His Essence.
Rabelais is not precisely a book for bachelors and maids--at times,
indeed, is not a book for grown men. There are passages not to be read
without a blush and a sensation of sickness: the young giant which is the
Renaissance being filthy and gross as Nature herself at her grossest and
her most filthy. It is argued that this is all deliberate--is an effect
of premeditation: that Rabelais had certain home-truths to deliver to his
generation, and delivered them in such terms as kept him from the fagot
and the rope by bedaubing him with the renown of a common buffoon. But
the argument is none of the soundest in itself, and may fairly be set
aside as a piece of desperate special pleading, the work of counsel at
their wits' end for matter of defence. For Rabelais clean is not
Rabelais at all. His grossness is an essential component in his mental
fabric, an element in whose absence he would be not Rabelais but somebody
else. It inspires his practice of art to the full as thoroughly as it
informs his theory of language. He not only employs it wherever it might
be useful: he goes out of his way to find it, he shovels it in on any and
every occasion, he bemerds his readers and himself with a gusto that
assuredly is not a common characteristic of defensive operations. In
him, indeed, the humour of Old France--the broad, rank, unsavoury _esprit
gaulois_--found its heroic expression; he made use of it because he must;
and we can no more eliminate it from his work than we can remove the
quality of imagination from Shakespeare's or those of art and intellect
from Ben Jonson's. Other men are as foul or fouler; but in none is
foulness so inbred and so ingrained, from none is it so inseparable. Few
have had so much genius, and in none else has genius been so curiously
featured.
His Secret.
It is significant enough that with all this against him he should have
been from the first a great moral and literary influence and the delight
of the wisest and soundest minds the world has seen. Shakespeare read
him, and Jonson; Montaigne, a greater than himself, is in some sort his
descendant; Swift, in Coleridge's enlightening phrase, is 'anima
Rabelaesii habitans in sicco'; to Sterne and Balzac and Moliere he was a
constant inspiration; unto this day his work is studied and his meanings
are sought with almost religious devoutness; while his phrases have
passed into the constitution of a dozen languages, and the great figures
he scrawled across the face of the Renaissance have survived the movement
that gave them being, and are ranked with the monuments of literature.
Himself has given us the reasons in the prologue to the first book, where
he tells of the likeness between Socrates and the boxes called Sileni,
and discourses of the manifest resemblance of his own work with Socrates.
'Opening this box,' which is Socrates, says he, 'you would have found
within it a heavenly and inestimable drug, a more than human
understanding, an admirable virtue, matchless learning, invincible
courage, inimitable sobriety, certain contentment of mind, perfect
assurance, and an incredible disregard of all that for which men
cunningly do so much watch, run, sail, fight, travel, toil, and turmoil
themselves.' In such wise must his book be opened, and the 'high
conceptions' with which it is stuffed will presently be apparent. Nay,
more: you are to do with it even as a dog with a marrowbone. 'If you
have seen him you might have remarked with what devotion and
circumspection he watches and wards it; with what care he keeps it; how
fervently he holds it; how prudently he gobbets it; with what affection
he breaks it; with what diligence he sucks it.' And in the same way you
'by a sedulous lecture and frequent meditation' shall break the bone and
suck out the marrow of these books. Since the advice was proffered,
generation after generation of mighty wits have taken counsel with the
Master, and his wisdom has through them been passed out into the practice
of life, the evolution of society, the development of humanity. But the
'prince de toute sapience et de toute comedie' has not yet uttered his
last word. He remains in the front of time as when he lived and wrote.
The Abbey of Thelema and the education of Gargantua are still unrealised
ideals; the Ringing Isle and the Isle of Papimany are in their essentials
pretty much as he left them; Panurge, 'the pollarded man, the man with
every faculty except the reason,' has bettered no whit for the three
centuries of improvement that have passed since he was flashed into
being. We--even we--have much to learn from Master Alcofribas, and until
we have learned it well enough to put it into practice his work remains
half done and his book still one to study.