Rabelais: Where was it? Student: In Spain. Rabelais: You are driven south of the Pyrenees to find your confuting example. Would you find the like in this country? Student: I doubt it. The Orders are banished. Rabelais: Or in your own? Student: Never. Rabelais: And you were enraged with your university? Student: I thought some of the customs quite stupid. Rabelais: Can you conceive a life so infernally and abysmally stupid that the air of an university was wine and excitement beside it? Student: You speak of a time when scholarship was new, when humanism had not given way to philology. We have no one like Henry Stephen, no one comparable to Helia Andrea. The role of your monastery is now assumed by the “institutions of learning,” the spirit of your class-room is found among a few scattered enthusiasts, men half ignorant in the present “scholarly” sense, but alive with the spirit of learning, avid of truth, avid of beauty, avid of strange and out of the way bits of knowledge. Do you like this scrap of Pratinas? Rabelais (reads) ’Εμὸς ἐμὸς ὁ Βρομίος Εμὲ δεῖ κελαδεῖν Εμὶ δεῖ παταγεῖν ’Αν ὀρεα εσσάμενον Μετὰ Ναἲδων Οἷα τε κύκνον ἄγοντα Ποικιλόπτερον μέλος Τᾶv ἀοιδᾶν.... Student: The movement is interesting. I am “educated,” I am considerably more than a “graduate.” I confess that I can not translate it. Rabelais: What in God’s name have they taught you?!! Student: I hope they have taught me nothing. I managed to read many books despite their attempts at suppression, or rather perversion. Rabelais: I think you speak in a passion; that you magnify petty annoyances. Since then, you have been in the world for some years, you have been able to move at your freedom. Student: I speak in no passion when I say that the whole aim, or at least the drive, of modern philology is to make a man stupid; to turn his mind from the fire of genius and smother him with things unessential. Germany has so stultified her savants that they have had no present perception, the men who should have perceived were all imbedded in “scholarship.” And as for freedom, no man is free who has not the modicum of an income. If I had but fifty francs weekly.... Rabelais: Weekly? C..... J....! Student: You forget that the value of money has very considerably altered. Rabelais: Admitted. Student: Well? Rabelais: Well, who has constrained you? The press in your day is free. Student: C..... J....! Rabelais: But the press in your day is free. Student: There is not a book goes to the press in my country, or in England, but a society of ....... in one, or in the other a pie-headed ignorant printer paws over it to decide how much is indecent. Rabelais: But they print my works in translation.