This contrary view was undoubtedly provoked by the evils which came from the attempt to put the ascetic principle extensively into practice. Rabelais is by all odds the most convincing of the moderns who revolted, for [p162] Rabelais not only talked about the natural man but actually knew him and delighted in him. Thus when Villers writes to Madame de Staël that in her work “primitive, incorruptible, naive, passionate nature” is “in conflict with the barriers and shackles of conventional life,” we feel, I think, that neither Villers nor the lady would really have cared very much for primitive nature in all its naivete. The natural man that they were talking about lived in Arcady and his passions were as violent as those of a lapdog; throughout the romantic movement, with rare exceptions, the talk about passion and impulse and instinct has this air of unreality and of neurotic confusion. There is not in it, as there is in Rabelais, for example, an honest gusto for the passions that are to be liberated from the restraints imposed by that “rabble of squint-minded fellows, dissembling and counterfeit saints, demure lookers, hypocrites, pretended zealots, tough friars, buskin-monks, and other such sects of men, who disguise themselves like masquers to deceive the world.” Rabelais advised his readers that if they desired to become good Pantagruelists, “that is to say, to live in peace, joy, health, making yourself always merry—never trust those men that always peep out through a little hole.” And in establishing the Abbey of Theleme, Gargantua furnished it magnificently and barred the gates against bigots, hypocrites, dissemblers, attorneys, barristers, usurers, drunkards, and cannibals; he invited in all noble blades and brisk and handsome people, faithful expounders of the Scripture, and lovely ladies, proper, fair, and mirthful. “Their life,” he says, “was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but at their own free will and pleasure. [p163] They rose from bed when they thought good, drank, ate, worked, slept, when the desire came to them. None did awaken them, none constrained them either to drink or eat, nor to do any other thing: for so had Gargantua established it. The Rule of their order had but one clause: _Do What Thou Wilt._” But there was a catch in this rule. Not only had drunkards and cannibals been excluded in the first place, but Rabelais assures us that those who were admitted, because they were “free, well born, well educated, and accustomed to good company, have by nature an instinct and spur which prompts them to virtuous acts and withdraws them from vice. This they call honor.” And in another passage Rabelais limits the propensities of the natural man even more radically when he speaks of “a certain gaiety of spirit _cured_ in contempt of chance and fortune.”