CHAPTER XXXV
Literature in the Age of Rabelais
1517–64

I. OF MAKING BOOKS

AFTER Gutenberg the impulse to self-display took an added form—the itch to be in print. It was a costly urge, for the only copyright then known was the “exclusive privilege” given by civil or ecclesiastical authorities to print a specified book. Such a grant was exceptional, and without it rival publishers, even in the same country, might “pirate” a work at will. If a book sold well the publisher would usually give the author an honorarium; but almost the only publications profitable enough to earn such a fee were popular romances, tales of magic or marvels, and controversial pamphlets which had to be abusive to sell. Works of scholarship were lucky to pay their cost. Publishers encouraged authors to dedicate such productions to state or Church dignitaries, or affluent magnates or lords, in the hope of a gift for the laud.

Printing and publishing were generally united in the same firm, and the man or family that engaged in them was a vital factor in his town and times. Fame through printing alone was rare. Claude Garamond of Paris managed it by discarding the “Gothic” type that German printers had adopted from manuscript lettering, and designing (c. 1540) a “roman” type based on the Carolongian minuscule script of the ninth century as developed by Italian humanists and the Aldine press. Italian, French, and English printers chose this roman form; the Germans clung to Gothic till the nineteenth century. Some styles of type still bear Garamond’s name.

Germany led the world in publishing. There were active firms in Basel, Strasbourg, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Wittenberg, Cologne, Leipzig, Frankfurt, and Magdeburg. Twice a year publishers and booksellers met at the Frankfurt fair, bought and sold books, and exchanged ideas. One Frankfurt printer issued the first newspaper (1548)—a sheet distributed at the fair and reporting recent events. Antwerp became a publishing center when Christopher Plantin turned his bindery into a printing shop (1555); two years later he sent 1,200 volumes to the Frankfurt fair. In France the hub of the book trade was Lyons; 200 printing establishments made the city challenge Paris as the intellectual capital of the land.

Étienne Dolet, printer and humanist, was the firebrand of Lyons. Born in Orléans, schooled in Paris, he fell in love with Cicero; “I approve only of Christ and Tully.” Hearing that thought was exceptionally free at Padua, he hurried there, and exchanged irreverent epigrams with skeptical Averroists. At Toulouse he became the soul of a freethinking band that laughed at “Papists” and Lutherans alike. Banished, he went to Lyons and made a name for himself with poems and articles, but he killed a painter in an argument, and fled to Paris, where Marguerite of Navarre won him a pardon from the King. He became friends—and quarreled—with Marot and Rabelais. Returning to Lyons, he set up a printing press, and specialized in publishing heretical works. The Inquisition summoned him, tried him, imprisoned him; he escaped, but was captured on a clandestine visit to his son. On August 3, 1546, he was burned alive.

The most distinguished of French publishers were the Étiennes, a dynasty as persistent in printing as the Fuggers in finance. Henri Étienne started his press at Paris about 1500; it was continued by his sons Francis, Robert, and Charles; to these four France owed her finest editions of the Greek and Latin classics. Robert compiled a Thesaurus linguae latinae (1532), which became the leaning-post for all later Latin-French dictionaries. To the Étiennes Latin became a second tongue; they regularly spoke it in their family life. Francis I praised their work, supported Marguerite in defending them against the Sorbonne, and on one occasion joined the coterie of scholars that met in Robert’s shop; a famous story tells how the King waited patiently while Robert corrected an urgent proof. Francis provided the funds with which Robert engaged Garamond to design and cast a new font of Greek type, so beautiful that it became the model of most later printing in Greek. The Sorbonne disapproved of the King’s flirtation with Hellenism; a professor warned Parlement (1539) that “to propagate a knowledge of Greek and Hebrew would operate to the destruction of all religion”; as for Hebrew, said a monk, it was “well known that all who learn Hebrew presently become Jews.” ¹ After being harassed by the Sorbonne for thirty years Robert transferred his press to Geneva (1552); and there, in the year of his death (1559), he revealed his Protestant inclinations by publishing an edition of Calvin’s Institutes. His son Henri Étienne II upheld the repute of the family by issuing in Paris handsome editions of the classics, and compiling in five volumes a Thesaurus linguae graecae (1572), which is still the most complete of all Greek dictionaries. He brought the Sorbonne down upon him by publishing an Apologie pour Herodote (1566), in which he pointed out the parallels between Christian miracles and the incredible marvels related by the Greek. He in his turn sought refuge in Geneva, but found the Calvinist regime as intolerant as the Sorbonne.

Many publications of this age were models of typography, engraving, and binding. The heavy half-metallic bindings of the fifteenth century gave place to lighter and cheaper covers in leather, velum, or parchment. Jean Grolier de Servières, treasurer of France in 1534, had most of his 3,000 volumes so elegantly bound in Levantine morocco that they rank among the handsomest books in existence. Private libraries were now numberless, and public libraries were opened in many cities—Cracow (1517), Hamburg (1529), Nuremberg (1538).... Under Francis I the old royal library assembled by Charles VIII was transferred from the Louvre to Fontainebleau, and was enriched with new collections and fine bindings; this Bibliothèque du Roi became, after the Revolution, the Bibliothèque Nationale. Many monastic libraries perished in the Reformation, but many passed into private hands, and what was of value in them found its way into public repositories. Much is lost in history, but so much of worth has been preserved that not a hundred lifetimes could absorb it.

II. SCHOOLS

It was natural that the Revolution should for a time disrupt the educational system of Western Europe, for that system was almost wholly a service of the Church, and the influence of the orthodox clergy could not be successfully challenged without breaking their control of education. Luther condemned the existing grammar schools as teaching the student “only enough bad Latin to become a priest and read Mass .... and yet remain all his life a poor ignoramus fit neither to cackle nor to lay eggs.” ² As for the universities, they seemed to him dens of murderers, temples of Moloch, synagogues of corruption; “nothing more hellish .... ever appeared on earth... or ever would appear”; and he concluded that they were “only worthy of being reduced to dust.” ³ Melanchthon agreed with him on the ground that the universities were turning students into pagans.⁴ The opinion of Carlstadt, the Zwickau “prophets,” and the Anabaptists—that education was a useless frill, a peril to morals, and a hindrance to salvation—was readily accepted by parents who grudged the cost of educating their children. Some fathers argued that since secondary instruction was largely directed to preparing students for the priesthood, and priests were now so unfashionable, it was illogical to send sons to universities.

The Reformers had expected that the revenues of ecclesiastical properties appropriated by the state would in part be devoted to establishing new schools to replace those that were disappearing with the closing of the monasteries; but “princes and lords,” Luther complained, “were so busily engaged in the high and important affairs of the cellar, the kitchen, and the bedchamber that they had no time” to help education. “In the German provinces,” he wrote (1524), “the schools are now everywhere allowed to go to ruin.”⁵ By 1530 he and Melanchthon were lamenting the deterioration of the German universities.⁶ At Erfurt the enrollment fell from 311 in 1520 to 120 in 1521, to 34 in 1524; at Rostock from 300 in 1517 to 15 in 1525; at Heidelberg in that year there were more professors than students; and in 1526 only five scholars enrolled at the University of Basel.⁷

Luther and Melanchthon labored to repair the damage. In an Epistle to the Burgomasters (1524) Luther appealed to secular authorities to establish schools. In 1530, far ahead of his time, he proposed that elementary education should be made compulsory, and be provided at public expense.⁸ To the universities, gradually reconstituted under Protestant auspices, he recommended a curriculum centered on the Bible, but also teaching Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, law, medicine, history, and “poets and orators .... heathen or Christian.” ⁹ Melanchthon made the revival of education a main task of his life. Under his leadership and stimulus many new schools were opened; by the end of the sixteenth century there were 300 in Germany. He drew up a Schulplan (1527) for the organization of schools and universities; he wrote textbooks of Latin and Greek grammar, of rhetoric, logic, psychology, ethics, and theology; and he trained thousands of teachers for the new institutions. His country gratefully named him Praeceptor Germaniae, the Educator of Germany. One by one the universities of northern Germany passed under Protestant control: Wittenberg (1522), Marburg (1527), Tübingen (1535), Leipzig (1539), Königsberg (1544), Jena (1558). Professors or students who (as Duke Ulrich of Württemberg put it) were opposed to “the right, true, evangelical doctrine” were dismissed. Calvinists were excluded from Lutheran colleges, and Protestants were barred from universities still held by Catholics. Generally, after the Peace of Augsburg (1555), German students were forbidden to attend schools of another faith than that of the territorial prince.¹⁰

Johannes Sturm immensely advanced the new education when he set up a Gymnasium or secondary school at Strasbourg (1538), and published in that year an influential tract On Rightly Opening Schools of Letters (De litterarum ludis recte aperiendis). Like so many leaders of thought in Central Europe, Sturm had received his schooling from the Brethren of the Common Life. Thence he went to Louvain and Paris, where he met Rabelais; the famous letter of Gargantua on education may echo a mutual influence. While making “a wise piety” the chief aim of education, Sturm laid rising stress on the study of the Greek and Latin languages and literatures; and this thoroughness of training in the classics passed down to the later Gymnasien of Germany to raise the army of scholars that in the nineteenth century raided and ransacked the ancient world.

The schools of England suffered even more than those of Germany from the religious overturn. Cathedral, monastic, guild, and chantry schools melted away in the heat of the attack upon ecclesiastical abuses and wealth. Most university students had been sent up by those schools; this flow ceasing, Oxford graduated only 173 bachelors of arts, Cambridge only 191, in 1548; in 1547 and 1550 Oxford had no such graduates at all.¹¹ Henry VIII felt the problem, but his need of funds for war or weddings limited him to establishing Trinity College, Cambridge (1546), and financing regius professorships in divinity, Hebrew, Greek, medicine, and law. Private philanthropy in this period founded Corpus Christi College, Christ Church College, St. John’s College, and Trinity College at Oxford, and Magdalen College at Cambridge. The royal commission sent by Cromwell to Oxford and Cambridge (1535) to appropriate their charters and endowments for the King brought both faculty and curriculum under governmental control. The reign of Scholasticism in England was summarily ended; the works of Duns Scotus were literally scattered to the winds;¹² canon law was set aside; Greek and Latin studies were encouraged; the curriculum was largely secularized. But dogmatism remained. A law of 1553 required all candidates for degrees to subscribe to the Anglican Articles of Religion.

In Catholic France and Flanders the universities declined not in endowments or enrollments but in vigor and freedom of intellectual life. New universities were opened at Reims, Douai, Lille, and Besançon. The University of Louvain rivaled that of Paris in number of students (5,000), and in defense of an orthodoxy that even the popes found extreme. The University of Paris had a large enrollment (6,000), but it no longer attracted foreign students in any considerable number, or tolerated, as in its thirteenth-century prime, the quickening ferment of new ideas. Its other faculties were so dominated by that of theology—the Sorbonne—that this name became almost a synonym for the university. The curriculum of theology and expurgated classics seemed to Montaigne a superficial routine of memorizing and conformity. Rabelais never tired of satirizing the scholastic formalities and logical gymnastics of the Sorbonne, the waste of student years in debates carefully removed from actual concern with human life. “I am willing to lose my share of paradise,” vowed Clément Marot, “if those great beasts”—the professors—“did not ruin my youth.”¹³ All the power and authority of the university were turned not only against the French Protestants but against the French humanists as well.

Francis I, who had drunk the wine of Italy, and had met churchmen steeped in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, did his best to protect French scholarship from the conservative discouragements emanating from the Sorbonne. Urged on by Guillaume Budé, Cardinal Jean du Bellay, and the indefatigable Marguerite, he provided funds to establish (1529), independently of the university, a school devoted predominantly to humanistic studies. Four “royal professors” were initially appointed—two for Greek, two for Hebrew; and chairs of Latin, mathematics, medicine, and philosophy were presently added. Tuition was free.¹⁴ This Collège Royale, later renamed Collège de France, became the warming hearth of French humanism, the home of the free but disciplined mind of France.

Spain, though passionately orthodox, had excellent universities, fourteen in 1553, including new foundations at Toledo, Santiago, and Granada; that of Salamanca, with seventy professors and 6,778 students in 1584, could bear comparison with any. The universities of Italy continued to flourish; that of Bologna, in 1543, had fifty-seven professors in the faculty of “arts,” thirty-seven in law, fifteen in medicine; and Padua was the Mecca of enterprising students from north of the Alps. Poland testified to its golden age by enrolling 15,338 students at one time in the University of Cracow;¹⁵ and in Poznan the Lubranscianum, founded (1519) by Bishop John Lubranski, was dedicated to humanistic pursuits. All in all, the universities suffered less in Catholic than in Protestant countries in this cataclysmic century.

The importance of the teacher was underestimated, and he was grievously underpaid. The professors at the Collège Royale received 200 crowns a year ($5,000?), but this was highly exceptional. At Salamanca the professors were chosen by the students after a trial period of sample lectures by rival candidates. Instruction was mostly by lectures, sometimes brought to life by debates. Note-taking served many a student in place of textbooks; dictionaries were rare; laboratories were practically unknown except to alchemists. Students were housed in cheap and poorly heated rooms, and became ill on unclean or inadequate food. Many worked their way through college. Classes began at six in the morning, ended at five in the afternoon. Discipline was rigorous; even near-graduates might be flogged. The students warmed themselves with street brawls and such wine and wenches as they could afford. By one means or another they achieved education, to a degree.

Girls of the lower classes remained illiterate; many of the middle classes found moderate schooling in nunneries; well-to-do young women had tutors. Holland boasted of several ladies who could be courted in Latin, and who could probably conjugate better than they could decline. In Germany the wife of Peutinger and the sisters and daughters of Pirkheimer were famous for learning; in France the women around Francis graced their flirtations with classical quotations; and in England some bluestockings—More’s daughters, Jane Grey, “Bloody Mary,” Elizabeth—were paragons of erudition.

Two famous teachers belong to this age. The lesser was Sir Thomas Elyot, whose Boke Named the Governour (1531) outlined an education by which pedigreed pupils might be fitted for statesmanship. Elyot began by berating the cultural crudity of the English nobles; he contrasted it with the learning credited to men of affairs in ancient Greece and Rome, and quoted Diogenes the Cynic, who, “seeing one without learning seated on a stone, remarked .... ‘Behold where one stone sitteth on another.’ “¹⁶ At seven the boy should be placed under a carefully selected tutor, who will teach him the elements of music, painting, and sculpture. At fourteen he is to be taught cosmography, logic, and history, and is to be trained in wrestling, hunting, shooting with the longbow, swimming, and tennis; not football, for that is plebeian, and “therein is nothing but beastly furie and external violence.” The lad is to study the classics at every stage of his education—first the poets, then the orators, then the historians, then the generals, then the philosophers; to which Elyot, as almost an afterthought, adds the Bible, thereby reversing Luther’s plan. For, despite his protestations, Elyot much prefers the classics to the Bible. “Lord God, what incomparable sweetness of words and matter in the works of Plato and Cicero, wherein is joined gravity and delectation, excellent wisdom with divine eloquence, absolute virtue with pleasure incredible,” so “that those books be almost sufficient to make a perfect and excellent governor!”¹⁷

Juan Vives, humanest of the humanists, followed a larger aim and wider course. Born at Valencia in 1492, he left Spain at seventeen, never to see it again. He studied in Paris long enough to love philosophy and despise Scholasticism. At twenty-six he wrote the first modern history of philosophy—De initiis, sectis, et laudibus philosophiae. In the same year he challenged the universities with an attack on Scholastic methods of teaching philosophy; the scheme of promoting thought by debates, he felt, promoted only futile wrangling over inconsequential issues. Erasmus hailed the book, recommended it to More, and politely feared that “Vives .... will overshadow .... Erasmus.” ¹⁸ Perhaps through Erasmus’ influence Vives was appointed professor of the humanities at Louvain (1519). Urged on by Erasmus, he published an edition of Augustine’s City of God with elaborate commentaries; he dedicated it to Henry VIII, and received so cordial a reply that he moved to England (1523). He was welcomed by More and Queen Catherine, his compatriot, and Henry named him one of Princess Mary’s tutors. Apparently for her guidance he wrote On the Education of Children (De ratione studii puerilis, 1523). All went well until he expressed disapproval of Henry’s plea for a marriage annulment. Henry stopped his salary, and put him under house arrest for six weeks. Released, Vives returned to Bruges (1528), and spent there the remaining years of his life.

Still idealistic at thirty-seven, he dedicated to Charles V an Erasmian appeal for an international court of arbitration as a substitute for war (De concordia et discordia in humano genere, 1529). Two years later he issued his major work, De tradendis disciplinis (On the Transmission of Studies), the most progressive educational treatise of the Renaissance. He called for an education directed “to the necessities of life, to some bodily or mental improvement, to the cultivation and increase of reverence.” ¹⁹ The pupil should enter school “as if into a holy temple,” but his studies there should prepare him to be a decent and useful citizen. Those studies should cover the whole of life, and should be taught in their interrelation, as they function in living. Nature, as well as books, should be studied; things are more instructive than theories. Let the student note the veins, nerves, bones, and other parts of the body in their anatomy and action; let him consult farmers, hunters, shepherds, gardeners .... and learn their lore; these gleanings will be more useful than the Scholastic “babblement which has corrupted every branch of knowledge in the name of logic.”²⁰ The classics, expurgated for youth, should remain a vital part of the curriculum, but modern history and geography are to be studied too. The vernaculars as well as Latin should be taught, and all by the direct method of daily use.

Vives was so far ahead of his time that it lost sight of him, and let him die in poverty. He remained a Catholic to the end.

III. SCHOLARS

The distinctive task of the universities, the academies, and the humanists in the Renaissance was to gather, translate, and transmit the old world of Greece and Rome to the young world of modern Europe. The task was grandly accomplished, and the classic revelation was complete.

Two men remain to be commemorated as oracles of this revelation. Guillaume Budé, after living sixty-two years in hopes of making Paris the heir of Italian humanism, came into his own when Francis founded the Collège Royale. He began his adult studies with law, and for almost a decade he buried himself in the Pandects of Justinian. To understand these texts better—Latin in language but Byzantine in bearings—he took up Greek with John Lascaris, and so devotedly that his teacher, departing, bequeathed to him his precious library of Greek books. When, at forty-one, Budé published Annotationes in XXIV libros Pandectarum (1508), the Digest of Justinian, for the first time in Renaissance jurisprudence, was studied in itself and its environment, instead of being displaced by the commentaries of the “glossators.” Six years later he issued another monument of recondite research, De asse et partibus—on its surface a discussion of ancient coins and measures, but actually an exhaustive consideration of classical literature in relation to economic life. Still more impressive were his Commentarii linguae graecae (1529), a work loosely ordered, but so rich in lexicographic information and illumination that it placed Budé at the head of all European Hellenists. Rabelais sent him a letter of homage, Erasmus paid him the compliment of jealousy. Erasmus was a man of the world, to whom scholarship was only a part of life; but to Budé scholarship and life were one. “It is philology,” he wrote, “that has so long been my companion, my associate, my mistress, bound to me by every tie of affection.... But I have been forced to loosen the bonds of a love so devouring... that I found it destructive to my health.” ²¹ He mourned that he had to steal time from his studies to eat and sleep. In moments of distraction he married and begot eleven children. Jean Clouet’s portrait of him (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) shows him in a pessimistic mood, but Francis I must have found some warmth in him, for he made him librarian at Fontainebleau, and liked to have the old scholar near him, even on tours. On one of these Budé caught a fever. He left precise instructions for an unceremonious funeral, and quietly passed away (1540). The Collège de France is his monument.

Paris had not yet in his time absorbed the intellectual life of France. Humanism had a dozen French hearths: Bourges, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, and, above all, Lyons, where love and humanism, ladies and literature, made a delightful mixture. And in Agen, where no one would have looked for an emperor, Julius Caesar Scaliger ruled imperiously over the philological scene after Budé’s death. Born probably at Padua (1484), he came to Agen at forty-one, and lived there till his death (1558). Every scholar feared him, for he had a masterly command of vituperative Latin. He made a name for himself by attacking Erasmus for belittling the “Ciceronians”—sticklers for a precise Ciceronian Latin. He criticized Rabelais, then criticized Dolet for criticizing Rabelais. In a volume of Exercitationes he examined Jerome Cardan’s De subtilitate, and undertook to prove that everything affirmed in that book was false, and everything denied in it was true. His De causis linguae latinae was the first Latin grammar based upon scientific principles, and his commentaries on Hippocrates and Aristotle were remarkable for both their style and their contributions to science. Julius had fifteen children, one of whom became the greatest scholar of the next generation. His Poetice, published four years after his death, shared with the work of his son—and the influence of the Italians who followed Catherine de Médicis to France—in turning French humanism back from Greek to Latin studies.

A special gift of the Greek revival was Amyot’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives. Jacques Amyot was one of Marguerite’s many protégés; through her he was appointed to a chair of Greek and Latin at Bourges. His translations of Daphnis and Chloë and other Greek love stories were rewarded, in the genial oddity of the times, with a rich abbey. So secured, he traveled widely in Italy, indulging his antiquarian and philological tastes. When he published the Lives (1559) he prefaced the book with an eloquent plea for the study of history as the “treasure house of humanity,” a museum in which a thousand examples of virtue and vice, statesmanship and decay, are preserved for the instruction of mankind; like Napoleon, he considered history a better teacher of philosophy than philosophy itself. Nevertheless he proceeded to translate also Plutarch’s Moralia. He was promoted to the bishopric of Auxerre. and died there in the ripeness of eighty years (1593). His version of the Lives was not always accurate, but it was a work of literature in its own right, endowed with a natural and idiomatic style quite equal to that of the original. Its influence was endless. Montaigne reveled in it, and turned from the France of St. Bartholomew to this select and ennobled antiquity; Shakespeare took three plays from North’s virile translation of Amyot’s translation; the Plutarchian ideal of the hero modeled a hundred French dramas and revolutionists; and the Vies des hommes illustres gave to the nation a pantheon of celebrities fit to stir the more masculine virtues of the French soul.

IV. THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE

It is customary and forgivable to call by this term, so rich in overtones, the period between the accession of Francis 1(1515) and the assassination of Henry IV (1610). Essentially this colorful flowering of French poetry and prose, manners and arts and dress was less a rebirth than a ripening. By the patient resilience of men and the new growth of the new-seeded earth, the French economy and spirit had recovered from the Hundred Years’ War. Louis XI had given France a strong, centered, orderly government; Louis XII had given it a fruitful decade of peace. The free, loose, fantastic creativeness of the Gothic age survived, even and most in Rabelais, who so admired the classics that he quoted nearly all of them. But the great awakening was also a renascence. French literature and art were unquestionably affected by a closer acquaintance with ancient culture and classic forms. Those forms and the classic temper—the predominance of intellectual order over emotional ardor—continued in French drama, poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture for almost three centuries. The fertilizing agents in the new birth were the French discovery and invasion of Italy, the French study of Roman rums, jurisprudence, and literature, of Italian letters and arts, and the influx of Italian artists and poets into France. To the happy issue many other factors contributed: printing; the dissemination and translation of classic texts; the patronage of scholars, poets, and artists by French kings, by their mistresses, by Marguerite of Navarre, by ecclesiastics and aristocrats; and the inspiration of women capable of appreciating other beauties than their own. All these elements came together in the flourishing of France.

Francis I, who inherited all this, had as á page the poet who served as a transition from Gothic to classic, from Villon to Renaissance. Clément Marot entered history as a frolicsome lad of thirteen who amused the King with jolly tales and sprightly repartees. Some years later Francis smiled upon the youth’s adventures and quarrels with “all the ladies of Paris,” for he agreed with Marot that they were very charming indeed:

“The Frenchwoman is flawless and complete; pleasure leads her; she does not look for profit. To conclude: whatever anyone may say to ridicule them, Frenchwomen are nature’s masterpiece.”²²

Marot babbled poems like a bubbling spring. They were seldom profound, but often touched with tender sentiment; they were verses of occasion, conversation pieces, ballads, roundels, madrigals, or satires and epistles reminiscent of Horace or Martial. He noted with some pique that women (himself to the contrary notwithstanding) could be more readily persuaded by diamonds than by dithyrambs:

In 1519 Marot became valet-de-chambre to Marguerite, and fell in love with her dutifully; gossip said she returned his moans, but more likely she gave him nothing but religion. He developed a moderate sympathy with the Protestant cause in the intervals of his amours. He followed Francis to Italy, fought like a Bayard at Pavia, had the honor to be captured with his King, and—no ransom being expected for a poet—was released. Back in France, he announced his Protestant ideas so openly that the bishop of Chartres summoned him, and kept him under genteel imprisonment in the episcopal palace. He was set free by Marguerite’s intercession, but was soon arrested for helping prisoners to escape from the police. Francis bailed him out, and took him to Bayonne to sing the charms of his new bride, Eleanor of Portugal. After another session in jail—for eating bacon in Lent—he followed Marguerite to Cahors and Nérac.

Presently the affair of the placards revived the campaign against the French Protestants. News reached Marot that his rooms in Paris had been searched, and that a warrant had gone out for his arrest (1535). Fearful that even Marguerite’s skirts would not suffice to hide him, he fled to Italy, to the Duchess Renée in Ferrara. She welcomed him as if a reborn Virgil had arrived from Mantua; and perhaps she knew that he liked to link his name with that of Publius Vergilius Maro. He resembled more the lighthearted, amorous Ovid, or his favorite Villon, whose poems he edited and whose life he relived. When Duke Ercole II let it be known that he was surfeited with Protestants, Clément moved on to Venice. Word reached him that Francis had offered pardon to abjuring heretics; Marot, thinking the ladies of Paris worth a Mass, abjured. The King gave him a house and garden, and Clément tried to be a bourgeois gentilhomme.

François Vatable, who was teaching Hebrew in the Collège Royale, asked him to translate the Psalms into French verse, and expounded them to him word for word. Marot put thirty of them into melodious poetry, and published them with a judicious dedication to the King. Francis liked them so much that he gave a special copy to Charles V, who was momentarily his friend; Charles sent the poet 200 crowns ($5,000?). Marot translated more of the Psalms, and issued them in 1543 with a dedication to his first love, “the ladies of France.” Goudimel put them to music, as we have seen, and half of France began to sing them. But as Luther and Calvin also liked them, the Sorbonne suspected them of Protestantism; or perhaps in the ordeal of success Marot had remumbled his heresies. The campaign against him was renewed. He fled to Geneva, but found the theological climate there too severe for his health. He slipped into Italy, and died in Turin (1544) at the age of forty-nine, leaving an illegitimate daughter to the care of the Queen of Navarre.

V. RABELAIS

1. Himself

The unique, inexhaustible, skeptical, hilarious, learned, and obscene author of “the most diverting and most profitable stories which have ever been told”²³ burst into the world in 1495, son of a prosperous notary at Chinon. He was entered at too early an age into a Franciscan monastery; he complained later that women who “carry children nine months beneath their hearts... cannot bear to suffer them nine years... and by simply adding an ell to their dress, and cutting I know not how many hairs from the top of their head, by means of certain words they turn them into birds”—i.e., they tonsure them and make them monks. The boy accepted his fate because he was inclined to study, and probably, like Erasmus, he was drawn to the books in the monastic library. He found there two or three other monks who wished to study Greek, and who were excited by the vast ancient world that scholarship was revealing. François made such progress that he received a letter of praise from Budé himself. Matters seemed to be going well, and in 1520 the future doubter was ordained a priest. But some older monks scented heresy in philology; they accused the young Hellenists of buying books with the fees they received for preaching, instead of handing the money over to the common treasury. Rabelais and another monk were put in solitary confinement and were deprived of books, which were to them half of life. Budé, apprised of this contretemps, appealed to Francis I, who ordered the scholars reinstated in freedom and privileges. Some further intercession brought a papal rescript permitting Rabelais to change his monastic allegiance and residence; he left the Franciscans, and entered a Benedictine house at Maillezais (1524). There the bishop, Geoffroy d’Estissac, took such a fancy to him that he arranged with the abbot that Rabelais should be allowed to go wherever he wished for his studies. Rabelais went, and forgot to return.

After sampling several universities he entered the School of Medicine at Montpellier (1530). He must have had some prior instruction, for he received the degree of bachelor of medicine in 1531. For reasons unknown he did not proceed to earn the doctorate, but resumed his wandering until, in 1532, he settled down in Lyons. Like Servetus, he combined the practice of medicine with scholarly pursuits. He served as editorial aide to the printer Sebastian Gryphius, edited several Greek texts, translated the Aphorisms of Hippocrates into Latin, and was willingly caught in the humanistic stream then in full flow at Lyons. On November 30, 1532, he dispatched a copy of Josephus to Erasmus with a letter of adulation strange in a man of thirty-seven, but savoring of that enthusiastic age:

In that same November 1532 we find Rabelais a physician in the Hôtel-Dieu, or city hospital, of Lyons, with a salary of forty livres ($1,000?) a year. But we must not think of him as a typical scholar or physician. It is true that his learning was varied and immense. Like Shakespeare, he seems to have had professional knowledge in a dozen fields—law, medicine, literature, theology, cookery, history, botany, astronomy, mythology. He refers to a hundred classic legends, quotes half a hundred classic authors; sometimes he parades his erudition amateurishly. He was so busy living that he had no time to achieve meticulous accuracy in his scholarship; the editions that he prepared were not models of careful detail. It was not in his character to be a dedicated humanist like Erasmus or Budé; he loved life more than books. He is pictured for us as a man of distinguished presence, tall and handsome, a well of learning, a light and fire of conversation.²⁵ He was not a toper, as an old tradition wrongly inferred from his salutes to drinkers and his paeans to wine; on the contrary, except for one little bastard²⁶—who lived so briefly as to be only a venial sin—he led a reasonably decent life, and was honored by the finest spirits of his time, including several dignitaries of the Church. At the same time he had in him many qualities of the French peasant. He relished the bluff and hearty types that he met in the fields and streets; he enjoyed their jokes and laughter, their tall tales and boastful ribaldry; and unwittingly he made Erasmus’ fame pale before his own because he collected and connected these stories, improved and expanded them, dignified them with classic lore, lifted them into constructive satire, and carefully included their obscenity.

One story, then current in many rural areas, told of a kindly giant named Gargantua, his cavernous appetite, his feats of love and strength; here and there were hills and boulders which, said local traditions, had dropped from Gargantua’s basket as he passed. Such legends were still told, as late as 1860, in French hamlets that had never heard of Rabelais. An unknown writer, perhaps Rabelais himself as a tour de rire, jotted some of the fables down, and had them printed in Lyons as The Great and Inestimable Chronicles of the Great and Enormous Giant Gargantua (1532). The book sold so readily that Rabelais conceived the idea of writing a sequel to it about Gargantua’s son. So, at the Lyons fair of October 1532, there appeared, anonymously, the Horribles et espouvantables faictz et prouesses du très renommé Pantagruel (The Horrible and Dreadful Deeds and Prowesses of the Most Renowned Pantagruel). This name had been used in some popular dramas, but Rabelais gave the character new content and depth. The Sorbonne and the monks condemned the book as obscene, and it sold well; Francis I enjoyed it, some of the clergy relished it. Not till fourteen years later did Rabelais admit his authorship; he feared to endanger, if not his life, his reputation as a scholar.

He was still so wedded to scholarship that he neglected his duties at the hospital, and was dismissed. He might have had trouble buttering his bread had not Jean du Bellay, Bishop of Paris and co-founder of the Collège de France, taken Rabelais with him as physician on a mission to Italy (January 1534). Returning to Lyons in April, Rabelais published there in October La vie très horrifique du grand Gargantua, père de Pantagruel (The Very Horrible Life of the Great Gargantua, father of Pantagruel). This second volume, which was later to form Book One of the full work, contained such rollicking satires of the clergy that it won another Sorbonnian condemnation. Soon the two stories, published together, outsold every publication in France except the Bible and The Imitation of Christ. ²⁷ Again, we are told, King Francis laughed and applauded.

But on the night of October 17–18, 1534, the posting of insulting Protestant placards on Paris buildings and the King’s own doors changed him from a protector of humanists into a persecutor of heretics. Rabelais had again concealed his authorship, but it was widely suspected, and he had good reason to fear that the Sorbonne, carrying the King in its train, would demand the scandalous writer’s head. Again Jean du Bellay came to his rescue. Now a cardinal, the genial churchman snatched the endangered scholar-physician-pornographer out of his Lyons den and took him to Rome (1535). It was Rabelais’ luck to find there an enlightened pope. Paul III forgave him his neglect of his monastic and priestly duties, and gave him permission to practice medicine. As amende honorable Rabelais expunged from future editions of his now “double-backed” book the passages most offensive to orthodox taste; and when Étienne Dolet played a trick on him by publishing, without permission, an unexpurgated edition, he crossed him from the roster of his friends. Under the protection of the Cardinal he studied again at Montpellier, received the doctorate in medicine, lectured to large audiences there, and then returned to Lyons to resume his life as physician and scholar. In June 1537, Dolet described him as conducting an anatomy lesson by dissecting an executed criminal before an assemblage of students.

Thereafter we know only snatches of his undulant career. He was in the suite of the King at the historic meeting of Francis I and Charles V in Aiguesmortes (July 1538). Two years later we find him at Turin as physician to Guillaume du Bellay, brother to the Cardinal, and now French ambassador to Savoy. About this time spies found in Rabelais’ correspondence some items that raised a flurry in Paris. He hurried to the capital, faced the matter out bravely, and was exonerated by the King (1541). Despite renewed condemnations of Gargantua and Pantagruel by the Sorbonne, Francis gave the harassed author a minor post in the government as maître des requêtes (commissioner of petitions), and official permission to publish Book Two of Pantagruel, which Rabelais gratefully dedicated to Marguerite of Navarre. The volume aroused such commotion among the theologians that Rabelais judged it discreet to take refuge in Metz, then part of the Empire. There he served for a year as physician in the city hospital (1546–47). In 1548 he thought it safe to return to Lyons, and in 1549 to Paris. Finally his ecclesiastical protectors secured his appointment (1551) as parish priest of Meudon, just southwest of the capital, and the hunted, aging gadfly resumed his sacerdotal robes. Apparently he delegated the duties of his benefice to subordinates, and confined himself to using the income.²⁸ So far as we know he was still curé of Meudon when, a bit anomalously, he published what is now Book Four of his work (1552). This was dedicated to Odet, Cardinal de Chatillon, presumably with permission; evidently there were then in France high churchmen of the learning and lenience of the Italian Renaissance cardinals. Nevertheless the book was denounced by the Sorbonne, and its sale was forbidden by the Parlement. Francis I and Marguerite were now dead, and Rabelais found no favor with the somber Henry II. He absented himself for a while from Paris, but soon returned. There, after a long illness, he died (April 9, 1553). An old story tells how, when he was asked on his deathbed where he expected to go, he answered, Je vais chercher un grand peut-être—“I go to seek a great perhaps.” ²⁹ Alas, it is a legend.

2. Gargantua

The Prologue to Book One (originally Book Two) gives at once the taste and smell of the whole:

This is Urquhart’s famed translation, which sometimes overdoes the original, but is here quite faithful to it, even with pithy words now no longer permitted in learned discourse. In these two paragraphs we have Rabelais’ spirit and aim: serious satire clothed in neck-saving buffoonery, and sometimes smeared with unfumigated smut. We proceed at our own risk, thankful that the printed word does not smell, and trusting to find some diamonds in the dunghill.

Gargantua begins with a peerless genealogy Scriptural in form. The father of the giant was Grangousier, King of Utopia; the mother was Gargamelle. She bore him for eleven months, and when her pains began their friends gathered for a merry bout of wine, alleging that nature abhors a vacuum. “On with a sheep’s courage!” the proud father tells his wife painlessly; “dispatch this boy, and we will speedily fall to work... making another.” For a moment she wishes him the fate of Abélard; he proposes to accomplish this forthwith, but she changes her mind. The unborn Gargantua, finding the usual outlet of maternity blocked by an untimely astringent, “entered the vena cava” of Gargamelle, climbed through her diaphragm and neck, and “issued forth by the left ear.” As soon as he was born he cried out, so loudly that two counties heard him, À boire! à boire! à boire!—“Drink! drink! drink!” 17,913 cans of milk were set aside for his nourishment, but he early showed a preference for wine.

When it came time to educate the young giant, and make him fit to succeed to the throne, he received as tutor Maître Jobelin, who made a dolt of him by stuffing his memory with dead facts and befuddling his reason with Scholastic argument. Driven to a desperate expedient, Gargantua turned the boy over to the humanist Ponocrates. Teacher and pupil went off to Paris to get the latest education. Gargantua rode on a tremendous mare, whose swishing tail cut down vast forests as she proceeded; hence part of France is a plain. Arrived in Paris, Gargantua alighted on a tower of Notre Dame; he took a fancy to the bells, and purloined them to hang them about his horse’s neck. Ponocrates began the re-education of the spoiled giant by giving him an enormous purgative to cleanse the bowels and the brain, which are near allied. So purified, Gargantua became enamored of education; he began zealously to train at once his body, his mind, and his character; he studied the Bible, the classics, and the arts; he learned to play the lute and the virginal and to enjoy music; he ran, jumped, wrestled, climbed, and swam; he practiced riding, jousting, and the skills needed in war; he hunted to develop his courage; and to develop his lungs he shouted so that all Paris heard him. He visited metalworkers, stonecutters, goldsmiths, alchemists, weavers, watchmakers, printers, dyers, and “giving them somewhat to drink,” studied their crafts; he took part every day in some useful physical work; and sometimes he went to a lecture, or a trial, or to “the sermons of evangelical preachers” (a Protestant touch).

Amid all this education Gargantua was suddenly called back to his father’s realm, for another king, Picrochole, had declared war on Grangousier. Why? Rabelais steals a story from Plutarch’s Life of Pyrrhus, and tells how Picrochole’s generals boasted of the lands they would conquer under his leadership: France, Spain, Portugal, Algeria, Italy, Sicily, Crete, Cyprus, Rhodes, Greece, Jerusalem.... . Picrochole rejoices and swells. But an old philosopher asks him: “What shall be the end of so many labors and crosses?” “When we return,” answers Picrochole, “we shall sit down, rest, and be merry.” “But,” suggests the philosopher, “if by chance you should never come back, for the voyage is long and dangerous, were it not better for us to take our rest now?” “Enough,” cried Picrochole; “go forward; I fear nothing.... He that loves me, follow me” (I, xxxiii). Gargantua’s horse almost wins the war against Picrochole by drowning thousands of the enemy with one simple easement.

But the real hero of the war was Friar John, a monk who loved fighting more than praying, and who let his philosophical curiosity venture into the most dangerous alleys. “What is the reason,” he asks, “that the thighs of a gentlewoman are always fresh and cool?”—and though he finds nothing about this engaging problem in Aristotle or Plutarch, he himself gives answers rich in femoral erudition. All the King’s men like him, feed and wine him to his paunch’s content; they invite him to take off his monastic robe to allow more eating, but he fears that without it he will not have so good an appetite. All the faults that the Protestant reformers alleged against the monks are satirized through this jolly member of their tribe: their idleness, gluttony, guzzling, prayer-mumbling, and hostility to all but a narrowing range of study and ideas. “In our abbey,” says Friar John, “we never study, for fear of the mumps” (I, xxxix).

Gargantua proposed to reward the Friar’s good fighting by making him abbot of an existing monastery, but John begged instead to be given the means of establishing a new abbey, with rules “contrary to all others.” First, there should be no encompassing walls; inmates are to be free to leave at their pleasure. Second, there is to be no exclusion of women; however, only such women shall enter as are “fair, well-featured, of a sweet disposition,” and between the ages of ten and fifteen. Third, only men between twelve and eighteen will be accepted, and they must be comely, and of good birth and manners; no sots or bigots may apply, no beggars, lawyers, judges, scribes, usurers, gold-graspers, or “sniveling hypocrites.” Fourth, no vows of chastity, poverty, or obedience; the members may marry, enjoy wealth, and in all matters be free. The abbey is to be called Theleme, or What You Will, and its sole rule will be Fais ce que vous vouldras—“Do what you wish.” For “men that are free, wellborn, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them to virtuous actions and withdraws them from vice; and this instinct is called Honor” (I, lvii). Gargantua provided the funds for this aristocratic anarchism, and the abbey rose according to specifications which Rabelais gave in such detail that architects have made drawings of it. He provided for it a library, a theater, a swimming pool, a tennis court, a football field, a chapel, a garden, a hunting park, orchards, stables, and 9,332 rooms. It was an American hotel in vacation land. Rabelais forgot to provide a kitchen, or to explain who would do the menial work in this paradise.

3. Pantagruel

After Gargantua had succeeded his father as king he took his turn at procreation and pedagogy. At the age of “four hundred fourscore forty and four years” he begot Pantagruel on Badebec, who died in giving birth; whereat Gargantua “wept like a cow” for his wife, and “laughed like a calf” over his robust son. Pantagruel grew up to Brobdingnagian proportions. In one of his meals he inadvertently swallowed a man, who had to be excavated by a mining operation in the young giant’s digestive tract. When Pantagruel went to Paris for his higher schooling Gargantua sent him a letter redolent of the Renaissance:

Pantagruel studied zealously, learned many languages, and might have become a bookworm had he not met Panurge. Here again, even more than in Friar John, the subordinate character stands out more clearly than his master, as Sancho Panza sometimes outshines the Don. Rabelais does not find full scope for his irreverent humor and riotous vocabulary in Gargantua or Pantagruel; he needs this quarter-scoundrel, quarter-lawyer, quarter-Villon, quarter-philosopher as a vehicle for his satire. He describes Panurge (which means “Ready to do anything”) as lean like a starving cat, walking gingerly “as if he trod on eggs”; a gallant fellow, but a little lecherous, and “subject to a kind of disease... called lack of money”; a pickpocket, a “lewd rogue, a cozener, a drinker... and very dissolute fellow,” but “otherwise the best and most virtuous man in the world” (II, xiv, xvi). Into Panurge’s mouth Rabelais puts his most ribald sallies. Panurge particularly resented the habit which the ladies of Paris adopted, of buttoning their blouses up the back; he sued the women in court, and might have lost, but he threatened to start a similar custom with male culottes, whereupon the court decreed that women must leave a modest but passable opening in front (II, xvii). Angered by a woman who scorned him, Panurge sprayed her skirts, while she knelt in prayer at church, with the effluvia of an itching pet; when the lady emerged, all the 600,014 male dogs of Paris pursued her with unanimous and indefatigable devotion (II, xxi-xxii). Pantagruel, himself a very mannerly prince, takes to this rascal as a relief from philosophy, and invites him on every expedition.

As the story rollicks on into Book Three, Panurge debates with himself and others whether he should marry. He lists the arguments pro and con through a hundred pages, some sparkling, many wearisome; but in those pages we meet the man who married a dumb wife, and the renowned jurist Bridlegoose, who arrives at his soundest judgments by throwing dice. The Prologue to Book Four catches a cue from Lucian and describes a “consistory of gods” in heaven, with Jupiter complaining about the unearthly chaos reigning on the earth, the thirty wars going on at once, the mutual hatreds of the peoples, the divisions of theologies, the syllogisms of the philosophers. “What shall we do with this Ramus and Galland... who together are setting all Paris by the ears?” Priapus counsels him to turn these two Pierres into stones (pierres); here Rabelais steals a pun from Scripture.

Returning to earth, he records in Books Four and Five* the long Gulliverian voyages of Pantagruel, Panurge, Friar John, and a royal Utopian fleet to find the Temple of the Holy Bottle, and to ask whether Panurge should marry. After a score of adventures, satirizing Lenten fasts, Protestant pope-haters, bigot pope-olators, monks, dealers in fake antiques, lawyers (“furred cats”), Scholastic philosophers, and historians, the expedition reaches the Temple. Over the portal is a Greek inscription to the effect that “in wine there is truth.” In a near-by fountain is a half-submerged bottle, from which a voice emerges, gurgling, TRINC; and the priestess Bacbuc explains that wine is the best philosophy, and that “not laughing but drinking .... cool, delicious wine... is the distinguishing character of man.” Panurge is happy to have the oracle confirm what he has known all the time. He resolves to eat, drink, and be married, and to take the consequences manfully. He sings an obscene hymeneal chant, and Bacbuc dismisses the party with a blessing: “May that intellectual sphere whose center is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere, whom we call GOD, keep you in His Almighty protection” (V, xlii). So, with a typical blend of lubricity and philosophy, the great romance comes to an end.

4. The King’s Jester

What sense is there behind this nonsense, and is there any wisdom in this demijohn of Falernian-Priapean hilarity? “We country clowns,” Rabelais makes one of his asses say, “are somewhat gross, and apt to knock words out of joint” (V, vii). He loves words, has an endless supply of them, and invents a thousand more; he draws them, like Shakespeare, from every occupation and profession, every field of philosophy, theology, and law. He makes lists of adjectives, nouns, or verbs, as if for the pleasure of contemplating them (III, xxxviii); he multiplies synonyms in an ecstasy of redundancy; this pleonasm was already an old trick on the French stage.³² It is part of Rabelais’ boundless and uncontrollable humor, an overflow beside which even the humor of Aristophanes or Molière is a modest trickle. His coarseness is another phase of this unmanageable flux. Perhaps some of it was a reaction against monastic asceticism, some of it the anatomical indifference of a physician, some of it a bold defiance of pedantic precision; much of it was in the manner of the age. Undoubtedly Rabelais carries it to excess; after a dozen pages of urogenital, excretory, and gaseous details we weary and turn away. Another generation of classic influence would be needed to tame such volcanic exuberance into disciplined form.

We forgive these faults because Rabelais’ style runs away with us, as with him. It is an unpretentious, unliterary style, natural, easy, flowing, just the medium for telling a long story. The secret of his verve is imagination plus energy plus clarity; he sees a thousand things unobserved by most of us, notes innumerable quirks of dress and conduct and speech, unites them fantastically, and sets the mixtures chasing one another over the sportive page.

He borrows right and left, as the custom was, and with Shakespeare’s excuse, that he betters everything that he steals. He helps himself to hundreds of proverbial snatches from Erasmus’ Adagia,³³ and follows many a lead from The Praise of Folly or the Colloquies. He assimilates half a hundred items from Plutarch, years before Amyot’s translation opened that treasury of greatness to any literate thief. He appropriates Lucian’s “heavenly discourse,” and Folengo’s tale of the self-drowned sheep; he finds in the comedies of his time the story of the man who regretted that he had cured his wife’s speechlessness; and he uses a hundred suggestions from the fabliaux and interludes that had rolled down from medieval France. In describing the voyages of Pantagruel he leans on the narratives that were being issued by the explorers of the New World and the Far East. Yet, with all this borrowing, there is no author more original; and only in Shakespeare and Cervantes do we find imaginative creations so lusty with life as Friar John and Panurge. Rabelais himself, however, is the main creation of the book, a composite of Pantagruel, Friar John, Panurge, Erasmus, Vesalius, and Jonathan Swift, babbling, bubbling, smashing idols, loving life.

Because he loved life he flayed those who made it less lovable. Perhaps he was a bit too hard on the monks who had been unable to share his humanistic devotions. He must have been clawed by a lawyer or two, for he tears their fur revengefully. Mark my words, he warns his readers, “if you live but six Olympiads and the age of two dogs more, you’ll see these law-cats lords of all Europe.” But he lays his whip also upon judges, Scholastics, theologians, historians, travelers, indulgence peddlers, and women. There is hardly a good word for women in all the book; this is Rabelais’ blindest spot, perhaps the price he paid, as monk and priest and bachelor, for never earning tenderness.

Partisans have debated whether he was a Catholic, a Protestant, a freethinker, or an atheist. Calvin thought him an atheist; and “my own belief,” concluded his lover Anatole France, “is that he believed nothing.”³⁴ At times he wrote like the most irreverent cynic, as in the language of the sheep drover about the best way to fertilize a field (IV, vii). He ridiculed fasting, indulgences, inquisitors, decretals, and enjoyed explaining the anatomical requisites for becoming a pope (IV, xlviii). He had evidently no belief in hell (II, xxx). He echoed the Protestant arguments that the papacy was draining the nations of their gold (IV, liii), and that the cardinals of Rome lived lives of gluttony and hypocrisy (IV, lviii-lx). He sympathized with the French heretics; Pantagruel, he says, did not stay long in Toulouse, because there they “burn their regents alive, like red herrings”—referring to the execution of an heretical professor of law (II, v). But his Protestant sympathies seem to have been limited to those who were humanists. He followed Erasmus admiringly, but only mildly favored Luther, and he turned with distaste from the dogmatism and puritanism of Calvin. He was tolerant of everything but intolerance. Like nearly all the humanists, when driven to choose, he preferred Catholicism with its legends, intolerance, and art to Protestantism with its predestination, intolerance, and purity. He repeatedly affirmed his faith in the fundamentals of Christianity, but this may have been the prudence of a man who, in defense of his opinions, was willing to go to the stake exclusively. He loved his definition of God so well that he (or his continuator) repeated it (III, xiii; V, xlvii). He apparently accepted the immortality of the soul (II, viii; IV, xxvii), but in general he preferred scatology to eschatology. Farel called him a renegade for accepting the pastorate of Meudon,³⁵ but this was understood, by donor and recipient, as merely a way of eating.

His real faith was in Nature, and here, perhaps, he was as trustful and credulous as his orthodox neighbors. He believed that ultimately the forces of Nature work for good, and he underestimated her neutrality as between men and fleas. Like Rousseau, and against Luther and Calvin, he believed in the natural goodness of man; or, like other humanists, he was confident that a good education and a good environment would make men good. Like Montaigne, he counseled men to follow Nature, and possibly he looked with impish unconcern on what would then happen to society and civilization. In describing the Abbey of Theleme he seemed to be preaching philosophical anarchism, but it was not so; he would admit to it only those whose good breeding, education, and sense of honor would fit them for the trials of freedom.

His final philosophy was “Pantagruelism.” This must not be confused with the useful weed Pantagruelion, which is merely hemp, and whose final virtue is that it can make appropriate neckties for criminals. Pantagruelism is living like Pantagruel—in a genial and tolerant fellowship with Nature and men, in grateful enjoyment of all the good things of life, and in cheerful acceptance of our inescapable vicissitudes and termination. Once Rabelais defined Pantagruelism as une certaine gaieté d’esprit confite de mépris des choses fortuites—“a certain gaiety of spirit preserved in contempt of the accidents of life” (IV, Prologue). It combined Zeno the Stoic, Diogenes the Cynic, and Epicurus: to bear all natural events with equanimity, to view without offense all natural impulses and operations, and to enjoy every sane pleasure without puritanic inhibitions or theological remorse. Pantagruel “took all things in good part, and interpreted every action in the best sense; he neither vexed nor disquieted himself .... since all the goods that the earth contains... are not of so much worth as that we should for them disturb or disorder our emotions, trouble or perplex our senses or spirits” (III, ii). We must not exaggerate the epicurean element in this philosophy; Rabelais’ litanies to wine were more verbal than alcoholic; they do not quite comport with a contemporary’s description of him as a man of “serene, gracious, and open countenance”;³⁶ the wine he celebrated was the wine of life. And this pretended Lord of Dipsophily put into the mouth of Gargantua a sentence that in ten words phrases the challenge of our own time: “Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul” (II, viii).

France has treasured Rabelais more than any other of her giants of the pen except Montaigne, Molière, and Voltaire. In his own century Etienne Pasquier called him the greatest writer of the age. In the seventeenth century, as manners stiffened under lace and perukes, and classic form became literally de rigueur, he lost some standing in the nation’s memory; but even then Molière, Racine, and La Fontaine were confessedly influenced by him; Fontenelle, La Bruyère, and Mme. de Sévigné loved him, and Pascal appropriated his definition of God. Voltaire began by despising his coarseness, and ended by becoming his devotee. As the French language changed, Rabelais became almost unintelligible to French readers in the nineteenth century; and perhaps he is now more popular in the English-speaking world than in France. For in 1653 and 1693 Sir Thomas Urquhart published a translation of Books One and Three into virile English as exuberant as the original; Peter de Motteux completed the version in 1708; and by the work of these men Gargantua and Pantagruel became an English classic. Swift stole from it as if by right of clergy, and Sterne must have found in it some leaven for his wit. It is among the books that belong to the literature not of a country but of the world.

VI. RONSARD AND THE PLÉIADE

Meanwhile a veritable flood of poetry was pouring over France. We know some 200 French poets in the reigns of Francis and his sons; and these were no vapid mourners in an unheeding wilderness; they were warriors in a literary battle—form vs. content, Ronsard vs. Rabelais—that determined the character of French literature till the Revolution,

A complex ecstasy inspired them. They longed to rival the Greeks and Romans in purity of style and perfection of form, and the Italian sonneteers in grace of speech and imagery; nevertheless they were resolved to write not in Latin, like the scholars who were instructing and exciting them, but in their native French; and at the same time they proposed to mellow and refine that still rough tongue by teaching it words, phrases, constructions, and ideas judiciously pilfered from the classics. The episodic formlessness of Rabelais’ romance made it, in their eyes, a crude vessel of clay hastily turned by hand, unpainted and unglazed. They would add to his earthly vitality the discipline of form carefully designed, and of feeling rationally controlled.

The classical crusade began in the Lyons of Rabelais himself. Maurice Sève spent part of his life locating, as he thought, the tomb of Petrarch’s Laura, then composed 446 stanzas to his own desired Délie; and in the melancholy delicacy of his verse he cleared a path for Ronsard. His ablest competitor in Lyons was a woman, Louise Labé, who, in full armor, fought like another Joan at Perpignan, and then cooled into marriage with a rope-maker who winked in kindly Gallic fashion at her subsidiary amours. She read Greek, Latin, Italian, and Spanish, played the lute alluringly, kept a salon for her rivals and her lovers, and wrote some of the earliest and finest sonnets in the French language. We might judge her fame from her funeral (1566), which, said a chronicler, “was a triumph. She was carried through the city with her face uncovered, and her head crowned with a floral wreath. Death could do nothing to disfigure her, and the people of Lyons covered her grave with flowers and tears.”³⁷ Through these Lyonese poets the Petrarchan style and mood passed up to Paris, and entered the Pléiade.

The very word was a classic echo, for in the Alexandria of the third century before Christ a galaxy of seven poets had likewise been named from the constellation that commemorated the seven mythological daughters of Atlas and Pleïone. Ronsard, brightest star in the French Pléiade, rarely used that term, and his models were Anacreon and Horace rather than Alexandrian Theocritus or Callimachus. It was in 1548, at an inn in Touraine, that he met Joachim du Bellay, and conspired with him to make French poetry classical. They won to their enterprise four other young poets—Antoine de Baïf, Remi Belleau, Étienne Jodelle, and Ponthus de Thyard; and they were joined also by the scholar Jean Dorat, whose lectures on Greek literature at the Collège de France and the Collège de Coqueret fired them with enthusiasm for the lyric singers of ancient Greece. They called themselves La Brigade, and vowed to rescue the French muse from the coarse hands of Jean de Meung and Rabelais, and the loose measures of Villon and Marot. They turned their noses from the riotous language and privy wisdom of Gargantua and Pantagruel; they found no classic restraint in those jumbled verbs and adjectives, those coprophilic ecstasies, no feeling for beauty of form in woman, nature, or art. A hostile critic, seeing them seven, dubbed them La Pléiade. Their victory turned the word into a flag of fame.

In 1549 Du Bellay proclaimed the linguistic program of the Brigade in a Défense et illustration de la langue françoyse. By défense he meant that the French language could be enabled to express all that the classic tongues had uttered; by illustration he meant that French could take on new luster, could brighten and polish itself, by putting aside the rough speech of prevalent French prose, and the ballad, roundel, virelay forms of French poesy, and purify and enrich itself by importing classical terms and studying classical forms, as in Anacreon, Theocritus, Virgil, Horace, and Petrarch. For to the Pléiade Petrarch was already a classic, and the sonnet was the most perfect of all literary forms.

Pierre de Ronsard realized in his verse the ideals that Du Bellay voiced in splendid prose. He came of a recently ennobled family; his father was maître d’hôtel to Francis I, and for some time Pierre lived at the brilliant court. He was successively page to the Dauphin Francis, then to the Madeleine who married James V of Scotland, then écuyer or squire to the future Henry II. He looked forward to military exploits, but at sixteen he began to grow deaf. He sheathed his sword and brandished a pen. He fell in with Virgil by accident, and saw in him a perfection of form and speech as yet unknown in France. Dorat led him on from Latin to Greek, and taught him to read Anacreon, Aeschylus, Pindar, Aristophanes. “O Master!” cried the youth, “why have you hidden these riches from me so long?” ³⁸ At twenty-four he met Du Bellay. Thereafter he divided his time devotedly among song, woman, and wine.

His Odes (1550) completed the lyric revolt. They frankly imitated Horace, but they introduced the ode into French poetry, and stood on their own feet in purity of language, elegance of phrase, precision of form. Two years later, in the 183 sonnets of his Amours, he took Petrarch as his model, and achieved a grace and refinement never surpassed in French poetry. He wrote to be sung, and many of his poems were put to music during his lifetime, some by famous composers like Jannequin and Goudimel. He offered to the women he courted the old invitation to make play while beauty shines, but even on that ancient theme he struck an original note, as when he warned one prudent lass that she would someday regret having lost the opportunity of being seduced by so renowned a bard:

The exaltation of style suited well the court of Catherine de Médicis, who had brought to France an Italian retinue bearing Petrarch in their books. The new poet—hard of hearing but proud of carriage, with martial figure, golden hair and beard, and the face of Praxiteles’ Hermes—became a favorite of Catherine, Henry II, Mary Stuart, even of Elizabeth of England, who, as his seventeenth cousin, sent him a diamond ring. The Greco-Roman mythology of the Pléiade was welcomed; when the poets talked of Olympus the court acknowledged the compliment;³⁹ Henry became Jupiter, Catherine Juno, Diane Diana; and the sculpture of Goujon confirmed the comparison.

When Henry died, Charles IX continued to befriend Ronsard, not quite to good result, for the young monarch wanted an epic about France to match the Aeneid. “I can give death,” wrote the royal simpleton, “but you can give immortality.” ⁴⁰ Ronsard began a Franciade, but found his muse too short of breath for so long a run; soon he gave up the pretense, and returned to lyrics and love. He passed peacefully into old age, protected from the noise of the world, safely conservative in politics and religion, revered by younger minstrels, and respected by all but death. It came in 1585. He was buried at Tours, but Paris gave him an Olympian funeral, in which all the notables of the capital marched to hear a bishop intone an oraison funèbre.

The poets who called him prince produced many volumes of verse, delicate but dead. Most of them, like the master, were pagans who at their ease professed Catholic orthodoxy, and scorned the moralistic Huguenots. However poor these poets might be in pocket, they were aristocrats in pride, sometimes in blood, and they wrote for a circle that had the leisure to relish form. Rabelais returned their hostility by ridiculing their pedantry, their servile imitation of Greek and Roman meters, phrases, and epithets, their thin echoes of ancient themes and Petrarchan conceits and laments. In that conflict between naturalism and classicism the fate of French literature was decided. The poets and tragic dramatists of France would choose the straight and narrow path of perfect structure and chiseled grace; the prose writers would aim to please by force of substance alone. Hence French poetry before the Revolution is untranslatable; the vase of form cannot be shattered and then be refashioned in an alien mold. In nineteenth-century France the two streams met, the half-truths merged, content married form, and French prose became supreme.

VII. WYATT AND SURREY

Not as a flood, but as a river flowing through many outlets to the sea, the influence of Italy passed through France and reached England. The scholarship of one generation inspired the literature of the next; the divine revelation of ancient Greece and Rome became the Bible of the Renaissance. In 1486 the plays of Plautus were staged in Italy, and soon thereafter at the rival courts of Francis I and Henry VIII. In 1508 Bibbiena’s Calandra began the vernacular classic comedy in Italy; in 1552 Jodelle’s Cléopatre captive began the vernacular classic tragedy in France; in 1553 Nicholas Udall produced the first English comedy in classical form. Ralph Roister Doister, said a critic, “smelt of Plautus”;⁴¹ it did; but it smelled of England too, and of that robust humor that Shakespeare would serve to the groundlings at the Elizabethan theaters.

The Italian influence appeared brightest in the poetry of the Tudor reigns. The medieval style survived in such pretty ballads as The Not-browne Mayd (1521); but when the poets who basked in the sun of young Henry VIII took to verse their ideal and model were Petrarch and his Canzoniere. Just a year before Elizabeth’s accession, Richard Tottel, a London printer, published a Miscellany in which the poems of two distinguished courtiers revealed the triumph of Petrarch over Chaucer, of classic form over medieval exuberance. Sir Thomas Wyatt, as a diplomat in the service of the King, made many a trip to France and Italy, and brought back some Italians to help him civilize his friends. Like a good Renaissance cortigiano, he burned his fingers in love’s fire: he was, said tradition, one of Anne Boleyn’s early lovers, and he was briefly imprisoned when she was sent to the Tower.⁴² Meanwhile he translated Petrarch’s sonnets, and was the first to compress English verse into that compact form.

When Wyatt died of a fever at thirty-nine (1542), another romantic figure at Henry’s court, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, caught the lyre from his hands. Surrey chanted the beauties of spring, reproved reluctant lasses, and vowed eternal fidelity to each in turn. He took to nocturnal excesses in London, served a term in jail for challenging to a duel, was summoned to trial for eating meat in Lent, broke some windows with his playful crossbow, was again arrested, again released, and fought gallantly for England in France. Returning, he toyed too audibly with the idea of becoming king of England. He was condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, but was let off with decapitation (1547).

Poetry was an incidental ornament in this strenuous life. Surrey translated some books of the Aeneid, introduced blank verse into English literature, and gave the sonnet the form that Shakespeare was to use. Perhaps foreseeing that the paths of undue glory might lead to the block, he addressed to a Roman poet a wistful idyl of rustic routine and peace:

VIII. HANS SACHS

The mind of Germany, in the century that followed Luther’s Theses, was lost in the hundred years’ debate that prepared the Thirty Years’ War. After 1530 the publication of ancient classics almost ceased; in general, fewer books were issued; they were replaced by a torrent of controversial pamphlets. Thomas Murner, a Franciscan monk with an acid pen, scourged everybody with a chain of booklets about rascals or dolts —Schmelmenzunft (Guild of Rogues), Narrenbeschwörung (Muster of Fools)... all proliferated from Brant’s Narrenschiff.* Many of the fools lashed by Murner were churchmen, and he was at first mistaken for a Lutheran; but then he celebrated Luther as “a savage bloodhound, a senseless, foolish, blasphemous renegade.” ⁴³ Henry VIII sent him £100.

Sebastian Franck was of finer metal. The Reformation found him a priest in Augsburg; he hailed it as a brave and needed revolt, and became a Lutheran minister (1525). Three years later he married Ottilie Beham, whose brothers were Anabaptists; he developed sympathy for this persecuted sect, condemned Lutheran intolerance, was expelled from Strasbourg, and made a living by boiling soap in Ulm. He ridiculed the determination of religious orthodoxy by the German dukes, noting that “if one prince dies and his successor brings in another creed, this at once becomes God’s Word.”⁴⁴ “Mad zeal possesses all men today, that we should believe .... that God is ours alone, that there is no heaven, faith, spirit, Christ, but in our sect.” His own faith was a universalist theism that closed no doors. “My heart is alien to none. I have my brothers among the Turks, Papists, Jews, and all peoples.” ⁴⁵ He aspired to “a free, unsectarian... Christianity, bound to no outer thing,” not even to the Bible.⁴⁶ Shocked by sentiments so unbecoming to his century, Ulm banished him in its turn. He found work as a printer in Basel, and died there in honest penury (1542).

German poetry and drama were now so immersed in theology that they ceased to be arts and became weapons of war. In this strife any jargon, coarseness, and obscenity were held legitimate; except for folk songs and hymns, poetry disappeared in a fusillade of poisoned rhymes. The lavishly staged religious dramas of the fifteenth century passed out of public taste, and were succeeded by popular farces lampooning Luther or the popes.

Now and then a man rose above the fury to see life whole. If Hans Sachs had obeyed the magistrates of Nuremberg he would have remained a shoemaker; for when, without securing the civic imprimatur, he published a rhyming history of the Tower of Babel, they suppressed the book, assured him that poetry was obviously not his line, and bade him stick to his last.⁴⁷ Yet Hans had some rights, for he had passed through the usual stages to become a Meistersinger, and the anomaly of his being a cobbler and a poet fades when we note that the guild of weavers and shoemakers to which he belonged regularly practiced choral song, and gave public concerts thrice a year. For this guild, and at any other opportunity, Sachs wrote songs and plays as assiduously as if he were mouthing nails.

We must think of him not as a great poet, but as a sane and cheerful voice in a century of hate. His basic interest was in simple people, not in geniuses; his plays were almost always about such people; and even God, in these dramas, is a benevolent commoner, who talks like some parson of the neighborhood. While most writers peppered their pages with bitterness, vulgarity, or ribaldry, Hans portrayed and exalted the virtues of affection, duty, piety, marital fidelity, parental and filial love. His first published poems (1516) proposed “to promote the praise and glory of God,” and “to help his fellow creatures to a life of penitence”;⁴⁸ and this religious spirit warmed his writings to the end. He turned half the Bible into rhyme, using Luther’s translation as a text. He saluted Luther as “the Nightingale of Wittenberg,” who would cleanse religion and restore morality.

Now Sachs became the bard of the Reformation, satirizing the faults of Catholics with doggerel tenacity. He wrote plays about rascally monks, and traced the origin of their tribe to the Devil; he issued burlesques and farces which showed, for example, a priest seducing a girl or saying Mass while drunk; in 1558 he published a History in Rhyme of the Popess Joanna—a fable which most Protestant preachers accepted as history. But Hans satirized Lutherans too, denouncing their lives as scandalously contrary to their creed: “With your flesh-eating, your uproars, your abuse of priests, your quarreling, mocking, insulting, and all your other improper behavior, you Lutherans have brought the Gospel into great contempt.”⁵⁰ He joined a hundred others in mourning the commercialism and immorality of the age.

All in all, and discounting Wagner’s idealization, Hans Sachs may typify the bluff and crude but kindly German who, at least in the south, must have been in the majority. We picture him happy and melodious for forty years in his home and his poetry. When his first wife died (1560) he married, at sixty-eight, a pretty woman of twenty-seven, and survived even this trial. There is something to be said for an age and a city in which a cobbler could become a humanist, a poet, and a musician, acquire and use a large library, learn Greek literature and philosophy, write 6,000 poems, and live in reasonable health and happiness to die at the age of eighty-two.

IX. THE IBERIAN MUSE: 1515–55

This was a lively time in the literature of Portugal. The exciting stimulus of the explorations, the spreading wealth of expanding commerce, the influence of Italy, the humanists at Coimbra and Lisbon, the patronage of a cultivated court, joined in an efflorescence that would soon culminate in the Lusiads (1572) of Camoëns. A merrv battle raged between the Eschola Velha—Old School—of Gil Vicente, who cherished native themes and forms, and Os Quinhentistas—The Men of the Fifteenth (our Sixteenth) Century—who followed Sá de Miranda in enthusiasm for Italian and classic modes and styles. For thirty-four years (1502–36) Gil Vicente, “the Portuguese Shakespeare,” dominated the theater with his simple autos, or acts; the court smiled upon him, and expected him to celebrate every royal event with a play; and when the king was quarreling with the pope Gil was allowed to satirize the papacy with such freedom that Aleander, seeing one of Vicente’s plays in Brussels, “thought I was in mid-Saxony listening to Luther.”⁵¹ The fertile dramatist wrote sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in Portuguese, sometimes in both, with scraps of Italian and French, Church Latin and peasant slang, thrown in. Often the action of the piece was interrupted, as in Shakespeare, with lyrics that crept into the hearts of the people. Like Shakespeare, Gil was actor as well as playwright; he was stage manager as well, and directed the settings. For good measure he was one of the best goldsmiths of the age.

In 1524 Francisco Sá de Miranda returned from a six years’ stay in Italy, and brought with him the classical fever of the Renaissance. Like Ronsard and the Pléiade in France, like Spenser and Sidney in England, he proposed to dignify the national literature by modeling its subjects, meters, and style on classical lines; like Joachim du Bellay, he included Petrarch among the classics, and introduced the sonnet to his countrymen; like Jodelle he wrote the first classical tragedy in his native tongue (1550); and he had already (1527) written the first Portuguese prose comedy in classic form. His friend Bernardim Ribeiro composed bucolic poetry in the style of Virgil, and lived a tragedy in the manner of Tasso: he made such a stir with his passion for a lady of the court that he was banished; he was forgiven and restored to royal favor, and died insane (1552).

A school of colorful historians recorded the triumphs of the explorers. Caspar Correa went out to India, rose to be one of Albuquerque’s secretaries, denounced official corruption, and was murdered in Malacca in 1565. Amid this active life he wrote in eight volumes what he called “a brief summary” of the Portuguese conquest of India (Lendas da India), full of the color of that expansive era. Fernäo Lopes de Castanheda traveled for half a lifetime in the East, and labored for twenty years on his Historia do descobrimento e conquista da India pelos Portuguezes. Joao de Barros served in several administrative capacities at India House in Lisbon for forty years, and disgraced his predecessors by amassing no fortune. He had access to all the archives, and gathered them into a history which he called simply Asia, but which acquired the name of Decades because three of its four huge volumes covered periods of some ten years each. In order, accuracy, and clarity it bears comparison with any contemporary historical composition except the works of Machiavelli and Guicciardini. The proud nation would have rejected the exceptions, and gave Barros the title of “the Portuguese Livy.”

The Castilian tongue had now become the literary language of Spain. Galician, Valencian, Catalonian, Andalusian dialects survived in the speech of the people, and Galician became Portuguese; but the use of Castilian as the language of state and Church under Ferdinand, Isabella, and Ximenes gave that dialect an insuperable prestige, and from their time to ours its masculine sonority has carried the literature of Spain. An infatuation with language appeared in some writers of this age. Antonio de Guevara set an example of linguistic conceits and rhetorical flourishes, and the translation of his Reloj de principes (Dial of Princes, 1529) by Lord Berners helped to mold the euphuism of John Lyly’s Euphues, and the silly wordplay of Shakespeare’s early comedies.

Spanish literature sang of religion, love, and war. The passion for romances of chivalry reached such a height that in 1555 the Cortes recommended that they be prohibited by law; such a decree was actually issued in Spanish America; had it been enforced in Spain we might have missed Don Quixote. One of the romances spared by the curate in the purification of the Knight’s library was the Diana enamorata (1542) of Jorge de Montemayor; it imitated the Arcadia (1504) of the Spanish-Italian poet Sannazaro, and was itself imitated by Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590). Montemayor’s prose-and-poetry romance was one of a thousand instances of Italian influence on Spanish literature; here again the conquered conquered the conquerors. Juan Boscan translated Castiglione’s Cortigiano into prose quite worthy of the original, and accepted the suggestion of the Venetian poet Navagero to popularize the sonnet form in Spain.

His friend Garcilaso de la Vega almost at once brought the form to perfection in Castilian. Like so many Spanish writers of this period, he came of high lineage; his father was ambassador of Ferdinand and Isabella at Rome. Born at Toledo in 1503, Garcilaso was early dedicated to arms. In 1532 he distinguished himself in the repulse of the Turks from Vienna; in 1535 he was twice severely wounded in the siege of Tunis; a few months later he shared in Charles V’s futile campaign in Provence. At Fréjus he volunteered to lead an attack upon an obstructive castle; he was the first to mount the wall; he received a blow on the head from which he died a few days later, aged thirty-three. One of the thirty-seven sonnets which he bequeathed to his friend Boscan struck a note that has echoed in every war:

He could not see, but a thousand books commemorated him fondly. Historians recorded his death among the leading events of the time. His poems were printed in handy volumes which were carried in the pockets of Spanish soldiers into a dozen lands. Spanish lutenists put his lyrics to music as madrigals for the vihuela, and dramatists turned his eclogues into plays.

The Spanish drama marked time, and could not know that it would soon rival the Elizabethan. One-act comedies, farcical satires, or episodes from popular romances were performed by strolling players in a public square or the corrale—yard—of an inn, sometimes at a princely seat or royal court. Lope de Rueda, who succeeded Gil Vicente as chief provider of autos for such troupes, made his fame—and gave us a word—with his bobos, clowns.

Historians abounded. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo was appointed historiographer of the New World by Charles V, and acquitted himself indifferently well with a voluminous and ill-ordered Historia general y natural de las Indias Occidentales (1535). During forty years of residence in Spanish America he grew rich from mining gold, and he resented the Brevisima relacion de la destruycion de las Indias (1539 f.), in which Bartolomé de las Casas exposed the merciless exploitation of native slave labor in the American mines. Las Casas sailed with Columbus in 1502, became Bishop of Chiapa in Mexico, and gave nearly all his life to the cause of the Indians. In Memorials addressed to the Spanish government he described the rapidity with which the natives were dying under the arduous conditions of work imposed upon them by the settlers. The Indians had been accustomed by their warm climate and simple diet to only casual labor; they had not mined gold, but had been content to derive it from the surface of the earth or the beds of shallow streams, and used it only as an ornament. Las Casas calculated that the native population of the “Indies” had been reduced from 12,000,000 (doubtless too high a guess) to 14,000 in thirty-eight years.⁵³ Dominican and Jesuit missionaries joined with Las Casas in protesting against Indian slavery,⁵⁴ and Isabella repeatedly denounced it.⁵⁵ Ferdinand and Ximenes prescribed semi-humane conditions for the conscription of Indian labor,⁵⁶ but while these gentlemen were engrossed in European politics their instructions for the treatment of the natives were mostly ignored.

A minor debate concerned the conquest of Mexico. Francisco López de Gómara gave a very Cortesian account of that rape; Bernal Díaz del Castillo, in protest, composed (1568 f.) his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, which, while giving due praise to Cortes, condemned him for taking all the honors and profits of the conquest, leaving little for such brave soldiers as Bernal. It is a fascinating book, full of the lust of action, the joy of victory, and honest amazement at the wealth and splendor of Aztec Mexico. “When I beheld the scenes that were around me, I thought within myself that this was the garden of the world.” And then he adds, “All is destroyed.”⁵⁷

The most mature Spanish history and the most famous Spanish novel of this period have been attributed to the same man. Diego Hurtado de Mendoza was born at Granada some eleven years after its conquest by Ferdinand; his father had won laurels in the siege, and had been made governor of the city after its fall. Educated at Salamanca, Bologna, and Padua, Mendoza acquired a wide culture in Latin, Greek, and Arabic, in philosophy and law; he collected classic texts with the zeal of a Renaissance prince; and when Suleiman the Magnificent bade him name his reward for certain good offices he had performed for the Porte, he asked only for some Greek manuscripts. He rose to high place in the diplomatic service of Charles V at Venice, Rome, and the Council of Trent. Rebuked by Paul III for conveying some harsh message from Charles to the Pope, he answered with all the pride of a Spanish grandee: “I am a cavalier, my father was one before me, and as such it is my duty to fulfill the commands of my royal master, without any fear of your Holiness, so long as I observe due reverence to the vicegerent of Christ. I am minister to the King of Spain .... safe, as his representative, even from your Holiness’s displeasure.”⁵⁸

Recent research questions Mendoza’s authorship of the first picaresque novel in European literature—The Life and Adventures of Lazarillo de Tormes. Though not printed till 1553, it had probably been written many years before. That a scion of a family only less noble than the king’s should make a thief his hero would be startling; more so that a man originally intended for the priesthood should include in his story such sharp satires of the clergy that the Inquisition forbade any further printing of the book until it had been expurgated of all offense.⁵⁹ Lazarillo* is a waif who, as guide to a blind beggar, acquires the tricks of petty larceny, and rises to higher crimes as servant to a priest, a friar, a chaplain, a bailiff, a seller of indulgences. Even the worldly wise young thief is impressed with some of the marvels arranged by the indulgence peddler in promoting his wares. “I must confess that I, amongst many others, was deceived at the time, and thought my master a miracle of sanctity.” ⁶⁰ This rollicking narrative set the gusto picaresco, or “style of the rogue,” in fiction; it evoked innumerable imitations, culminating in the most renowned of picaresque romances, the Gil Bias (1715–35) of Alain Lesage.

Exiled from the court of Philip II for drawing his sword in an argument, Mendoza retired to Granada, composed incidental verses too free to be printed during his lifetime, and recounted the Moorish revolt of 1568–70 in an Historia de la guerra de Granada so impartial, so just to the Moors, that this too could not find a publisher, and saw print only in 1610, and then only in part. Mendoza took Sallust for his model, rivaled him, and stole a theme or two from Tacitus; but all in all, this was the first Spanish work that advanced beyond mere chronicle or propaganda to factual history interpreted with philosophical grasp and presented with literary art. Mendoza died in 1575, aged seventy-two. He was one of the most complete personalities of a time rich in complete men.

Always, in these hurried pages, conscience runs a race with time, and warns the hurrying pen that, like the hasty traveler, it is but scratching surfaces. How many publishers, teachers, scholars, patrons, poets, romancers, and reckless rebels labored for half a century to produce the literature that here has been so narrowly confined, so many masterpieces unnamed, nations ignored, once immortal geniuses slighted with a line! It cannot be helped. The ink runs dry; and while it lasts it must be enough if from its scratches and splashes some hazy picture unfolds of men and women resting a while from theology and war, loving the forms of beauty as well as the mirages of truth and power, and building, carving, painting words until thought finds an art to clothe it, wisdom and music merge, and literature arises to let a nation speak, to let an age pour its spirit into a mold so fondly fashioned that time itself will cherish’ and carry it down tnrough a thousand catastrophes as an heirloom of the race.