us world. Other
writers interpret things, or warn us against things. Rabelais takes us
by the hand, shows us the cup of life, deep as eternity, and bids us
drink and be satisfied. What else could he use, if not _wine,_ as a
symbol for such quenching of such thirst. And after wine, sex. There
is no other who treats sex as Rabelais does; who treats it so
completely as it _ought_ to be treated!

Walt Whitman is too obsessed by it; too grave over it--Rabelais
enjoys it, fools with it, plunges into it, wallows in it; and then, with
multitudinous laughter, shakes himself free, and bids it go to the
Devil!

The world will have to come to this, sooner or later--to the
confusion of the vicious--and the virtuous!

The virtuous and the vicious play indeed into each others hands; and
neither of them love laughter. Sexual dalliance is either too serious a
matter to be mocked by satyr-laughter; or it is too sad and
deplorable to be laughed at at all. In a few hundred years, surely, the
human race will recognize its absolute right to make mock at the
grotesque elements in the sex comedy, and such laughter will clear
the air of much "virtue" and much "vice."

Wine is his first symbol of the large, sane, generous mood he
bequeaths to us--the focusing of the poetry of life, and the glow and
daring of it, and its eternal youthfulness.

But it is more than a symbol--it is a sacrament and an initiation. It is
the sap that rises in the world's recurrent spring. It is the ichor, the
quintessence of the creative mystery. It is the blood of the sons of
the morning. It is the dew upon the paradisic fields. It is the red-rose
light, upon the feet of those who dance upon graves. Wine is a sign
to us how there is required a certain generous and sane intoxication,
a certain large and equable friendliness in dealing with people and
things and ideas. It is a sign that the earth calls aloud for the
passionate dreamer. It is a sign that the truth of truth is not in labor
and sorrow, but in joy and happiness. It is a sign that gods and men
have a right to satisfy their hearts desire, with joy and pleasure and
splendid freedom. And just as he uses wine, so he uses meat. Bread
that strengthened man's heart (and bologna-sausages, gammons of
bacon, or what you will, else) this also is a symbol and a sacrament.
And it is indeed more, for one must remember that Rabelais was a
great doctor of medicine, as well as of Utopian Theology--and the
stomach, wit