RIDICULE may be considered as a species of eloquence; it has all its
vehemence, all its exaggeration, all its power of diminution; it is
irresistible! Its business is not with truth, but with its appearance;
and it is this similitude, in perpetual comparison with the original,
which, raising contempt, produces the ridiculous.
There is nothing real in ridicule; the more exquisite, the more it
borrows from the imagination. When directed towards an individual, by
preserving a unity of character in all its parts, it produces a
fictitious personage, so modelled on the prototype, that we know not
to distinguish the true one from the false. Even with an intimate
knowledge of the real object, the ambiguous image slides into our
mind, for we are at least as much influenced in our opinions by our
imagination as by our judgment. Hence some great characters have come
down to us spotted with the taints of indelible wit; and a satirist of
this class, sporting with distant resemblances and fanciful analogies,
has made the fictitious accompany for ever the real character. Piqued
with Akenside for some reflections against Scotland, Smollett has
exhibited a man of great genius and virtue as a most ludicrous
personage; and who can discriminate, in the ridiculous physician in
"Peregrine Pickle," what is real from what is fictitious?[80]
The banterers and ridiculers possess this provoking advantage over
sturdy honesty or nervous sensibility--their amusing fictions affect
the world more than the plain tale that would put them down. They
excite our risible emotions, while they are reducing their adversary
to contempt--otherwise they would not be distinguished from gross
slanderers. When the wit has gained over the laughers on his side, he
has struck a blow which puts his adversary _hors de combat_. A grave
reply can never wound ridicule, which, assuming all forms, has really
none. Witty calumny and licentious raillery are airy nothings that
float about us, invulnerable from their very nature, like those
chimeras of hell which the sword of AEneas could not pierce--yet these
shadows of truth, these false images, these fictitious realities, have
made heroism tremble, turned the eloquence of wisdom into folly, and
bowed down the spirit of honour itself.
Not that the legitimate use of RIDICULE is denied: the wisest men have
been some of the most exquisite ridiculers; from Socrates to the
Fathers, and from the Fathers to Erasmus, and from Erasmus to Butler
and Swift. Ridicule is more efficacious than argument; when that keen
instrument cuts what cannot be untied. "The Rehearsal" wrote down the
unnatural taste for the rhyming heroic tragedies, and brought the
nation back from sound to sense, from rant to passion. More important
events may be traced in the history of Ridicule. When a certain set of
intemperate Puritans, in the reign of Elizabeth, the ridiculous
reformists of abuses in Church and State, congregated themselves under
the literary _nom de guerre_ of _Martin Mar-prelate_, a stream of
libels ran throughout the nation. The grave discourses of the
archbishop and the prelates could never silence the hardy and
concealed libellers. They employed a moveable printing-press, and the
publishers perpetually shifting their place, long escaped detection.
They declared their works were "printed in Europe, not far from some
of the bouncing priests;" or they were "printed over sea, in Europe,
within two furlongs of a bouncing priest, at the cost and charges of
Martin Mar-prelate, gent." It was then that TOM NASH, whom I am about
to introduce to the reader's more familiar acquaintance, the most
exquisite banterer of that age of genius, turned on them their own
weapons, and annihilated them into silence when they found themselves
paid in their own base coin. He rebounded their popular ribaldry on
themselves, with such replies as "Pap with a hatchet, or a fig for my
godson; or, crack me this nut. To be sold, at the sign of the
Crab-tree Cudgel, in Thwack-coat lane."[81] Not less biting was his
"Almond for a Parrot, or an Alms for Martin." Nash first silenced
_Martin Mar-prelate_, and the government afterwards hanged him; Nash
might be vain of the greater honour. A ridiculer then is the best
champion to meet another ridiculer; their scurrilities magically undo
each other.
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 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; 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 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 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 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
_naivete_ 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."