I have a delightful rather than a difficult, or even a delicate duty
to perform in speaking of those remains of Hood which are not in
the keeping of the graveyard’s silent warders, but in the custody
of ever-living generations of men and women. I have at this day no
intelligent opinions of Thomas Hood’s ability and achievements to
oppose; no detractions from his just and symmetrical fame to rebuke;
no reluctant acknowledgments of his mastership to stimulate. The most
that can be done now for the dear, dead poet, is to waft his fame, on
the breath of honest applause, to circles of men outside of the serried
ranks which have already closed in upon his shrine.
It appears from the researches of his children that he was born May 23,
1799.
It rarely happens in the history of genius that the verdict of
posterity becomes unanimous within its own generation. Yet, this is
true of Thomas Hood. He was, indeed, broadly and lovingly appreciated
in life, and he had not been long dead when every murmur of doubt,
every dissonance of judgment concerning his kingship among the humorous
poets of the nineteenth century, died away. Where now he is not admired
and extolled and loved for what he did for letters and humanities, let
us charitably suppose he is only _not known_. Of him it is preëminently
true,
“None know him but to love him;
None name him but to praise.”
I have no hesitation in making my discourse this afternoon his eulogy.
If I could not have praised him as a matchless humorist, as a great
poet, and as a noble example of manhood, I would have kept silence
concerning him.
No name in the literary annals of our century better deserves to be
inscribed upon the hearts of the people than does his. He was the
friend of the people, and of all the motley he chose to wear, no garb
better fitted him, or was more commonly worn, than that of brotherly
kindness. This, indeed, he always wore, like a close-fitting tunic, and
even when the gay tissues and tinsel of Momus or Harlequin glittered
upon the outside, the cerement of charity was between them and his
bosom.
The chief reputation Hood achieved in his lifetime was not that which
now cleaves to his name. He was known and admired for what is, however
admirable in itself, the lesser of his two great gifts. These were wit
and poetry, and he shone most to the public eye in the former. I have
pronounced him a matchless humorist and a great poet. The proof of my
words must be sought in his works.
* * * * *
He was as peculiar in his humor as he was in his character. His passion
for punning was never exceeded, perhaps. It would have aroused all the
dogmatism of Dr. Johnson’s elephantine nature to explosive indignation
against him. Looked at superficially, very much of what Hood wrote
appears to be the veriest wantoning of verbal merriment. There are
whole volumes of prose and verse, in which he seems to riot in fun, and
to ransack the English language for sounds and synonyms of nonsense;
but, even in his wildest abandonment to the mood of mirth, there is
discoverable a method in his madness, a meaning in his mummery, which
is the token of a great brain, throbbing under the jester’s plume, and
of a noble heart beating right humanly beneath the mummer’s spangled
vest.
The world at first mistook him, no doubt, for a literary harlequin, a
poetical pranker, at whose antics they were called upon to laugh only.
The admirable humorist lived to see their great mistake rectified, and
to behold
“Laughter, holding both his sides,”
not infrequently lift his restraining hands to eyes all suddenly dashed
with great blinding tears, or to a bosom growing tempestuous with sighs
and throes of human sympathy.
Yet there were not, I think, two distinct sides to Hood’s nature, as
some of the earlier critics said, to account for the mysterious pathos
welling up from the founts of his wit, but rather a unique single,
capable of many manifestations seemingly distinct and diverse, and
even antagonistic, but all alike, whether grave or gay, imaginative or
practical, comic or tragic—phases only of a homogeneous soul.
It was truly said of him that he introduced comedy and tragedy to each
other, and taught them to live together in a cordial union. When his
most whimsical poems are scanned, for the discovery, not of their feet,
but of their feeling, they reveal his heart beneath the rattling ribs
of verbiage.
In that extraordinary poem, “Miss Killmansegg and her Precious Leg,”
which to the hasty or over-serious reader seems only a foolish though
glittering pageant of rhetorical figures and fancies, a motley troop
of “whims and oddities,” there is nevertheless a deep vein of wisdom,
which, if visible nowhere else, leads plainly enough to the surface in
the terribly grotesque catastrophe. The heroine having lost a member by
a casualty, wore instead of it a leg of gold, which she laid under her
pillow at night, to keep it from the clutches of her spendthrift lord,
who had hinted to her—
—In language low,
That her precious leg was precious slow,
A good ’un to look at, but bad to go,
And kept quite a sum lying idle.
That instead of playing musical airs,
Like Colin’s foot in going up-stairs,
As the wife in the Scottish ballad declares—
It made an infernal stumping;
Whereas a member of cork, or wood,
Would be lighter and cheaper, and quite as good,
Without the unbearable thumping.
Dissensions ripened into quarrels. The countess, in her anger,
destroyed her will, which act hastened the dreadful end. That night her
sleep was broken;—
’Twas a stir at her pillow she felt,
And some object before her glittered.
’Twas the golden leg!—she knew its gleam,
And up she started, and tried to scream;
But e’en in the moment she started—
Down came the limb with a frightful smash,
And, lost in the universal flash,
That her eyeballs made at so mortal a crash,
The spark, called vital departed!
* * * * *
Gold, still gold! hard, yellow and cold,
For gold she had lived, and she died for gold,
By a golden weapon—not oaken.
In the morning they found her all alone,
Stiff and bloody, and cold as a stone—
But her leg, the golden leg, was gone,
And the “golden bowl” was broken!
Gold—still gold! it haunted her yet—
At the “Golden Lion” the inquest met,
Its foreman and carver and gilder—
And the jury debated, from twelve till three,
What their verdict ought to be,
And they brought it in a _felo-de-se_,
Because her own leg had killed her!