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 à la mort,’ says Champfleury, ‘est d’une gaieté 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.