His Essence.
Rabelais is not precisely a book for bachelors and maids—at times, indeed, is not a book for grown men. There are passages not to be read without a blush and a sensation of sickness: the young giant which is the Renaissance being filthy and gross as Nature herself at her grossest and her most filthy. It is argued that this is all deliberate—is an effect of premeditation: that Rabelais had certain home-truths to deliver to his generation, and delivered them in such terms as kept him from the fagot and the rope by bedaubing him with the renown of a common buffoon. But the argument is none of the soundest in itself, and may fairly be set aside as a piece of desperate special pleading, the work of counsel at their wits’ end for matter of defence. For Rabelais clean is not Rabelais at all. His grossness is an essential component in his mental fabric, an element in whose absence he would be not Rabelais but somebody else. It inspires his practice of art to the full as thoroughly as it informs his theory of language. He not only employs it wherever it might be useful: he goes out of his way to find it, he shovels it
in on any and every occasion, he bemerds his readers and himself with a gusto that assuredly is not a common characteristic of defensive operations. In him, indeed, the humour of Old France—the broad, rank, unsavoury esprit gaulois—found its heroic expression; he made use of it because he must; and we can no more eliminate it from his work than we can remove the quality of imagination from Shakespeare’s or those of art and intellect from Ben Jonson’s. Other men are as foul or fouler; but in none is foulness so inbred and so ingrained, from none is it so inseparable. Few have had so much genius, and in none else has genius been so curiously featured.