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Updated: June 18, 2025
The Sorbonne preserves Epimenides's skin written over with mysterious letters, as an oracle which men may only see after having borne the title of Magister noster for fifteen years. It is not a far cry from caricatures like these to the Sorbonistres and the Barbouillamenta Scoti of Rabelais.
In order perfectly to realize the artistic perfection of Erasmus's book we should compare it with Rabelais. 'Without me', says Folly, 'the world cannot exist for a moment.
Rabelais is not Rabelais, just as life is not life, without it. It is indeed the way of "salvation" for certain neurotic natures. Has that been properly understood? There are people who suffer frightfully and they are often rare natures, too, though they are sometimes very vicious from their loathing of the excremental side of life. Swift was one of these.
Rabelais speaks of the rings Gargantua wore because his father desired him to “renew that ancient mark of nobility.” On the forefinger of his left hand he had a gold ring, set with a large carbuncle; and on the middle finger one of mixed metal, then usually made by alchemists.
It is the land of Rabelais, of Descartes, of Balzac, of good books and good company, as well as good dinners and good houses. George Sand has somewhere a charm- ing passage about the mildness, the convenient quality, of the physical conditions of central France, "son climat souple et chaud, ses pluies abondantes et courtes."
Rabelais probably translated or directly imitated it. He changed the scene; there was no giuooco della pugna in France. He transferred to a drinking-bout this clatter of exclamations which go off by themselves, which cross each other and get no answer. He made a wonderful thing of it.
Little they know of Rabelais who call him a lewd buffoon the profanest of mountebanks. He was one of those rare spirits that redeem humanity. To open his book though the steam of the grossness of it rises to Heaven is to touch the divine fingers the fingers that heal the world.
He does not reproduce the words, but, like the Italian, he revels in drinking scenes, junkettings, gormandizing, battles, scuffles, wounds and corpses, magic, witches, speeches, repeated enumerations, lengthiness, and a solemnly minute precision of impossible dates and numbers. The atmosphere, the tone, the methods are the same, and to know Rabelais well, you must know Folengo well too.
Addison has given the pedigree of humor: the union of truth and goodness produces wit; that of wit with wrath produces humor. We should say that this was rather a pedigree of satire. For what trace of wrath is there in the humor of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Fielding, or Thackeray? The absence of wrath is the characteristic of all of them. Ben Jonson says that
What I have said of Milton, I would say of Dante, or Ariosto, of Petrarch, and of Tasso; nor less would I say it of Boccaccio and Chaucer, of Camoens and Spenser, of Rabelais and of Cervantes, of Gil Blas and the Vicar of Wakefield, of Byron and of Shelley, of Goethe and of Schiller.
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