1. TALES
Nothing is more characteristic of the Renaissance than the abundance of tales. Printed in large collections, they evidently answered a steady demand; and they furnished many plots for the Elizabethan stage. Often significant of Renaissance taste in stories, they are generally less interesting in narrative art.
(a) Bandello
Bandello dedicates each of his 224 novelle to some friend in a prefatory letter which usually represents it as actually told in his hearing by a person whom he names (Le quattro parti de le novelle del Bandello riprodotte sulle antiche stampe di Lucca [1554] e di Lione [1573] a cura di Gustavo Balsamo-Crivelli, Turin, 1910). The stories are further documented by proper names; or Bandello tells us that he has substituted fictitious ones to shield well-known families. Novella 16, for instance, of Part I “happened last winter in this city of Mantua.” Though this and many others are conventional fabliaux or stock friar tales, they are all alike told for their news value, as striking or exciting. Bandello seems more intent on finding good stories than on making stories good. Hence he is more significant of the appetite and taste of his time than as a story-teller.
The Elizabethans, who often hunted in his collection, often through French or English translations, created from some of his persons characters as convincing as Juliet and the Duchess of Malfi; but characterization rarely detains Bandello himself. Since he may be content with a mere clever retort or a dirty trick, many of his tales are brief, and many of these are mere anecdote. Even so the obligatory introduction summarizing the situation may occupy a fourth, or even a third; and the rehearsal of the facts may suffice without the salience that would give them narrative interpretation.
Novella 9 of Part I in ten pages exhibits a husband so jealous as to violate the confessional and thereupon murder his wife. First displaying the luxury of Milan, the scene of the story, and even pausing to comment on the Milanese dialect, it proceeds to slow exposition of the situation, with dialogue of minor persons not active in the story, and with lingering over minor details. The only scene developed before our eyes is the violated confession. Thus bungled, the ugly story becomes more tedious than tragic.
Lack of salience, though not often so flagrant, is habitual. Without salience, without sufficient motivation, Bandello’s tales are oftener a mere series of events than a sequence of scenes. They are not consistently developed by action. Instead of revealing themselves progressively before our eyes, his persons make speeches or even think aloud. Their speeches are far oftener oratory than narrative dialogue. Indeed, they may repeat what has been already thought or done. The very inequality in the collection betrays Bandello’s weakness in narrative composition. His ornate style is fairly constant in elegant fluency; but his composition is hit or miss. He has no steady command of story management.
Nor is his art sure in the eighteen longer tales. Of these, twelve (Part I. 5, 17, 21, 34, 45, 49; Part II. 24, 28, 36, 40, 41, 44), averaging about twenty-three pages, have essentially the same slack composition as the shorter tales. The remaining six deserve more attention.
I. 2 (26 pages) Ariobarzanes, proud and generous courtier, endured from Artaxerxes a series of humiliations, and emerged triumphant. The tale begins with the posing of a question: is the life of a courtier essentially liberality and courtesy, or obligation and debt? The series of trials is cumulative enough to give a certain sequence; but that it involved a struggle against detraction is not disclosed until the final oration, and thus does not operate as motivation.
I. 15 (23 pages) Two clever wives conspired to outwit the intrigues of their husbands, delivered them from prison, and reconciled them to each other. Here are complication and solution, but through a plot as artificial as it is ingenious. Though the detail is livelier, the action is slow. It halts in the middle; and the dénouement comes finally through a long oration rehearsing the whole story in court. The only characterization is of a third lady in the sub-plot.
I. 22 (25 pages) Timbreo, betrothed to Fenicia, repudiated her through a dastardly trick of his rival. The lady, who was supposed to be dead of shame, hid herself in a villa. The rival repenting and confessing, both men vowed to set her name right. At the request of her father marrying “Lucilla,” Timbreo found her to be Fenicia. The rival married a sister, and the King adorned the wedding with royal festivities, dowries for the brides, and posts for the men. Here again are complication and solution. Though some of the scenes are realized, there is not that salience of critical situations which leads a narrative sequence onward. The royal wedding at the end, for instance, has as much space as the repudiation. Fenicia is presented with some hints of characterization.
I. 27 (27 pages) Don Diego and Ginevra, two very young country gentlefolk, falling in love utterly at sight, the girl turned so violently jealous as to deny all attempts at reconciliation; and the boy in despair went far away to end his days as a hermit in a cave. An old friend of both families, finding his retreat, reasoned with him in vain, but roused his hope by promising to move the girl. The girl was so far from being moved that she planned to elope with an adventurer. The old friend frustrated this and, in spite of the girl’s fury, carried her off toward the boy’s cave. Her pride remaining quite obstinate, the old friend finally lost patience and told her to go her own foolish way; but the boy, coming to meet them, showed so deep and unselfish devotion that she fell on his neck. This tale, which Bandello had from Spain, has not only complication and solution, but, in spite of some unnecessary interruption, an engaging narrative progress. Besides the constant motivation of the persons’ youth, there is definite characterization of the old friend, of the boy, and especially of the girl. No other tale of the collection equals this in narrative composition.
II. 9 (35 Pages) The now familiar tale of Romeo and Juliet is told straight through with little salience and with little characterization.
II. 37 (48 pages) Edward III, suing a lady long in vain, at last had to marry her. The lady’s first high-spirited and intelligent response has some distinct characterization; but the situation is repeated again and again with cumulative urgency until this longest of the tales becomes tedious.
Even these better longer tales, then, are quite unequal in story management. Bandello seems to take his stories as he finds them. His literary fiction of writing a story that he has heard seems essentially true in that sense. As he has not discerned in Boccaccio the various achievement of a narrative artist, so he does not see what makes his own best tales good, much less shape others accordingly. He is not creative.
(b) Marguerite de Navarre
The collection of tales made by Marguerite de Navarre, probably with her literary household, and now known as the Heptameron, was first printed as Les Amants fortunés in 1558. Obviously patterned on Boccaccio’s Decameron, it uses the literary frame of an aristocratic house party more realistically. The dialogue in comment on the stories is developed to characterize each person. Thus the collection is made a series of cases (exempla) for social comment. But the tales themselves are inferior. Told simply, without much flavor, “for fear” says the preface, “that beauty of style might prejudice historical truth,” they are usually lucid, somewhat conversational, often lax. There is no mastery of narrative movement. The steadfast purity of the wife is, indeed, a constant motivation in II. 3; but the few salient scenes hardly constitute a sequence. The mere series of events in III. 1 makes eighteen pages tedious and ends in mere reversal. The dialogue of the retold Châtelaine de Vergi (VII. 10; 20 pages) is oftener oratory than narrative. The longest of the tales (I. 10; 32 pages), a romance covering years, has so little salience that it might as well have ended earlier. Most of the tales are either anecdote or fabliau of about seven pages. Put forward as actual, they are sometimes stock medieval tales, especially of the stupidity or brutality of friars, and where they appear to narrate facts, sometimes merely report them without realizing any moment as a scene. Boccaccio, too, has simple anecdotes, in which all the charm is of style; he too prolongs some of his stories without salience; but among his many experiments are five novelle (I. 4, II. 1 and 2, VIII. 8, IX. 6) intensified by their sequence. Far from noticing this difference, the writers of the Heptameron show little awareness of narrative composition. The accompaniment of discussion is better managed than the stories themselves.
(c) Giraldi Cinthio
The collection Hecatommithi (hundred fables) of Giovan-Battista Giraldi, known as Giraldi Cinthio,[69] accumulated through years. Begun apparently in his young manhood, it had reached seventy tales in 1560,[70] was published in 1565, and reprinted in 1566, 1574, 1580, and 1584.[71] (Hecatommithi, ouero cento nouelle, di M. Giovanbattista Giraldi Cinthio, nobile ferrarese: nelle quali, oltre le diletteuole materie, si conoscano moralità vtilissime a gli huomini per il benviuere, & per destare altresi l’intelletto alla sagacità; potendosi da esse con facilità apprendere il vero modo di scriuere toscano ... 4th edition, Venice, 1580.) Thus the moralizing suggestion of the title is confirmed by the sub-title. Here are offered one hundred—indeed, with the preliminary decade, one hundred and ten—exempla. Nor is the collection made less formidable by being classified: ten tales to exhibit the superiority of wedded love, ten to show the risks of dealing with courtesans, ten on infidelity, ten on chivalry, etc. Nevertheless the tales are not all moralities, and in some the moral is not even clear; for here once more are both fabliaux and anecdotes. The frame is once more Boccaccio’s. Young aristocrats, escaped from the sack of Rome (1527), board ship and on a slow cruise entertain one another with tales. The style, though sometimes slack and diffuse, is not dilated for decoration. There is a leisurely introduction; each tale is prefaced by comment on the preceding; and each decade has an epilogue of discussion and verse. The whole ends with a roll of fame commemorating some hundred and fifty men of letters in terza rima, and adding a list of eminent ladies.
Running generally from three pages to ten, the tales, even the few that run to fourteen, remain scenario. II. ii. recounts in fourteen pages a Persian tale of Oronte and Orbecche. V. x. tells at the same length how the virtuous wife of Filogamo, shipwrecked, resisted the Prince of Satalia, and that he was thereupon expelled. In X. viii two quarreling nobles come to blows, are imprisoned by King Louis, and subsequently reconciled by the courtesy of one. Even the tale of the Moorish captain, which has hardly more than eight pages, is not developed narratively. Looking back to it from Othello, one distinguishes the motivation discerned by Shakspere; but in Giraldi’s tale this is either generalized or merely hinted; it does not conduct the narrative.
The composition, then, is generally scenario. If the dialogue sometimes rises to narrative economy, it also becomes sometimes mere oration. Character, often merely typical, rarely suffices for motivation. Unnecessary spreading of the time-lapse betrays a carelessness of focus. There is no habit either of realizing scenes concretely in action, or of conducting them in a sequence.
A typical example is I. v. Pisti, condemned in Venice for killing a man that had sought to debauch his wife, escaped to Ferrara and was banned. The situation is first propounded, and then recounted by his wife. She and his daughter being left in poverty, he wrote anxiously, urging them to maintain their honor. He was betrayed into captivity by two supposed friends, that their father, who was also under Venice ban, might by delivering him up reinstate himself. The father, refusing to take advantage of their treachery, liberated Pisti on condition that he forgive them. Pisti, returning secretly to Venice, bade his wife denounce him to the Signory and claim the reward for his head. She refused in an oration so fervent as to attract the guard, who thereupon arrested him. Going with him to court, she so told the whole story that the Signory pardoned Pisti, restored his property, gave the reward to his daughter for dowry, and even pardoned his false friends’ father. The motivation of an ingenious complication and solution is all here—in the abstract. But the tale in eight pages merely sums up or orates instead of realizing it in scenes. The novella thus remains an exemplum of generosity, instead of becoming a story of Pisti’s wife.
Thus Giraldi, seeking with Bandello news interest and therefore melodrama, proposing an edification often quite dubious, ignored the deeper narrative values. Reporter, manipulator, moralizer, he is not a creator.
(d) Belleforest, Painter, and Fenton
The collections of tales, then, show Renaissance story-telling as a regression from the fourteenth century. The narrative art of Boccaccio, to say nothing of Chaucer, has suffered eclipse. Far from being advanced, it is not even discerned. Renaissance story-telling is generally as inferior as it is abundant. The few well managed stories stand out in sharp relief against the mass of convention and of bungling. But this is not all. Bandello’s tales as rendered (1566-1576) in French by Belleforest and in English through him by Painter and Fenton, are not merely translated; they are dilated and decorated to the point of being actually obscured as stories. Bandello’s forty-ninth tale, already doubled by Belleforest, is trebled in Fenton’s first. Livio and Camilla, told by Bandello in 1,500 words, has nearly 11,000 in Belleforest’s twenty-second, and 16,731 in Fenton’s second. The dilation is by show-pieces of description, by oratory, by moralizing, by allusions to classical mythology and to the “natural” history derived from Pliny, and by those balanced iterations known generically in English as euphuism. Belleforest in his preface (1568) begs the reader’s pardon for not “subjecting” himself to the style of Bandello. “I have made a point,” he says, “of recasting it.” His Continuation informs the Duc d’Orléans in a dedication that he has “enriched with maxims, stories, harangues, and epistles.” So Painter must pause to describe.
There might be seene also a certain sharpe and rude situation of craggy and vnfruictful rocks, which notwithstanding yelded some pleasure to the Eyes to see theym tapissed with a pale moasie greene, which disposed into a frizeled guise made the place pleasaunt and the rock soft according to the fashion of a couerture. There was also a very fayre and wide Caue, which liked him well, compassed round about with Firre trees, Pine apples, Cipres, and Trees distilling a certayne Rosen or Gumme, towards the bottom whereof, in the way downe to the valley, a man might haue viewed a passing company of Ewe trees, Poplers of all sortes, and Maple trees, the Leaues whereof fell into a Lake or Pond, which came by certaune smal gutters into a fresh and very cleare fountayne right agaynst that Caue. The knight viewing the auncientry and excellency of the place, deliberated by and by to plant there the siege of his abode for performing of his penaunce and life (Vol. III, p. 222, of the 1890 reprint).
Description for itself, without function, and even more plainly the other habitual means of decoration, show not only the general habit of dilation, but also the general carelessness of narrative values. So is smothered even the Spanish tale of Don Diego and Ginevra,[72] which Bandello had the wit, or the luck, to repeat in its original sequence. Evidently these versions were looking not to composition, not to the conduct of the story, but only to style.
(e) Pettie, Lyly, and Greene
William Pettie’s A Petite Pallace of Pettie His Pleasure, containing many pretie histories by him set forth in comely colours and most delightfully discoursed (1576) iterates the medieval balance figures and reënforces them with alliteration. Thus his rendering of the tale of Scylla and Minos, after an expository summary and due moralizing, presents:
one Nisus, who had to daughter a damsel named Scilla, a proper sweet wench, in goodliness a goddess, in shape Venus herself, in shew a saint, in perfection of person peerless, but in deeds a dainty dame, in manners a merciless maid, and in works a wilful wench.... But to paint her out more plainly, she was more coy than comely, more fine than well-favoured, more lofty than lovely, more proud than proper, more precise than pure.
If there be any place for such style, surely it is not in story. The story is hardly told; it is decorated, moralized, generalized without narrative salience. The decoration thus abused by Pettie became a vogue through John Lyly (1553?-1606). His Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and His England (1580) made the schemata of sophistic, especially isocolon, parison, and paromoion,[73] a main item in the curious style called euphuism.
Come therefore to me, all ye lovers that have been deceived by fancy, the glass of pestilence, or deluded by women, the gate to perdition; be as earnest to seek a medicine as you were eager to run into a mischief. The earth bringeth forth as well endive to delight the people as hemlock to endanger the patient, as well the rose to distil as the nettle to sting, as well the bee to give honey as the spider to yield poison (Croll’s ed., p. 93).
Yet if thou be so weak, being bewitched with their wiles, that thou hast neither will to eschew nor wit to avoid their company, if thou be either so wicked that thou wilt not or so wedded that thou canst not abstain from their glances, yet at the least dissemble thy grief. If thou be as hot as the mount Aetna, feign thyself as cold as the hill Caucasus, carry two faces in one hood, cover thy flaming fancy with feigned ashes, show thyself sound when thou art rotten, let thy hue be merry when thy heart is melancholy, bear a pleasant countenance with pined conscience, a painted sheath with leaden dagger (Ibid., p. 104).
The tiresome heaping of balances and allusions so cumbers narrative that these books keep little semblance of story.
Nevertheless the habit was continued in the longer English tales, sometimes called novels, of the 1580’s and 90’s. Greene’s Carde of Fancie (1584-1587) decorates emotion with allusion and supplies balances by handfuls.
He manfullie marcht on towards her, and was as hastilie incountred by Castania, who embracing Gwydonius in her armes, welcommed him with this salutation.
As the whale, Gwydonius, maketh alwaies signe of great joye at the sight of the fishe called Talpa Marina, as the Hinde greatlie delighteth to see the Leopard, as the Lion fawneth at the view of the Unicorne, and as he which drinketh of the Fountaine Hipenis in Scithia feeleth his mind so drowned in delight that no griefe, though never so great, is able to assuage it, so, Gwydonius, I conceive such surpassing pleasure in thy presence, and such heavenlie felicitie in the sight of thy perfection, that no miserie though never so monstrous, is able to amaze me, no dolour though never so direfull is able to daunt me, nor no mishap though never so perillous is able to make me sinke in sorrow, as long as I injoy thy presence, which I count a soveraine preservative against all carefull calamities.
It is not necessary to regard this as quite serious to see that balanced iteration and learned allusion had become epidemic, and that both arise from the habit of dilation. For even plain Thomas Deloney must decorate his clothier Jack of Newbury (1597) with myth and marvel. That such perversion of narrative, owing something now and then, perhaps, to the Hypnerotomachia or to Apuleius, is imitated more specifically from the Greek Romances is plainest in Sidney’s Arcadia.[74] It is one of the clearest instances of Renaissance Alexandrianism.
2. RABELAIS
Émile Egger was once moved to protest: “The actual French usage of 1530 shows nowhere in either speech or writing the diction of Rabelais.”[75] Every student of Rabelais will recognize this observation as a lead. It means much more than the truisms that every eminent author has his own style, and that study of style is the most constantly fruitful study of literature. It means that Rabelais makes the special demand of compelling attention always to his style. His vocabulary[76] ranges from Latinizing to dialect and jargon; his word-play from reckless puns to various iteration; his cadences from the clausula of Cicero to mere lists. His volubility flashes with picturesque concreteness. He is popular, yes, but rarely in being simple, usually in talking with his readers and in stimulating them by extravagance. The fifteenth-century extravagance of Skelton, showing a similar volubility, has less display. Rabelais will not let us ever forget his style.
Pantagruel rencontra un escolier tout joliet.... “Mon amy, dond viens tu à ceste heure?” L’escolier luy respondit: “De l’alme, inclyte, et celebre academie que l’on vocite Lutece.” “Q’est ce à dire?” dist Pantagruel à un de ses gens. “C’est,” respondit il, “de Paris.” “Tu viens donc de Paris,” dit il. “Et à quoy passez vous le temps, vous autres estudiants audit Paris?” Respondit l’escolier: “Nous transfretons la Sequane au dilucule et crepuscule, nous deambulons par les compites et quadrivies de l’urbe, nous despumons la verbocination latiale, et comme verisimiles amorabonds captons la benevolence de l’omnijuge, omniforme, et omnigene sexe feminin.... Et si par forte fortune y a rarité ou penurie de pecune en nos marsupies, et soient exhaustes de metal ferruginé, pour l’escot nous dimittons nos codices et vestes oppigncrées, prestolans les tabellaires à venirdes penates et lares patriotiques.” A quoy Pantagruel dist “Quel diable de langage est cecy? Par dieu, tu es quelque heretique.” “Segnor no,” dist l’escolier; “car libentissimement des ce qu’illucesce quelque minutule lesche de jour, je demigre en quelqu’un de ces tant bien architectés monstiers, et là, me irrorant de belle eau lustrale, grignotte d’un transon de quelque missique precation de nos sacrificules. Et submirmillant mes precules horaires, elue et absterge mon anime de ses inquinamens nocturnes. Je revere les olympicoles. Je venere latrialement le supernel astripotens.” Je dilige et redame mes proximes. Je serve les prescrits decalogiques, et selon la facultatule de mes vires n’en discede le late unguicule.... “Et bren, bren,” dist Pantagruel, “Qu’est ce que veult dire ce fol? Je croy qu’il nous forge icy quelque langage diabolique, et qu’il nous charme comme enchanteur.” A quoy dist un de ces gens: “Seigneur, sans nul doubte ce gallant veult contrefaire la langue des Parisiens; mais il ne fait que escorcher le latin, et cuide ainsi pindariser; et luy semble bien qu’il est quelque grand orateur en françois parce qu’il dedaigne l’usance commun de parler.” A quoy dist Pantagruel, “Est il vray?” L’escolier respondit: “Segnor missayre, mon genie n’est point apte nate à ce que dit ce flagitiose nebulon, pour escorier la cuticule de nostre vernacule gallique; mais vice-versement je gnave, opere, et par veles et rames je me enite de le locupleter de la redondance latinicome.” “Par dieu,” dit Pantagruel, “je vous apprendray à parler” (II. vi).
The parody is of that Latinizing “enrichment” of the vernacular which was a wide preoccupation and the special creed of the Pléiade. Rabelais, as Erasmus, ridicules its paganizing. The larger satire is the rendering of the conventions of student wildness in an iterative learned jargon. For the iteration is not careless. Thus he prolongs a mere play upon the word Sorbonne:
... ces marauds de sophistes, sorbillans, sorbonagres, sorbinigenes, sorbonicoles, sorboniformes, sorbonisecques, niborcisans (II. xviii).
Thus he prolongs a parody of legal citations.
Ayant bien veu, reveu, leu, releu, paperassé, et feuilleté les complainctes, adjournemens, comparitions, commissions, informations, avant procedés, productions, allegations, intenditz, contredits, requestes, enquestes, repliques, dupliques, tripliques, escritures, reproches, griefz, salvations, recollements, confrontations, acarations, libelles, apostoles, lettres royaulx, compulsoires, declinatoires, anticipatoires, evocations, envoyz, renvoyz, conclusions, fins de non proceder, apoinctemens, reliefz, confessions, exploictz, et autres telles dragées et espiceries d’une part et d’autre, comme doibt faire le bon juge selon ce qu’en a not. spec. de ordinario § 3 et tit. de offic. omn. jud. § fin. et de rescript. praesentat., § 1 (III. xxxix).
Thus the resolution of Diogenes to do his part in the defense of Corinth lets Rabelais stop to amplify the commonplaces of a siege.
When Philip threatened siege, the Corinthians prepared for defense. Some from the fields to the fortresses brought household goods, cattle, wine, food, and necessary munitions. Others repaired walls, raised bastions ... [and so through a series of 25 predicates]. Some polished corselets [and so through another catalogue of particulars]. Diogenes girt his loins, rolled up his sleeves, gave his manuscripts to the charge of an old friend [and so through another series of details].... “Icy beuvant je delibere, je discours, je resouldz et concluds. Aprés l’epilogue je ris, j’escris, je compose, je boy. Ennius beuvant escrivoit, escrivant beuvoit. Eschylus (si à Plutarche foy avez in Symposiacis) beuvoit composant, beauvant composait. Homere jamais n’escrivit à jeun. Caton jamais n’escrivit qu’aprés boire.” Thus the resolution gives occasion for eight pages. (Prologue to Tiers Livre.) As here, the amplification is often oratorical.
This various diffuseness, parody of Latinizing, legal iteration, oratorical amplitude, is gift of gab, oral expansiveness, passion for words; it is satire; and ultimately it is search for a reading public. Taking his cue from the almanacs and giant stories, Rabelais was exploiting the grotesque. He was clever enough to see that he could amuse not only the bon bourgeois who bought almanacs, but also those who had some pretensions to studies. Both, as Ariosto knew, found relaxation in the grotesque. The latter would appreciate technical jargon more; but the former would catch enough of its satire and get some amusement from its very strangeness. Both he could feed also with the marvels of voyages. For the grotesque is an adult fairyland.
Rabelais takes us in and out of it, back and forth. Though the work is largely narrative, it is not progressive story. The persons, often vividly realized at a given moment, are not advancing to a destined issue. There is much description, much discussion; and each has its effect rather by itself than in a reasoned sequence. Thus the disgusting story of the lady haunted by dogs, one of the most notorious of his incidental nouvelles, is told quite as much for its own shock as for any turn it gives to the larger story.
On the whole, Rabelais’ writing is conte, though usually involving some exposition in aim and some actual comment. The series of exempla and opinions as to whether Panurge shall marry (III. xxi, seq.) reaches neither a decision on the marriage nor a conclusion of character. We find ourselves discussing the mendicant friars, listening to a discourse on devils, and ending on sheer lore about the herb Pantagruelion (III. xlix, seq.). All the while the concreteness of the rendering is vivid in contrast to the conventional generalities of the collections of tales. The dialogue, instead of being exchange of orations, sometimes flashes with narrative interaction. Rabelais takes us traveling, as it were, through many excitements with a group of voluble grotesques whose ideas are not developed in sequences of paragraphs, nor their habits in sequences of chapters. He opened both novel and essay without achieving the form of either. For he was moving toward that other kind of story and discussion which ripened in journalism. Integration and continuity are less important to attract readers than abundance and animation. Instead of making a point, he often hovers around it with many suggestions. Instead of giving a scene distinct significance to lead into the next, he plays it with many overtones. Unsystematic as his various abundance is certainly, and sometimes confusing, it must be recognized as creative. Rabelais is not content merely to rehearse, paraphrase, or decorate. Charged with various lore, his work is never second-hand. What he seizes he animates.
The satire of Rabelais, as distinct from his more descriptive ridicule, is directed oftenest against pedantry. The idea that he satirizes the Middle Age as an apostle of Renaissance enlightenment extends a dubious contrast beyond the evidence. For Rabelais is in some aspects medieval. He was a wandering scholar, a vagans; he was something of a goliard; and in the way of Godescalc he was a mauvais clerc. His satire on monks and friars is medieval literary stock. Indeed, it is much less attack, still less reform, than excitement. Against medieval education he does not urge Renaissance enlightenment except in irony.
In a letter of June 3, 1532, he raised a disconcerting question.
How comes it, most learned Tiraqueau, that in the abundant light of our century, in which by some special gift of the gods we see all the better disciplines recovered, there are still found everywhere men so constituted as to be either unwilling or unable to lift their eyes from the more than Cimmerian darkness of the gothic time to the evident torch of the sun?[77]
The irony of this is iterated and underlined in the oft-quoted eighth chapter of his Pantagruel, where Gargantua recalls his youth.
As you may easily understand, the times were not so suited, so convenient for literature, as the present, and had few such teachers as you have had. The times were still dark, and still exhaled the awkwardness and ill luck of the Goths, who had destroyed all good literature. But by divine goodness light and dignity have been restored to literature in my time; and I see such improvement that at present I should hardly be received in the beginning class, though as a man I used to be reputed the most learned of my time. I say this not in vain boasting, though I might legitimately do so in writing to you (see Marcus Tullius De senectute and Plutarch in the book entitled How to praise oneself without reproach), but to show you my deep affection.
Nowadays all the disciplines have been restored, the languages reëstablished: Greek, without which ’tis a shame for any one to call himself learned, Hebrew, Chaldee, Latin; printed editions as elegant as correct in usage, which were invented in my time by divine inspiration, as artillery by suggestion of the devil. The whole world is full of scholars, of most learned teachers, most ample libraries; and it seems to me that neither the time of Plato nor that of Cicero offered such convenience for study as is seen now. Hereafter we need not find in office or in society any one unpolished by the shop of Minerva. I see brigands, executioners, adventurers, stableboys of today more learned than the doctors and preachers of my time. Nay more, women and girls have aspired to that praise and celestial manna of good instruction.
What is pierced here is not medieval ignorance, but Renaissance complacency. The pedantry that Rabelais satirizes is of both ages. His quarrel with the Sorbonne of his own day may have been edged by the banning of Pantagruel. The book was banned as obscene. It is obscene. Let us no longer pretend that he attacked obscurantism as a champion of enlightenment. For whatever his motive, Rabelais remained singularly detached. He was far from being an apostle of enlightenment, or of anything else.
Yet he is still cited in some histories as forecasting modern education. An educational theory has been extracted from him, even a scheme. To support this, his conventional or picturesque ridicule of university teaching and of student manners is at most negative. A positive contribution has been found in his abbey of Thelème (I. lii-lviii).
Thelème, the ideal abbey that is the scene of the so-called scheme of education, takes its name probably from that preposterous allegory Hypnerotomachia,[78] wherein the hero forsakes the guidance of Reason (Logistica) for that of will (Thelemia). Its architecture and landscape gardening, again reminding of Colonna’s pseudo-classical elaboration, receive, with the furniture and accessories, ten times as much space as the studies. It has 9,332 suites. Its library abounds in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, Tuscan, and Spanish (omitting English and German); and its frescoes are of “antiques prouesses.” Outside are fountains, a hippodrome, a theater, swimming pool, garden, labyrinth, tennis court, and park. Inside it is supplied with costumers and furnishers. Its community of men and women, all handsome, richly dressed, and commanding the six languages well enough to compose in prose and verse, has no community obligation. Living in luxury, with the six languages among their pastimes, freed from the world and from all duties to one another, these privileged souls have for their community device “Fais ce que voudras.”
The humor of this, which ought to be discernible even to those preoccupied with schemes of education, might more easily be taken to imply that irresponsibility plus command of languages is not a sufficient educational formula even in an ideally luxurious environment. Since this would be a shrewd satire on the Renaissance, it may well be what Rabelais meant. Certainly he did not mean to propose Thelème for adoption as an idea, much less as a scheme. Do as you please, provided you live in luxury and command six languages. Is that an educational idea? Is it by any tenable interpretation an educational scheme? To range Rabelais with such pioneers of the fifteenth century as Guarino and Vittorino, or with such coming leaders as Vives and Loyola, is not only to misinterpret him; it is to do him wrong. His satire is not limited to the loud and boisterous; he is master also of irony. Let Thelème rest as he left it, an ironical fantasy.
Nor should Gargantua’s studious day (I. xxiii), no hour unfilled, no subject neglected, be called a program of education.[79] Rabelais must have been aware that for educational reform he had no warrant. Whatever else may be laid to his charge, he was not pretentious. His own education, interrupted, never carried through in any field, but widely ranging, gave him not a system, but a singularly various fund. His reputation for scholarship, recently urged, is hardly borne out by the few contemporary compliments. Rather their fewness and their vagueness, in a period of mutual admiration among scholars, suggest that he was less famous than he has been made to appear. He was not Latinist enough to detect the fabrication of the so-called Will of Lucius Cuspidius, which he published in 1532.[80] His Greek, extending to the translation of certain well-known Greek works of medicine,[81] may have been fortified by previous Latin translations. His knowledge of law is vouched by his abundant use of legal terms, evidence rather of his friendship with lawyers and his appetite for jargon. He knew medicine enough to be house physician at the Lyon Hôtel Dieu and personal physician in the suite of the Cardinal du Bellay. Certainly this is evidence, almost the only specific evidence, of his achievement in learning. But it should not imply that he was a scientist. At most he did not advance the narrow limits of the medicine current in his time. He was an acceptable practitioner in a period of prolonged ignorance.
But such generalizations are less suggestive than what has been laboriously pieced together of his very meager chronology. In 1530 he was matriculated in medicine at the University of Montpellier. In 1532 he was practicing medicine at Lyon and publishing the Latin letters of the Italian physician Manardi, the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, the fabricated Cuspidius, and his own Pantagruel. This in two years. Within the two years preceding 1530 it is suggested that he may have studied law at Poitiers and visited other universities. Even if the suggestion could be brought to the dignity of an inference, what would it guarantee of learning? Except for a single undated letter from the priory of Ligugé, we have no documentation on Rabelais from 1521 to 1530. But if indeed he did study law at Poitiers and did visit other universities before he turned to medicine, or if he picked up some medicine on the way, then he was superficially experimenting toward versatility. The issue is sometimes dodged by calling him a humanist.[82] But though he had humanist friends, he was obviously not a classicist. Or again, his learning, because his allusions are astonishingly various, is called encyclopedic. As a compliment to learning, the adjective is dubious; but in another sense it is suggestive of his intellectual curiosity and his acute awareness of words. Knowing that there is much to be learned, as Dr. Johnson said, from the backs of books, he was alert to pick up a little of everything. He found that for his new readers bits of lore had the interest of news. While they liked his samples of learning and relished his satire on the pedantries of humanism, the humanists, seeing more in the joke, relished it none the less. It was gay, but also thoughtful, escape from the solemn Renaissance fictions of classicism. Rabelais already knew his readers well enough to carry them wine on both shoulders.
The insistent and various extravagance anticipated journalism in that it was the cultivation of style as advertisement. Besides perennial excitements of substance he uses dialect, slang, jargon, parody, oratory, not in ebullience, not in occasional outbreak, but in constant parade of style. He is a sensationalist; his readers are to be shocked and amused. So he turned to the grotesque, and so he pursued it. He has no winsome persons; his satire has no indignation; his laughter, no sympathy. In this aspect a most suggestive contrast is offered by Cervantes. “Cervantes laughed Spain’s chivalry away” is unjust because it is shallow. From the beginning and throughout, Don Quixote thrives on what Rabelais precludes, geniality. The grotesque of Cervantes is human enough to make us feel a certain social service beyond laughter in attacks on windmills; and his great achievement is the creation of a grotesque whom we come to love.
3. HISTORY
History straddles the fundamental division of composition into the forms of discussion or persuasion on the one hand and, on the other, those of story or play. For history is now one, now the other, and now both together. Earlier chronicles, more or less epic, hardly discuss at all; some recent histories are so bent on analysis as hardly to narrate at all; and some of the greater histories, ancient or modern, Thucydides, Tacitus, Macchiavelli, bring the two into effective combination. In any age this last is so difficult as to demand superior grasp. Livy, for instance, being generally content with narrative, hardly makes even his imaginary orations to troops expository. But Thucydides, narrating effectively, is no less concerned to instruct his readers in the issues. His “Expedition against Syracuse” thus became both tragedy and sermon.
(a) Latin Histories
The fifteenth century shows the advance of history beyond chronicle in the Latin of Leonardo Bruni, of Arezzo (1369-1444; Leonardi Aretini historiarum florentini populi libri XII, Florence, 1855-1860, 3 vols., ed. by Mancini, Leoni, and Tonietti, with the Italian translation of Donato Acciajuoli). Chronicles nevertheless persisted; for they still had, perhaps still have, the values realized by Herodotus. But Bruni undertook and fairly accomplished something more: “history, which in so many simultaneous events must keep the longer sequence, explain the causes of single facts, and bring out the interpretation” (I. 52). Not quite Thucydides or Tacitus, perhaps, he has clearly moved in their direction. His style is periodic in habit without often conforming strictly, humanistic without being laboriously imitative or diffuse, intelligently Ciceronian without being inhibited by Ciceronianism. The orations inserted after the fashion of Livy show, indeed, that he felt bound to such amplitude, variety, and classical allusion as should climb the high style; but they are neither frequent nor conventionally decorative, and some of them are both lively and urgent pleas. The following examples are typical.
Book III: Pope Gregory to the Florentines for peace through the restoration of the exiles; and the Florentine speech of refusal.
Book IV: Ianus Labella for insuring the republic against the pride of the nobles.
Book VI: Debate of the Perugian envoys with the Florentines.
Book VIII: The Florentine envoys to the Pope; the Pope’s reply and Barbadoro’s indignant rejoinder.
Book XII: The Milanese legates at Venice against the Florentines, and the Florentine reply.
Bruni puts orations oftenest into the mouths of envoys to develop issues which he has already summarized. Generally they are terser than the speeches of the fashionable dialogues; and sometimes, for he had often been an envoy himself, they are warm with actual debate. In this way his narrative is interpreted by exposition. Remaining narrative in plan, it indicates the animating considerations and interprets the outcome.