"Mieulx est de ris que de larmes escripre,
Pour ce que rire est le propre de lhomme,"
was his maxim. But this maxim never rose to a creed. His Giants seem, almost against his will, to stride beyond the territory of mere burlesque. They are as easily free from theology as from science. They have never been of La Bâmette. They are as far from Montpellier. To these colossal creations, heroes fashioned in ridicule of the old fantastico-chivalric deeds of their age, as they come down more and more from the clouds, are more and more given the feelings common to this earth's creatures. All three bear, from their birth, a sturdy human sympathy not natural to their kind, as mediæval superstition classed it. Two of them, in being brought to the level of humanity, join with this a simple Christian manliness and a childlike faith under all emergencies, not set on their own massive strength, but fixed on God, whom they had been taught to know, and honor, and serve—and all this by whom? Forsooth, by the same François Rabelais, laugher, mocker, and "insensate reviler." From Grandgousier, the good-hearted guzzler, through Gargantua, with his heady youth and wise old age, to "the noble Pantagruel," the gain in purity and Christian manhood is steady. The royal race of Chalbroth follows no track beaten down by other kingly lines known to history. While their line descends from father to son, it ascends in virtue.
One charge—a legacy from the narrow times when run-mad commentators spied a plot in every folio—has followed, to this day, Rabelais and his work. Wise men have, to their own satisfaction, proved the latter to be an enigma filled with hidden meanings, dangerous to state and morals; with mad attacks directed, from every chapter, against ordered society; with satiric thrusts lurking, in every sentence, against Pope, and King, and nobles; in brief, a Malay-muck run with a pen, instead of a knife, against the moral foundations of the world. All these, if not true, are certainly "like, very like" the Rabelais as he is painted by purists in the gallery of great authors. If true, they have wrought more subtly than all else in the forging of those heavy chains which have been bound, coil upon coil, around his hapless big men. It is not to be wondered at that even their mighty number of cubits should have been smothered under the fine, slow-settling dust of three centuries. Happily, however, fair play has been, of old, the standing boast of all English-speaking men. François Rabelais—never once deigning to ask for it at home, when living—has, in penalty therefor, been ferociously denied it abroad, when dead. To that sentiment—moved, it may be, by a concurrent testimony given, in this age, to the memory of the author himself—I appeal now in behalf of his Giants. That they have fared badly through all these centuries, mostly by reason of him, cannot be gainsaid. That of themselves, however, they have in no wise merited such ostracism, is what I have ventured to claim in this compilation. Freed alike from that prejudice which has hunted them down, and from those formidable
"... points of ignorance
Pertaining thereunto,"
which have, so far, blocked every avenue to modern sympathy, I would have them honored, among all stout lovers of fair play, as I leave them in this "Explanation by way of Preface."
J. D.