_Lucian_.--Friend Rabelais, well met--our souls are very good company for
one another; we both were great wits and most audacious freethinkers. We
laughed often at folly, and sometimes at wisdom. I was, indeed, more
correct and more elegant in my style; but then, in return, you had a
greater fertility of imagination. My "True History" is much inferior, in
fancy and invention, in force of wit and keenness of satire, to your
"History of the Acts of Gargantua and Pantagruel."
_Rabelais_.--You do me great honour; but I may say, without vanity, that
both those compositions entitle the authors of them to a very
distinguished place among memoir-writers, travellers, and even
historians, ancient and modern.
_Lucian_.--Doubtless they do; but will you pardon me if I ask you one
question? Why did you choose to write such absolute nonsense as you have
in some places of your illustrious work?
_Rabelais_.--I was forced to compound my physic for the mind with a large
dose of nonsense in order to make it go down. To own the truth to you,
if I had not so frequently put on the fool's-cap, the freedoms I took in
other places with cowls, with Red Hats, and the Triple Crown itself,
would have brought me into great danger. Not only my book, but I myself,
should, in all probability, have been condemned to the flames; and
martyrdom was an honour to which I never aspired. I therefore
counterfeited folly, like Junius Brutus, from the wisest of all
principles--that of self-preservation. You, Lucian, had no need to use
so much caution. Your heathen priests desired only a sacrifice now and
then from an Epicurean as a mark of conformity, and kindly allowed him to
make as free as he pleased, in conversation or writings, with the whole
tribe of gods and goddesses--from the thundering Jupiter and the scolding
Juno, down to the dog Anubis and the fragrant dame Cloacina.
_Lucian_.--Say rather that our Government allowed us that liberty; for I
assure you our priests were by no means pleased with it--at least, they
were not in my time.
_Rabelais_.--The wiser men they; for, in spite of the conformity required
by the laws and enforced by the magistrate, that ridicule brought the
system of pagan theology into contempt, not only with the philosophical
part of mankind, but even with the vulgar.
_Lucian_.--It did so, and the ablest defenders of paganism were forced to
give up the poetical fables and allegorise the whole.
_Rabelais_.--An excellent way of drawing sense out of absurdity, and
grave instructions from lewdness. There is a great modern wit, Sir
Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, who in his treatise entitled "The Wisdom of
the Ancients" has done more for you that way than all your own priests.
_Lucian_.--He has indeed shown himself an admirable chemist, and made a
fine transmutation of folly into wisdom. But all the later Platonists
took the same method of defending our faith when it was attacked by the
Christians; and certainly a more judicious one could not be found. Our
fables say that in one of their wars with the Titans the gods were
defeated, and forced to turn themselves into beasts in order to escape
from the conquerors. Just the reverse happened here, for by this happy
art our beastly divinities were turned again into rational beings.
_Rabelais_.--Give me a good commentator, with a subtle, refining,
philosophical head, and you shall have the edification of seeing him draw
the most sublime allegories and the most venerable mystic truths from my
history of the noble Gargantua and Pantagruel. I don't despair of being
proved, to the entire satisfaction of some future ape, to have been,
without exception, the profoundest divine and metaphysician that ever yet
held a pen.
_Lucian_.--I shall rejoice to see you advanced to that honour. But in
the meantime I may take the liberty to consider you as one of our class.
There you sit very high.
_Rabelais_.--I am afraid there is another, and a modern author too, whom
you would bid to sit above me, and but just below yourself--I mean Dr.
Swift.
_Lucian_.--It was not necessary for him to throw so much nonsense into
his history of Lemuel Gulliver as you did into that of your two
illustrious heroes; and his style is far more correct than yours. His
wit never descended, as yours frequently did, into the lowest of taverns,
nor ever wore the meanest garb of the vulgar.
_Rabelais_.--If the garb which it wore was not as mean, I am certain it
was sometimes as dirty as mine.
_Lucian_.--It was not always nicely clean; yet, in comparison with you,
he was decent and elegant. But whether there was not in your
compositions more fire, and a more comic spirit, I will not determine.
_Rabelais_.--If you will not determine it, e'en let it remain a matter in
dispute, as I have left the great question, Whether Panurge should marry
or not? I would as soon undertake to measure the difference between the
height and bulk of the giant Gargantua and his Brobdignagian Majesty, as
the difference of merit between my writings and Swift's. If any man
takes a fancy to like my book, let him freely enjoy the entertainment it
gives him, and drink to my memory in a bumper. If another likes
Gulliver, let him toast Dr. Swift. Were I upon earth I would pledge him
in a bumper, supposing the wine to be good. If a third likes neither of
us, let him silently pass the bottle and be quiet.
_Lucian_.--But what if he will not be quiet? A critic is an unquiet
creature.
_Rabelais_.--Why, then he will disturb himself, not me.
_Lucian_.--You are a greater philosopher than I thought you. I knew you
paid no respect to Popes or kings, but to pay none to critics is, in an
author, a magnanimity beyond all example.
_Rabelais_.--My life was a farce; my death was a farce; and would you
have me make my book a serious affair? As for you, though in general you
are only a joker, yet sometimes you must be ranked among grave authors.
You have written sage and learned dissertations on history and other
weighty matters. The critics have therefore an undoubted right to maul
you; they find you in their province. But if any of them dare to come
into mine, I will order Gargantua to swallow them up, as he did the six
pilgrims, in the next salad he eats.
_Lucian_.--Have I not heard that you wrote a very good serious book on
the aphorisms of Hippocrates?
_Rabelais_.--Upon my faith I had forgot it. I am so used to my fool's
coat that I don't know myself in my solemn doctor's gown. But your
information was right; that book was indeed a very respectable work. Yet
nobody reads it; and if I had writ nothing else, I should have been
reckoned, at best, a lackey to Hippocrates, whereas the historian of
Panurge is an eminent writer. Plain good sense, like a dish of solid
beef or mutton, is proper only for peasants; but a ragout of folly, well
dressed with a sharp sauce of wit, is fit to be served up at an emperor's
table.
_Lucian_.--You are an admirable pleasant fellow. Let me embrace you. How
Apollo and the Muses may rank you on Parnassus I am not very certain;
but, if I were Master of the Ceremonies on Mount Olympus, you should be
placed, with a full bowl of nectar before you, at the right hand of
Momus.
_Rabelais_.--I wish you were; but I fear the inhabitants of those sublime
regions will like your company no better than mine. Indeed, how Momus
himself could get a seat at that table I can't well comprehend. It has
been usual, I confess, in some of our Courts upon earth, to have a
privileged jester, called the king's fool. But in the Court of Heaven
one should not have supposed such an officer as Jupiter's fool. Your
allegorical theology in this point is very abstruse.
_Lucian_.--I think our priests admitted Momus into our heaven, as the
Indians are said to worship the devil, through fear. They had a mind to
keep fair with him. For we may talk of the giants as much as we please,
but to our gods there is no enemy so formidable as he. Ridicule is the
terror of all false religion. Nothing but truth can stand its lash.
_Rabelais_.--Truth, advantageously set in a good and fair light, can
stand any attacks; but those of Ridicule are so teasing and so fallacious
that I have seen them put her ladyship very much out of humour.
_Lucian_.--Ay, friend Rabelais, and sometimes out of countenance too. But
Truth and Wit in confederacy will strike Momus dumb. United they are
invincible, and such a union is necessary upon certain occasions. False
Reasoning is most effectually exposed by Plain Sense; but Wit is the best
opponent to False Ridicule, as Just Ridicule is to all the absurdities
which dare to assume the venerable names of Philosophy or Religion. Had
we made such a proper use of our agreeable talents; had we employed our
ridicule to strip the foolish faces of Superstition, Fanaticism, and
Dogmatical Pride of the serious and solemn masks with which they are
covered, at the same time exerting all the sharpness of our wit to combat
the flippancy and pertness of those who argue only by jests against
reason and evidence in points of the highest and most serious concern, we
should have much better merited the esteem of mankind.