at he is he, and I am
but myself; yet against his classification of Falstaff, against his
definition of Shakespeare's unapproached and unapproachable masterpiece
in the school of comic art and humouristic nature, I must and do with all
my soul and strength protest. The admirable phrase of "swine-centaur"
(_centaure du porc_) is as inapplicable to Falstaff as it is appropriate
to Panurge. Not the third person but the first in date of that divine
and human trinity of humourists whose names make radiant for ever the
Century of their new-born glory--not Shakespeare but Rabelais is
responsible for the creation or the discovery of such a type as this.
"_Suum cuique_ is our Roman justice"; the gradation from Panurge to
Falstaff is not downward but upward; though it be Victor Hugo's very self
who asserts the contrary. {108} Singular as may seem the collocation of
the epithet "moral" with the name "Falstaff," I venture to maintain my
thesis; that in point of feeling, and therefore of possible moral
elevation, Falstaff is as undeniably the superior of Sancho as Sancho is
unquestionably the superior of Panurge. The natural affection of Panurge
is bounded by the self-same limits as the natural theology of Polyphemus;
the love of the one, like the faith of the other, begins and ends alike
at one point;

Myself,
And this great belly, first of deities;

(in which line, by the way, we may hear as it were a first faint prelude
of the great proclamation to come--the hymn of praise and thanksgiving
for the coronation day of King Gaster; whose laureate, we know, was as
lovingly familiar with the Polyphemus of Euripides as Shakespeare with
his own Pantagruel.) In Sancho we come upon a creature capable of
love--but not of such love as kills or helps to kill, such love as may
end or even as may seem to end in anything like heartbreak. "And now
abideth Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, these three; but the greatest
of these is Shakespeare."

I would fain score yet another point in the fat knight's favour; "I have
much to say in the behalf of that Falstaff." Rabelais, evangelist and
prophet of the Resurrection of the Flesh (so long entombed, ignored,
repudiated, misconstrued, vilified, by so many generations and ages of
Galilean preachers and Pharisaic schoolmen)--Rabelais was content to
paint the flesh merely, in its honest human reality--human at least, if
also bestial; in its frank and rude reaction against the half