of Mr Pope. The caricature of his filth and zanyism show how fully he both knew and felt the danger in which he stood. I could write a treatise in praise of the moral elevation of Rabelais' work, which would make the church stare and the conventicle groan,[235] and yet would be truth, and nothing but the truth. I class Rabelais with the great creative minds of the world, Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, etc."
François Rabelais was born in Touraine, according to the date usually given, and which there is no reason to question, in the same year as Luther and Raphael, A.D. 1483, and died in Paris in 1553. His father had a small estate, and was an apothecary (or, as some say, a tavern-keeper) in the town of Chinon, at the foot of the castle where, three centuries before, our Henry II. had died, and whither, a little more than fifty years before François was born, Joan of Arc had come with promises of supernatural aid to Charles VII. He was the youngest of five sons, and, as was often the case in those days, was provided for by being made a monk, while the other members of the family divided amongst them the paternal estate. In one passage in his works he speaks of mothers who "cannot bear their children nor brook them in their houses nine, nay often not seven years, but by putting a shirt over their robe, and by cutting a few hairs on the top of their head ... they transform them into birds," i.e., get rid of them as soon as possible, and thrust them into monasteries. This seems to have been his own sad fate.
In course of time, after the schoolboy period of his life was past, he entered the order of Franciscan monks at the convent of Fontenay-le-Comte in Poitou, and took holy orders; and it was here, during the next fifteen years (1509-1524), that he devoted himself to the acquisition of everything in the shape of literature or learning, and laid the foundation of the astonishing erudition which his works display. His long residence in the monastery had inspired Rabelais with a deep hatred of monasticism and monks, and, after being allowed to exchange the Franciscan for the Benedictine order, he laid down the regular habit and took that of a secular priest, and left the convent without the sanction of his superior—a breach of ecclesiastical discipline which exposed him to severe censure. After wandering hither and thither in the pursuit of medical knowledge, he entered the University of Montpellier, graduated as a physician, and practised there with credit and success. After being Hospital Physician at Lyons, he spent some time in Rome, as a medical attendant upon Jean du Bellay, Bishop of Paris. While here he succeeded in making his peace with the Church, and by a papal Bull (17th January 1536) was allowed to return to the Benedictine order and to practise physic according to canonical rules, i.e., to charge no fees and to use neither fire nor knife. This release from ecclesiastical disabilities allowed him to be appointed to a place in the abbey of St Maur-des-Fosses, near Paris. After another period of exile and wandering he was nominated curé of Meudon, an office which he resigned after two years. Three months afterwards he died in Paris (9th April, 1553), and was buried in the cemetery of the parish of St Paul's.
The publication of the satirical writings of Rabelais was spread over a long series of years, from 1532 or 1533, when the first installment, in his Gargantua, was brought out, down to 1564, eleven years after his death, when the fifth and concluding book of his Pantagruel was issued in its entirety. The main object of his satire was what used to be called "the intolerance, superstition, and disgusting follies and vices of the Romish Church," but, incidentally, pretenders to knowledge of every kind come under his lash. For when imposture, folly, and humbug grow too rank and noisome, there arise, it can scarcely be by accident, men like Lucian, Rabelais, and Voltaire, whose calling it is to cut them down. That theirs is an ill-requited office is sufficiently plain from the odium which, in spite of their beneficent labours, is often associated with their names. "[Hast thou] only a torch for burning, no hammer for building?" says the somewhat wearisome Herr Teufelsdröckh to the last named of these satirists, "take our thanks, then, and—thyself away."[236] Yet the torch for burning is as necessary as the hammer for building, if the site for the Temple of Truth is to be prepared. It may well be that burning down and rooting up are needed before building can be begun, and some of those who have endeavoured to benefit mankind have felt themselves called to the one sort of work rather than to the other.
The form which Rabelais chooses for the frame-work of his satire is the burlesque adventures of the giant Gargantua, of whom many legends were current in Touraine, and of his son Pantagruel, sometimes spoken of as also a giant, and at others as a wise and virtuous prince of ordinary proportions. Along with the strange, tangled, and chaotic story of their exploits the writer from time to time enunciates admirable ideas, which must have seemed revolutionary to his contemporaries, and some of which even we have not yet realised.
The translation of Rabelais by Sir Thomas Urquhart is his great literary achievement. "It is impossible," says Tytler, "to look into it without admiring the air of ease, freshness, and originality which the translator has so happily communicated to his performance. All those singular qualifications which unfitted Urquhart to succeed in serious composition—his extravagance, his drollery (?), his unbridled imagination, his burlesque and endless epithets—are in the task of translating Rabelais transplanted into their true field of action, and revel through his pages with a licence and buoyancy which is quite unbridled, yet quite allowable. Indeed, Urquhart and Rabelais appear, in many points, to have been congenial spirits, and the translator seems to have been born for his author."[237]
As might have been expected, the translation is not marked by painful exactness of rendering. On the contrary, evidences of carelessness and inaccuracy are by no means uncommon, but yet the work is, as some one calls it, "one of the most perfect transfusions of an author from one language to another,[238] that ever man accomplished." The great merits of the translation consist in its preserving the very air and style of the original, and in the astonishing richness of vocabulary which it manifests. Where Rabelais invents a word, Sir Thomas invents one, or two, or three; and if the former has a list of twenty or thirty epithets, the latter has no hesitation in supplying his readers with forty or sixty, which seem quite as good as the original stock which he thus enlarges. Sometimes, too, as Mr W. F. Smith, a very distinguished student of Rabelais, remarks, "in translating a single word of the French he often empties all the synonyms given by Cotgrave into his version."
Mr Tytler, in the above-quoted criticism on Urquhart's translation, speaks of the peculiarities of his style as "revelling through his pages with a licence and buoyancy which is quite unbridled, yet quite allowable." One is obliged to demur to the last adjective. A translator, like a compositor, should be under some obligation to adhere to the text before him; and, as a matter of fact, the success of Urquhart's version is occasionally interfered with by this same "unbridled revelling." The style of Rabelais is graphic and vigorous, and at times exceedingly graceful, and occupies a high place in French literature. Any tampering with it, therefore, in the way of alteration or addition, was not likely to be an improvement.
But, even after all deductions are made, the praise bestowed upon Urquhart's work has been fully deserved. "The buoyancy and unembarrassed sweep of its general character," says Sir Theodore Martin, "which gives his Rabelais more the look of an original than of a translation, its rich and well-compacted diction, the many happy turns of phrase that are quite his own, have fairly earned for it the high estimation in which it has long been held. His task was one of extreme difficulty, and there have perhaps been few men besides himself that could have brought to it the world of omnigenous knowledge which it required. It was apparently Urquhart's ambition to realise in his own person the ideal of human accomplishment, to be at once
'Complete in feature and in mind,
With all good grace to grace a gentleman.'