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,