Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

his unsatisfied craving for study, Rabelais is a true child of the Renaissance. He declares war on all that the Middle Ages had worshipped-the love of martial conquest, the life of contemplation, mortification of the flesh, scholasticism, and the sounding words which scarcely concealed their emptiness. The inspiration of the movement is upon him. He feels the ecstasy of its renewed life. But its effect on his mind was widely different from the artistic passion of Italy or the practical devotion of Germany. The ideal which he seeks is freedom of thought, the right of every man to pursue knowledge how and when he will, the liberty to worship God as he understood His divinity. He protests against intolerance, but he cares nothing for doctrinal definitions; to him dogmas, whether of Protestantism or Catholicism, are accidents of time and circumstance. He looked for a gradual reconstruction of the world and the spread of education and of science, a process which was necessarily slow, and, in the face of surrounding circumstances, impossible. The foes of culture were the same that they had ever been, on the one hand the priesthood, on the other the unlearned-the narrowness of fanaticism or the panic fear of ignorance. It was because authority checked speculation, upheld shams, discountenanced study, asserted absurd pretensions, and bound living men to dead forms by the iron chains of tradition, that he arraigns the Papacy, the monasteries, and all the learned professions in one sweeping comprehensive indictment. Pantagruel' is an attempt to promote the course of progress in France by the removal of everything that obstructed its advance in religion, law, education, institutions, or society. And the basis of Rabelais' humanitarian enthu-' siasm is his faith in the natural goodness of mankind. Restraint creates the evil which it is designed to check. Shake off the fetters, and the innate potentialities of human excellence will have room to expand. Meanwhile the true wisdom is that of the Pantagruelian philosopher, who strips himself of all that is transitory and passing, possesses his own soul in patience, labours all his life to advance the spread of knowledge, strives to discover the great perhaps,' and dies in the bosom of the Church in which he was born.

[ocr errors]

The absorbing interest of Rabelais' attitude towards the French Renaissance consists in its representative character, and in his relation through the sixteenth-century movement to the intellectual changes which preceded the Revolution. There was a period in his life when he inclined towards the Reformation, and readers of Pantagruel'in its existing form

*

and its English translation may possibly imagine that he was always a Protestant at heart. Calvin says of him that he had once tasted the Gospel,† and in the first book of 'Pantagruel' he shows himself to have been a supporter of Reuchlin against Ortuin and the theologians of Cologne. He treats the Papacy with scant ceremony, attacks indulgences, pilgrimages, and superstitious observances; he scoffs at the purchase of pardons; he lashes with the full force of his satire the vices of the monastic system. But these features of his satire are in no degree proofs of his Protestantism. More positive evidence of his inclination towards the Reformed doctrines will be found in his advocacy of a returu to the simplicity of Gospel teaching, his insistence with St. Paul on the spirit as opposed to the letter, his education of Pantagruel to read the Bible in Hebrew and Greek, and finally in Pantagruel's promise that in his kingdom of Utopia the Gospel shall be preached 'purement, simplement, et ' entièrement, si que les abus d'un tas des papelars et faulx 'prophétes, qui ont par constitutions humaines et inventions 'dépraveés envenimé tout le monde, seront dentour moy 'exterminez.' But in time this feeling changed. The intellectual tyranny of Geneva became more distasteful to his mind than the cautious liberty of Rome. He found, and with him a crowd of Frenchmen whose latent leanings towards Protestantism were similarly checked, that the Huguenot leader was not the apostle of liberty, but thatCalvin was more rapacious in his attacks on human freedom than the great Pope-hawk himself. The narrowness of the Protestant dogmas repelled him, and although up to a certain point he had fought by the side of the Reformers, the alliance was gradually exchanged for hostility. Calvin

* Motteux, his English editor and translator, who was himself a Protestant, omits Rabelais' references to the Calvinists of Geneva. Thus in the fourth book, among the monstrous brood of eavesdropping dissemblers, superstitious pope-mongers, and priest-ridden bigots which anti-nature had engendered, Rabelais includes 'les demoniacles 'Calvins imposteurs de Genève.' Motteux omits this last addition. Also it seems certain that the fifth book, published ten years after the death of Rabelais, contains a considerable number of Protestant additions, possibly from the pen of Henri Estienne.

tQuotquot videmus hodie Lucianos homines qui totam Christi ' religionem subsannant! Alii (ut Rabelæsus, Deperus, et Goveanus) ' gustato Evangelio, eâdem cæcitate sunt percussi. Cur istud nisi quia illud vitæ æternæ pignus sacrilegâ ludendi aut ridendi audaciâ ante profanârant?'-De Scandalis.

wrote against him as the preacher of a creedless, soulless Epicureanism; Henri Estienne complained that 'il jette 'souvent des pierres dans notre jardin;' Ramus denounced him as an atheist; Robert Estienne reproached the men from whom he had himself fled for his own life because they had not burned the author of Pantagruel.' Rabelais was not backward in his reprisals. He had attacked the fasts of the Catholics, but he did not find that the meat diet of the Calvinists made them more tolerant or less suspicious; both were equally enemies of that science which was his mistress. His humanitarian fervour was diametrically opposed to the Huguenot doctrine of original sin, and he pours forth his ridicule upon the 'yea verily' of Calvin's catechism. The religious ideal which he puts forward in 'Theleme' is neither Calvinist nor Roman. He excludes from his abbey all who foment religious discord; he foresees the extinction of art and letters which will inevitably result from the impending struggle between Protestant and Catholic, and he throws in his lot with neither the one nor the other.

Rabelais held aloof from the conflict because he saw too

clearly the faults of both the combatants. His physical temperament also tended to make him a spectator rather than an actor. More eager to attain liberty of thought than doctrinal truth, Rabelais was totally without the martyr-spirit. He shudders at the execution of Jean Caturce at Toulouse in 1532; but while Dolet openly protests against it Rabelais' policy, like that of Pantagruel, was rather to avoid similar dangers. Pantagruel and his attendants visit Toulouse, mais ils n'y demeurent guères quand ils virent qu'ils 'faisaient brûler leurs régents touts vifs comme harengs 'saurets.' And the times were full of peril. Jean Leclerc, the wool-carder of Meaux, was tortured and burned at Metz in 1525. Louis Berquin, the friend of the Marguerite des Marguerites, was the first victim of a Commission of Enquiry, which resembled Alva's Tribunal of Blood. Bonaventure Desperriers broke out into open infidelity in his Cymbalum 'Mundi,' and committed suicide to avoid the inevitable result. Clément Marot was imprisoned for eating bacon on Friday --'Par le morbleu! voilà ClémentPrenez-le; il a mangé le lard!'-

and finally died in exile. Anne Dubourg was disgraced and deprived of liberty for his religious opinions. For the same reason Etienne Dolet was tortured, hanged, and burned on the Place Maubert in Paris. Three of these men were Rabelais' most intimate friends, and he himself was more

than once obliged to flee for his life. He well knew that the King, in his paroxysms of piety, was, to use the phrase of Brantôme, un peu rigoureux à faire brusler vifs les hérétiques 'de son temps.' He was ready to go, as he said himself, 'jusqu'au bûcher exclusivement' in matters of opinion. But, like Marot, he feared the flames.

'L'oisiveté des prêtres et cagots

Je la dirois, mais gare les fagots;
Et des abus dont l'Eglise est fourrée,
J'en parlerois, mais gare la bourrée.'

It is not, therefore, surprising that Rabelais, in doctrinal, if not in disciplinary, reforms, imitated the cautious silence of Jean du Bellay and other free-thinking prelates among his contemporaries. But meanwhile the writings of the great vernacular satirist leavened the masses with something of his own discontent at the developement of the struggle between the dominant religion and its Protestant rival. Rabelais represents the scientific impulse of the French Renaissance, its passion for liberty of thought, its humanitarian fervour, its hopes of the Reforming movement and its disappointment in the Genevan tyranny, its eternal acquiescence in the established faith and its growing scepticism and gradual negation of all creeds. And the stern restraint of the feelings which the Renaissance engendered, and which Rabelais cast into a popular form, gives additional importance and significance to his writings. Checked by the Church and by the selfish monarchy which succeeded the break-up of the feudal aristocracy, the ideas expressed in Pantagruel assumed more formidable and more menacing symptoms. It is worthy of note that, at the Revolution, Rabelais was recognised, for the first time since the sixteenth century, as one of the master minds of the world.

6

During all periods that have witnessed great changes men. are only known in reference to some particular point where their existence touches the broad stream of history. Stirring centuries like the sixteenth are too absorbed in the interests of masses to follow those of individuals; consequently the materials for the Life of Rabelais are scanty. The Lues 'Boswelliana,' which chronicles with infinite particularity the everyday doings of private persons, belongs to modern tastes and tamer times. To compensate in the case of Rabelais for the lack of authentic memorials, a popular biography has been created, resembling that which surrounds the name of Shakespeare. But three centuries after the death of the satirist we may be pardoned if we lay little stress on the

elaborate discussions which have centred round episodes in his career, and chronicle the commonly accepted facts of his life without entering into a criticism of disputed points.

[ocr errors]

The father of Rabelais was the landlord of the Lamproie at Chinon, and was also the proprietor or the tenant of a vineyard in the neighbouring village of Seuilly, which lies on the left-hand side of the road from Chinon to Saumur. At Chinon or at Seuilly François Rabelais was born in 1483. Probably Rabelais never knew the meaning of maternal affection. The only domestic relationship on which he dwells with any tenderness is that of father and son-the love of Gargantua for Grandgousier, of Pantagruel for Gargantua. It is possible that a passage in the fifth book of "Pantagruel' may be coloured by the bitterness of personal feeling. On the Ringing Island Pantagruel asks Edituus how the clerk-hawks are bred, if the Pope-hawk is bred from the cardin-hawks, and the cardin-hawks from the bis-hawks, and the bis-hawks from the clerk-hawks. When he hears the answer he is surprised that women, who bear their sons nine months in their womb, cannot endure them nine years, or even seven, in their house; but clap a shirt over the urchin's clothes, lop a few hairs from his crown, and by some Pythagorean metempsychosis transform the boy into a clerkhawk. Rabelais may be here recalling his own experience. Be this as it may, he was at an early age set apart for the priesthood. Near the Clos de la Devinière at Seuilly stood the Abbey of St. Sepulchre, and there the boy began his education. From Seuilly he passed to the Convent of La Basmette, near Angers, and possibly to the University of Angers. It was at this period of his life that he made the acquaintance of the famous family of Du Bellay, as well as of Geoffroi d'Estissac, afterwards Bishop of Maillezais.

In 1511 Rabelais was admitted into priest's orders as a Franciscan friar in the fraternity established at Fontenay-leComte, in Lower Poitou. Like Erasmus, he disgusted the friars by his secular leaning. He had not taken the vow of ignorance, and he was probably more galled by the restraints upon intellectual pleasures than by those upon licentious indulgences. Science was even now his austere mistress, and, in spite of his writings, his life, like that of Balzac, may have been free from sensual vices. Relying upon the Vulgate, the Church steadily set her face against the study of Greek and Hebrew. But Rabelais and his friend Amy taught themselves both languages, and corresponded with Budæus and other scholars. From scholarship to Lutheranism

« AnteriorContinuar »