The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton | Page 6

year 1594, which however is mainly interesting to us as having seen the publication of the work which we are here introducing to modern readers.
An eminent French critic, M. Jusserand, whose knowledge of English sixteenth-century literature is unsurpassed, was the first to draw attention to the singular interest which attaches to "The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton," 1594. In his treatise, "Le Roman au Temps de Shakespeare," 1887, M. Jusserand insisted upon the fact that this neglected book was the best specimen of the picaresque tale written in English before the days of Defoe. He shows that expressions put in the mouth of Nash's hero, which had been carelessly treated as autobiographical confessions of foreign travel and the like, on the part of the author, were but features of a carefully planned fiction. "Jack Wilton" describes the career of an adventurer, from his early youth as a page in the royal camp of Henry VIII. at the siege of Tournay, to his attainment of wealth, position, and a beautiful Italian wife.
The first exploit of the page is an encounter with a fraudulent innkeeper, which is described with great spirit, and M. Jusserand has ingeniously surmised that Shakespeare, after reading these pages, determined to fuse the two characters, mine host and the waggish picaroon, into the single immortal figure of Falstaff. After this point in the tale, it is probable that the reader may find the interest of the story flag; but his attention will be reawakened when he reaches the episode of the Earl of Surrey and Fair Geraldine, and that in which Jack, pretending to be Surrey, runs off with his sweet Venetian mistress, Diamante. It will be for the reader of the ensuing pages to say whether Nash had mastered the art of narrative quite so perfectly as M. Jusserand, in his just pride as a discoverer, seems to think. The romance, no doubt, is incoherent and languid at times, and is easily led aside into channels of gorgeous description and vain moral reflection.
It will doubtless be of interest, at this point, to quote the words in which, in a later volume, M. Jusserand has reiterated his praise of "Jack Wilton" and his belief in Nash as the founder of the British novel of character:--
"In the works of Nash and his imitators, the different parts are badly dovetailed; the novelist is incoherent and incomplete; the fault lies in some degree with the picaresque form itself. Nash, however, pointed out the right road, the road that was to lead to the true novel. He was the first among his compatriots to endeavour to relate in prose a long-sustained story, having for its chief concern: the truth.... No one, Ben Jonson excepted, possessed at that epoch, in so great a degree as himself, a love of the honest truth. With Nash, then, the novel of real life, whose invention in England is generally attributed to Defoe, begins. To connect Defoe with the past of English literature, we must get over the whole of the seventeenth century, and go back to 'Jack Wilton,' the worthy brother of 'Roxana,' 'Moll Flanders,' and 'Colonel Jack.'"
It is to be regretted that Nash made no second adventure in pure fiction. "Jack Wilton," now one of the rarest of his books, was never reprinted in its own age.
How Nash was employed during the next two years, it is not easy to conjecture. When we meet with him once more, the smouldering fire of his quarrel with the Harveys had burst again into flame. "Have with you to Saffron Walden," 1596, is devoted to the chastisement of "the reprobate brace of brothers, to wit, witless Gabriel and ruffling Richard." No fresh public outburst on Harvey's part seems to have led to this attack; but he bragged in private that he had silenced his licentious antagonists. Nash admits that his opponent's last book "has been kept idle by me, in a bye-settle out of sight amongst old shoes and boots almost this two year." Harvey was known to have come from Saffron Walden; Nash invites his readers to accompany him to that town to see what they can discover, and he retails a good deal of lively scandal about the rope-maker's sons. "Have with you" is perhaps the smartest and is certainly the most readable of Nash's controversial volumes. It gives us, too, some interesting fragments of autobiography. Harvey had accused him of "prostituting his pen like a courtisan," and Nash makes this curious and not very lucid statement in selfdefence:--
"Neither will I deny it nor will I grant it. Only thus far I'll go with you, that twice or thrice in a month, when res est angusta domi, the bottom of my purse is turned downward, and my conduit of ink will no longer