¹ Ronsard's Ode à Michel de G Hospital, the first complete literary exposition of inspiration and poetic genius, was not published until 1552: Les Amours: Ensemble le Cinquiesine des Odes, but was written in the second half of 1550. See Henri Chamard, Histoire de la Pléiade (Paris: Champion, 1939), i, 364. Thus the prologue to the Tiers Here predates it by at least four years, and the prologue to Gargantua was written when Ronsard and DuBellay and their apostles were not quite adolescents.

It is true that the term fureur divine had been bandied about for some time, but it had not been truly explored. As Chamard notes of DuBellay, although he had assumed the importance of “cete fureur divine . . . sans laquele ne fault point que nul espère faire chose qui dure,” he had neither defined nor developed the concept of inspiration (p. 368). Thomas Sebillet, in his Art poétique français, had been more explicit on this point than DuBellay. See Henri Franchet, Le Poète et son œuvre d'après Ronsard (Paris: Champion, 1923), pp. 6–7. Yet both DuBellay and Sebillet were writing treatises that dealt incompletely and theoretically with inspiration as a concept, whereas Rabelais and, after him, Ronsard had both used the idea as a vital creative principle whose dynamics functioned as the subject of their works.

² The two dialogues where Plato discusses inspiration and divine madness at greatest length are the Ion and the Phaedrus. Although the most complete exposition is given in the Phaedrus, the Ion was better known in the Renaissance. Ficino's Latin translation, with his “argument” (lo Platonis, vel de furore poeticd), was published in Venice in 1491 (Franchet, Ronsard, p. 12). Subsequent Latin editions multiplied in Florence, in Venice, and in Paris (1518, 1522, 1533). A French translation by Richard Le Blanc was published in 1546, the year of the publication of the Tiers livre (p. 14).

³ Ficino, it is true, in the Seventh Speech of the Commentary on the Banquet, addresses himself to the relationship among the four furors. However, his concern is with divine madness as a philosophic phenomenon rather than as a creative one. For Ficino, the furors are steps in the hierarchy by which the soul ascends from materiality to unity with God. The following is a paraphrase of his argument:

The first need is for the poetic madness which calms the discord of the soul by harmony. Next, the mysteries of Bacchus intervene to unify all the parts and to direct attention to the mind by which God is worshipped. Now that the soul is made a single out of many, the madness of Apollo is needed to raise the soul above mind, to put it out of time, which is to give it the gift of prophecy. And the final and highest furor is that of Love which unites the soul with God.

See Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on the Symposium, trans. Sears Jayne, Univ. of Missouri Studies, 19 (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri, 1944), 230–33. Pontus de Tyard, in Le Solitaire premier, follows this passage from Ficino very closely. See Le Solitaire premier, ed. Silvio Baridon (Geneva: Droz, 1950), pp. 17–18, for, despite the subtitle of this work, “Discours des Muses et de la fureur poétique,” Pontus discusses divine frenzy as less an esthetic than a philosophie phenomenon: “Car la fureur divine, Pasithée, est l'unique escalier par lequel l'Ame peut trouver le chemin qui la conduise à la source de son souverain bien et félicité dernière” (pp. 16–17).

⁴ In L'Ode à Michel de ['Hospital, Ronsard emulates Ficino's argument for the ion as he traces the hierarchy by which inspiration descends from God (Jupiter)—to Apollo, to the Muses, to the poet. In this poem, inspiration is perceived as conspicuously “Apollonian”; the poet is a prophet, virtuous and pure. But the picture is quite different in L'Hymne de Bacchus where the Muses are rather associated to the god of wine and Apollonian sobriety is vanished:

“Pere, ou me traines-tu? Que veux-tu plus de moy? Et quoy, n'ay-je pas, Pere, assez chanté de toy? Evoé je forcené, ah je sens ma poitrine Chaude des gros bouillons de ta fureur divine.”

Œuvres de Ronsard, ed. Isidore Silver (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967), vi, 219.

Moreover, Love as well as inspiration is affected by this alternation between the Bacchic and the Apollonian modes in Ronsard's poetry. Terence Cave's work suggests that these concepts may well be used to describe the variance of mood not only from one cycle of love poetry to another, but also within each sequence. See “Ronsard's Bacchic Poetry: From the Bacchanales to the Hymne de Taut orme” Esprit Créateur, 10 (1970), 104–16; and “Ronsard as Apollo: Myth, Poetry and Experience in a Renaissance Sonnet-Cycle,” Yale French Studies, 47 (1972), 76–89.

⁵ The Birth of Tragedy, trans. William A, Haussmann, Vol. I of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy (1909–11 ; rpt. New Ycrk: Russell & Russell, 1964). Despite the title and the emphasis of his study, Nietzsche says that comedy as well as tragedy was born of the marriage of Apollo and Dionysus: “And what then … is the meaning of that madness, out of which comic as well as tragic art has grown, the Dionysian madness?” (p. 7).

Nor must we forget that Plato's Symposium closes with Socrates' comment (overheard by Aristodemus through a drunken drowsiness) that “the same man might be capable of writing both comedy and tragedy—that the tragic poet might be a comedian as well” (223d). Trans. Michael Joyce, Plato: The Collected Dialogues including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), p. 574.

⁶ “In order to bring these two tendencies within closer range, let us conceive of them first of all as the separate artworlds of dreamland and drunkenness” (Birth of Tragedy, p. 22): “… Apollo: that measured limitation, that freedom from the wilder emotions, that philosophical calmness of the sculptor-god” (p. 25). Apollo is “the shaper,” the tendency to form and order, and as such is an ethical as well as an esthetic deity: “Apollo, as ethical deity, demands due proportion of his disciples and, that this may be observed, he demands self-knowledge. And thus, parallel to the aesthetic necessity for beauty, there run the demands 'know thyself and 'not too much,' while presumption and undueness are regarded as the truly hostile demons of the non-Apollonian sphere” (p. 40).

Bacchus, to the contrary, represents the anarchy of the generative organs as opposed to the ethical sense, the conscience, Apollo: “And now let us imagine to ourselves how the ecstatic tone of the Dionysian festival sounded in ever more luring and bewitching strains into this artificially confined world built on appearance and moderation, how in these strains all the undueness of nature, in joy, sorrow and knowledge, even to the transpiercing shriek, became audible: . . . The Undueness revealed itself as truth, contradiction, the bliss born of pain, declared itself out of the heart of nature” (p. 41). Bacchus embodies the torture of being obliged to create, he “strives after creation, after the voluptuousness of wilful creation; i.e. constructing and destroying” (p. xxvi).

⁷ In the Symposium, Alcibiades also compares Socrates to another follower of Bacchus, Marsyas, the satyr, a comparison that is developed at more length than that of the Silenus. Alcibiades likens the effect of Socrates' speech to the spell cast by Marsyas as he plays the flute, Bacchus' instrument (215b-216a).

⁸ I am consulting the edition directed by Pierre Jourda, Œuvres complètes de Rabelais, 2 vols. (Paris: Gamier, 1962).

⁹ For a study of banquet imagery and its significance in Rabelais's work, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), pp. 278–302. This book is concerned with exploring the influence of popular literature and traditions on Rabelais and is, in my opinion, generally the best study of his work.

¹⁰ See Floyd Gray, “Ambiguity and Point of View in the Prologue to Gargantua,” Romanic Review, 56 (1965), 12–21. Leo Spitzer's thesis might also be mentioned in this context: that Rabelais's neologisms—his use of farcical suffixes (sustantificque) or new root words (Pantagruélisme) —undermines his seriousness and reveals his comic, grotesque intent. See “The Works of Rabelais,” in Literary Masterpieces of the Western World, ed. Francis H. Horn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953), pp. 126–47; “Rabelais et les ‘rabelaisants,‘ ” Studi Francesi, 4 (1960), 401–23; “Le Prétendu Réalisme de Rabelais,” Modem Philology, 37 (1939–40), 139–50; and “Ancora sul prologo al primo libro del Gargantua de Rabelais,” Studi Francesi, 9 (1965), 42334.

¹¹ “C'est belle chose veoir la clairté du (vin et escuz) Soleil.” Jacques Le Clercq interprets the lapsus thus: “Light is beautiful! The sparkle of wine . . . no, I err; the twinkling of doubloons . . . no, no, I meant the light of day. . . . (At last, I make myself clear!).” The Complete Works of Rabelais (New York: Random, 1936), p. 293.

¹² For a discussion of this figure of speech as part of the rhetoric of mannerism, see Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953), pp. 278–80.

¹³ Floyd Gray, “Structure and Meaning in the Prologue to the Tiers livre,” L'Esprit Créateur, 3 (1963), 60.

¹⁴ Edgar Wind discusses the theme of the torture of the mortal by the god who inspires him to explain the iconography of Raphael's “Flaying of Marsyas.” See Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1967), pp. 171–76. Note, too, the similarity with Ronsard's Hymne de Bacchus where the poet is also attacked by the god of wine. (See n. 4.)

¹⁵ Nietzsche discusses the paradox of creation contingent upon destruction thus:

Indeed, it seems as if the myth sought to whisper in our ears that wisdom, especially Dionysian wisdom, is an unnatural abomination, and that whoever, through his knowledge, plunges nature into an abyss of annihilation, must also experience the dissolution of nature in himself.

(Birth of Tragedy, p. 75)