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 brainless
and wholly bloodless teachers whose doctrine he himself on the one hand,
and Luther on the other, arose together to smite severally--to smite them
hip and thigh, even till the going down of the sun; the mock sun or
marshy meteor that served only to deepen the darkness encompassing on
every side the doubly dark ages--the ages of monarchy and theocracy, the
ages of death and of faith.
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