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.
[The end]
William Ernest Henley's essay: Hood