and Esmangart, have generally committed the error of tormenting
themselves and their author to find individual explanations of
personages and events. The extravagance of the last-nained
commentator takes the form of seeing elaborate allegories; that
of some others devotes itself chiefly to identifying the characters
of the romance with more or less famous historical persons. But
the first blunder, that of forming a general hypothetical conception
of Rabelais and then adjusting interpretation of the work to it,
is the commoner. This conception, however, has singularly varied.
According to some expositors, among whom one of the latest and
not the least respectable is M. Fleury, Rabelais is a sober reformer,
an apostle of earnest work, of sound education, of rational if not
dogmatic religion, who wraps up his morals in a farcical envelope
partly to make them go down with the vulgar and partly to shield
himself from the consequences of his reforming zeal. According
to others, of whom we have had in England a distinguished example
in Sir Walter Besant, Rabelais is all this but with a difference. He
is not religious at all; he is more or less anti-religious; and his book
is more or less of a general protest against any attempt to explain
supernaturally the riddle of the earth. According to a third class,
the most distinguished recent representative of which was M. Paul
Lacroix, the Rabelaisian legend does not so much err in principle
as it invents in fact. Rabelais is the incarnation of the “ esprit
Gaulois," a jovial, careless soul, not destitute of common sense or
even acute intellectual power, but first of all a good fellow, rather
referring a broad jest to a fine-pointed one, and rollicking through
life like a good-natured undergraduate. Of all these views it may
be said that those who hold them are obliged to shut their eyes
to many things in the book and to see in it many which are not
there. The religious part of the matter will be dealt with presently;
but it is impossible to think that any unbiased judge reading
Rabelais can hold the grave-philosopher view or the reckless-good-fellow
view without modifications and allowances which practically
deprive either of any value. Those who, as it has been happily
put, identify Rabelais with Pantagruel, strive in vain, on any view
intellectually consistent or morally respectable, to account or the
vast ocean of pure or impure laughter and foolery which surrounds
the few solid islets of sense and reason and devotion. Those who
in the same way identify Rabelais with Panurge can never explain
the education scheme, the solemn apparition of Gargantua among
the farcical and fantastic variations on Panurge's wedding, and many
other passages; while, on the other hand, those who insist on a
definite propaganda of any kind must justify themselves by their
own power of seeing things invisible to plain men. But these
vagaries are not only unjustifiable; they are entirely unnecessary.
No one reading Rabelais without parti pris, but with a good knowledge
of the history and literature of his own times and the times
which preceded him, can have much difficulty in appreciating
his book. He had evidently during his long and studious sojourn
in the cloister (a sojourn which was certainly not less than five-and-twenty
years, while it may have been five-and-thirty, and of which
the studiousness rests not on legend but on documentary evidence)
acquired a vast stock of learning. He was, it is clear, thoroughly
penetrated with the instincts, the hopes, and the ideas of the
Renaissance in the form which it took in France, in England and
in Germany—a form, that is to say, not merely humanist but full
of aspirations for social and political improvement, and above all
for a joyous, varied, and non-ascetic life. He had thoroughly
convinced himself of the abuses to which monarchism lent itself.
Lastly, he had the spirit of lively satire and of willingness desipere
in loco which frequently goes with the love of books. It is in the
highest degree improbable that in beginning his great work he had
any definite purpose or intention. The habit of burlesquing the
roman d'aventures was no new one, and the form lent itself easily
to the two literary exercises to which he was most disposed apt
and quaint citation from and variation on the classics and
satirical criticism of the life he saw around him. The immense
popularity of the first two parts induced him to continue them, and
by degrees (the genuineness of the fifth book, at any rate in substance,
is here assumed) the possibility of giving the whole something
like a consistent form and a regular conclusion presented itself to
him. The voyage in particular allowed the widest licence of
satirical allusion, and he availed himself of that licence in the widest
sense. Here and there persons are glanced at, while the whole
scenery of his birthplace and its neighbourhood is curiously worked
in; but for the most part the satire is typical rather than individual,
and it is on the whole a rather negative satire. In only two points
can Rabelais be said to be definitely polemic. He certainly hated
the monkish system in the debased form in which it existed in his
time; he as certainly hated the brutish ignorance into which the
earlier systems of education had suffered too many of their teachers
and scholars to drop. At these two things he was never tired of
striking, but elsewhere, even in the grim satire of the Chats fourrés,
he is the satirist proper rather than the reformer. It is in the
very absence of any cramping or limiting purpose that the great
merit and value of the book consist. It holds up an almost perfectly
level and spotless mirror to the temper of the earlier
Renaissance. The author has no universal medicine of his own
(except Pantagruelism) to offer, nor has he anybody else's universal
medicine to attack. He ranges freely about the world, touching
the laughable sides of things with kindly laughter, and every now
and then dropping the risibile and taking to the rationale. It is
not indeed possible to deny that in the Oracle of the Bottle, besides
its merely jocular and fantastic sense, there is a certain “ echo,”
as it has been called, “ of the conclusion of the preacher," a certain
acknowledgment of the vanity of things. But in such a book such
a note could hardly be wanting unless the writer had been a fanatic,
which he was not, or a mere voluptuary, which he was not, or a
dullard, which he was least of all. It is, after all, little more than a
suggestion, and is certainly not strengthened by anything in the
body of the work. Rabelais is, in short, if he be read without
prejudice, a humorist pure and simple, feeling often in earnest,
thinking almost always in jest. He is distinguished from the two
men who alone can be compared with him in character of work and
force of genius combined—Lucian and Swift—by very marked
characteristics. He is much less of a mere mocker than Lucian,
and he is entirely destitute, even when he deals with monks or
pedants, of the ferocity of Swift. He neither sneers nor rages;
the fire immense which distinguishes him is altogether good-natured;
but he is nearer to Lucian than to Swift, and Lucian is perhaps
the author whom it is most necessary to know in order to understand
him rightly.
If this general view is correct it will probably condition to some extent the answer to be given to the two minor questions stated above. The first is connected with the great blemish of Gargantua and Pantagruel—their extreme coarseness of language and imagery. It is somewhat curious that some of those who claim Rabelais as an enemy of the supernatural in general have been the loudest to condemn this blemish, and that some of them have made the exceedingly lame excuse for him that it was a means of wrapping up his propaganda and keeping it and himself safe from the notice of the powers that were. This is not complimentary to Rabelais, and, except in some very small degree, it is not likely to be true. For as a matter of fact obscenity no less than impiety was charged against him by his ultra-orthodox enemies, and the obscenity no less than the supposed impiety gave them a handle against him before such bodies as the Sorbonne and the parliaments. As for the extreme theory of the anti-Rabelaisians, that Rabelais 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 unfamiliar 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 literature, 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 allowance) the coarsest passages of Rabelais. His coarseness, moreover, disgusting as it is, has nothing of the corruption of refined voluptuousness 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 considerably 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 mentioned 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 free-thinker 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 accusation of free-thinking, 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-être," said to have been uttered on his death-bed) are, as has been said, purely apocryphal. In the book itself nothing
