A Short History of French Literature
almanack called the _Pantagrueline Prognostication_, which is full of
his peculiar humour, of a short work entitled _Sciomachie_, describing a
festival at Rome, and of a few poems of no great merit. In _Gargantua_
and _Pantagruel_, however, his whole literary interest and character are
concentrated. Few books have been the subject of greater controversy as
to their meaning and general intention. The author, as if on purpose to
baffle investigation, mixes up real persons mentioned by their real
names, real persons mentioned in transparent allegory, and entirely
fictitious characters, in the most inextricable way. Occasionally, as in
his chapters on education, he is perfectly serious, and allows no touch
of humour or satire to escape him. Elsewhere he indulges in the wildest
buffoonery. Two of the most notable characteristics of Rabelais are,
first, his extraordinary predilection for heaping up piles of synonymous
words, and huge lists of things; secondly, his habit of indulging in the
coarsest allusions and descriptions. Both of these were to some extent
mere exaggerations of his mediaeval models, but both show the peculiar
characteristics of their author. The book as a whole has received the
most various explanations as well as the most various appreciations. It
has been regarded as in the main a political and personal satire, in
every incident and character of which some reference must be sought to
actual personages and events of the time; as an elaborate pamphlet
against the Roman Catholic Church; as a defence of mere epicurean
materialism, and even an attack on Christianity itself; as a huge piece
of mischief intended to delude readers into the belief that something
serious is meant, when in reality nothing of the kind is intended. Even
more fantastic explanations than these have been attempted; such, for
instance, as the idea that the voyage of Pantagruel is an allegorical
account of the processes employed in the manufacture of wine. The true
explanation, as far as there is any, of the book seems, however, to be
not very difficult to make out, provided that the interpreter does not
endeavour to force a meaning where there very probably is none. The form
of it was pretty well prescribed by the old romances of adventure, and
must be taken as given to Rabelais, not as invented by him for a special
purpose; a war, a quest, these are the subjects of every story in verse
and prose for five centuries, and Rabelais followed the stream. But when
he had thus got his main theme settled, he gave the widest licence of
comment, allusion, digression, and adaptation to his own fancy and his
own intellect. Both of these were typical, and, except for a certain
deficiency in the poetical element, fully typical of the time. Rabelais
was a very learned man, a man of the world, a man of pleasure, a man of
obvious interest in political and ecclesiastical problems. He was
animated by that lively appetite for enjoyment, business, study, all the
occupations of life, which characterised the Renaissance in its earlier
stages, in all countries and especially in France. Nor had science of
any kind yet been divided and subdivided so that each man could only
aspire to handle certain portions of it. Accordingly, Rabelais is
prodigal of learning in season and out of season. But independently of
all this, he had an immense humour, and this pervades the whole book,
turning the preposterous adventures into satirical allegories or half
allegories, irradiating the somewhat miscellaneous erudition with
lambent light, and making the whole alive and fresh to this day. The
extreme coarseness of language, which makes Rabelais difficult to read
now-a-days, seems to have arisen from a variety of causes. The essence
of his book was exaggeration, and he exaggerated in this as in other
matters. His keen appetite for the ludicrous, and a kind of
shamelessness which may have been partly due to individual peculiarity,
but had not a little also to do with his education and studies, inclined
him to make free with a department of thought where ludicrous ideas are,
as it has been said, to be had for the picking up by those whom shame
does not trouble at the expense of those whom it does. But besides all
this, there was in Rabelais a knowledge of human nature, and a faculty
of expressing that knowledge in literary form, in which he is inferior
to Shakespeare alone. Caricatured as his types purposely are, they are
all easily reducible to natural dimensions and properties; while
occasionally, though all too rarely, the author drops his mask and
speaks gravely, seriously, and then always wisely. These latter passages
are, it may be added, unsurpassed in mere prose style for many long
years after the author's death.
Altogether, independently of the intrinsic interest of Rabelais' work,
we go to him as we can go to only some score or half score of the
greatest writers of the world, for a complete reflection of the
sentiment and character of his time. As with all great writers, what he
shows is in great part characteristic of humanity at all times and in
all places, but, as also with all great writers except Shakespeare, more
of it is local and temporary merely. This local and temporary element
gives him his great historical importance. Rabelais is the literary
exponent of the earlier Renaissance, with its appetite for the good
things of the world as yet unblunted. Yet even in him there is a
foretaste of satiety, and the Oracle of the Bottle has something, for
all its joyousness, of the conclusion of the Preacher.
The popularity of Rabelais was immense, and of itself sufficed to
protect him against the enmity which his hardly veiled attacks on
monachism, and on other fungoid growths of the Church, could not have
failed to attract. In such a case imitation was certain, and, long
before the genuine series of the Pantagrueline Chronicles was
completed, spurious supplements and continuations appeared, all of them
without exception worthless. A more legitimate imitation coloured the
work of many of the fiction writers of the remaining part of the
century, though the tradition of short story writing, on the model of
the Fabliaux and of the Italian tales borrowed from them, continued and
was only indirectly affected by Rabelais. In this latter class one
mediocre writer and two of the greatest talent--of talent amounting
almost to genius--have to be noticed. In 1535, Nicholas of Troyes, a
saddler by trade, produced a book entitled _Grand Parangon de Nouvelles
Nouvelles_, in which he followed rather, as his title indicates, the
_Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ than any other model. His sources seem to
have been the _Decameron_ and the _Gesta Romanorum_ principally, though
some of his tales are original. Very different books are the _Contes_ of
Marguerite de Navarre, usually termed the 'Heptameron,' and the _Contes
et Joyeux Devis_ of her servant Bonaventure des Periers. Neither of
these books was published till a considerable period after the death,
not merely of Rabelais, but of their authors.
[Sidenote: Bonaventure des Periers.]
There are few persons of the time of whom less is known than of
Bonaventure des Periers[183], and, by no means in consequence merely of
this mystery, there are few more interesting. He must have been born
somewhere about the beginning of the sixteenth century, and his friend
Dolet calls him _Aeduum poetam_, which would seem to fix his birth
somewhere in the neighbourhood at least of Autun. He was undoubtedly one
of the literary courtiers of Marguerite d'Angouleme. Finally, it seems
that in the persecution which, during the later years of Francis I.'s
reign, came upon the Protestants and freethinkers, and which the
influence of Marguerite was powerless to prevent, he committed suicide
to escape the clutches of the law. Henri Estienne, however, attributes
the act to insanity or delirium. However this may be, there is no doubt
that Des Periers was a remarkable example of a humanist. He was
certainly a good scholar, and he was also a decided freethinker. He has
left poems of some merit, but not great perhaps, some translations and
minor prose pieces, but certainly two works of the highest interest, the
_Cymbalum Mundi_ (1537) and the _Nouvelles Recreations et Joyeux Devis_
(1558). The _Cymbalum Mundi_ betrays the influence of Lucian, which was
also very strong on Rabelais. It is a work in dialogue, satirising the
superstitions of antiquity with a hardly dubious reference to the
religious beliefs of Des Periers' own day. The _Nouvelles Recreations et
Joyeux Devis_ are compact of less perilous stuff, while they exhibit
equal and perhaps greater literary skill. They consist of a hundred and
twenty-nine short tales, similar in general character to those of the
_Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ and other collections. Although, however, a
great licence of subject is still allowed, the language is far less
coarse than in the work of Antoine de la Salle, while the literary
merits of the style are very much greater. Des Periers was beyond all
doubt a great master of half-serious and half-joyous French prose. Nor
is his matter much less remarkable than his style. Like Rabelais, but
with the difference that his was a more poetical temperament than that
of his greater contemporary, he has sudden accesses of seriousness,
almost of sentiment. At these times the spirit of the French
Renaissance, in its more cultivated and refined representatives, comes
out in him very strongly. This spirit may be defined as a kind of
cultivated sensuality, ardently enamoured of the beautiful in the world
of sense, while fully devoted to intellectual truth, and at the same
time always conscious of the nothingness of things, the instant pressure
of death, the treacherousness of mortal delights. The rare sentences in
which Des Periers gives vent to the expression of this mental attitude
are for the most part admirably written, while as a teller of tales,
either comic or romantic, he has few equals and fewer superiors.
[Sidenote: The Heptameron.]
The same spirit which has just been described found even fuller
expression, with greater advantages of scale and setting, in the
_Heptameron_[184] of Marguerite of Navarre. The exact authorship of this
celebrated book is something of a literary puzzle. Marguerite was a
prolific author, if all the works which were published under her name be
unhesitatingly ascribed[185] to her. Besides the poems printed under the
pretty title of _Les Marguerites de la Marguerite_, she produced many
other works, as well as the _Heptameron_ which was not given to the
world until after her death (1558). The House of Valois was by no means
destitute of literary talent. But that which seems most likely to be the
Queen's genuine work hardly corresponds with the remarkable power shown
in the _Heptameron_. On the other hand, Marguerite for years maintained
a literary court, in which all the most celebrated men of the time,
notably Marot and Bonaventure des Periers, held places. If it were
allowable to decide literary questions simply by considerations of
probability, there could be little hesitation in assigning the entire
_Heptameron_ to Des Periers himself, and then its unfinished condition
would be intelligible enough. The general opinion of critics, however,
is that it was probably the result of the joint work of the Queen, of
Des Periers, and of a good many other men, and probably some women, of
letters. The idea and plan of the work are avowedly borrowed from
Boccaccio, but the thing is worked out with so much originality that it
becomes nothing so little as an imitation. A company of ladies and
gentlemen returning from Cauterets are detained by bad weather in an
out-of-the-way corner of the Pyrenees, and beguile the time by telling