If this general view is correct it will probably condition to some extent the answer to be given to the two minor questions stated above. The first is connected with the great blemish of Gargantua and Pantagruel—their extreme coarseness of language and im agery. Rabelais's errors in this way are of course, looked at from an absolute standard, unpardonable. But judged relatively there are several, we shall not say excuses, but explanations of them. In the first place, his comparative indecency has been much exaggerated by persons unfamiliar with early French literature. The form of his book was above all things popular, and the popular French literature of the middle ages as distinguished from the courtly and literary literature, which was singularly pure, can hardly be exceeded in point of coarseness. Moreover, Rabelais's coarseness, disgusting as it is, has nothing of the corruption of refined voluptuousness about it, and nothing of the sniggering indecency which disgraces men like Pope, like Voltaire, and like Sterne. The general taste having been considerably re fined since, Rabelais has in parts become nearly unreadable—the worst and most appropriate punishment for his faults. As for those who have tried to make his indecency an argument for his laxity in religious principle, that argument hardly needs dis cussion. It is notoriously false as a matter of experience.
This brings us to the last point—what his religious opinions were. He has been claimed as a free-thinker of all shades, from undogmatic theism to atheism, and as a concealed Protestant. The last of these claims has now been very generally given up, but the accusation of free-thinking, if not of directly anti-Christian thinking, has always been more common. T11,-, who hold this opinion, however, never give chapter and verse for it, and it may be said confidently that chapter and verse cannot be given. The sayings attributed to Rabelais which colour the idea are purely apocryphal. Even a jest at the Sorbonne couched in the Pauline phrase about "the evidence of things not seen," was removed by the author from the later editions. It must be re membered that the later middle age, which in many respects Rabelais represents almost more than he does the Renaissance, was, with all its unquestioning faith, singularly reckless and, to our fancy, irreverent in its use of the sacred words and images. On the other hand, there are in the book expressions which either signify a sincere and unfeigned piety of a simple kind or else are inventions of the most detestable hypocrisy. For these pass ages are not, like many to be found from the Renaissance to the end of the i8th century, obvious flags of truce to cover attacks— mere bowings in the house of Rimmon to prevent evil conse quences. They are always written in the author's highest style,
a style perfectly eloquent and unaffected; they can only be interpreted (on the free-thinking hypothesis) as allegorical with the greatest difficulty and obscurity, and it is pretty certain that no one reading the book without a thesis to prove would dream of taking them in a non-natural sense. There is absolutely noth ing within the covers of Rabelais's works incompatible with an orthodoxy which would be recognized as sufficient by Christendom at large, leaving out of the question those points of doctrine and practice on which Christians differ. Beyond this no wise man will go, and short of it hardly any unprejudiced man will stop.
See monographs by E. Noel (1850) ; A. Mayrargues (1868) ; J. Fleury (1876) ; P. Stapfer (the best) (1889) ; H. Hatzfield (Leipzig, 1923) ; J. Plattard, La Vie de Fr. R. (1929) ; also L. Saineanu, La Langue de R. (2 tom., 1922-23), and Le cinqueme livre de R. in Problemes Litteraires du seizieme siècle (1927) ; P. Villey, Les Brands ecrivains du XVI siecle, R. et Marot, in Bibi. Litteraire de la Renais sance, Tom. XI. (1923) ; J. Boulenger, R. a travers les ages, bibl. (1925) ; W. Nicati, R. notre maitre; son oeuvre, sa doctrine, le Pantagruelisme (1926) ; see also Revue des Etudes Rabelaisiennes (1903-12), contd. as Revue du seizieme siècle (I913, in prog.).
Rabelais was very early popular in England, and Sir T. Urquhart trans. the earlier books in 1653 ; Motteux finished it with an extensive commentary in 1694. In 1893 there was a new trans. (2 vols.) by W. F. Smith. For English criticism see A. F. Chappell, The Enigma of R., an essay in Interpretation (1924) ; N. H. Clement, The Infi. of the Arthurian Romances on the five books of R. (Univ. of California, 1926). See also S. P. Putnam, Rabelais: Man of the Renaissance (1929).