Rabelais was right when he laughed the old outworn values down, and declared that women were in the first place female, men in the first place male; that the written word should be a self-expression, a sincerity, not a task or a catalogue or a penance, but, like laughter and speech, essentially human, making all men brothers, doing away with artificial barriers and distinctions, making the scholar shake in time with the toper, and doubling the divine up with the losel; bidding even the lady hold her sides in company with the harlot. Eating and drinking were seen to be good in themselves; the eye and the nose and the palate were not only to be respected but courted; free love was better than married enmity. No rite, no church, no god, could annihilate these facts or restrain their influence any more than the sea could be tamed. Dürer was touched with this spirit; we see it in his fine clothes, in his collector's rapacity, above all in his letters to his friend Pirkheimer--a man more typical of that Rabelaisian age than Dürer and Michael Angelo, who were both of them not only modern men but men conservative of the best that had been--men in travail for the future, absorbed by the responsibility of those who create. Pirkheimer, one year Dürer's senior, was a gross fat man early in life, enjoying the clinking of goblets, the music of fork and knife, and the effrontery of obscene jests. A vain man, a soldier and a scholar, pedantic, irritable, but in earnest; a complimenter of Emperors, a leader of the reform party, a partisan of Luther's, the friend and correspondent of Erasmus, the elective brother of Dürer. The man was typical; his fellows were in all lands. Dürer was surprised to find how many of them there were at Venice--men who would delight Pirkheimer and delight in him. "My friend, there are so many Italians here who look exactly like you I don't know how it happens! ... men of sense and knowledge, good lute players and pipers, judges of painting, men of much noble sentiment and honest virtue; and they show me much honour and friendship." Something of all this was doubtless in Dürer too; but in him it was refined and harmonised by the sense and serious concern, not only for the things of to-day, but for those of to-morrow and yesterday; the sense of solidarity, the passion for permanent effect, eternal excellence. These things, in men like Pirkheimer, still more in Erasmus, and even in Rabelais and Montaigne, are not absent; but they are less stringent, less religious, than they are in a Dürer or a Michael Angelo. CHAPTER III DÜRER AT VENICE I