APRIL.
For the month of April the required C. L. S. C. reading comprises two of the Hampton Tracts—No. 5, A Haunted House, and No. 9, Cleanliness and Disinfection—and the designated reading in The Chautauquan. The following is the division of the work for the month according to weeks:
First Week—1. Hampton Tract, No. 5, A Haunted House.
2. Russian History, in The Chautauquan.
3. Sunday Reading, selection for April 1, in The Chautauquan.
Second Week—1. Hampton Tract, No. 9, Cleanliness and Disinfection.
2. Scandinavian History and Literature, in The Chautauquan.
3. Sunday Reading, selection for April 8, in The Chautauquan.
Third Week—1. Readings in Physiology, in The Chautauquan.
2. Pictures from English History, in The Chautauquan.
3. Sunday Reading, selection for April 15, in The Chautauquan.
Fourth Week—1. Selections from English Literature, in The Chautauquan. [See page 423.]
2. Sunday Readings, selections for April 22 and 29, in The Chautauquan.
Poesy is a beauteous young lady, chaste, honorable, discreet, witty, retired, and who keeps herself within the limits of the strictest discretion; she is the friend of solitude, fountains entertain her, meadows console her, woods free her from ennui, flowers delight her; and, in short, she gives pleasure and instruction to all with whom she communicates.—Cervantes.
THOMAS HOOD.[N]
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!
And here follows what the poet designates “Her Moral:”—
Gold! gold! gold! gold!
Bright and yellow, hard and cold,
Molten, graven, hammered and rolled,
Heavy to get, and light to hold,
Hoarded, bartered, bought, and sold,
Stolen, borrowed, squandered, doled:
Spurned by the young, but hugged by the old,
E’en to the verge of the church-yard’s mould;
Price of many a crime untold:
Gold! gold! gold! gold!
Good or bad a thousand-fold—
How widely its agencies vary,
To save, to ruin, to curse, to bless;—
As even its minted coins express,
Now stamped with the image of Good Queen Bess,
And now of a Bloody Mary.
The bulk of his production is expressed with the same levity which strikes the ear, as in the verses just quoted. He was unquestionably the greatest trafficker in words of double meaning the world had ever known. His stock was exhaustless, and whether home-made or far-fetched, his mots and jeux were sure of currency.
The secret of the perpetual playfulness of his pen is to be found in the eagerness of the public mind to be moved to mirth, and in his need to minister to the mood of the public mind. In a word, he was dependent upon his brain for his bread. Labor was his law, and so, as it befel, humor and mirth became his profits. His puns (so easily spun from himself,) were transmuted into pence and pounds. His quips looked quaintly ahead to quarter-day. His grotesque metaphors were sold in the street, like plaster images, for a livelihood. Had he been less under constraint to please the public ear, he would have wrought, perchance, one dull epic, instead of a thousand delicious epigrams.
******
His writings are indeed light, but in a double sense. They are light with the buoyancy of the zephyr or of the gossamer wafted in its bosom. They are light also with the luminousness of the sun-beam, kindling beauty and light and warmth as it flashes along its track. The writings of Hood are to be laughed at, but they who only laugh at them have no true appreciation of their subtle power. They disparage them for their mirthfulness, because they can not discover the depths below the dimpling surface of their rolling humor.
******
His description of a November fog, in London, must be familiar to man y of you, but I will venture to quote it in illustration of his facility in rhyming, and also of his skill in supplying the details of a picture which is all painted only in shadows. It is entitled,