But the abuse of ridicule is not one of the least calamities of literature, when it withers genius, and gibbets whom it ought to enshrine. Never let us forget that Socrates before his judges asserted that “his persecution originated in the licensed raillery of Aristophanes, which had so unduly influenced the popular mind during several years!” And thus a fictitious Socrates, not the great moralist, was condemned. Armed with the most licentious ridicule, the Aretine of our own country and times has proved that its chief magistrate was not protected by the shield of domestic and public virtues; a false and distorted image of an intelligent monarch could cozen the gross many, and aid the purposes of the subtle few.
There is a plague-spot in ridicule, and the man who 117 is touched with it can be sent forth as the jest of his country.
The literary reign of Elizabeth, so fertile in every kind of genius, exhibits a remarkable instance, in the controversy between the witty Tom Nash and the learned Gabriel Harvey. It will illustrate the nature of the fictions of ridicule, expose the materials of which its shafts are composed, and the secret arts by which ridicule can level a character which seems to be placed above it.
Gabriel Harvey was an author of considerable rank, but with two learned brothers, as Wood tells us, “had the ill luck to fall into the hands of that noted and restless buffoon, Tom Nash.”
Harvey is not unknown to the lover of poetry, from his connexion with Spenser, who loved and revered him. He is the Hobynol whose poem is prefixed to the “Faery Queen,” who introduced Spenser to Sir Philip Sidney: and, besides his intimacy with the literary characters of his times, he was a Doctor of Laws, an erudite scholar, and distinguished as a poet. Such a man could hardly be contemptible; and yet, when some little peculiarities become aggravated, and his works are touched by the caustic of the most adroit banterer of that age of wit, no character has descended to us with such grotesque deformity, exhibited in so ludicrous an attitude.
Harvey was a pedant, but pedantry was part of the erudition of an age when our national literature was passing from its infancy; he introduced hexameter verses into our language, and pompously laid claim to an invention which, designed for the reformation of English verse, was practised till it was found sufficiently ridiculous. His style was infected with his pedantic taste; and the hard outline of his satirical humour betrays the scholastic cynic, not the airy and fluent wit. He had, perhaps, the foibles of a man who was clearing himself from obscurity; he prided himself on his family alliances, while he fastidiously looked askance on the trade of his father—a rope-manufacturer.
He was somewhat rich in his apparel, according to the rank in society he held; and, hungering after the notice of his friends, they fed him on soft sonnet and relishing dedication, till Harvey ventured to publish a collection of panegyrics on himself—and thus gravely stepped into a niche erected to Vanity. At length he and his two brothers—one a divine and the other a physician—became students of astronomy; 118 then an astronomer usually ended in an almanac-maker, and above all, in an astrologer—an avocation which tempted a man to become a prophet. Their “sharp and learned judgment on earthquakes” drove the people out of their senses (says Wood); but when nothing happened of their predictions, the brothers received a severe castigation from those great enemies of prophets, the wits. The buffoon, Tarleton, celebrated for his extempore humour, jested on them at the theatre;[82] Elderton, a drunken ballad-maker, “consumed his ale-crammed nose to nothing in bear-bating them with bundles of ballads.”[83] One on the earthquake commenced with “Quake! quake! quake!” They made the people laugh at their false terrors, or, as Nash humorously describes their fanciful panic, “when they sweated and were not a haire the worse.” Thus were the three learned brothers beset by all the town-wits; Gabriel had the hardihood, with all undue gravity, to charge pell-mell among the whole knighthood of drollery; a circumstance probably alluded to by Spenser, in a sonnet addressed to Harvey—
| “Harvey, the happy above happier men, I read; that sitting like a looker-on Of this worlde’s stage, dost note with critique pen The sharp dislikes of each condition; And, as one carelesse of suspition, Ne fawnest for the favour of the great; Ne fearest foolish reprehension Of faulty men, which daunger to thee threat, But freely doest of what thee list, entreat, Like a great lord of peerlesse liberty.—” |
The “foolish reprehension of faulty men, threatening Harvey with danger,” describes that gregarious herd of town-wits in the age of Elizabeth—Kit Marlow, Robert Greene, Dekker, Nash, &c.—men of no moral principle, of high passions, and the most pregnant Lucianic wits who ever 119 flourished at one period.[84] Unfortunately for the learned Harvey, his “critique pen,” which is strange in so polished a mind and so curious a student, indulged a sharpness of invective which would have been peculiar to himself, had his adversary, Nash, not quite outdone him. Their pamphlets foamed against each other, till Nash, in his vehement invective, involved the whole generation of the Harveys, made one brother more ridiculous than the other, and even attainted the fair name of Gabriel’s respectable sister. Gabriel, indeed, after the death of Robert Greene, the crony of Nash, sitting like a vampyre on his grave, sucked blood from his corpse, in a memorable narrative of the debaucheries and miseries of this town-wit. I throw into the note the most awful satirical address I ever read.[85] It became necessary to dry up the 120 floodgates of these rival ink-horns, by an order of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The order is a remarkable fragment of our literary history, and is thus expressed:—“That all Nashe’s bookes and Dr. Harvey’s bookes be taken wheresoever they may be found, and that none of the said bookes be ever printed hereafter.”
This extraordinary circumstance accounts for the excessive rarity of Harvey’s “Foure Letters, 1592,” and that literary scourge of Nash’s, “Have with you to Saffron-Walden (Harvey’s residence), or Gabriel Harvey’s Hunt is vp, 1596;” pamphlets now as costly as if they consisted of leaves of gold.[87]
Nash, who, in his other works, writes in a style as flowing as Addison’s, with hardly an obsolete vestige, has rather injured this literary invective by the evident burlesque he affects of Harvey’s pedantic idiom; and for this Mr. Malone has hastily censured him, without recollecting the aim of this modern Lucian.[88] The delicacy of irony; the sous-entendu, that subtlety of indicating what is not told; all that poignant satire, which is the keener for its polish, were 121 not practised by our first vehement satirists; but a bantering masculine humour, a style stamped in the heat of fancy, with all the life-touches of strong individuality, characterise these licentious wits. They wrote then as the old fabliers told their tales, naming everything by its name; our refinement cannot approve, but it cannot diminish their real nature, and among our elaborate graces, their naïveté must be still wanting.
In this literary satire Nash has interwoven a kind of ludicrous biography of Harvey; and seems to have anticipated the character of Martinus Scriblerus. I leave the grosser parts of this invective untouched; for my business is not with slander, but with ridicule.
Nash opens as a skilful lampooner; he knew well that ridicule, without the appearance of truth, was letting fly an arrow upwards, touching no one. Nash accounts for his protracted silence by adroitly declaring that he had taken these two or three years to get perfect intelligence of Harvey’s “Life and conversation; one true point whereof well sat downe will more excruciate him than knocking him about the ears with his own style in a hundred sheets of paper.”
And with great humour says—
“As long as it is since he writ against me, so long have I given him a lease of his life, and he hath only held it by my mercy; and now let him thank his friends for this heavy load of disgrace I lay upon him,