LITMIR.BIZ

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animal is the pig. One of those horrid Ptolemies was called the Belly,—Physcon. The belly is to humanity a formidable weight: it breaks every moment the equilibrium between the soul and the body. It fills history. It is responsible for nearly all crimes. It is the bottle of all vices. It is the belly which by voluptuousness makes the sultan and by drunkenness the czar; it is this that shows Tarquin the bed of Lucrece; it is this that ends by making that senate which had waited for Brennus and dazzled Jugurtha deliberate on the sauce of a turbot. It is the belly which counsels the ruined libertine, Cæsar, the passage of the Rubicon. To pass the Rubicon, how well that pays one's debts! To pass the Rubicon, how readily that throws women, into one's arms! What good dinners afterward! And the Roman soldiers enter Rome with the cry, "Urbani, claudite uxores; mœchum calvum adducimus." The appetite debauches the intellect. Voluptuousness replaces will. At starting, as is always the case, there is some nobleness. It is the orgy. There is a gradation between being fuddled and being dead drunk.

      Then the orgy degenerates into bestial gluttony. Where there was Solomon there is Ramponneau. Man becomes a barrel; an inner sea of dark ideas drowns thought; conscience submerged cannot warn the drunken soul. Beastliness is consummated; it is not even any longer cynical, it is empty and beastly. Diogenes disappears; there remains but the barrel. We commence by Alcibiades, we finish by Trimalcion. It is complete; nothing more, neither dignity, nor shame, nor honour, nor virtue, nor wit,—animal gratification in all its nakedness, thorough impurity. Thought dissolves itself in satiety; carnal gorging absorbs everything; nothing survives of the grand sovereign creature inhabited by the soul. As the word goes, the belly eats the man. Such is the final state of all societies where the ideal is eclipsed. That passes for prosperity, and is called aggrandizing one's self. Sometimes even philosophers thoughtlessly aid this degradation by inserting in their doctrines the materialism which is in the consciences. This sinking of man to the level of the human beast is a great calamity. Its first fruit is the turpitude visible at the summit of all professions,—the venal judge, the simoniacal priest, the hireling soldier; laws, manners, and beliefs are a dungheap,—totus homo fit excrementum. In the sixteenth century all the institutions of the past are in that state. Rabelais gets hold of that situation; he proves it; he authenticates that belly which is the world. Civilization is, then, but a mass; science is matter; religion is blessed with a stomach; feudality is digesting; royalty is obese. What is Henry VIII.? A paunch. Rome is a fat-gutted old woman. Is it health? Is it sickness? It is perhaps obesity; it is perhaps dropsy-query. Rabelais, doctor and priest, feels the pulse of Papacy; he shakes his head and bursts out laughing. Is it because he has found life? No, it is because he has felt death; it is, in reality, breathing its last. While Luther reforms, Rabelais jests. Which tends best to the end? Rabelais ridicules the monk, the bishop, the Pope; laughter and death-rattle together; fool's bell sounding the tocsin! Well, then, what? I thought it was a feast; it is agony. One may be deceived by the nature of the hiccough. Let us laugh all the same. Death is at the table; the last drop toasts the last sigh. The agony feasting,—it is superb. The inner colon is king; all that old world feasts and bursts, and Rabelais enthrones a dynasty of bellies,—Grangousier, Pantagruel, and Gargantua. Rabelais is the Æschylus of victuals; indeed, it is grand when we think that eating is devouring. There is something of the gulf in the glutton. Eat then, my masters, and drink, and come to the finale. To live is a song, of which to die is the refrain. Others dig under the depraved human race fearful dungeons. For subterraneous caves the great Rabelais contents himself with the cellar. This universe, which Dante put into hell, Rabelais confines in a wine-cask; his book is nothing else. The seven circles of Alighieri bung and encompass this extraordinary tun. Look within the monstrous cask, and you see them there. In Rabelais they are entitled, Idleness, Pride, Envy, Avarice, Anger, Luxury, Gluttony; and it is thus that you suddenly meet again the formidable jester. Where?—in church. The seven sins are this curé's sermon. Rabelais is priest. Castigation, properly understood, begins at home; it is therefore on the clergy that he strikes first. It is something, indeed, to be at home! The Papacy dies of indigestion. Rabelais plays the Papacy a trick,—the trick of a Titan. The Pantagruelian joy is not less grandiose than the mirth of a Jupiter,—jaw for jaw. The monarchical and priestly jaw eats; the Rabelaisian jaw laughs. Whoever has read Rabelais has forever before his eyes this stem opposition: the mask of Theocritus gazed at fixedly by the mask of Comedy.

      13. Another, Cervantes, is also a form of epic mockery; for as the writer of these lines said in 1827,[3] there are between the Middle Ages and the modern times, after the feudal barbarism, and placed there as it were for a conclusion, two Homeric buffoons,—Rabelais and Cervantes. To sum up horror by laughter, is not the least terrible manner of doing it. It is what Rabelais did; it is what Cervantes did. But the raillery of Cervantes has nothing of the large Rabelaisian grin. It is the fine humour of the noble after the joviality of the curé. I am the Signor Don Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra, Caballeros, poet-soldier, and, as a proof, one-armed. No broad, coarse jesting in Cervantes. Scarcely a flavour of elegant cynicism. The satirist is fine, sharp-edged, polished, delicate, almost gallant, and would even run the risk sometimes of diminishing his power with all his affected ways if he had not the deep poetic spirit of the Renaissance. That saves his charming grace from becoming prettiness. Like Jean Goujon, like Jean Cousin, like Germain Pilon, like Primatice, Cervantes has the chimera within himself. Thence all the unexpected marvels of his imagination. Add to that a wonderful intuition of the inmost deeds of the mind, and a philosophy, inexhaustible in aspects, which seems to possess a new and complete chart of the human heart. Cervantes sees the inner man. His philosophy blends with the comic and romantic instinct. Thence does the unexpected break in at each moment in his characters, in his action, in his style,—the unforeseen, magnificent adventure. Personages remaining true to themselves, but facts and ideas whirling around them, with a perpetual renewing of the original idea, with the unceasing breathing of that wind which carries flashes of lightning,—such is the law of great works. Cervantes is militant; he has a thesis; he makes a social book. Such poets are the fighting champions of the mind. Where have they learned fighting? On the battle-field itself. Juvenal was a military tribune; Cervantes arrives from Lepanto, as Dante from Campalbino, as Æschylus from Salamis. After which they pass to a new trial. Æschylus goes into exile, Juvenal into exile, Dante into exile, Cervantes into prison. It is just, for they have served you well. Cervantes, as poet, has the three sovereign gifts,—creation, which produces types, and clothes ideas with flesh and bone; invention, which hurls passions against events, makes man flash brightly over destiny, and brings forth the drama; imagination, sun of the brain, which throws light and shade everywhere, and, giving relieve, creates life. Observation, which is acquired, and which, in consequence, is a quality rather than a gift, is included in creation. If the miser was not observed, Harpagon would not be created. In Cervantes, a new-comer, glimpsed at in Rabelais, puts in a decided appearance; it is common-sense. You have caught sight of it in Panurge; you see it plainly in Sancho Panza. It arrives like the Silenus of Plautus; and it may also say, "I am the god mounted on an ass." Wisdom at once, reason by-and-by; it is indeed the strange history of the human mind. What more wise than all religions? What less reasonable? Morals true, dogmas false. Wisdom is in Homer and in Job; reason, such as it ought to be to overcome prejudices,—that is to say, complete and armed cap-à-pie,—will be found only in Voltaire. Common-sense is not wisdom and is not reason; it is a little of one and a little of the other, with a dash of egotism. Cervantes makes it bestride ignorance; and, at the same time, completing his profound satire, he gives fatigue as a nag to heroism. Thus he shows one after the other, one with the other, the two profiles of man, and parodies them, without more pity for the sublime than for the grotesque. The hippogriff becomes Rosinante. Behind the equestrian figure, Cervantes creates and gives movement to the asinine personage. Enthusiasm takes the field, Irony follows in its footsteps. The wonderful feats of Don Quixote, his riding and spurring, his big lance, steady in the rest, are judged by the donkey, a connoisseur in windmills. The invention of Cervantes is so masterly that there is between the man type and the quadruped complement statuary adhesion; the reasoner, like the adventurer, is part of the beast which belongs to him, and you can no more dismount Sancho Panza than Don Quixote. The Ideal is in Cervantes as in Dante; but it is called the impossible, and is scoffed at. Beatrice is become Dulcinea. To rail at the ideal would be the failing of Cervantes; but this failing is only apparent. Look well! The smile has a tear. In reality, Cervantes is for Don Quixote

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