Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564
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the soul; it behooveth thee to serve, to love, to fear God.... Be
serviceable to all thy neighbors, and love them as thyself;
reverence thy preceptors; shun the conversation of those whom thou
desirest not to resemble, and receive not in vain the graces which God
hath bestowed upon thee. And when thou shalt see that thou hast
attained to all the knowledge that is to be acquired in that part,
return unto me, that I may see thee, and give thee my blessing
before I die....
Thy father,
GARGANTUA
`063530
-
Pantagruel studied zealously, learned many languages, and might have
become a bookworm had he not met Panurge. Here again, even more than
in Friar John, the subordinate character stands out more clearly
than his master, as Sancho Panza sometimes outshines the Don. Rabelais
does not find full scope for his irreverent humor and riotous
vocabulary in Gargantua or Pantagruel; he needs this
quarter-scoundrel, quarter-lawyer, quarter-Villon, quarter-philosopher
as a vehicle for his satire. He describes Panurge (which means
"Ready to do anything") as lean like a starving cat, walking
gingerly "as if he trod on eggs"; a gallant fellow, but a little
lecherous, and "subject to a kind of disease... called lack of money";
a pickpocket, a "lewd rogue, a cozener, a drinker... and very
dissolute fellow," but "otherwise the best and most virtuous man in
the world" (II, xiv, xvi). Into Panurge's mouth Rabelais puts his most
ribald sallies. Panurge particularly resented the habit which the
ladies of Paris adopted, of buttoning their blouses up the back; he
sued the women in court, and might have lost, but he threatened to
start a similar custom with male culottes, whereupon the court
decreed that women must leave a modest but passable opening in front
(II, xvii). Angered by a woman who scorned him, Panurge sprayed her
skirts, while she knelt in prayer at church, with the effluvia of an
itching pet; when the lady emerged, all the 600,014 male dogs of Paris
pursued her with unanimous and indefatigable devotion (II,
xxi-xxii). Pantagruel, himself a very mannerly prince, takes to this
rascal as a relief from philosophy, and invites him on every
expedition.
As the story rollicks on into Book Three, Panurge debates with
himself and others whether he should marry. He lists the arguments pro
and con through a hundred pages, some sparkling, many wearisome; but
in those pages we meet the man who married a dumb wife, and the
renowned jurist Bridlegoose, who arrives at his soundest judgments
by throwing dice. The Prologue to Book Four catches a cue from
Lucian and describes a "consistory of gods" in heaven, with Jupiter
complaining about the unearthly chaos reigning on the earth, the
thirty wars going on at once, the mutual hatreds of the peoples, the
divisions of theologies, the syllogisms of the philosophers. "What
shall we do with this Ramus and Galland... who together are setting
all Paris by the ears?" Priapus counsels him to turn these two Pierres
into stones ( pierres ); here Rabelais steals a pun from Scripture.
Returning to earth, he records in Books Four and Five *06064 the
long Gulliverian voyages of Pantagruel, Panurge, Friar John, and a
royal Utopian fleet to find the Temple of the Holy Bottle, and to
ask whether Panurge should marry. After a score of adventures,
satirizing Lenten fasts, Protestant pope-haters, bigot pope-olators,
monks, dealers in fake antiques, lawyers ("furred cats"), Scholastic
philosophers, and historians, the expedition reaches the Temple.
Over the portal is a Greek inscription to the effect that "in wine
there is truth." In a near-by fountain is a half-submerged bottle,
from which a voice emerges, gurgling, TRINC; and the priestess
Bacbuc explains that wine is the best philosophy, and that "not
laughing but drinking... cool, delicious wine... is the distinguishing
character of man." Panurge is happy to have the oracle confirm what he
has known all the time. He resolves to eat, drink, and be married, and
to take the consequences manfully. He sings an obscene hymeneal chant,
and Bacbuc dismisses the party with a blessing: "May that intellectual
sphere whose center is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere, whom
we call GOD, keep you in His Almighty protection" (V, xlvii). So, with
a typical blend of lubricity and philosophy, the great romance comes
to an end.
4. The King's Jester
-
What sense is there behind this nonsense, and is there any wisdom in
this demijohn of Falernian-Priapean hilarity? "We country clowns,"
Rabelais makes one of his asses say, "are somewhat gross, and apt to
knock words out of joint" (V, vii). He loves words, has an endless
supply of them, and invents a thousand more; he draws them, like
Shakespeare, from every occupation and profession, every field of
philosophy, theology, and law. He makes lists of adjectives, nouns, or
verbs, as if for the pleasure of contemplating them (III, xxxviii); he
multiplies synonyms in an ecstasy of redundancy; this pleonasm was
already an old trick on the French stage. `063532 It is part of
Rabelais' boundless and uncontrollable humor, an overflow beside which
even the humor of Aristophanes or Moliere is a modest trickle. His
coarseness is another phase of this unmanageable flux. Perhaps some of
it was a reaction against monastic asceticism, some of it the
anatomical indifference of a physician, some of it a bold defiance
of pedantic precision; much of it was in the manner of the age.
Undoubtedly Rabelais carries it to excess; after a dozen pages of
urogenital, excretory, and gaseous details we weary and turn away.
Another generation of classic influence would be needed to tame such
volcanic exuberance into disciplined form.
We forgive these faults because Rabelais' style runs away with us,
as with him. It is an unpretentious, unliterary style, natural,
easy, flowing, just the medium for telling a long story. The secret of
his verve is imagination plus energy plus clarity; he sees a
thousand things unobserved by most of us, notes innumerable quirks
of dress and conduct and speech, unites them fantastically, and sets
the mixtures chasing one another over the sportive page.
He borrows right and left, as the custom was, and with Shakespeare's
excuse, that he betters everything that he steals. He helps himself to
hundreds of proverbial snatches from Erasmus' Adagia, `063533 and
follows many a lead from The Praise of Folly or the Colloquies. He
assimilates half a hundred items from Plutarch, years before Amyot's
translation opened that treasury of greatness to any literate thief.
He appropriates Lucian's "heavenly discourse," and Folengo's tale of
the self-drowned sheep; he finds in the comedies of his time the story
of the man who regretted that he had cured his wife's
speechlessness; and he uses a hundred suggestions from the fabliaux
and interludes that had rolled down from medieval France. In
describing the voyages of Pantagruel he leans on the narratives that
were being issued by the explorers of the New World and the Far
East. Yet, with all this borrowing, there is no author more
original; and only in Shakespeare and Cervantes do we find imaginative
creations so lusty with life as Friar John and Panurge. Rabelais
himself, however, is the main creation of the book, a composite of
Pantagruel, Friar John, Panurge, Erasmus, Vesalius, and Jonathan
Swift, babbling, bubbling, smashing idols, loving life.
Because he loved life he flayed those who made it less lovable.
Perhaps he was a bit too hard on the monks who had been unable to
share his humanistic devotions. He must have been clawed by a lawyer
or two, for he tears their fur revengefully. Mark my words, he warns
his readers, "if you live but six Olympiads and the age of two dogs
more, you'll see these law-cats lords of all Europe." But he lays
his whip also upon judges, Scholastics, theologians, historians,
travelers, indulgence peddlers, and women. There is hardly a good word
for women in all the book; this is Rabelais' blindest spot, perhaps
the price he paid, as monk and priest and bachelor, for never
earning tenderness.
Partisans have debated whether he was a Catholic, a Protestant, a
freethinker, or an atheist. Calvin thought him an atheist; and "my own
belief," concluded his lover Anatole France, "is that he believed
nothing." `063534 At times he wrote like the most irreverent cynic, as
in the language of the sheep drover about the best way to fertilize
a field (IV, vii). He ridiculed fasting, indulgences, inquisitors,
decretals, and enjoyed explaining the anatomical requisites for
becoming a pope (IV, xlviii). He had evidently no belief in hell
(II, xxx). He echoed the Protestant arguments that the papacy was
draining the nations of their gold (IV, liii), and that the
cardinals of Rome lived lives of gluttony and hypocrisy (IV,
lviii-lx). He sympathized with the French heretics; Pantagruel, he
says, did not stay long in Toulouse, because there they "burn their
regents alive, like red herrings"- referring to the execution of an
heretical professor of law (II, v). But his Protestant sympathies seem
to have been limited to those who were humanists. He followed
Erasmus admiringly, but only mildly favored Luther, and he turned with
distaste from the dogmatism and puritanism of Calvin. He was
tolerant of everything but intolerance. Like nearly all the humanists,
when driven to choose, he preferred Catholicism with its legends,
intolerance, and art to Protestantism with its predestination,
intolerance, and purity. He repeatedly affirmed his faith in the
fundamentals of Christianity, but this may have been the prudence of a
man who, in defense of his opinions, was willing to go to the stake
exclusively. He loved his definition of God so well that he (or his
continuator) repeated it (III, xiii; V, xlvii). He apparently accepted
the immortality of the soul (II, viii; IV, xxvii), but in general he
preferred scatology to eschatology. Farel called him a renegade for
accepting the pastorate of Meudon, `063535 but this was understood, by
donor and recipient, as merely a way of eating.
His real faith was in Nature, and here, perhaps, he was as
trustful and credulous as his orthodox neighbors. He believed that
ultimately the forces of Nature work for good, and he underestimated
her neutrality as between men and fleas. Like Rousseau, and against
Luther and Calvin, he believed in the natural goodness of man; or,
like other humanists, he was confident that a good education and a
good environment would make men good. Like Montaigne, he counseled men
to follow Nature, and possibly he looked with impish unconcern on what
would then happen to society and civilization. In describing the Abbey
of Theleme he seemed to be preaching philosophical anarchism, but it
was not so; he would admit to it only those whose good breeding,
education, and sense of honor would fit them for the trials of
freedom.
His final philosophy was "Pantagruelism." This must not be
confused with the useful weed Pantagruelion, which is merely hemp, and
whose final virtue is that it can make appropriate neckties for
criminals. Pantagruelism is living like Pantagruel- in a genial and
tolerant fellowship with Nature and men, in grateful enjoyment of
all the good things of life, and in cheerful acceptance of our
inescapable vicissitudes and termination. Once Rabelais defined
Pantagruelism as une certaine gaiete d'esprit confite de mepris des
choses fortuites - "a certain gaiety of spirit preserved in contempt
of the accidents of life" (IV, Prologue). It combined Zeno the
Stoic, Diogenes the Cynic, and Epicurus: to bear all natural events
with equanimity, to view without offense all natural impulses and
operations, and to enjoy every sane pleasure without puritanic
inhibitions or theological remorse. Pantagruel "took all things in
good part, and interpreted every action in the best sense; he
neither vexed nor disquieted himself... since all the goods that the
earth contains... are not of so much worth as that we should for
them disturb or disorder our emotions, trouble or perplex our senses
or spirits" (III, ii). We must not exaggerate the epicurean element in
this philosophy; Rabelais' litanies to wine were more verbal than
alcoholic; they do not quite comport with a contemporary's description
of him as a man of "serene, gracious, and open countenance"; `063536
the wine he celebrated was the wine of life. And this pretended Lord
of Dipsophily put into the mouth of Gargantua a sentence that in ten
words phrases the challenge of our own time: "Science without
conscience is but the ruin of the soul" (II, viii).
France has treasured Rabelais more than any other of her giants of
the pen except Montaigne, Moliere, and Voltaire. In his own century
Etienne Pasquier called him the greatest writer of the age. In the
seventeenth century, as manners stiffened under lace and perukes,
and classic form became literally de rigueur, he lost some
standing in the nation's memory; but even then Moliere, Racine, and La
Fontaine were confessedly influenced by him; Fontenelle, La Bruyere,
and Mme. de Sevigne loved him, and Pascal appropriated his
definition of God. Voltaire began by despising his coarseness, and
ended by becoming his devotee. As the French language changed,
Rabelais became almost unintelligible to French readers in the
nineteenth century; and perhaps he is now more popular in the
English-speaking world than in France. For in 1653 and 1693 Sir Thomas
Urquhart published a translation of Books One and Three into virile
English as exuberant as the original; Peter de Motteux completed the
version in 1708; and by the work of these men Gargantua and
Pantagruel became an English classic. Swift stole from it as if by
right of clergy, and Sterne must have found in it some leaven for
his wit. It is among the books that belong to the literature not of
a country but of the world.
VI. RONSARD AND THE PLEIADE
-
Meanwhile a veritable flood of poetry was pouring over France. We
know some 200 French poets in the reigns of Francis and his sons;
and these were no vapid mourners in an unheeding wilderness; they were
warriors in a literary battle- form vs. content, Ronsard vs. Rabelais-
that determined the character of French literature till the
Revolution.
A complex ecstasy inspired them. They longed to rival the Greeks and
Romans in purity of style and perfection of form, and the Italian
sonneteers in grace of speech and imagery; nevertheless they were
resolved to write not in Latin, like the scholars who were instructing
and exciting them, but in their native French; and at the same time
they proposed to mellow and refine that still rough tongue by teaching
it words, phrases, constructions, and ideas judiciously pilfered
from the classics. The episodic formlessness of Rabelais' romance made
it, in their eyes, a crude vessel of clay hastily turned by hand,
unpainted and unglazed. They would add to his earthly vitality the
discipline of form carefully designed, and of feeling rationally
controlled.
The classical crusade began in the Lyons of Rabelais himself.
Maurice Seve spent part of his life locating, as he thought, the
tomb of Petrarch's Laura, then composed 446 stanzas to his own desired
Delie; and in the melancholy delicacy of his verse he cleared a path
for Ronsard. His ablest competitor in Lyons was a woman, Louise
Labe, who, in full armor, fought like another Joan at Perpignan, and
then cooled into marriage with a rope-maker who winked in kindly
Gallic fashion at her subsidiary amours. She read Greek, Latin,
Italian, and Spanish, played the lute alluringly, kept a salon for her
rivals and her lovers, and wrote some of the earliest and finest
sonnets in the French language. We might judge her fame from her
funeral (1566), which, said a chronicler, "was a triumph. She was
carried through the city with her face uncovered, and her head crowned
with a floral wreath. Death could do nothing to disfigure her, and the
people of Lyons covered her grave with flowers and tears." `063537
Through these Lyonese poets the Petrarchan style and mood passed up to
Paris, and entered the Pleiade.
The very word was a classic echo, for in the Alexandria of the third
century before Christ a galaxy of seven poets had likewise been
named from the constellation that commemorated the seven
mythological daughters of Atlas and Pleione. Ronsard, brightest star
in the French Pleiade, rarely used that term, and his models were
Anacreon and Horace rather than Alexandrian Theocritus or Callimachus.
It was in 1548, at an inn in Touraine, that he met Joachim du
Bellay, and conspired with him to make French poetry classical. They
won to their enterprise four other young poets- Antoine de Baif,
Remi Belleau, Etienne Jodelle, and Ponthus de Thyard; and they were
joined also by the scholar Jean Dorat, whose lectures on Greek
literature at the College de France and the College de Coqueret
fired them with enthusiasm for the lyric singers of ancient Greece.
They called themselves La Brigade, and vowed to rescue the French
muse from the coarse hands of Jean de Meung and Rabelais, and the
loose measures of Villon and Marot. They turned their noses from the
riotous language and privy wisdom of Gargantua and Pantagruel;
they found no classic restraint in those jumbled verbs and adjectives,
those coprophilic ecstasies, no feeling for beauty of form in woman,
nature, or art. A hostile critic, seeing them seven, dubbed them La
Pleiade. Their victory turned the word into a flag of fame.
In 1549 Du Bellay proclaimed the linguistic program of the Brigade
in a Defense et illustration de la langue francoyse. By defense he
meant that the French language could be enabled to express all that
the classic tongues had uttered; by illustration he meant that
French could take on new luster, could brighten and polish itself,
by putting aside the rough speech of prevalent French prose, and the
ballad, roundel, virelay forms of French poesy, and purify and
enrich itself by importing classical terms and studying classical
forms, as in Anacreon, Theocritus, Virgil, Horace, and Petrarch. For
to the Pleiade Petrarch was already a classic, and the sonnet was
the most perfect of all literary forms.
Pierre de Ronsard realized in his verse the ideals that Du Bellay
voiced in splendid prose. He came of a recently ennobled family; his
father was maitre d'hotel to Francis I, and for some time Pierre
lived at the brilliant court. He was successively page to the
Dauphin Francis, then to the Madeleine who married James V of
Scotland, then ecuyer or squire to the future Henry II. He looked
forward to military exploits, but at sixteen he began to grow deaf. He
sheathed his sword and brandished a pen. He fell in with Virgil by
accident, and saw in him a perfection of form and speech as yet
unknown in France. Dorat led him on from Latin to Greek, and taught
him to read Anacreon, Aeschylus, Pindar, Aristophanes. "O Master!"
cried the youth, "why have you hidden these riches from me so
long?" `063538 At twenty-four he met Du Bellay. Thereafter he
divided his time devotedly among song, woman, and wine.
His Odes (1550) completed the lyric revolt. They frankly
imitated Horace, but they introduced the ode into French poetry, and
stood on their own feet in purity of language, elegance of phrase,
precision of form. Two years later, in the 183 sonnets of his
Amours, he took Petrarch as his model, and achieved a grace and
refinement never surpassed in French poetry. He wrote to be sung,
and many of his poems were put to music during his lifetime, some by
famous composers like Jannequin and Goudimel. He offered to the
women he courted the old invitation to make play while beauty
shines, but even on that ancient theme he struck an original note,
as when he warned one prudent lass that she would someday regret
having lost the opportunity of being seduced by so renowned a bard:
-
Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, a la chandelle,
Assise aupres du feu, devisant et filant,
Direz chantant mes vers, en vous emerveillant:
Ronsard me celebrait du temps que j'etais belle.
Lors vous n'aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle,
Desia sous le labeur a demi soummeilant,
Qui au bruit de son nom ne s'aille reveillant,
Benissant votre nom de louange immortelle.
Je serai sous la terre et, fantome sans os,
Par les ombres myrteux je prendrai mon repos;
Vous serez au foyer une vieille accroupie,
Regrettant mon amour et votre fier dedain.
Vivez, si m'en croyez, n'attendez a demain:
Cueillez des aujourd'hui les roses de la vie. *06065
-
The exaltation of style suited well the court of Catherine de
Medicis, who had brought to France an Italian retinue bearing Petrarch
in their books. The new poet- hard of hearing but proud of carriage,
with martial figure, golden hair and beard, and the face of
Praxiteles' Hermes - became a favorite of Catherine, Henry II, Mary
Stuart, even of Elizabeth of England, who, as his seventeenth
cousin, sent him a diamond ring. The Greco-Roman mythology of the
Pleiade was welcomed; when the poets talked of Olympus the court
acknowledged the compliment; `063539 Henry became Jupiter, Catherine
Juno, Diane Diana; and the sculpture of Goujon confirmed the
comparison.
When Henry died, Charles IX continued to befriend Ronsard, not quite
to good result, for the young monarch wanted an epic about France to
match the Aeneid. "I can give death," wrote the royal simpleton,
"but you can give immortality." `063540 Ronsard began a Franciade,
but found his muse too short of breath for so long a run; soon he gave
up the pretense, and returned to lyrics and love. He passed peacefully
into old age, protected from the noise of the world, safely
conservative in politics and religion, revered by younger minstrels,
and respected by all but death. It came in 1585. He was buried at
Tours, but Paris gave him an Olympian funeral, in which all the
notables of the capital marched to hear a bishop intone an oraison
funebre.
The poets who called him prince produced many volumes of verse,
delicate but dead. Most of them, like the master, were pagans who at
their ease professed Catholic orthodoxy, and scorned the moralistic
Huguenots. However poor these poets might be in pocket, they were
aristocrats in pride, sometimes in blood, and they wrote for a
circle that had the leisure to relish form. Rabelais returned their
hostility by ridiculing their pedantry, their servile imitation of
Greek and Roman meters, phrases, and epithets, their thin echoes of
ancient themes and Petrarchan conceits and laments. In that conflict
between naturalism and classicism the fate of French literature was
decided. The poets and tragic dramatists of France would choose the
straight and narrow path of perfect structure and chiseled grace;
the prose writers would aim to please by force of substance alone.
Hence French poetry before the Revolution is untranslatable; the
vase of form cannot be shattered and then be refashioned in an alien