The Reformation

by Will Durant

  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.32 It is part of Rabelais’ boundless and uncontrollable humor, an overflow beside which even the humor of Aristophanes or Molière 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,33 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.”34 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,35 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 gaieté d’esprit confite de mépris 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”;36 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, Molière, 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 Molière, Racine, and La Fontaine were confessedly influenced by him; Fontenelle, La Bruyère, and Mme. de Sévigné 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 PLÉIADE

  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 Sève spent part of his life locating, as he thought, the tomb of Petrarch’s Laura, then composed 446 stanzas to his own desired Délie; and in the melancholy delicacy of his verse he cleared a path for Ronsard. His ablest competitor in Lyons was a woman, Louise Labé, 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.”37 Through these Lyonese poets the Petrarchan style and mood passed up to Paris, and entered the Pléiade.

  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 Pleïone. Ronsard, brightest star in the French Pléiade, 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 Baïf, Remi Belleau, Étienne Jodelle, and Ponthus de Thyard; and they were joined also by the scholar Jean Dorat, whose lectures on Greek literature at the Collège de France and the Collège 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 Pléiade. Their victory turned the word into a flag of fame.

  In 1549 Du Bellay proclaimed the linguistic program of the Brigade in a Défense et illustration de la langue françoyse. By défense 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 Pléiade 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 maître d’hôtel 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 écuyer 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?” 38 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, à la chandelle,

  Assise auprès du feu, devisant et filant,

  Direz chantant mes vers, en vous émerveillant:

  Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’êtais belle.

  Lors vous n’aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle,

  Desia sous le labeur à demi soummeilant,

  Qui au bruit de son nom ne s’aille reveillant,

  Bénissant votre nom de louange immortelle.

  Je serai sous la terre et, fantôme sans os,

  Par les ombres myrteux je prendrai mon repos;

  Vous serez au foyer une vieille accroupie,

  Regrettant mon amour et votre fier dédain.

  Vivez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain;

  Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie*

  The exaltation of style suited well the court of Catherine de Médicis, 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 Pléiade was welcomed; when the poets talked of Olympus the court acknowledged the compliment;39 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.” 40 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 pa
ssed 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 funèbre.

  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 mold. In nineteenth-century France the two streams met, the half-truths merged, content married form, and French prose became supreme.