How Much of Him?
Hood wrote much for bread, and he wrote much under pressure of all manner
of difficulties--want of health and want of money, the hardship of exile
and the bitterness of comparative failure; and not a little of what he
produced is the merest journalism, here to-day and gone to-morrow. At
his highest he is very high, but it was not given to him to enjoy the
conditions under which great work is produced: he had neither peace of
body nor health of mind, his life from first to last was a struggle with
sickness and misfortune. How is it possible to maintain an interest in
all he wrote, when two-thirds of it was produced with duns at the door
and a nurse in the other room and the printer's-devil waiting in the
hall? Of his admirable courage, his fine temper, his unfailing goodness
of heart, his incorruptible honesty, it were hard to speak too highly;
for one has but to read the story of his life to wonder that he should
have written anything at all. At his happiest he had the gift of
laughter; at his deepest and truest the more precious gift of tears. But
for him there were innumerable hours when the best he could affect was
the hireling's motley; when his fun and his pathos alike ran strained and
thin; when the unique poet and wit became a mere comic rhymester. Is it
just to his memory that it should be burdened with such a mass of what is
already antiquated? But one answer is possible. The immortal part of
Hood might be expressed into a single tiny volume.
Death's Jest-Book.
Thackeray preferred Hood's passion to his fun; and Thackeray knew. Hood
had an abundance of a certain sort of wit, the wit of odd analogies, of
remote yet familiar resemblances, of quaint conceits and humourous and
unexpected quirks. He made not epigrams but jokes, sometimes purely
intellectual but nearly always with the verbal quality as well. The
wonderful jingle called _Miss Kilmansegg_--hard and cold and glittering
as the gold that gleams in it--abounds in capital types of both. But for
an example of both here is a stanza taken at random from the _Ode to the
Great Unknown_:--
'Thou _Scottish Barmecide_, feeding the hunger
Of curiosity with airy gammon;
Thou mystery-monger,
_Dealing it out like middle cut of salmon_
_That people buy and can't make head or tail of it_,'
and so forth, and so forth: the first a specimen of oddness of
analogy--the joke intellectual; the second a jest in which the
intellectual quality is complicated with the verbal. Of rarer merit are
that conceit of the door which was shut with such a slam 'it sounded like
a wooden d---n,' and that mad description of the demented mariner,--
'His head was _turned_, and so he _chewed_
_His pigtail_ till he died,'--
which is a pun as unexpected and imaginative as any that exists, not
excepting even Lamb's renowned achievement, the immortal 'I say, Porter,
is that your own Hare or a Wig?' But as a punster Hood is merely
unsurpassable. The simplest and the most complex, the wildest and the
most obvious, the straightest and the most perverse, all puns came alike
to him. The form was his natural method of expression. His prose
extravaganzas--even to the delightful _Friend in Need_--are pretty well
forgotten; his one novel is very hard to read; there is far less in _Up
the Rhine_ than in _Humphry Clinker_ after all; we have been spoiled for
_Lycus the Centaur_ and _The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies_ by the rich
and passionate verse of the Laureate, the distinction, and the measure of
Arnold, the sumptuous diction and the varied and enchanting music of
_Atalanta_ and _Hesperia_ and _Erechtheus_. We care little for the old-
fashioned whimsicality of the _Odes_, and little for such an inimitable
farrago of vulgarisms, such a _reductio ad absurdum_ of sentiment and
style, as _The Lost Child_. But the best of Hood's puns are amusing
after forty years. They are the classics of verbal extravagance, and
they are a thousand times better known than _The Last Man_, though that
is a work of genius, and almost as popular as the _Song of the Shirt_,
the _Bridge of Sighs_, the _Dream of Eugene Aram_ themselves. By an odd
chance, too, the rhymes in which they are set have all a tragic theme.
'Tout ce qui touche a la mort,' says Champfleury, 'est d'une gaiete
folle.' Hood found out that much for himself before Champfleury had
begun to write. His most riotous ballads are ballads of death and the
grave. Tim Turpin does murder and is hanged
'On Horsham drop, and none can say
He took a drop too much';
Ben Battle entwines a rope about his melancholy neck, and for the second
time in life _enlists him in the line_; Young Ben expires of grief for
the falsehood of Sally Brown: Lieutenant Luff drinks himself into his
grave; John Day the amorous coachman,
'With back too broad to be conceived
By any narrow mind,'
pines to nothingness, and is found heels uppermost in his cruel
mistress's water-butt. To Hood, with his grim imagination and his
strange fantastic humour, death was meat and drink. It is as though he
saw so much of the 'execrable Shape' that at last the pair grew friends,
and grinned whenever they foregathered even in thought.
His Immortal Part.
Was Thackeray right, then, in resenting the waste of Hood's genius upon
mere comicalities? I think he was; but only to a certain point. Hood
was a true poet: but it was not until after years of proof and endeavour
that he discovered the use to which his powers could best be put and the
material on which they could best be employed. He worked hard and with
but partial success at poetry all his life long. He passed his life in
punning and making comic assaults on the Queen's English; but he was
author all the while of _The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies_, the _Ode to
Melancholy_, _Hero and Leander_, _Lycus the Centaur_, and a score and
more of lovable and moving ballads; and he had won himself a name with
two such capital examples of melodrama as _The Last Man_ (1826) and _The
Dream of Eugene Aram_ (1829). But as a poet he profited little. The
public preferred him as a buffoon; and not until his last years (and then
anonymously) was he able to utter his highest word. All was made ready
against his coming--the age, the subject, the public mind, the public
capacity of emotion; and in _The Song of the Shirt_ he approved himself a
great singer. In the days of _Lycus the Centaur_ and the _Midsummer
Fairies_ he could no more have written it than the public could have
heeded had he written. But times were changed--Dickens had come, and the
humanitarian epoch--and the great song went like fire. So, a year or two
after, did _The Bridge of Sighs_. That, says Thackeray, 'was his
Corunna, his Heights of Abraham--sickly, weak, wounded, he fell in the
full blaze and fame of that great victory.' Could he have repeated it
had he lived? Who knows? In both these irresistible appeals to the
heart of man the material is of equal value and importance with the form;
and in poetry such material is rare. A brace of such songs is possible
to a poet; ten couples are not. It is Hood's immortality that he sang
these two. Almost in the uttering they went the round of the world; and
it is not too much to say of them that they will only pass with the
language.