Gargantua and Pantagruel are, unfortunately, so little read that some sketch of their contents is necessary. The first book, Gar gantua, describes the birth of that hero (a giant and the son of gigantic parents), whose nativity is ushered in by the account of a tremendous feast. In this the burlesque exaggeration of the pleasures of eating and drinking, which is one of the chief exterior notes of the whole work, is pushed to an extreme. Very early, how ever, the author becomes serious in contrasting the early education of his hero—a satire on the degraded schools of the middle ages— with its subsequent and reformed stage, in the account of which all the best and noblest ideas of the humanist Renaissance in reference to pedagogy are put with exceptional force. Gargantua is recalled from Paris, whither he had been sent to finish his education, owing to a war between his father, Grandgosier, and the neigh bouring king, Picrochole. This war is described at great length, the chief hero of it being the monk, Friar John, a very unclerical cleric, in whom Rabelais greatly delights. Picrochole defeated and peace made, Gargantua establishes the abbey of Thelema in another of Rabelais's most elaborate literary passages, where all the points most obnoxious to him in monastic life are indicated by the assignment of their exact opposites to this model convent. The second book introduces the principal hero of the whole, Pantagruel, Gargantua's son, who goes through something like a second edition of the educational experiences of his father. Like him, he goes to Paris, and there meets with Panurge, the principal triumph of Rabelaisian character-drawing, and the most original as well as puzzling figure of the book. Panurge has almost all intellectual accomplishments, but is totally devoid of morality. This book, like the other, has a war in its latter part ; Gargantua scarcely appears in it and Friar John not at all. It is not till the opening of the third book that the most important action begins. This arises from Panurge's determination to marry—a determina tion, however, which is very half-hearted, and which leads him to consult a vast number of authorities, each giving occasion for satire of a more or less complicated kind. At last it is determined that Pantagruel and his followers (Friar John has reappeared in the suite of the prince) shall set sail to consult the Oracle of the Dive Bouteille. The book ends with the obscurest passage of the whole, an elaborate eulogy of the "herb pantagruelion," which appears to be, if it is anything, hemp. Only two probable ex planations of this have been offered, the one seeing in it an anticipation of Joseph de Maistre's glorification of the execu tioner, the other a eulogy of work, hemp being on the whole the most serviceable of vegetable products for that purpose. The fourth and fifth books are entirely taken up with a description of the voyage. Many strange places with stranger names are visited, some of them offering obvious satire on human institu tions, others, except by the most far-fetched explanations, resolv able into nothing but sheer extravaganza. At last the Land of Lanterns, borrowed from Lucian, is reached, and the Oracle of the Bottle is consulted. This yields the single word "Trinq," which the attendant priestess declares to be the most gracious and intelligible she has ever heard from it. Panurge takes this as a sanction of his marriage, and the book ends abruptly. This singular romance includes the most bewildering abundance of digression, burlesque amplification, covert satire on things polit ical, social and religious, miscellaneous erudition of the literary and scientific kind. Everywhere the author lays stress on the excellence of "Pantagruelism," and the reader who is himself a Pantagruelist (it is perfectly idle for any other to attempt the book) soon discovers what this means. It is, in plain English, humour, which may be said to consist in the extension of a wide sympathy to all human affairs, together with a comprehension of their vanity. Moroseness and dogmatism are as far from the Pantagruelism of Rabelais as maudlin sentimentality or dilet tantism. Perhaps the chief things lacking in his attitude are, in the first place, reverence, of which, however, from a few passages, it is clear he was by no means totally devoid, and secondly, an appreciation of passion and poetry.
For a general estimate of Rabelais's literary character and influence the reader may be referred to the article FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE.
However, there are three questions without the discussion of which this notice of one of the f oremost writers of the world would not be worthy of its present place. These are—What is the general drift and purpose of Gargantua and Pantagruel, sup posing there to be any? What defence can be offered, if any defence is needed, for the extraordinary licence of language and imagery which the author has permitted himself ? What was his attitude towards the great questions of religion, philosophy and politics? These questions succeed each other in the order of reason, and the answer to each assists the resolution of the next.
According to some expositors, Rabelais is a sober reformer, an apostle of sound education, of rational if not dogmatic religion, who wraps up his morals in a farcical envelope partly to make them go down with the vulgar and partly to shield himself from the consequences of his reforming zeal. According to others, Rabelais is all this but with a difference. He is not religious at all ; he is more or less anti-religious ; and his book is more or less of a general protest against any attempt to explain supernaturally the riddle of the earth. According to a third class, the Rabelaisian legend does not so much err in prin ciple as it invents in fact. Rabelais is the incarnation of the "esprit Gaulois," a jovial, careless soul, not destitute of common sense or even acute intellectual power, but first of all a good fellow, rather preferring a broad jest to a fine-pointed one, and rollicking through life like a good-natured undergraduate. But it is impossible to think that any unbiased judge reading Rabelais can hold the grave-philosopher view or the reckless-goodfellow view without modifications and allowances which practically de prive either of any value. Those who identify Rabelais with Pantagruel, strive in vain to account for the vast ocean of pure or impure laughter and foolery which surrounds the few solid islets of sense and reason and devotion. Those who identify Rabelais with Panurge can never explain the education scheme, the solemn apparition of Gargantua among the farcical and fan tastic variations on Panurge's wedding, and many other passages; while, on the other hand, those who insist on a definite propaganda of any kind must justify themselves by their own power of seeing things invisible to plain men.
No one reading Rabelais without parti pris, but with a good knowledge of the history and literature of his own times and the times which preceded him, can have much difficulty in ap preciating his book. He had evidently during his long and studious sojourn in the cloister acquired a vast stock of learning. He was, it is clear, thoroughly penetrated with the instincts, the hopes, and the ideas of the Renaissance in the form which it took in France, in England and in Germany—a form, that is to say, not merely humanist but full of aspirations for social and political improvement, and above all for a joyous, varied, and non-ascetic life. He had thoroughly convinced himself of the abuses to which monachism lent itself. Lastly, he had the spirit of lively satire and of willingness desipere in loco which frequently goes with the love of books. It is in the highest degree improbable that in beginning his great work he had any definite purpose or intention. The habit of burlesquing the romans d'aventures was no new one, and the form lent itself easily to the two literary exercises to which he was most disposed—apt and quaint citation from and variation on the classics and satirical criticism of the life he saw around him. Here and there persons are glanced at, but for the most part the satire is typical rather than individual, and it is on the whole a rather negative satire. In only two points can Rabelais be said to be definitely polemic. He certainly hated the monkish system in the debased form in which it existed in his time ; he as certainly hated the brutish ignorance into which the earlier sys tems of education had suffered too many of their teachers and scholars to drop. At these two things he was never tired of strik ing, but elsewhere, even in the grim satire of the Chats fourres, he is the satirist proper rather than the reformer. It is in the very absence of any cramping or limiting purpose that the great merit and value of the book consist. It holds up an almost per fectly level and spotless mirror to the temper of the earlier Renaissance. The author has no universal medicine of his own (except Pantagruelism) to offer, nor has he anybody else's uni versal medicine to attack. It is not indeed possible to deny that in the Oracle of the Bottle, besides its merely jocular and fan tastic sense, there is a certain "echo," as it has been called, "of the conclusion of the preacher," a certain acknowledgment of the vanity of things; but it is little more than a suggestion, and is certainly not strengthened by anything in the body of the work. Rabelais is, in short, if he be read without prejudice, a humorist pure and simple, feeling often in earnest, thinking almost always in jest. He is distinguished from the two men who alone can be compared with him in character of work and force of genius combined—Lucian and Swift—by very marked characteristics. He is much less of a mere mocker than Lucian, and he is entirely destitute, even when he deals with monks or pedants, of the ferocity of Swift. He neither sneers nor rages; the rire immense which distinguishes him is altogether good-natured; but he is nearer to Lucian than to Swift, and Lucian is perhaps the author whom it is most necessary to know in order to understand him.