Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/53

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