dolet, Bonaventure des Periers, Clement Marot, Maurice Shve, Lyon Jamet, and the most eminent men of the time. It is certain that Rabelais was very intimate with Dolet and Marot ; but they were soon separated. Placards blaspheming the sacrifice of the Mass were posted about Paris in the night, and an image of the Virgin at the corner of a street was profaned. Fran- cis 1. declared that he would cut off his own arm if he knew that it was gangrened with heresy, and ordered the Parliament to proceed with vigour and rigour against all of dubious faith. Six Lutherans were burnt alive, in presence of the king and all the court. Marot heard that his papers and books had been seized in his rooms at Paris, and forthwith fled to Beam, to the protection of the sister of Francis, his Marguerite des Margu.erites, or I*earl of Pearls, the noble Marguerite of Navarre, patroness and pro- tectress of all liberal thinkers and writers. Not feeling safe even with her, he went to Ferrara, and then to Venice ; and, indeed, she did not pass unRABELAIS 15 attacked herself, for Brantome says, " The Constable de Montmorency, when in the greatest favour, speaking one day with the king, did not scruple to tell him that if he really meant to exterminate the heretics from his realm, he must begin with his court and those nearest him, naming the queen his sister." Dolet was imprisoned at Lyons until released by the influence of his protector, Pierre Duchatel, Bishop of Tulle. Rabelais, who had satirised the monks and Catholicism in the last " Gargantua," hurried off to Italy in 1536. In Mr. Besant's words : "He chose the safest place in Europe for a man of heretical opinions — Rome." Jean du Bellay was still there on business of the king, and in high favour with the new Pope, Paul III., who had made him a cardinal ; and Rabelais was again attached to his household, as physician, reader, secretary, and librarian. Rabelais, by the advice of his friends, addressed to the Pope a supplication for apostasy, in which, after confessing his sins against the Church, and particularly his flight from the convent of Maillezais, he besought full absolution for the past, with permission to resume the Benedictine habit and re-enter the monastery, and also to practise medicine wherever he pleased, but for charity, not payment, and using neither fire nor iron. By the intervention of some Roman cardinals, who loved his wit and learning more than they hated his heresies, he got all he asked for, and thus pro- tected by the bulls of the Pope, could defy even the Sorbonne. However, he did not at once return to France, where the persecution was still hot, but remained at Rome till March 1537, when he was recalled to both Paris and Montpellier — to Paris to l6 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES occupy a benefice which Cardinal du Bellay had assigned him in the Abbey de St. Maur des Fosses, to MontpelUer to take his degree of Doctor of Medi- cine. Sixteen letters, written by him during this sojourn to the Bishop of Maillezais, are extant, and appear in the English edition of his works (Bohn's ; the translation by Sir Thomas Urquhart and Motteux), having been first published a hundred years after his death. He went direct to Montpellier, where he took his degree in May, being fifty-four years old, and gave public lectures on anatomy, &c., for about a year, although he was not a professor. L. Jacob, Bibliophile (Paul Lacroix), to whose very full Memoir, prefixed to his edition of Rabelais, I am much in- debted, says, on the authority of Kuhnholtz : " The faculty, nevertheless, placed his portrait among those of the professors, and this original portrait, which was painted about this time, represents Rabelais with a bearing noble and majestic, regular features, fresh and ruddy complexion, fine beard of a pale gold, intelligent {spirituelle) expression, eyes full of both fire and sweetness, air gracious though grave and thoughtful." Rabelais seems to have then gone to Paris, where he practised medicine, but did not fulfil the other conditions of the Papal brief which gave him security, not renouncing the secular habit nor submitting to conventual discipline. The Cardinal du Bellay had returned to France, and obtained a well-deserved pre- ponderance in the Royal Council, and he enjoined Rabelais to enter upon the functions of the canonry, in the convent of St. Maur des Fosses, to which he had been appointed. The other canons opposed his RABELAIS 17 admission, on the ground that he remained under the censure of the Church for apostasy, the bulls of abso- lution being cancelled by his non-compliance with their conditions. Accordingly, he had to address another application to the Pope, which, like the first, is extant, for confirmation of the previous absolution and indulgences. As it was recommended by the cardinal, and supported by friends in Rome, it seems to have been granted without difficulty ; and Rabelais, assuming the Benedictine habit, installed himself, with his books and scientific instruments, in the said convent of St. Maur, where, more than a century after his death, his room was still shown to strangers, as was also, at Montpellier, the house he had lived in. He loved this residence, which, in his epistle to Car- dinal de Chastillon, he terms " Paradise of salubrity, amenity, serenity, commodity, delights, and all honest pleasures of agriculture and country life." The Car- dinal du Bellay, who also liked the place, equally favourable for study and health, erected a magnificent mansion there in the Italian style, adorned with sculptures and surrounded by gardens; and Rabe- lais was always a welcome guest. But he was not the man to confine himself to the convent when the Papal brief gave him permission to practise medicine, as a work of charity, wherever he pleased. He kept travel- ling about, sojourning now in one town, now in another ; he visited the friends of his youth, Antoine Ardillon at Fontenay-le-Comte, Geofifroi d'Estissac at Leguge or I'Ermenaud, Jean Bouchet at Poitiers, Andre Tiraqueau at Bordeaux, where he had been appointed Councillor to the Parliament. He frequently stayed a while at Chinon, where he still had relatives. l8 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES The vineyard he seems to have lost at the death of his father, but the hotel of the Lamprey remained to him, and he reserved in it a modest room for himself, which was respected long after his death. In the editions of Le Duchat, we are told, there are several engravings showing the hotet and the room as they were at the end of the seventeenth century. But he lived most of all with one or other of the brothers Du Bellay, his old and leal comrades of the convent of I^ Basmette, and all distinguished men. Besides the cardinal, there were Martin du Bellay, Lieutenant- General of Normandy (and real King of Yvetot, by his marriage with Elizabeth Chenu, proprietor of that principality), who was then writing memoirs of his negotiations and campaigns ; Rene du Bellay, Bishop of Mans, the youngest, an ardent student of the phy- sical sciences ; and Guillaume du Bellay, Seigneur de Langey, a great captain and diplomatist, who also was writing memoirs in Latin. Li this work it has been supposed that he w^s assisted by Rabelais, who in his own name printed a work on the same subject (of which not a copy is known to exist), as appears by a quoted title : " Stratagems, that is to say Prowesses and Ruses of War of the Valiant and very Celebrated Chevalier Langey, &c. Translated from the I>atin of Fr. Rabelais by Claude Massuan. (Lyons, 1542.)" Jean du Bellay, the cardinal, was not only a real statesman and powerful orator, but an elegant poet in Latin, and a large-minded man, interested in all matters of literature, science, and philosophy, and so liberal in his ideas that. Churchman and cardinal as he was, he corresponded with Melancthon on the most cordial terms. The beneficent genius of PantaRABELAIS 19 gruelism was right bountiful to Rabelais when it secured him such life-long friends as these. He was staying with Guillaume du Bellay, at the end of 1542, when the veteran, who was lieutenant- general of the armies of the king in Piedmont, being warned by his spies of a secret intrigue of Charles V. against Francis I., did not hesitate to start at once, in spite of his great age, his infirmities, and the rigour of the season, to acquaint the king with what was passing. On leaving Lyons, carried in a litter, since he was not able to ride on horseback, he soon felt so ill that he was compelled to stop, and knew that his end was at hand. His death and the circumstances attending it made a profound impression on Rabelais, who loved and esteemed him; it is spoken of three times in " Pantagruel," and always with an unmistakable seri- ousness. In Book iv., chap, xxvi., Epistemon says : " We have had experience of this lately at the death of that valiant and learned knight, Guillaume du Bellay, during whose life France enjoyed so much happiness that all the world had her in envy, all the world sought her friendship, all the world feared her. From the day of his death it has been the scorn of all the world for a very long time." And in chap, xxvii., Pantagruel himself first speaking : " * This we saw several days before the departure of that so illustrious, generous, and heroic soul of the learned and valiant chevalier of Langey, of whom you have spoken.' — ' I remember it,' said Epistemon, 'and still my heart shudders and trembles within its membrane when I think of the prodigies, so various and horrific, which we saw plainly five or six days before his departure ; so that the lords D'Assier, Chemant, Mailly the one20 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES eyed, Saint Ayl, Villeneufue la Guyart, Master Gabriel, physician of Savillan, Rabelais, Cohnau, Massuan, Maiorici, Bullon, Ceren, called Bourgemaistre, Fran- goys Proust, Ferron, Charles Girard, Frangoys Bourrd, and many more friends, followers, and servants of the deceased, all dismayed, regarded each other in silence, without saying a word, but all indeed reflecting and foreseeing in their minds that soon France would be deprived of a chevalier so perfect and necessary to her glory and protection, and that the heavens claimed him as due to them by natural propriety.' " Mark the long array of honourable witnesses, all well known, and all named for legacies in the will of Du Bellay, Rabe- lais himself having fifty livres a year till such time as he should hold livings worth at least three hundred livres per annum. And again, in Book iii., chap, xxi., the noble Pantagruel, speaking here also : " I will but remind you of the learned and valiant Chevalier Guillaume du Bellay, late Lord of Langey, who died on the hill of Tarana, the loth of January, in the cli- macteric year of his age [the sixty-third], and of our computation 1543, according to the Roman reckon- ing. The three or four hours before his death he employed in vigorous speech, tranquil and serene in mind, predicting to us what in part we have since seen come to pass, and in part we expect to come ; although at the time these prophecies seemed to us somewhat incredible and strange, as we discerned no present cause or sign portending what he foretold." These serious testimonies of a writer who was anything but superstitious, and who burlesqued the astrologers with infinite scorn, are certainly trustworthy. He perhaps wrote the epitaph — RABELAIS 21 " Ci git Langey, dont la plume et I'epee Ont surmonte Ciceron et Pompee." We know that he was on the most friendly terms with the noblemen and gentlemen he names, both before and after the death of their lord. The bequest to him seems to show either that a canonry at St. Maur was worth very little, or that he was not then drawing its income. It appears that Rend du Bellay gave him a living — that of St. Christophe de Jambert — whose duties he performed by deputy. Meanwhile the public was impatient for the long- promised continuation of " Pantagruel." It is pro- bable that his friends dissuaded him from bringing it out, in view of the terrible judgments given by the Parliament of Paris against heretical books and their authors. Clement Marot, whose return from exile had been procured by Marguerite of Navarre, had to take refuge in Geneva in 1543, the Sorbonne scenting heresy in his popular version of the Psalms, long used in the Calvinistic Churches. It was the translation to which Browning makes Ronsard allude — " And whose faculties move in no small mist When he versifies David the Psalmist." Des Periers is said to have committed suicide about 1544, rather than fall into the hands of the Church. Etienne Dolet in 1546 was condemned, as a relapsed atheist, to be put to the torture, then hanged, then burned together with his books, with the thought- ful proviso that if he made any scandal, or uttered any blasphemy, at the place of execution, his tongue should be cut out and burned first. Yet in this very year Rabelais ventured to publish his third book, with 22 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES its mordant satire of theologians and legists. At first sight the act appears audacious to the verge of frenzy, when it was criminal to render the Gospels and Psalms into the vernacular ; when praying to God in French was a crime punished with the gibbet and the stake ; when Francis I. had declared that he would cut off his own arm if he knew it to be gangrened with heresy. It is true that he had power- ful protectors, but so had Berquin, and likewise the special favour of Francis ; yet all had not availed to save him. But, most wonderful of all, the friends of Rabelais actually succeeded in getting the royal authority and privilege for this third book valid for ten years from its date, which license we can still read. He is supposed to have been chiefly indebted for it, in addition to the Du Bellays and D'Estissac, to Pierre du Chatel, Bishop of Tulle, almoner and reader to the king, and a secret supporter of the Protestants, and to Odet, Cardinal de Chastillon (brother of Admiral de Coligny), who subsequently avowed himself a Huguenot, and married in his pontifical robes. To crown his hardihood, Rabelais put his own name to this book, caUing himself Doctor of Medicine and callo'ier (reverend father) des isles Hieres, adding : " The above-named author begs his benevolent readers to reserve their laughter till the seventy-eighth book." In this book he abandons the romances of chivalry, the giants with their horrible and dreadful deeds, and his native Touraine. The burlesque has become satire ; for local allusions we have general. He passes in review the leading pro- fessions embodied in typical personages — the theo- logian, the physician, the legist, the philosopher, RABELAIS 23 delivering themselves on the great question whether Panurge ought to marry or not. With all the fun these are not mere caricatures, but admirable intel- lectual studies by the greatest and best-informed intellect of the age. He introduces it by some lines to the spirit of Marguerite of Navarre, although she did not die until two years later. In the Prologue he challenges his enemies with infinite scorn : " Back with you, bigots ! To your sheep, mastiffs ! Out of this, hypocrites, in the devil's name, hay ! Are you still there? I renounce my part of Papimanie if I grip you. Grr, grrr, grrrrrr." There was a furious outcry against him from the monks and the theo- logians. Council was held at the Sorbonne, the book was strictly examined, and enough was found in it to condemn the author twenty times over. Especially in chapters xxii. and xxiii., the word asne {ane), "a jackass," was found three times for asme {dme), " soul." The first passage reads : " May his jackass go to thirty thousand basketfuls of devils;" the second : " May his jackass go lo thirty thousand cartloads of devils ; " the third : " At any rate, if he loses body and life, let him not damn his jackass." Rabelais, in the Epistle to Monseigneur Odet, Cardinal de Chastillon, dated January 1552, pre- fixed to the fourth book, coolly declares that the one word was thus put for the other three times running through the fault and negligence of the printers ! Many an author's burden has been re- jected on that long-suffering class, but never more audaciously than in this instance. As the book was protected by the royal authority, the Sorbonne could not impeach it without the permission of the king, 24 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES which they accordingly requested. Francis had not read the book; "but now," as Rabelais tells us in the above-mentioned epistle, "having, by the voice and pronunciation of the most learned and faithful reader of this kingdom [Pierre du Chatel, already named] heard and listened to the distinct reading of these books of mine (I say mine, because some false and infamous ones have been maliciously laid to my charge), he found no suspicious passage ; and he had in horror some eater of serpents who founded mortal heresy on an n put for an in by the fault and negligence of the printers. And so had his son, our so gracious, virtuous, and blessed King Henry, whom may God long preserve to us ! So that, for me, he granted you privilege and particular protection against my calumniators," III In 1547 or 1548 he published, by itself, a Prologue to a fourth book of " Pantagruel," now known as the Old Prologue, for he wrote a new one for the book when issued. In this first Prologue, which is not given in the English version, he thanks his friends and admirers, " the most illustrious tipplers," for a present they had made him, being a richly ornamented flask of silver in the form of a breviary, with indications what wines he should drink at the several hours of prayer, this being his favourite style of devotion. These friends were probably the Pan- tagruelists of the court — for, as an old writer says, everybody began to cultivate Pantagruelism~-and, I RABELAIS 25 doubtless, comprised the famous Pleiad of poets, Ronsard, Baif, and the rest, who, in the celebrated orgie of Arcueil, renewed the antique rites of Bacchus, offering to Jodelle, whose classical tragedy of " Cleo- patra " had been acted with success before Henry II. and his court at Rheims, a he-goat crowned with flowers, chanting Evohe, reciting dithyrambs, and pouring libations of wine in honour of all the deities of Olympus. Meanwhile, more was expected of him than drolleries and satires : the philosophers hoped for a serious work, sceptical or atheistic ; the reformers for a solemn declaration in their favour. However, the Calvinists joined the Romanists in denouncing his books with true theological rancour. He soon afterwards went to Rome a third time with the Cardinal du Bellay, who, having lost his credit by the death of Francis I. and accession of Henry II., resigned his offices, which fell to the Cardinal of Lorraine. Beroalde de Verville, in his facetious Moyen de Parvenir, or " Way to get on in the World," tells us a story of this time, which I give for what it is worth: many think it true. "The Cardinal du Bellay, to whom Rabelais was physician, being ill of a hypochondriac humour, it was decided by the learned doctors in consultation, that an aperitive de- coction must be made for monseigneur. Whereupon Rabelais goes out, leaving these gentlemen to finish their babbling to better use up money. He makes place in the middle of the court a tripod on a large fire, and on this a cauldron full of water, into which he threw all the keys he could find, and stirred the keys with a stick to make them boil well. The doctors having come down, and asking what he was 26 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES about, he replied : ' Gentlemen, I carry out your prescription, for nothing can be more aperitive than keys ; and, if you are not content, I will send to the arsenal for some pieces of cannon to make the last opening.'" Besides being physician, he seems to have been astrologer, great as was his contempt for the judicial astrology. Catherine de Medicis had introduced this pretended science into France, and it had become the fashion for every one who could afford it to have his horoscope drawn, and every great personage had an astrologer in his suite. It is certain that he published, though no exemplar is known to exist, an "Almanack and Ephemerides for the Year of Our Lord 1550, composed and calculated for all Europe, by Master Frangois Rabelais, physician- in-ordinary to Monseigneur the Most Reverend Car- dinal du Bellay. Here are found, at the end of each month, the planets of infants, both male and female, and to which they are subject." It is evident from this title that he treated the matter with apparent seriousness, however ironically. The cardinal and the French ambassador gave a grand mimic siege, followed by a Gargantuan banquet, in honour of the birth of a son to their king, and also of his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, very appro- priately represented by the chaste goddess after whom she was named. Rabelais took part in this, probably assisting in its invention, and wrote an account of it, which was sent to Charles de Lorraine, Cardinal de Guise, the favourite minister of Diane, who had it printed. She was grateful for the flattery, but the one cardinal feared the other too much to permit his return. Rabelais, however, reaped his reward in a RABELAIS 27 privilege of the king, dated 1550, protecting not only the books already published but also the sequel to " Pantagruel," yet to see the light. This privilege distinctly states that Rabelais had also published several works in Greek, Latin, French, and Tuscan ; but of these, other than those already mentioned, nothing is known. Thus secured against religious persecution, he was recalled to France, and was thenceforward in great measure attached to the powerful house of Lorraine, while faithful to his old protectors, the Du Bellays, who remained his stead- fast friends. The Cardinal de Guise had just bought from the Duchess d'Etampes, who had been mistress of Francis I., the fine estate of Meudon, where, it being near Paris, he could reside with his brother, Henri de Lorraine, Duke de Guise, without remitting attendance at the court and council of the king. Cardinal du Bellay, as Bishop of Paris, had the vicarage {cure) of Meudon in his gift, and hastened to appoint to it Rabelais, thus gratifying the Lor- raines as well as himself ; the vicar {cure) in posses- sion, of course, resigning at a hint from such great men, and being presumably indemnified with some other benefice. Accordingly, on the 19th January 1551, Rabelais was inducted vicar of the parish church of St. Martin de Meudon by the Bishop of Treves, vicar-general of the Cardinal du Bellay ; and, as Mr. Besant remarks, he has since been generally known as Cur^ of Meudon, though he was this but two years out of a life of seventy, he being sixty- eight when appointed. He now resolved or ventured to pubUsh the fourth book of " Pantagruel," more daring in its satire and scepticism than any of the L 28 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES preceding. In his Dedicatory Epistle to his old pro- tector, the Cardinal de Chastillon, dated Paris, 28th January 1552, he declares, with that coolness of con- summate audacity which must have largely helped to save him when weaker men were lost : " But the calumny of certain cannibals, misanthropes, and laughterless fools {agelastes) had been so atrocious and unreasonable against me, that it had vanquished my patience, and I had intended not to write a jot more. For one of the least of their slanders was that all my books are stuffed with heresies, though they could not show a single one in any passage. Of joyous fooleries, free from offence to God and the king, yes : they are the unique subject and theme of these books ; of heresies, no ; if not perversely, and against all usage of reason and common lan- guage, interpreted into what I would rather suffer a thousand deaths, were it possible, than have thought ; as who should interpret bread, stone ; fish, serpent ; egg, scorpion." Yet, in this fourth book, he not only mercilessly derided the monks as before, but also the fasts of the Church, the Court of Rome, the Council of Trent, the authority of the Pope, and even (chap, xxvii.) the immortality of the soul, and (chap, xxviii.) the Divinity of Christ. Ac- cordingly, this book had scarcely appeared when it was condemned by the Faculty of Theology, which procured a decree of the Parliament of Paris, dated I St March 1552, suspending the sale, and sum- moning the printer to appear before it. Paul La- croix, indeed, argues with probability that the first edition was suppressed, that which we have being the second, and the Epistle dedicatory to the CarRABELAIS 29 dinal de Chastillon really thanking him for having, in conjunction with other friends, procured the royal permission for the republication of the work. At any rate, the king did intervene ; and the Faculty of Theology and the Parliament left Rabelais and his book to their own wicked devices, unchecked. He was only made to resign one of the two livings he held; and in January 1553, he resigned that of St. Christophe de Jambet, being the farther from Paris. It is doubtful whether he had ever visited it. The vogue of this fourth book was such that the Paris printer almost immediately issued a new edition, revised and corrected by the author; and piratical editions abounded throughout France. Our worthy cure of Meudon lived in his parish in peace, troubled only by a quarrel with Ronsard, who had taken up the cause of his friend and master, Pierre Ramus, the anti-Aristotelian, with whom Rabe- lais had a literary feud. Ronsard vented his rancour in a long epitaph on his old friend. Rabelais was a frequent guest of his " good parishioners " the Duke and Duchess of Guise, and was visited by the most distinguished scholars and nobles of Paris. He had grown so virtuously discreet, now that he was verging on the threescore and ten, that he would allow no woman to enter his manse ! He assiduously fulfilled the duties of his office — improving his church, in- structing his choristers, and teaching the poor to read. People flocked from all the surrounding country to see him in the character of a decorous cure, and hear him preach. Meudon thus became a regular resort of the Parisians, who continued to go there long after his death, in accordance with the proverbial saying, 30 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Still popular in the seventeenth century, " Let us go to Meudon ] there we shall see the castle, the terrace, the grottos, and Af. le cure, the man in all the world of the most agreeable countenance, the most pleasant humour, the best to welcome his friends and all honest folk, and the best of talkers." The date and place of decease and the place of burial are uncer- tain. It is rather tradition than history that he died at Paris, April 9, 1553, in a house in the Rue des Jardins, and was interred in the cemetery of the parish of St. Paul, at the foot of a large tree, which stood for more than a century. The accounts of his last moments are most contradictory : his friends reported that his end was what is called edifying; his foes that he proved by his conduct and mockeries in the face of death that he had no belief in another life. For my own part, I confess that I do not think Rabelais a likely subject for repentance. He who had always mocked life might well mock death. The chief stories concerning his end are well known. The first is given among the "Apophthegms" of Lord Bacon, who terms Rabelais the grand jester of France. When he had received Extreme Unction he declared that they had greased his boots for the long journey. When the attending priest asked him whether he believed in the real presence of Jesus Christ in the wafer given him for the Communion, he answered, with a respectful air : " I believe in it, and it rejoices me J for I seem to see my God as when He entered Jerusalem, triumphant and borne by an ass." When he was near the point of death they passed over him his Benedictine robe, and he still had the spirit to pun in allusion to it : " Beati qui moriuntur in RABELAIS 31 Domino" ( " Blessed are they who die in the Lord, or in a domino." ) He is said to have dictated the magnificent and munificent will : " I have nothing, I owe much ; the rest I give to the poor." Whatever doubt there may be as to the genuineness of the pre- ceding, I think there can be little or none as to that of the two following ; they are so eminently charac- teristic. A page was introduced, sent by his friend Cardinal du Bellay, or Cardinal de Chastillon, to inquire as to his state. He beckoned the youth to his bedside, and murmured faintly : " Tell mon- seigneur in what gallant humour you find me ; I go to seek a great Perhaps." Finally, before expiring, he gathered all his strength to exclaim, with a laugh : " Draw the curtain : the farce is over." What adds to the presumption of the essential truth of these stories is the fact that the priest who confessed him and administered to him the sacrament spread the report that he died drunk, proving the priestly dis- gust at his end ; while we may assume that the absolution and sacrament would have been withheld had the same priest at the time not considered him to be in a fit state to receive them. All the poets of the time made epitaphs on him in French or Latin verse, most of them celebrating less his marvellous genius than his inexhaustible jollity. Thus his friend Baif, one of the Pleiad, writes : " Oh Pluto, receive Rabelais, that thou, who art the king of those who never laugh, mayst henceforth have a laugher ! " — "O ! Pluton, Rabelais re9oi, Afin que toi qui es le roi Dc ceux qui ne rient jamais, Tu aies un rieur desormais ! " 32 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Ronsard, as I have said, was rancorous, and in his epitaph represents him as simply a glutton and a drunkard, as if mere drinking and guzzling could have gathered together his immensity of manifold learning, could have written " Pantagruel," could have secured the friendship of such men as the Du Bellay brothers. Eleven years after his death, in 1564, the year of Shakespeare's birth, was published, neither printer's name nor place being given, "The Fifth and last Book of the Heroic Deeds and Words of the Good Pantagruel." He is reported to have left other works in manuscript which never got printed. Although the Council of Trent had prohibited the whole work, and it had been placed upon the Index Expurga- iorius, no practical measures seem to have been taken to stop its circulation, and its popularity was prodigious. This fifth book was in some respects the most daring of any, particularly in its intensely contemptuous attacks on the great Pope-hawk with all his host of cardinal-hawks, bishop-hawks, priest- hawks; and also upon the Furred Law-Cats of all kinds. Yet the Faculty of Theology did not censure it, nor the Parliament of Paris arrest its sale. This book conducts Pantagruel and his companions to the great Oracle of the Holy Bottle, whence they receive the ultimate word of all wisdom, the luminous con- densation of the whole Pantagruelian philosophy, in the sublime word Drink. RABELAIS 33 IV " Then I went in-doors, brought out a loaf, Half a cheese, and a bottle of Chablis ; Lay on the grass, and forgot the oaf, Over a jolly chapter of Rabelais." — Robert Browning : Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis, Having sketched the life of Rabelais, it remains for me to venture a few remarks on his genius and his great work. Lord Bacon called him the grand jester of France, and this view of his character was the common one amongst us, so far as I am aware, until Coleridge challenged it in a famous passage, brief enough for citation here : " Beyond a doubt, Rabelais was among the deepest as well as boldest thinkers of his age. His buffoonery was not merely Brutus's rough stick, which contained a rod of gold : it was necessary as an amulet against the monks and legates. Never was there a more plausible, and seldom, I am persuaded, a less appropriate line, than the thousand times quoted — ' Rabelais laughing in his easy-chair,' of Mr. Pope. The caricature of his filth and zanyism show sic how fully he both knew and felt the danger in which he stood. I could write a treatise in praise of the moral elevation of Rabelais' work, which would make the Church stare and the conventicle groan, and yet would be truth, and nothing but the truth. I class Rabelais with the great creative minds of the world— Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, &c." I may note, in passing, that "the thousand times quoted" line of Pope is quoted incorrectly (as verse usually 34 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES is when quoted from memory), and on the face of it is imperfect; the real line, as we have it in the "Dunciad," i. 22, in the apostrophe to Swift, runs thus : — "Whether thou choose Cervantes' serious air, Or laugh and shake in Rabelais' easy-chair." As if over-anxious to distinguish himself from the purblind vulgar, Coleridge not seldom appears re- solved to see more in a writer than the writer actually contains, reading himself into the book, in the manner marked by Gothe (First Epistle in the Poems) : "Yet each only reads himself out of the book, and if he is powerful he reads himself into the book;" but his authority as a most subtle critic is rightly so great that no one since has ventured to treat Rabelais as a mere jester and buffoon. Strangely enough, in the very beginning of the Prologue to the first book, which is nearly all simple nonsense and extravagance, Rabelais makes the same claim for himself which Coleridge makes for him : " Alcibiades, in that dialogue of Plato's which is entided the ' Banquet,' setting forth the praises of his teacher, Socrates, beyond all question the prince of philosophers, said among other things that he resembled the sileni. Silent of old were little boxes, such as we now see in the shops of apothecaries, painted on the outside with wanton toyish figures, as harpies, satyrs, bridled geese, horned hares, saddled ducks, flying goats, thiller harts, and other such pictures, caricatured at pleasure to excite people to laughter, as did Silenus himself, master of the god Bacchus ; but within they conserved fine drugs, as balm, ambergris, amomon. RABELAIS 35 musk, civet, jewels, and other precious things." He goes on to say that his book, Uke these sileni and Socrates, conceals things of the utmost value within a rude and absurd exterior; and then gives another illustration : " But did you ever see a dog meeting with a marrow-bone ? He is, as Plato says (' Re- public,' Book ii.), the most philosophical beast in the world. If you have seen him, you have been able to note with what devotion he watches it, with what care he guards it, with what fervour he holds it, with what prudence he manages it, with what affec- tion he breaks it, and with what diligence he sucks it. What moves him to do all this ? What is the hope of his labour ? At what good does he aim ? Nothing but a little marrow. It is true that this little is more delicious than much of anything else, because marrow is a nourishment elaborated to perfection by nature, as Galen says (iii. Facult. Nat. ct xi., de Usu Par- tiutti). After the example of this dog, it becomes you to be wise, to smell, feel, and esteem these goodly books of high conception, easy in the pursuit, diffi- cult in the encounter. Then, by sedulous reading and frequent meditation, break the bone and suck the substantial marrow, that is to say, what I mean by these Pythagorical symbols, with assured hope to be made discreet and valiant by the said study ; for in this you shall find quite another taste, and a more abstruse doctrine, which will reveal to you most high sacraments and horrific mysteries, as well in what concerns our religion as in matters of public state and the life economical." Yet, immediately after, he ridicules these serious pretensions : " Do you believe, on your conscience, that Homer, writing the * Iliad ' 36 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES and * Odyssey,' thought of the allegories which have been squeezed out of him by Plutarch, Heraclides Pon- ticus, Eustathius, Cornatus, and which Politian filched again from them ? If you believe it, with neither feet nor hands do you approach my opinion, which judges them to have been as little dreamed of by Homer as were by Ovid, in his ' Metamorphoses,' the Sacraments of the Church, which a wolfish friar, a true bacon- picker, has tried to prove, if, perchance, he could meet with others as foolish as himself, and (as the proverb says) a lid worthy of the saucepan." Now, while agreeing with Coleridge that Rabelais was among the deepest, as well as boldest, thinkers of his time, and even considering him, so far as I can judge, quite the boldest and deepest of all; while further agreeing that he is to be classed with the great creative minds of the world — Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, &c. ; and, while yet further agreeing that his filth and zanyism show how fully he both knew and felt the danger in which he stood, I must still think Pope's line not only plausible but also appro- priate. Profound thought and creative genius may wear a riant not less than a tragic face, or, in some instances, the one and the other in alternation ; and there are even instances in which one-half the mask has been of Thalia and the other of Melpomene ; for wisdom and genius are not necessarily, though they are more frequently, grave. 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. If he felt bitterness against any class and institution in the world, it was against monks and monkery ; and well might he feel bitter against these after the fifteen years, closing with the in pace, immured among the ignorant and bigoted Franciscans of Fontenay-le- Comte. Yet compare even this bitterness, kept acrid by such memories of personal wrong, with the double- distilled gall and wormwood of Swift on subjects in which he had no personal interest, and you will see how sweet-natured was the illustrious Tourangean. Both see with a vision that cannot be muffled through all the hypocrisies and falsehoods, all the faults and follies of mankind ; but the scorn of Rabelais rolls out in jolly laughter, while the scorn of Swift is a scBva indignatio — the one is vented in wine, the other in vitriol. Both are prodigal in dirt, having an immense and varied assortment always on hand, to be supplied at the shortest notice. But the dirt of Swift, in spite of all that has been said against it, is in most cases distinctly moral, being heaped on immorality and vileness in order to render them the more repulsive ; and it can therefore be vindicated on the same grounds as the grossness and obscenity of the Hebrew prophets, for to high thought and intense moral earnestness nothing that will serve a purpose can be common or unclean. The dirt of Rabelais, on the other hand, when he does not intentionally 38 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES besmear himself with it in order to appear a buffoon when most audaciously sarcastic and heterodox, has nothing to do with morality or immorality, but is simply the dirt of a child, such as he has described in the infancy of Gargantua, in Book i., chap. xi. As Mr. Besant, in his "French Humourists," re- marks, "The filth and dirt of Rabelais do not take hold of the mind — a little cold water washes all off." We find the same in Chaucer and other early writers, though not so abundantly as in Rabelais, who had to use much for mere disguise, like one crouching in a foul ditch in order to escape his enemies ; and though offensive to us now, it is perfectly innocent compared with certain recent French and English novels, more read by fine ladies than by any other class, wherein the vilest obscenity, mingled with spurious senti- mentaUsm and other sweet nastiness, is served up in choice language — a luscious and poisonous com- pound, as revolting to the really pure minded as that hideous Thais of Dante {Inferno, xviii.) in that cesspool of Malebolge — "quclla sozza scapigliata fante, Che la si graffia con 1' unghie merdose, Et or s' accoscia, et era e in piede stante. Taida e la puttana." We may be sure that the rude and rigorous Dante, even the ineffably tender and ardent Dante of the Vita Nuova and the imparadised Beatrice, would have painted just such a picture of some lovely and fascinating countess of, say, Dumas fils — an exquisite and delicate creature, redolent of the costliest per- fumes, and redolent of the impurest passions in the purest French. RABELAIS 39 Coleridge says : "It is impossible to read Rabelais without an admiration mixed with wonder at the depth and extent of his learning, his multifarious knowledge and original observation, beyond what books could in that age have supplied him with;" and Mr. Besant remarks that he knew more than any other man of the time. This learning and general knowledge he pours forth with the most careless prodigality on every page, d propos of everything and nothing, so as to suggest that his stores are really inexhaustible. The book-learning and the command over many languages are astonishing enough, espe- cially to one who, like myself, is no scholar ; but yet more astonishing is the other knowledge of which Coleridge speaks, the knowledge books could not furnish, and in which perhaps only Shakespeare can parallel him : in our day Robert Browning comes nearest to this quasi-omniscience. Rabelais' long medical studies may account for much of his acquaint- ance with natural history, which is such as to recall the precepts of Gargantua in that magnanimous letter to his son (ii, 8) : " Now, in matter of the know- ledge of the works of nature, I would have thee to study that exactly; that so there be no sea, river, nor fountain of which thou dost not know the fishes ; all the fowls of the air ; all the several kinds of shrubs and trees, whether in forests or orchards ; all the sorts of herbs and flowers that grow upon the ground ; all the various metals hidden within the bowels of the earth ; the precious stones of all the Orient and the South — let nothing of all these be unknown to thee." But how and when and where did he gather, how did he find room in his head to store up that prodigious 40 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES knowledge, always ready to his want, of what I must call things in general — local customs, traditions, pro- verbs, rhymes, unwritten dialects, costumes, various trades and professions, with their implements and modes of working and technical terms, and so forth, and so forth ? Such instances as Rabelais and Shakespeare make us incline to Plato's theory that all knowledge is but reminiscence, that we have all got thoroughly acquainted with our world in previous existences, and are only ignorant in so far as our memories are asleep or inert; or they suggest that a few privileged minds are as mirrors, wherein, with- out any effort on their part, all objects that come before them spontaneously image themselves, and that these images remain for ever clear and well- ordered, still without any effort on the part of the mirroring mind. Speaking of Rabelais' knowledge of herbs, we cannot but deeply regret that, through no fault of his own, he had to die in ignorance of the noblest of all, the herb of herbs, which is tobacco. Had time and fortune but made him acquainted with it, we may be sure that tobacco, and not vile hemp, would have been recognised by him as the herb Panta- gruehon ; and the last four chapters of Book iii., which are now devoted to the glorification of this herb of the hangman, would have been devoted to a far more enthusiastic eulogy of tobacco. How he would have described and anatomised it, this learned physician and naturalist ! How he would have dilated on its countless cfiicacies and virtues, and on its marvellous affinities with good wine, this supreme philosopher, this royal reveller ! Alas ! that our peerless Pantagruelist was cut off from the knowRABELAIS 41 ledge of our peerless Pantagruelion ! It is a case doleful and disastrous as when, two who were meant to be lovers, two souls complemental to each other, are by some error or oversight of nature born in different ages ! His style is as multifarious, or rather omnifarious, as his knowledge. The beautiful, child-like Old French of the Romances was gone, the modern French was slowly forming and still in a half-chaotic state, every one doing with it that which was right in his own eyes. Rabelais' exuberance of mere words and phrases is overwhelming ; and he often pours them out one on top of another interminably, rioting in their exhaustless rush and flow. The vocabulary of his age is far too poor for him ; he presses into his service every patois, he invents the wildest quirks and the most extravagant compounds, he lays ancient and modern tongues under tribute, stamping their coins with French inflections. In this enormous wealth and prodigal volubility of language, he is again to be compared only to our Shakespeare. I remember reading somewhere of two Oxford or Cam- bridge professors discussing whether Shakespeare or Milton had the greater command of language, when one remarked conclusively : " Why, in half-an-hour Shakespeare would have slanged Milton into a ditch ! " I take it that Rabelais would have slanged Racine into a ditch in about five minutes. Despite his own chartered libertinism, Rabelais had a strong respect for the purity of his native tongue, as we see (ii. 6) by Pantagruel's treatment of the Limosin scholar who Pindarised or Latinised the plain honest French. And whenever he would be serious and 42 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES not humoristic, he proves that he has a most noble natural style of his own, rich without excess, as in the epistle of Gargantua already cited, the descrip- tion of the Temple of the Holy Bottle at the close of Book v., and that at the close of Book i. of Friar John's glorious abbey of Theleme, where all was in direct contradiction to what obtains in the monas- teries and nunneries of the Church, where brave men and beautiful women freely mingled, where marriage was honourable, where the only regulation was to have no regulation at all : " In their rule there was but this clause — 'do what thou wilt.'" It may be here remarked that though his immense learning, his infinity of allusions to matters abstruse and obscure, and of recondite and lawless words, render him by far the most difficult of French authors to translate, he has been Englished more happily and thoroughly than almost any other of the French classics, who, indeed, with the notable exception of Montaigne by Cotton, have been usually treated scurvily by hacks, or else neglected altogether. The case of Rabelais is not so surprising as it at first appears. Of a common French writer there may be a thousand or ten thousand English who could give a commonplace version. Of an unique writer there will be only half-a-dozen qualified to attempt the translation ; but these will be well qualified, having strong affinities for the original in humour and predilections. I do not say that the version of Sir Thomas Urquhart and Motteux is by any means perfect, but it gives a better notion of Rabelais than I should have thought, before seeing it, could have been given in our language. Bohn's edition, in two RABELAIS 43 vols., is enriched with an abundance of notes on words, things, and events, gathered from the best commentators, and constituting a real treasure-house of Rabelaisian information. The cheap and handy edition of L. Jacob, Bibliophile (Paul Lacroix), pub- lished by Charpentier, Paris, has the advantage of the Memoir — to which I have already acknowledged my indebtedness — and of glossarial and other notes at the bottom of each page, thus sparing the reader the great nuisance of continual reference to a glossary at the end of the work, a nuisance so great that most readers soon give up referring at all. Mr. Besant, in his bright book, " The French Humourists," says : " It is not impossible that England will yet learn to appreciate more largely this glorious wit and satirist. There may be found some man who has the leisure, and to whom it would be a labour of love to edit for modern readers the life and voyages of Pantagruel. The necessary omissions could be made without very great difficulty, and the parts to be left out are not inwoven with the web of the whole." For myself, although I detest castrated editions, I have no objection to see such an experi- ment tried with Rabelais ; but I doubt whether the general reader, who may be supposed not to care for him in his complete form, would care for him thus mutilated. Mr. Besant goes on : " Considering him as a moral teacher, we must remember what things he taught, and that he was the first to teach them in the vernacular. Many of his precepts are now commonplaces, texts for the copy-book; but they were not so then. In that time, when only a few had learning, and the old mediaeval darkness was 44 still over the minds of men, we must remember what things perfectly new and previously unsuspected he poured into men's ears." And he proceeds to enumerate some of them ; yet in concluding his essay he writes : " 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." Now, assuredly Mr. Besant is no Philistine ; yet I cannot but think that when writing the last passage he was labouring under an attack of Philistinism. Perhaps he was de- pressed with a bad cigar, or bilious with a bad glass of wine ; perhaps his good manners were corrupted for the moment by evil communications with men from Qaza, Gath, or Ascalon. Moreover, he is clearly inconsis- tent. If Rabelais has inflicted such unequalled and lasting injury on his own country, how can Mr. Besant hope that he will yet be more largely appreciated, that is to say more extensively studied, here ? Does he want earnestness effectually destroyed in England ? Again, how can a great moral teacher, profoundly wise, inflict lasting injury on his country? How can it be better for said country that the book of such a teacher should be tied to a millstone and hurled into the sea? If this is how Mr. Besant would treat the books of great moral teachers, what a dreadfully RABELAIS 45 wicked man he must be ! Finally, I challenge al- together this charge against the French of want of earnestness. It is a common, narrow-minded English cant, quite unworthy of an accomplished gentleman like Mr, Besant. The great French people are no more to be judged by a few third-rate Parisian littera- teurs than the English by the popular lady novelists of the day. And if there is light life in Paris (as well as profoundly serious), how much of it is encouraged by foreigners, including the virtuous English and Americans — the two people who, as we are aware, have the monopoly of virtue on this terrestrial globe ? Were Pascal and his friends not earnest? Was not Fenelon? In our own day, Victor Hugo, Michelet, Quinet? The mass of the people sober, frugal, in- dustrious ? The men of the Revolutions, leaders of liberty in Europe, with their burning faith in humanity and progress, equality and fraternity? The French can laugh and enjoy themselves more gaily and grace- fully than we, without getting stolidly besotted; therefore they are frivolous ! They have had many pleasant humorists, therefore they are not earnest ! It might as well be argued from their jolly old songs and the glorious humou^ of Burns (whose laughter is rich and deep-chested as Rabelais') that the Scotch are without earnestness 1 On the whole, while conscious that I have neither the knowledge nor the intellect required for judging so large a question, I am inclined to look up to Rabelais as the greatest genius in French literature. Perhaps the very finest work in that literature has been done by Pascal, but Pascal's finest work is a series of fragments ; and while as profound, he is narrow as an artesian well, in comparison with the oceanic amplitude and energy, as well as depth, of Rabelais. Of the humour I say nothing—it is proverbial; a frank, jolly laughter, unrestrained, diluvian, immense, inextinguishable as the laughter of the gods. His enormous erudition and knowledge are mere toys for his playtime; but throughout his whole work, or play, he gives you the sense of easiest power and mastery—at home in everything, rising with its theme as readily as it falls, never strained or fatigued, able to do what it likes, equal and more than equal to far more arduous things if it cared to undertake them; in short, with an indefinite reserve of capacity in all directions: and this I take to be the impression which only a supreme and Titanic genius can produce.