spirit upon French literature appeared with even more
striking force in the prose of RABELAIS. The great achievement of the
_Pleiade_ had been the establishment, once and for all, of the doctrine
that literature was something essentially artistic; it was Rabelais who
showed that it possessed another quality--that it was a mighty
instrument of thought. The intellectual effort of the Middle Ages had
very rarely clothed itself in an artistic literary form. Men laughed or
wept in the poetry or prose of their own tongue; but they thought in
scholastic Latin. The work of Jean de Meung was an exception; but, even
there, the poetical form was rough and feeble; the artistic and the
intellectual principles had not coalesced. The union was accomplished by
Rabelais. Far outstripping Jean de Meung in the comprehensiveness and
vigour of his thought, he at the same time infinitely surpassed him as
an artist. At first sight, indeed, his great book hardly conveys such an
impression; to a careless reader it might appear to be simply the work
of a buffoon or a madman. But such a conception of it would be totally
mistaken. The more closely one examines it, the more forcibly one must
be struck alike by its immense powers of intellect and its consummate
literary ability. The whole vast spirit of the Renaissance is gathered
within its pages: the tremendous vitality, the enormous erudition, the
dazzling optimism, the courage, the inventiveness, the humanity, of that
extraordinary age. And these qualities are conveyed to us, not by some
mere conscientious pedant, or some clumsy enthusiast, but by a born
writer--a man whose whole being was fixed and concentrated in an
astonishing command of words. It is in the multitude of his words that
the fertility of Rabelais' spirit most obviously shows itself. His book
is an orgy of words; they pour out helter-skelter, wildly, into swirling
sentences and huge catalogues that, in serried columns, overflow the
page. Not quite wildly, though; for, amid all the rush and bluster,
there is a powerful underlying art. The rhythms of this extraordinary
prose are long and complex, but they exist; and they are controlled with
the absolute skill of a master.

The purpose of Rabelais' book cannot be summed up in a sentence. It may
be described as the presentment of a point of view: but _what_ point of
view? There lies the crux of the question, and numberless critics have
wrangled over the solution of it. The truth is, t