HOOD
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,’—