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.
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.