American Views of Rabelais
Francis Rabelais : the Man and his Work. By Albert Jay Nock and C. R. Wilson. (Harper. 15s.)
Frangois Rabelais : Man of the Renaissance. A Spiritual Biography. By Samuel Putnam. (Cape. 12s. 6d.)
IN a general way collaboration fails to establish that two heads are better than one ; yet in this particular instance, when we are blessed with two simultaneously appearing books on Rabelais, joint authorship has produced something at least very much more intelligible. Without the assistance of Messrs. Nock and Wilson it would be hard, indeed, to make head or tail of Mr. Putnam's " Spiritual Biography." They however, have set forth the facts known about the life of Rabelais in a lucid and continuous fashion, and, moreover, related him appropriately to the background of his time and anyone who, after mastering their story, cares to be whacked about the head with words and bewildered with display of erudition can tackle the job of reading Mr. Putnam. His opening tells us that criticism ought to be " an enchanted hurricane." Hurricane is a big word : a tempest in an inkpot does not help us to that " passionate and informing point of view " which Mr. Putnam desiderates in rival biographies. Here are examples :— " On that day, in the year 1528 or 1529, when the pie-powdered Francois rode into Paris, whether on a Great and Numidian Mare, or on some humbler and more prosaic steed, the French Renaissance was just beginning to burst into its first gorgeous bloom. . . It was, let us not forget, in 1527 that Rome was sacked, while by 1530 Charles V. had completed his pacification and had set up a Spanish hegemony in the peninsula ; it was Ave and Vale for the Renaissance in the land of its birth. It was in 1530, also, that Copernicus put what were virtually the finishing touches to his Con:unentariolus, giving a first fascinating account of the new heavens, above an earth which, since 1492 and 1498, had not been the same."
For those who like this sort of thing, there are some 500 pages of it—and some illustrations for which one May be rightly thankful ; reproducing autographs of Rabelais, who wrote..a noble hand ; the portrait. of his. close friend and patron, Jean, Cardinal du Bellay ; a photograph of La Deviniere, the fifteenth-century-built house in which Rabelais was probably born five years before the close of that century ; and the reconstructed portrait. of Rabelais 1,?y another man of genius, Dela.croix,, which is in the Hotel de Vile at Chinon.
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The joint authors of the other book prefer in the main to reProduce, Dore's "fantasies—which presumably they. -take for the best expression of the types conceived by 'that 'queer. brain. It may suffice to commend this book generally— but for an instance take this justification of many passages which seem to us tedious, and even absurd,- as when bookiess Friar John becomes a vehicle for copious erudition :-
To understand this turn-of Rabelais' geriiiis; dnehai but to' recall
thaLlke..r9V.Kal was auChta aetv. ..fA Ikea_ and 'so absorbing, that a sight of the mere apparatus of erudition was enough to touch off the humanists' enthusiasm like a spark in gun. powder. Their almost uproarious love -of classical citation, their joy in seeing a thesis shored up by references to chapter and verse of classical authority—in fairness all this seems althost -too naive, spontaneous, and wholehearted to be called pedantry. The humanist readers of Rabelais in his own day would revel, like cats in a bed of valerian over the appalling string of citations in chapters twenty. nine to forty-three of the Third Book for instance, which report the trial of Bridle Goose."
That is admirable criticism. One may venture, however, to dissent from their view of Rabelais' " detachment " in those passages which lead to the accusation of grossness. If they are right, Rabelais had no desire to stimulate concu- piscence ; he merely wanted to" tell his story in the best possible way. They hold also that Rabelais in his own life had " little biological interest in womankind " and was " singularly free from such preoccupations." It would be
just as reasonable to argue that his glorification of wine was a literary affectation. He was a native of Touraine and people there do not conceive existence without wine, and though they are anything but drunken, they are much pre- occupied with drink—as he is. He exaggerates, it is part of his humour ; and he magnifies the sex appetite ; but also, just as, for instance, Anatole France did, he counts on the stimulation of sex appetite as a means of literary attractive- ness. This may be morally wrong ; but it seems futile to deny that Francois Rabelais had a taste for what the Scotch call sculduddery, and knew that his tales would be the better relished because of this seasoning. D. H. Lawrence in our day has justified this excitation as one of the legitimate pleasures to be given by literature. Rabelais would probably never have troubled to justify himself; but laughed a big, jolly laugh.
These American highbrows in their scorn of the bourgeois, really get out of touch with fact, and we have much sympathy with their countryman; Mr. W. F. Smith, who says that reading Rabelais is like looking for pearls in a dunghill— but in a dunghill that yields pearls. The people, and they
exist, who revel in the power of his imagination and his vocabulary to plaster us With stercoracemIS detail-are welcome to their enjoyment ; these passages certainly make no appeal to concupiscence. But the reader who is not well hardened to sculduddery had perhaps better keep, away from the whole discussion of the question of Panurge's marriage, *Which is, nevertheless, a masterpiece of wit and of humour—whether one reads it in the French or in Urquhart's rendering, which the critics justly rate virtually as an original. Except the English Bible, there is no other such translation.
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