Dialogue XXII

LUCIAN--RABELAIS.

Lucian.--Friend Rabelais, well met--our souls are very good company for one another; we both were great wits and most audacious freethinkers. We laughed often at folly, and sometimes at wisdom. I was, indeed, more correct and more elegant in my style; but then, in return, you had a greater fertility of imagination. My “True History” is much inferior, in fancy and invention, in force of wit and keenness of satire, to your “History of the Acts of Gargantua and Pantagruel.”

Rabelais.--You do me great honour; but I may say, without vanity, that both those compositions entitle the authors of them to a very distinguished place among memoir-writers, travellers, and even historians, ancient and modern.

Lucian.--Doubtless they do; but will you pardon me if I ask you one question? Why did you choose to write such absolute nonsense as you have in some places of your illustrious work?

Rabelais.--I was forced to compound my physic for the mind with a large dose of nonsense in order to make it go down. To own the truth to you, if I had not so frequently put on the fool’s-cap, the freedoms I took in other places with cowls, with Red Hats, and the Triple Crown itself, would have brought me into great danger. Not only my book, but I myself, should, in all probability, have been condemned to the flames; and martyrdom was an honour to which I never aspired. I therefore counterfeited folly, like Junius Brutus, from the wisest of all principles--that of self-preservation. You, Lucian, had no need to use so much caution. Your heathen priests desired only a sacrifice now and then from an Epicurean as a mark of conformity, and kindly allowed him to make as free as he pleased, in conversation or writings, with the whole tribe of gods and goddesses--from the thundering Jupiter and the scolding Juno, down to the dog Anubis and the fragrant dame Cloacina.

Lucian.--Say rather that our Government allowed us that liberty; for I assure you our priests were by no means pleased with it--at least, they were not in my time.

Rabelais.--The wiser men they; for, in spite of the conformity required by the laws and enforced by the magistrate, that ridicule brought the system of pagan theology into contempt, not only with the philosophical part of mankind, but even with the vulgar.

Lucian.--It did so, and the ablest defenders of paganism were forced to give up the poetical fables and allegorise the whole.

Rabelais.--An excellent way of drawing sense out of absurdity, and grave instructions from lewdness. There is a great modern wit, Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, who in his treatise entitled “The Wisdom of the Ancients” has done more for you that way than all your own priests.

Lucian.--He has indeed shown himself an admirable chemist, and made a fine transmutation of folly into wisdom. But all the later Platonists took the same method of defending our faith when it was attacked by the Christians; and certainly a more judicious one could not be found. Our fables say that in one of their wars with the Titans the gods were defeated, and forced to turn themselves into beasts in order to escape from the conquerors. Just the reverse happened here, for by this happy art our beastly divinities were turned again into rational beings.

Rabelais.--Give me a good commentator, with a subtle, refining, philosophical head, and you shall have the edification of seeing him draw the most sublime allegories and the most venerable mystic truths from my history of the noble Gargantua and Pantagruel. I don’t despair of being proved, to the entire satisfaction of some future ape, to have been, without exception, the profoundest divine and metaphysician that ever yet held a pen.

Lucian.--I shall rejoice to see you advanced to that honour. But in the meantime I may take the liberty to consider you as one of our class. There you sit very high.

Rabelais.--I am afraid there is another, and a modern author too, whom you would bid to sit above me, and but just below yourself--I mean Dr. Swift.

Lucian.--It was not necessary for him to throw so much nonsense into his history of Lemuel Gulliver as you did into that of your two illustrious heroes; and his style is far more correct than yours. His wit never descended, as yours frequently did, into the lowest of taverns, nor ever wore the meanest garb of the vulgar.

Rabelais.--If the garb which it wore was not as mean, I am certain it was sometimes as dirty as mine.

Lucian.--It was not always nicely clean; yet, in comparison with you, he was decent and elegant. But whether there was not in your compositions more fire, and a more comic spirit, I will not determine.