Why should we attempt to deceive ourselves? We cannot always live with those liberating airs blowing upon our foreheads. We have to bear the burden of the unillumined hours, even as our fathers before us, and our children after us. Enough if we keep our souls so prepared that when the touch, the glimpse, the word, the gesture, that carries with it the thrilling revelation of the "grand manner", returns to us in its appointed hour, it shall find us not unworthy of our inheritance. RABELAIS There are certain great writers who make their critics feel even as children, who picking up stray wreckage and broken shells from the edge of the sea waves, return home to show their companions "what the sea is like." The huge suggestiveness of this tremendous spirit is not easy to communicate in the space of a little essay. But something can be done, if it only take the form of modest "advice to the reader." Is it a pity, one asks oneself, or is it a profound advantage, that enjoyment of Rabelais should be so limited? At least there are no false versions to demolish here--no idealizations to unmask. The reading of Rabelais is not easy to everyone, and perhaps to those for whom it is least easy, he would be most medicinal. What in this mad world, do we lack, my dear friends? Is it possibly _courage?_ Well, Rabelais is, of all writers, the one best able to give us that courage. If only we had courage, how the great tides of existence might sweep us along--and we not whine or wince at all! To read Rabelais is to gather, as if from the earth-gods, spirit to endure anything. Naturally he uses wine, and every kind of wanton liquor, to serve as symbols of the intoxication he would produce. For we must be "rendered drunk" to swallow Life at this rate--to swallow it as the gods swallow it. We must be drunk but not mad. For in the spiritual drunkenness that Rabelais produces there is not the remotest touch of insanity. He is the sanest of all the great writers; perhaps the only sane one. What he has the power of communicating to us is a renewal of that _physiological energy,_ which alone makes it possible to enjoy this monstrous world. Other writers interpret things, or warn us against things. Rabelais takes us by the hand, shows us the cup of life, deep as eternity, and bids us drink and be satisfied. What else could he use, if not _wine,_ as a symbol for such quenching of such thirst. And after wine, sex. There is no other who treats sex as Rabelais does; who treats it so completely as it _ought_ to be treated! Walt Whitman is too obsessed by it; too grave over it--Rabelais enjoys it, fools with it, plunges into it, wallows in it; and then, with multitudinous laughter, shakes himself free, and bids it go to the Devil! The world will have to come to this, sooner or later--to the confusion of the vicious--and the virtuous!