uses in verse. Throughout the work Nashe's phrasing has the vividness of a clown's red nose. We read of old trots ‘in the wrinckles of whose face ye may hide false dice and play at cherrypit in the dint of their cheekes’; the Devil is ‘MasterOs foetidum, Bedle of the Blackesmithes’; women have lips ‘as lauishly red as if they vsed to kisse an okerman euery morning’; Nashe ‘has tearmes (if he be vext) laid in steepe in Aquafortis and gunpowder, that shall rattle through the skyes and make an Earthquake in a Pesants eares’. He concludes his belabouring of Richard Harvey with a delightful vos plaudite—‘Haue I not an indifferent prittye vayne in spurgalling an Asse? if you knew how extemporall it were at this instant and with what hast it is writ, you would say so.’

As this passage was the shoeing-horn to draw on the whole Nashe-Harvey quarrel, it will be convenient here to group together Nashe's other contributions to it, the Strange News of 1592 and Have with you to Saffron Walden (1596). The rights and wrongs of this great flyting must be sought in Dr. McKerrow's magnificent edition, and in fact they do not matter much. Nashe certainly, the Harveys not impossibly, were well aware that such stuff would sell. The example of great humanistic dog-fights like that between Poggio and Valla could hardly be absent from their minds. And whatever Nashe's extra-literary motives may have been, an enemy to bespatter was clearly an artistic necessity to one who had just discovered a style so suited for invective. The obscurity of the quarrel need deter no reader from exploring these pamphlets, which are their author's liveliest works. You must come to them as to a ferocious game: if you are looking for serious debate you will find them unreadable. The very qualities which we should blame in an ordinary controversialist are the life and soul of Nashe. He is unfair, illogical, violent, extravagant, coarse: but then that is the joke. When a half drunk street-corner humorist decides to make a respectable person (say, from Peebles) ridiculous, it is useless for the respectable person to show that the charges brought against him are untrue—that he does not beat his wife, is not a cinema star in disguise, is not wearing a false nose. The more eagerly he refutes them, the louder the spectators laugh. When the butt is anyone so unamiable, so grotesque, as Gabriel Harvey, we enjoy the fun with (almost) a clear conscience. The very names that are flung at him confer a grievous immortality—Gilgilis Hobberdehoy, Braggadochio Glorioso, Timothy Tiptoes, Gerboduck Huddleduddle. Nashe's satire, in other respects the very reverse of Dryden's, always has Dryden's unanswerable ease and gusto, seems to cost the writer nothing, kills with nonchalance. Poor Harvey may writhe at allusions to his father the ropemaker; the more fool he, says Nashe, for ‘had I a Ropemaker to my father and somebody had cast it in my teeth, I would foorthwith haue writ in praise of Ropemakers and prou'd it by sound sillogistry to be one of the 7 liberal sciences’. He would have, too.

In Christs Tears over Jerusalem (1593) Nashe attempts a serious theme with very little success. The bones of the work are, once more, medieval. We begin with a long speech put into the mouth of Christ, and of course Nashe fails as conspicuously as More had failed in a similar audacity. We pass thence to a lurid account of the siege and fall of Jerusalem in which we are alternately nauseated by physical horrors and lulled asleep by ineffective rhetoric. When we reach Schimeon's proclamation, the author's irrepressible relish for roguery rather overwhelms his (presumably) moral purpose. The book ends with a call upon plague-stricken London to repent, set in a complicated framework of eight vices which are the five sons and three daughters of pride. This is a thoroughly bad piece of work: the descriptions of the vices produce neither laughter nor compunction. Nashe's peculiar richness of phrase sometimes appears, as in the description of the courtier whose ‘backe bandieth colours with the Sunne’ and in many images of famine and corruption which are veritably nightmares ten words long. But in the main Nashe seems to be trying, and not very happily, to alter his style—unless, indeed, the Tears is early work rehashed. The Dedication, to Lady Elizabeth Carey, uses a heavy ink-horn rhetoric foreign to his mature manner. In the speech given to the Saviour he uses a strange artifice of which I do not know the history (the 119th Psalm might be the ultimate model). A series of keywords (stones, gather, echo, would not, and desolate) are used in turn like leitmotifs.

The Terrors of the Night, published in 1594, is said to have been written ‘a long time since’, but is more characteristic of Nashe's developed manner than the Anatomy of Absurdity had been. Perhaps it was re-worked and added to. It is a rambling attack on demonology and oneiromancy. As usual, Nashe is quite indifferent to consistency. He starts off by regarding night as Spenser regarded it and dwells, movingly enough, on the horrors of nocturnal conscience and solitude, when we are ‘shut separately in our chambers’ and Satan (who rules the night, as God the day) ‘reuealeth the whole astonishing treasurie of his wonders’. Presently, however, night becomes the friend: almost, as in Kipling's story, our kind protector against Policeman Day. For ‘he that dreames merily is like a boy new breetcht, who leapes and daunceth for joy his paine is past’, but soon ‘his master the day, seeing him so iocund and pleasant, comes and dooes as much for him againe, whereby his hell is renued’. Corda oblita laborum—who would have expected this Virgilian pity from burly Nashe? Unless, having read our way so far into his mind, we come to suspect—and I think every reader of Nashe will—that the ‘burliness’ is by no means the whole story: may indeed be only the ‘manic’ peak, balanced in private by a ‘depressive’ trough. The Terrors is ostensibly a sceptical work written to remove night-fears. And Nashe gets great fun out of the minor devils of whom ‘infinite millions wil hang swarming about a worm-eaten nose’ or ‘entrench themselves’ in the wrinkles of a hag, or the Druids in Man who were positively ‘lousie with familiars’. But these, like nearly all Nashe's comic images, are comic only if you see them in a flash and from exactly the right angle. Move a hair's breadth, dwell on them a second too long, and they become disturbing.

The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) will be treated under the head of fiction. I mention it here only to notice that its long scene of torture deepens the impression of something in Nashe which is the reverse of comic, though also closely connected with his peculiar kind of comedy. The grotesque is a ridge from which one can descend into very different valleys.

On learning that Lenten Stuff (1599) is a panegyric on red herrings, the modern reader may feel inclined to yawn. Nashe was moved to adopt such a theme partly by the desire to repay some kindness shown him in the town of Yarmouth and partly by emulation of the great wits who had written paradoxes in praise of trifles or evils—Synesius of Baldness, Erasmus of Folly, de Mornay of Death, de la Noue of Imprisonment. His pamphlet is thus both a comic advertisement and a display of the skill that can talk on any subject. The latter task suited Nashe admirably. Lenten Stuff is one of his best works. The description of Yarmouth is a relief after the somewhat feverish unsubstantiality of his other pamphlets, in so far as it at last brings our minds to bear on real things like walls, sand, ships, and tides. The comic myths of the coronation of King Herring and the Pope's dinner are good, if not excellent. The first of them is prefaced with a serio-comic rehandling of the story of Hero and Leander, ‘of whom Musaeus sang, and a diuiner Muse than him, Kit Marlow’. Our taste is a little offended by Nashe on this theme, as it is offended when we read Mark Twain on Arthur or Eloise. But his treatment has its own merits and works up to a vivid conclusion, when, as Hero stooped to kiss the dead Leander, ‘boystrous woolpacks of ridged tides came rowling in and raught him from her’.

Though Nashe owed much to his predecessors he is one of our most original writers. The groundwork of his style comes to him, as I have indicated, through Martin, from the old, native tradition which we see in Latimer and More. He is the supreme master of literary sansculottisme. To these cheap-jack and gutter-snipe elements (I use the words to define, not to dispraise, for these also require genius) he added, however, something quite different; comic ink-horn terms, burlesque rodomontade, gigantic hyperbole, Rabelaisian monstrosity. It is this second element which he himself refers to when he claims that his style ‘is no otherwise puft vp than any mans should be that writes with any spirite’ and prefers it to ‘this demure soft mediocre genus that is like wine and water mixt together: but giue me pure wine of itself, and that begets blood and heates the brain thorowly’. The effect of this extravagance, most happily married to the colloquial, was new and strong. His predecessors had talked merely like Shakespeare's rogues: Nashe talked like Falstaff. Or, to put it the right way round, when Falstaff promises that his cudgel shall hang like a meteor over the horns of Mr. Ford, he owes something to Nashe.

Paradoxically, though Nashe's pamphlets are commercial literature, they come very close to being, in another way, ‘pure’ literature: literature which is, as nearly as possible, without a subject. In a certain sense of the verb ‘say’, if asked what Nashe ‘says’, we should have to reply, Nothing. He tells no story, expresses no thought, maintains no attitude. Even his angers seem to be part of his technique rather than real passions. In his exhilarating whirlwind of words we find not thought nor passion but simply images: images of ludicrous and sometimes frightful incoherence boiling up from a dark void. There is that in Nashe which connects him with artists like Bosch and the later Picasso. If he took himself seriously he would at once create horrors: he has all the material. In fact, however, in his pamphlets (as in the Hunting of the Snark) this material, if not quite controlled by, is usually exploited for, a comic purpose. In Chesterton's phrase he rides the nightmare, not the nightmare him, though his seat is not always secure. Hence he is closer to Mr. Thurber's pictures than to Picasso's. He is a great American humorist.

Note

1. b. 1567 at Lowestoft. Sizar at St. John's, Cambridge, 1582. B.A., 1586. Probably in London, 1588. Probably never in Italy. Patronized by Sir George Carey. Stays with Carey at Carisbrooke Castle, 1592-3. Subjected to (undefined) ‘persecution’ by the City authorities, whom Christ's Tears had offended, 1594. Lodges at the Dolphin in Cambridge, 1595. About this time appears to have lived with John Danter the printer. His lodgings searched by the Privy Council on suspicions aroused by his share in the Isle of Dogs, 1597. Visits Yarmouth. Mentioned as dead in 1601. (Very little is known about Nashe's life.)