Book: Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860




"One day, as I was going by
That part of Holborn christened High," etc.

Then there is that broadest of broad, but morally inoffensive stories,
in which the laundress, in trying to cure a smoking chimney, blows
herself to death, having merely power to speak a few words to
Betty,--who gaspingly explains to her mistress "The Report from Below":--

"Well, Ma'am, you won't believe it,
But it's gospel fact and true,
But these words is all she whispered,--
_'Why, where is the powder blew?_'"

For other examples refer to "The Ode to Malthus" and "The Blow-up,"
which pain the sides while they cheer the heart.

Again, we find the grotesque through Hood's writings in union with
the fantastic and the fanciful. His fertility in the most unexpected
analogies becomes to the reader of his works a matter of continual
wonder. Strange and curious contrasts and likenesses, both mental and.
verbal, which might never once occur even to a mind of more than common
eccentricity and invention, seem to have been in his mind with the
ordinary flow of thinking. Plenteous and sustained, therefore, as his
wit is, it never fails to startle. We have no doubt of his endless
resources, and yet each new instance becomes a new marvel. His wit, too,
is usually pregnant and vital with force and meaning. This constitutes
the singular and peculiar worth of his verbal wit in general, and of his
puns in particular. In verbal wit he has had but few equals, and in puns
he has had none. He made the pun an instrument of power; and had his wit
been malignant, he could have pointed the pun to a sharpness that would
have left wounds as deep as thought, and could have added a poison to it
that would have kept them rankling as long as memory lasted. The secret
of his power in the pun is, that he does not rest in the analogy of
sound alone, but seeks also for analogy of significance. Generally there
is a subtile coincidence between his meaning and what the sound of the
pun signifies, and thus the pun becomes an amusing or illustrative
image, or a most emphatic and striking condensation of his thought.
"Take care of your cough," he writes to his engraver, "lest you go to
coughy-pot, as I said before; but I did _not_ say before, that nobody is
so likely as a wood-engraver to cut his stick." Speaking of his wife, he
says,--"To be sure, she still sticks to her old fault of going to sleep
while I am dictating, till I vow to change my _Woman_uensis for a
_Man_uensis." How keenly and well the pun serves him in burlesque, in
his comic imitations of the great moralist! He hits off with inimitable
ridicule the great moralist's dislike to Scotland. Boswell inquired the
Doctor's opinion on illicit distillation, and how the great moralist
would act in an affray between the smugglers and the excise. "If I went
by the _letter_ of the law, I should assist the customs; but according
to the _spirit_, I should stand by the contrabandists." The Doctor was
always very satirical on the want of timber in the North. "Sir," said he
to the young Lord of Icombally, who was going to join his regiment, "may
Providence preserve you in battle, and especially your nether limbs! You
may grow a walking-stick here, but you must import a wooden leg." At
Dunsinnane the old prejudice broke out. "Sir," said he to Boswell,
"Macbeth was an idiot; he ought to have known that every wood in
Scotland might be carried in a man's hand. The Scotch, Sir, are like the
frogs in the fable: if they had a log, they would make a king of it." We
will quote here a stanza which contains quite a serious application of
the pun; and for Hood's purpose no other word could so happily or so
pungently express his meaning. The poem is an "Address to Mrs. Fry"; and
the doctrine of it is, that it is better and wiser to teach the young
and uncorrupted that are yet outside the prison than the vicious and the
hardened who have got inside it. Thus he goes on:--

"I like your chocolate, good Mistress Fry!
I like your cookery in every way;
I like your Shrove-tide service and supply;
I like to hear your sweet Pandeans play;
I like the pity in your full-brimmed eye;
I like your carriage and your silken gray,
Your dove-like habits, and your silent preaching;
But I don't like your _Newgatory_ teaching."

Hood had not only an unexampled facility in the discovery of analogies
in a multitude of separate resemblances and relations, but he had an
equal facility of tracing with untiring persistency a single idea
through all its possible variations. Take, for example, the idea
of _gold_, in the poem of "Miss Kilmansegg," and there is hardly a
conceivable reference to _gold_ which imagination or human life can
suggest, that is not presented to us.

But this play of words and thought would, after all, be in itself little
more than serious trifling, a mere exhibition of mental and verbal
ingenuity. It would be a kind of intellectual and linguistical
dexterity, which would give the author a singularity and supremacy
above the world. It would make him the greatest of mental acrobats or
jugglers, and he might almost deserve as eminent a reputation as a
similar class of artists in bodily achievements; possibly he might claim
to be ranked with the man who cooked his dinner and ate it on a tight
rope over the Niagara Rapids, or with the man who placed a pea-nut under
a dish-cover and turned it into the American eagle. Such, however, is
not Hood's case. In all feats of mental and verbal oddity, he does,
indeed, rank the highest,--but _that_ is the very lowest of his
attainments. His pranks do verily cause us to laugh and wonder; but
there is also that ever in his pranks which causes us to think, and
even sometimes to weep. In much of his that seems burlesque, the most
audacious, there are hidden springs of thought and tears. Often, when
most he seems as the grimed and grinning clown in a circus girded by
gaping spectators, he stops to pour out satire as passionate as that of
Juvenal, or morality as eloquent and as pure as that of Pascal. And this
he does without lengthening his face or taking off his paint. Sometimes,
when he most absurdly scampers in his thoughts, when he kicks up the
heels of his fancy in the most outrageous fashion, he is playing as it
most doth please him on our human sympathy, and the human heart becomes
an instrument to his using, out of which he discourseth eloquent music
according to his moods. The interest one finds in reading Hood is often
the sudden pleasure which comes upon him. When in the midst of what
appears a wilful torrent of absurdity, there bursts out a rush of
earnest and instinctive nature. We could quote enough in confirmation
of this assertion to make a moderate volume. And then the large and
charitable wisdom, which in Hood's genius makes the teacher humble
in order to win the learner, we value all the more that it conceals
authority in the guise of mirth, and under the coat of motley or the
mantle of extravagance insinuates effective and salutary lessons.

No writer has ever so successfully as Hood combined the grotesque
with the terrible. He has the art, as no man but himself ever had, of
sustaining the illusion of an awful or solemn narrative through a long
poem, to be closed in a catastrophe that is at once unexpected and
ludicrous. The mystification is complete; the secret of the issue is
never betrayed; suspense is maintained with Spartan reticence; curiosity
is excited progressively to its utmost tension; and the surprise at the
end is oftentimes electric. "A Storm at Hastings" and "The Demon
Ship" are of this class. But sometimes the terrible so prevails as to
overpower the ludicrous, or rather, it becomes more terrible by the very
presence of the ludicrous. We have evidence of this in the poem called
"The Last Man." Sometimes we find the idea of the supernatural added to
the ludicrous with great moral and imaginative effect. Observe with
what pathetic tenderness this is done in the "Ode to the Printer's
Devil,"--with what solemn moral power in "The Tale of a Trumpet,"--and
with what historical satire and social insight in "The Knight and the
Dragon." Sometimes the ludicrous element entirely disappears, and we
have the purely terrible,--the terrible in itself, as in "The Tower of
Lahneck,"--the terrible in pathos, as in "The Work-House Clock,"--the
terrible in penitence and remorse, as in "The Lady's Dream,"--the
terrible in temptation and despair, as in "The Dream of Eugene Aram."

Hood, as we have seen, is a perfect master equally of the grotesque and
the terrible. Some writers, it may be, were as powerful as he in the
grotesque. Rabelais had a certain hugeness in it, which Hood did not
have and did not need. Other writers transcended Hood in the region of
the terrible. It is almost useless to name such sublime masters of it as
Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton. But in the intermingling of the grotesque
and terrible, and in the infinite diversification of them as thus
united, not only has Hood no equal, but no rival. In some few marked
and outward directions of his genius he may have imitators; but in this
magical alchemy of sentiment, thought, passion, fancy, and imagination,
the secret of his laboratory was _his_ alone; no other man has
discovered it, and no other man, as he did, could use it. But he worked
in the purely ideal also;--if he did not work supremely, he worked well,
as we have proof in many of his serious poems, and particularly in
his "Plea for the Midsummer Fairies." And when aroused,--but that
was rarely,--he could wield a burningly satiric pen, and with manly
indignation and impassioned scorn wield it to chastise the hypocritical
and the arrogant, as his letter to a certain pious lady and his "Ode to
Rae Wilson" bear sufficient witness.

Along with the grotesque and terrible in Hood's writings we also often
observe a wizard-like command over the elements of the desolate, the
weird, the sad, the forlorn, and the dreary. We may trace it in many of
the poems to which we have already alluded. But it appears with all its
lonely gloom of power in "The Haunted House." This poem is surely the
work of a fancy that must have often gone into the desert of the soul
to meditate, and that must have made itself acquainted with all that is
dismal in imagery and feeling. Pictures, in succession or combination,
it would be impossible to conceive, which more dolefully impress the
mind with a sense of doom, dread, and mystery; yet every picture is in
itself natural, and, while each adds to the intensity of the impression,
each is in itself complete.

Now, having gone over some of the most noticeable qualities in the
writings of Hood, we come to the crowning quality of his genius,
the _simply pathetic_. We could, if space remained, adduce many
psychological and other reasons why we apply this phrase to the pathos
of Hood. One reason is, that Hood's pathos involves none of the
complications of higher passion, nor any of the pomp which belongs, in
mood, situation, or utterance, to the loftier phases of human suffering.
The sorrow of those who most attracted his sympathy was not theatrical
or imposing. It has been well said of him, that his "bias was towards
all that was poor and unregarded." And thus, while those who painfully
moved the charity and compassion of his genius were considered by him
the victims of artificial civilization, his own feeling for them was
natural and instinctive; yet never did natural and instinctive feeling
receive expression more artistic, but with that admirable art in which
elaboration attains the utmost perfection of simplicity. It excites
our wonder to observe how in pathos Hood's genius divests itself of
attributes which had seemed essential to its existence. All that is
grotesque, whimsical, or odd disappears, and we have only the soul of
pity in the sound of song,--in song "most musical, most melancholy." In
pathos, Hood's is not what we should call a transformed genius so much
as a genius becoming divested of its coarser life, and then breathing
purely the inner spirit of goodness and beauty. The result is what one
might almost term the "absolute" in pathos. Nothing is excluded that is
necessary to impression; nothing is admitted that could vulgarize or
weaken it. We have thus pathos at once practical and poetic,--pathos at
once the most affecting and the most ideal,--coming from a heart rich
with all human charities, and gaining worthy and immortal form by means
of a subtile, deep, cultivated imagination. The pathetic, therefore, no
less than the comic, in Hood's writings has all the author's peculiar
originality, but has it in a higher order. Pathos was the product of
the author's mind when it was most matured by experience, and
when suffering, without impairing its strength, had refined its
characteristic benevolence to the utmost tenderness.

Hood's pathos culminates in "The Song of the Shirt," "The Lay of the
Laborer," and "The Bridge of Sighs."

These are marvellous lyrics. In spirit and in form they are singular
and remarkable. We cannot think of any poems which more show the mystic
enchantment of genius. How else was a ragged sempstress in a squalid
garret made immortal, nay, made universal, made to stand for an entire
sisterhood of wretchedness? Here is the direst poverty, blear-eyed
sorrow, dim and dismal suffering,--nothing of the romantic. A stern
picture it is, which even the softer touches render sterner; still there
is nought in it that revolts or shocks; it is deeply poetic, calls into
passionate action the feelings of reverence and pity, and has all the
dignity of tragedy. Even more wonderful is the transformation that a
rustic hind undergoes in "The Lay of the Laborer," in which a peasant
out of work personifies, with eloquent impressiveness, the claims and
calamities of toiling manhood. But an element of the sublime is added in
"The Bridge of Sighs." In that we have the truly tragic; for we have in
it the union of guilt, grief, despair, and death. An angel from heaven,
we think, could not sing a more gentle dirge, or one more pure; yet
the ordinary associations suggested by the corpse of the poor, ruined,
self-murdered girl are such as to the prudish and fastidious would not
allow her to be mentioned, much less bring her into song. But in the
pity almost divine with which Hood sings her fate there is not only a
spotless delicacy, there is also a morality as elevated as the heavenly
mercy which the lyrist breathes. The pure can afford to be pitiful; and
the life of Hood was so exemplary, that he had no fear to hinder him
from being charitable. The cowardice of conscience is one of the saddest
penalties of sin; and to avert suspicion from one's self by severity to
others is, indeed, the most miserable expediency of self-condemnation.
The temper of charity and compassion seems natural to men of letters and
of art. They are emotional and sensitive, and by the necessity of their
vocation have to hold much communion with the inmost consciousness of
our nature; they thus learn the weakness of man, and the allowances that
he needs; they are conversant with a broad and diversified humanity, and
thence they are seldom narrow, intolerant, or self-righteous; feeling,
too, their full share of moral and mortal imperfection, they refuse
to be inquisitors of the unfortunate, but rather choose to be their
advocates and helpers. No man ever had more of this temper than Hood;
and out of it came these immortal lyrics upon which we have been
commenting. For such a temper the writing of these lyrics was exceeding
great reward; not only because they made the author an everlasting
benefactor to the poor, but also because they became an interpretation
of his own deeper genius, and revealed a nobler meaning in his works
than had ever before been discerned. Hence-forth, he was more thought of
as a profound poet than as the greatest of mimes, jesters, and punsters.
The lyrics of the poor saved him from imminent injustice.--All that we
have further to say of these lyrics is to express our admiration as to
the classical finish of their diction, and as to the wild, sweet, and
strange music in their sadly sounding measures.

Hood is a writer to whom, in his degree, we may apply the epithet
_Shakspearian_. We do not, indeed, compare him with Shakspeare in bulk
or force of genius, but only in quality and kind. He had, as the great
dramatist, the same disregard of the temporary and discernment of the
essential; the same wonderful wealth of vocabulary, and the same bold
dexterity in the use of it; the same caprices of jestings and conceits;
the same comminglings of mirth and melancholy; the same many-sided
conception of existence; the same embracing catholicity of tastes and
tendencies; the same indifference to sects and factions; the same
freedom from jealousies, asperities, and spites; and in the lower scale
of his genius, he resembled the mighty dramatist in subtile perception
of life and Nature, in his mental and moral independence, and in his
intuitive divinations of abstract truth and individual character.

As a poet of the poor, Crabbe is the only poet with whom he can be
critically compared. The comparison would be a contrast; and in order to
handle it to any purpose, a long essay would be required. Hood wrote
but a few short lyrics on the poor; Crabbe wrote volumes. Crabbe was
_literal_: Hood _ideal_. Crabbe was concrete; Hood was abstract. Crabbe
lived among the rural poor; Hood among the city poor. Crabbe saw the
poor constantly, and went minutely and practically into the interior of
their life; if Hood ever directly saw them at all, it was merely with
casual glimpses, and he must have learned of them only by occasional
report. Crabbe was a man of vigorous constitution, he lived a hardy
life, and he lived it long; Hood was a man of feeble health, he lived a
life of pain, and he closed it early. Crabbe had a hard youth, but
after that a certain and settled competence; Hood's was also a youth of
struggle, but struggle was his destiny to the end. These radical and
circumstantial differences between the men will account for their
different modes in thinking and writing of the poor. But both were men
of genius, of genial humanity, and of singular originality. No one who
reads Crabbe's writings will deny him genius; no one who reads them with
adequate sympathy and attention will deny that his genius is vital with
passion and imagination. Only the latent heat of passion and imagination
could save these seemingly bald and monotonous narratives from being as
dull as a dictionary. But they are not so; they have an interest which
holds the reader with a fixedness of grasp which he cannot loosen.
Crabbe's poetry of the poor is slow and epic; Hood's is rapid
and lyrical. Crabbe's characters are only actual and intensified
individuals; Hood's characters are idealized and representative persons.
Hood gives you only the pathetic or tragical essentials; but, along
with these, Crabbe gives you the complexity and detail of life which
surrounded them. Hood presents you with the picture of a lonely woman at
midnight toiling and starving in the slavery of sewing; but Crabbe would
trace her from her quiet country-home, through the follies which led her
to a London garret. Hood, in his "Lay of the Laborer," makes you listen
to the wail of a strong man imploring leave to toil; Crabbe would find
him drunk in the beer-house or the gin-shop, and then carry you on to
the catastrophe in his ruined home or in his penal death. Hood, in his
"Bridge of Sighs," brings you into the presence of death, and you gaze,
weeping, over the lifeless form of beauty that had once been innocent
and blooming girlhood, but from which the spirit, early soiled and
saddened, took violent flight in its despair; Crabbe would give us the
record of her sins, and connect her end retributively with her
conduct. Much is in Crabbe that is repulsive and austere; but he is,
notwithstanding, an earnest moral teacher and a deep tragic poet. Let
us be content with both Crabbe and Hood: we need to look at the aspect
which each of them gives us of life,--the stern poetry of fact in
Crabbe, and the lyrical poetry of feeling in Hood. Crabbe has dealt with
groups and masses; Hood has immortalized single figures, which, by their
isolation and intensity, take full and forcible possession of the mind,
and can never be driven out from memory.

This is a rather serious conclusion of an article on a comic genius. As
the humorist is for the most part on the play-side of literature, he
should, we are apt to suppose, be entirely on the play-side of life.
He ought to laugh and grow fat,--and he ought to have an easy-chair to
laugh in. Why should he who makes so many joyous not have the largest
mess of gladness to his share? He ought to be a favored Benjamin at the
banquet of existence,--and have, above the most favored of his
brethren, a double portion. He ought, like the wind, to be "a chartered
libertine,"--to blow where he listeth, and have no one to question
whence he cometh or whither he goeth. He ought to be the citizen of a
comfortable world, and he ought to have an ungrudged freedom in it. What
debt is he should not be allowed to learn or to know,--and the idea of
a dun it should not be possible for him even to conceive. Give him good
cheer; enrich the juices of his blood, nourish generously the functions
of his brain; give him delicate viands and rosy wine; give him smiles
and laughter, music and flowers; let him inherit every region of
creation, and be at home in air and water as well as on the earth; at
last, in an Anacreontic bloom of age, let him in a song breathe away his
life. Such is the lot, we believe, that many imagine as the condition
of a humorist; but which the humorist, less than most men, has ever
enjoyed. All great humorists have been men grave at heart, and often
men of more than ordinary trials. None but the superficial can fail to
recognize the severity of Rabelais's genius. The best portion of poor
Moliere's manhood was steeped in sorrow. The life of Swift was a hidden
tragedy. The immortal wit of "Hudibras" did not save Butler from the
straits and struggles of narrow means. Cervantes spent much of his time
in a prison, and much of his grandest humor had there its birthplace.
Farquhar died young, and in terrible distress of mind at the desolate
prospect that he saw before his orphan children. How Sheridan died is
familiar to us all. The very conditions of temperament which gave Sterne
genius gave him also torment. Fielding and Smollett battled all their
lives with adversity; and Goldsmith died in his prime, embittered in
his last hours by distress and debt. Banim, the great Irish novelist,
withered early out of life upon a government pittance of a pension;
Griffin gave up literature, became a monk, and found in youth a grave;
Carleton, one of the most gifted humorists that ever painted the
many-colored pictures of Irish character, is now struggling against the
pressure of a small income in his advancing years. Not to carry this
melancholy list farther,--which might be indefinitely prolonged,--we
close it with the name of Thomas Hood.

But not by contest with realities of life alone have humorists been
saved from temptations to any dangerous levity; great humorists, as we
have said, have generally been earnest men, very grave at heart, and
much that they have written has been tragedy in the guise of irony. All
readers cannot find this out. They cannot see the grief of life beneath
its grin; they cannot detect the scorn or the pity that is hidden in
joke or banter; neither can they always find out the joke or banter that
is covered by a solemn face; and many a sincere believer has been deemed
an atheist because he burlesqued hypocrites with their own gravity.
Numbers judge only by the outside, and never reach the spirit of
writing or of man. They laugh at the contortions of grimace, but of the
mysteries of mind or the pains of heart which underlie the contortions
they know nothing. They snatch their rapid pleasure, and leave unvalued
the worth of him who gives it; they care not for the cost of genius
or labor at which it has been procured; and when they have had their
transient indulgence, they have had all they sought and all that they
could enjoy.

The relation of many to the humorist is illustrated by that of the
doctor, on a certain occasion, to Liston, the celebrated comedian.
Liston was subject to constitutional melancholy, and in a severe attack
of it he consulted a famous physician.

"Go and see Liston," said the doctor.

"I am Liston," said the actor.

And thus the inner soul of a great humorist is often as unrecognized
by those who read him as was the natural personality of Liston by the
doctor.




FAYAL AND THE PORTUGUESE.


Every man when he first crosses the ocean is a Columbus to himself, no
matter how many voyages by other navigators he may have heard described
or read recorded. Geographies convince only the brain, not the senses,
that the globe is round; and when personal experience exhibits the fact,
it is as wonderful as if never before suggested. You have dwelt for
weeks within one unbroken loneliness of sea and sky, with nothing that
seemed solid in the universe but the bit of painted wood on which you
have floated. Suddenly one morning something looms high and cloudlike
far away, and you are told that it is land. Then you feel, with all
ignorant races, as if the ship were a god, thus to find its way over
that trackless waste, or as if this must be some great and unprecedented
success, and in no way the expected or usual result of such enterprises.
A sea-captain of twenty-five years' experience told me that this
sensation never wore off, and that he still felt as fresh a sense of
something extraordinary, on making land, as upon his first voyage. To
discover for one's self that there is really another side to the ocean,
--that is the astonishing thing. And when it happens, as in our case,
that the haven thus gained is not merely a part of a great continent
which the stupidest ship could not miss, if it only sailed far enough,
but is actually a small volcanic island, a mere dot among those wild
waves, a thing which one might easily have passed in the night,
unsuspecting, and which yet was not so passed,--it really seems like the
maddest piece of good-luck, as if one should go to sea in a bowl, hoping
somewhere or other to land on the edge of a tea-cup.

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