"Oedipus," "Morte D'Arthur," "Kubla Khan," "Don Quixote," and "Rabelais" immediately are proven fine literature; a host of other esteemed works merely, if you like, good literature.
"Pantagruel" by a more delicate application of the test becomes a finer work than "Don Quixote," and in the exposition of this dictum we come upon one of the mountain peaks of Machen's amazing philosophy.
He begins the discussion with a jest about the enormous capacity for strong drink exhibited by Mr. Pickwick and his friends, and reminds us that it was the god of wine in whose honor Sophocles wrote his dramas and choral songs, who was worshipped and invoked at the Dionysiaca; and that all the drama arose from the celebration of the Bacchic mysteries. He goes on to the "Gargantua" and "Pantagruel," which reek of wine as Dickens does of brandy and water.
The Rabelaisian history begins: "Grandgousier estoit bon raillard en son temps, aimant à boire net," and ends with the Oracle of the Holy Bottle, with the word "Trinch ... un mot panomphée, celebré et entendu de toutes nations, et nous signifie, beuvez." "And I refer you," continues Machen, "to the allocution of Bacbuc, the priestess of the Bottle, at large. 'By wine,' she says, 'is man made divine,' and I may say that if you have not got the key to these Rabelaisian riddles, much of the value—the highest value—of the book is lost to you."
Seeking the meaning of this Bacchic cultus, this apparent glorification of drunkenness in all lands and in all times, from Ancient Greece through Renascent France to Victorian England, by peoples and persons not themselves given to excess, he finds it again in the word ecstasy.
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"We are to conclude that both the ancient people and the modern writers recognized ecstasy as the supreme gift and state of man, and that they chose the Vine and the juice of the Vine, as the most beautiful and significant symbol of that Power which withdraws a man from the common life and the common consciousness, and taking him from the dust of earth, sets him in high places, in the eternal world of ideas ... Let us never forget that the essence of the book ('Pantagruel') is in its splendid celebration of ecstasy, under the figure of the Vine."
At this point Mr. Machen places the "key" in our hands and declines further to reveal his secrets. In Mr. Pickwick's overdose of milk punch we are to find, ultimately, "a clue to the labyrinth of mystic theology."
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