The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood

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THE POETICAL WORKS

OF

THOMAS HOOD

WITH BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

BY

WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTI

ENLARGED AND REVISED EDITION

A. L. BURT COMPANY, PUBLISHERS, 52-58 DUANE STREET, NEW YORK

[Illustration: THOMAS HOOD.]

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION.

There were scarcely any events in the life of Thomas Hood. One
condition there was of too potent determining importance--life-long ill
health; and one circumstance of moment--a commercial failure, and
consequent expatriation. Beyond this, little presents itself for record
in the outward facts of this upright and beneficial career, bright with
genius and coruscating with wit, dark with the lengthening and deepening
shadow of death.

The father of Thomas Hood was engaged in business as a publisher and
bookseller in the Poultry, in the city of London,--a member of the firm
of Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe. He was a Scotchman, and had come up to the
capital early in life, to make his way. His interest in books was not
solely confined to their saleable quality. He reprinted various old
works with success; published Bloomfield's poems, and dealt handsomely
with him; and was himself the author of two novels, which are stated to
have had some success in their day. For the sake of the son rather than
the father, one would like to see some account, with adequate
specimens, of these long-forgotten tales; for the queries which Thomas
Hood asks concerning the piteous woman of his _Bridge of Sighs_
interest us all concerning a man of genius, and interest us moreover
with regard to the question of intellectual as well as natural
affinity:--

"Who was his father,
Who was his mother?
Had he a sister,
Had he a brother?"

Another line of work in which the elder Hood is recorded to have been
active was the opening of the English book-trade with America. He
married a sister of the engraver Mr. Sands, and had by her a large
family; two sons and four daughters survived the period of childhood.
The elder brother, James, who died early of consumption, drew well, as
did also one or two of the sisters. It would seem therefore, when we
recall Thomas Hood's aptitudes and frequent miscellaneous practice in
the same line, that a certain tendency towards fine art, as well as
towards literature, ran in the family. The consumption which killed
James appears to have been inherited from his mother; she, and two of
her daughters, died of the same disease; and a pulmonary affection of a
somewhat different kind became, as we shall see, one of the poet's most
inveterate persecutors. The death of the father, which was sudden and
unexpected, preceded that of the mother, but not of James, and left the
survivors in rather straitened circumstances.

Thomas, the second of the two sons, was born in the Poultry, on or
about the 23d of May, 1799. He is stated to have been a retired child,
with much quiet humor; chuckling, we may guess, over his own quaint
imaginings, which must have come in crowds, and of all conceivable or
inconceivable sorts, to judge from the products of his after years;
keeping most of these fancies and surprises to himself, but every now
and then letting some of them out, and giving homely or stolid
bystanders an inkling of insight into the many-peopled crannies of his
boyish brain. He received his education at Dr. Wanostrocht's school at
Clapham. It is not very clear how far this education extended:[1] I
should infer that it was just about enough, and not more than enough,
to enable Hood to shift for himself in the career of authorship,
without serious disadvantage from inadequate early training, and also
without much aid thence derived--without, at any rate, any such rousing
and refining of the literary sense as would warrant us in attributing
to educational influences either the inclination to become an author,
or the manipulative power over language and style which Hood displayed
in his serious poems, not to speak of those of a lighter kind. We seem
to see him sliding, as it were, into the profession of letters, simply
through capacity and liking, and the course of events--not because he
had resolutely made up his mind to be an author, nor because his
natural faculty had been steadily or studiously cultivated. As to
details, it may be remarked that his schooling included some
amount--perhaps a fair average amount--of Latin. We find it stated that
he had a Latin prize at school, but was not apt at the language in
later years. He had however one kind of aptitude at it--being addicted
to the use of familiar Latin quotations or phrases, cited with humorous
verbal perversions.

[Footnote 1: The authority--I might almost say, the _one_
authority--for the life of Hood, is the _Memorials_ published by his
son and daughter. Any point which is not clearly brought out in that
affectionate and interesting record will naturally be equally or more
indefinite in my brief summary, founded as it is on the _Memorials_.]

In all the relations of family life, and the forms of family affection,
Hood was simply exemplary. The deaths of his elder brother and of his
father left him the principal reliance of his mother, herself destined
soon to follow them to the tomb: he was an excellent and devoted son.
His affection for one of his sisters, Anne, who also died shortly
afterwards, is attested in the beautiful lines named _The Deathbed_,--

"We watched her breathing through the night."

At a later date, the loves of a husband and a father seem to have
absorbed by far the greater part of his nature and his thoughts: his
letters to friends are steeped and drenched In "Jane," "Fanny," and
"Tom junior." These letters are mostly divided between perpetual family
details and perennial jocularity: a succession of witticisms, or at
lowest of puns and whimsicalities, mounts up like so many squibs and
crackers, fizzing through, sparkling amid, or ultimately extinguished
by, the inevitable shower--the steady rush and downpour--of the
home-affections. It may easily be inferred from this account that there
are letters which one is inclined to read more thoroughly, and in
greater number consecutively, than Hood's.

The vocation first selected for Hood, towards the age of fifteen, was
one which he did not follow up for long--that of an engraver. He was
apprenticed to his uncle Mr. Sands, and afterwards to one of the Le
Keux family. The occupation was ill-suited to his constantly ailing
health, and this eventually conduced to his abandoning it. He then went
to Scotland to recruit, remaining there among his relatives about five
years.[2] According to a statement made by himself, he was in a
merchant's office within this interval; it is uncertain, however,
whether this assertion is to be accepted as genuine, or as made for
some purpose of fun. His first published writing appeared in the
_Dundee Advertiser_ in 1814--his age being then, at the utmost, fifteen
and a half; this was succeeded by some contribution to a local
magazine. But as yet he had no idea of authorship as a profession.

[Footnote 2: "Two years," according to the _Memorials_; but the dates
for this portion of Hood's life are not accurately given in that work.
Hood completed the fifteenth year of his age in May, 1814. It is
certain, from the dates of his letters, that his sojourn in Scotland
began not later than September, 1815; and the writer of the _Memorials_
himself affirms that Hood "returned to London about 1820," in or before
July. If so, he was in Scotland about _five_ years; and, from the fact
that he had written in a Dundee newspaper in 1814, one might even
surmise that the term of six years was nearer the mark. At any rate, as
he had reached Scotland by September, 1815, he was there soon after
completing his sixteenth year: yet Mr. Hessey (_Memorials_, p. 23) says
that he was articled to the engraving business "at the age of fifteen
or sixteen," and his apprenticeship, according to Mr. Hood, junior,
lasted "some years" even _before_ his transfer from Mr. Sands to Mr. Le
Keux. The apprenticeship did not begin until after the father's death;
but the year of that death is left unspecified, though the day and
month are given. These dates, as the reader will readily perceive, are
sometimes vague, and sometimes contradictory. In the text of my notice,
I have endeavored to pick my way through their discrepancies.]

Towards the middle of the year 1820, Hood was re-settled in London,
improved in health, and just come of age. At first he continued
practising as an engraver; but in 1821 he began to act as a sort of
sub-editor for the _London Magazine_ after the death of the editor,
Mr. Scott, in a duel. He concocted fictitious and humorous answers to
correspondents--a humble yet appropriate introduction to the insatiable
habit and faculty for out-of-the-way verbal jocosity which marked-off
his after career from that of all other excellent poets.

His first regular contribution to the magazine, in July, 1821, was a
little poem _To Hope_: even before this, as early at any rate as 1815,
he was in the frequent practice of writing correctly and at some length
in verse, as witnessed by selections, now in print, from what he had
composed for the amusement of his relatives. Soon afterwards, a private
literary society was the recipient of other verses of the same order.
The lines _To Hope_ were followed, in the _London Magazine_, by the
_Ode to Dr. Kitchener_ and some further poems, including the important
work, _Lycus the Centaur_--after the publication of which, there could
not be much doubt of the genuine and uncommon powers of the new writer.
The last contribution of Hood to this magazine was the _Lines to a Cold
Beauty_. Another early work of his, and one which, like the verses _To
the Moon_, affords marked evidence of the impression which he had
received from Keats's poetry, is the unfinished drama (or, as he termed
it, "romance") of _Lamia_: I do not find its precise date recorded. Its
verse is lax, and its tone somewhat immature; yet it shows a great deal
of sparkling and diversified talent. Hood certainly takes a rather more
rational view than Keats did of his subject as a moral invention, or a
myth having some sort of meaning at its root. A serpent transformed
into a woman, who beguiles a youth of the highest hopes into amorous
languid self-abandonment, is clearly not, in morals, the sort of person
that ought to be left uncontrolled to her own devices. Keats
ostentatiously resents the action of the unimpassioned philosopher
Appollonius in revealing the true nature of the woman-serpent, and
dissolving her spell. An elderly pedant to interfere with the pretty
whims of a viper when she wears the outer semblance of a fine woman!
Intolerable!

(Such is the sentiment of Keats; but such plainly is not altogether the
conviction of Hood, although his story remains but partially
developed.)

By this time it may have become pretty clear to himself and others that
his proper vocation and destined profession was literature. Through the
_London Magazine_, he got to know John Hamilton Reynolds (author of the
_Garden of Florence_ and other poems, and a contributor to this serial
under the pseudonym of Edward Herbert), Charles Lamb, Allan Cunningham,
De Quincey, and other writers of reputation. To Hood the most directly
important of all these acquaintances was Mr. Reynolds; this gentleman
having a sister, Jane, to whom Hood was introduced. An attachment
ensued, and shortly terminated in marriage, the wedding taking place on
the 5th of May, 1824. The father of Miss Reynolds was the head
writing-master at Christ Hospital. She is stated to have had good
manners, a cultivated mind, and literary tastes, though a high
educational standard is not always traceable in her letters. At any
rate the marriage was a happy one; Mrs. Hood being a tender and
attentive wife, unwearied in the cares which her husband's precarious
health demanded, and he being (as I have said) a mirror of marital
constancy and devotion, distinguishable from a lover rather by his
intense delight in all domestic relations and details than by any
cooling-down in his fondness. It would appear that, in the later years
of Hood's life, he was not on entirely good terms with some members of
his wife's family, including his old friend John Hamilton Reynolds.
What may have caused this I do not find specified: all that we know of
the character of Hood justifies us in thinking that he was little or
not at all to blame, for he appears throughout a man of just,
honorable, and loving nature, and free besides from that sort of
self-assertion which invites a collision. Every one, however, has his
blemishes; and we may perhaps discern in Hood a certain over-readiness
to think himself imposed upon, and the fellow-creatures with whom he
had immediately to do a generation of vipers--a state of feeling not
characteristic of a mind exalted and magnanimous by habit, or "gentle"
in the older and more significant meaning of the term.

The time was now come for Hood to venture a volume upon the world.
Conjointly with Reynolds, he wrote, and published in 1825, his _Odes
and Addresses to Great People_. The title-page bore no author's name;
but the extraordinary talent and point of the work could hardly fail to
be noticed, even apart from its appeal to immediate popularity, dealing
as it did so continually with the uppermost topics of the day. It had
what it deserved, a great success. This volume was followed, in 1826,
by the first series of _Whims and Oddities_, which also met with a good
sale; the second series appeared in 1827. Next came two volumes of
_National Tales_, somewhat after the manner of Boccaccio (but how far
different from his spirit may easily be surmised), which are now little
known. The volume containing the _Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, Hero
and Leander_, and some other of Hood's most finished and noticeable
poems, came out in 1827. _The Midsummer Fairies_ itself was one of the
authors own favorite works, and certainly deserved to be so, as far as
dainty elegance of motive and of execution is concerned: but the
conception was a little too ingeniously remote for the public to ratify
the author's predilection. The _Hero and Leander_ will be at once
recognized as modelled on the style of Elizabethan narrative poems:
indeed Marlow treated the very same subject, and his poem, left
uncompleted, was finished by Chapman. Hood's is a most astonishing
example of revivalist poetry: it is reproductive and spontaneous at the
same time. It resembles its models closely, not
servilely--significantly, not mechanically; and has the great merit of
resembling them with comparative moderation. Elizabethan here both in
spirit and in letter, Hood is nevertheless a little less extreme than
his prototypes. Where they loaded, he does not find it needful to
overload, which is the ready and almost the inevitable resource of
revivalists, all but the fewest: on the contrary, he alleviates a
little,--but only a little.

In 1829 appeared the most famous of all his poems of a narrative
character--_The Dream of Eugene Aram_; it was published in the _Gem_,
an annual which the poet was then editing. Besides this amount of
literary activity, Hood continued writing in periodicals, sometimes
under the signature of "Theodore M."

His excessive and immeasurable addiction to rollicking fun, to the
perpetual "cracking of jokes" (for it amounts to that more definitely
than to anything else in the domain of the Comic Muse), is a somewhat
curious problem, taken in connection with his remarkable genius and
accomplishment as a poet, and his personal character as a solid
housekeeping citizen, bent chiefly upon rearing his family in
respectability, and paying his way, or, as the Church Catechism has
neatly and unimprovably expressed it, upon "doing his duty in that
state of life to which it had pleased God to call him." His almost
constant ill-health, and, in a minor degree, the troubles which beset
him in money-matters, make the problem all the more noticeable. The
influence of Charles Lamb may have had something to do with
it,--probably not very much. Perhaps there was something in the
literary atmosphere or the national tone of the time which gave
comicality a turn of predominance after the subsiding of the great
poetic wave which filled the last years of the eighteenth and the first
quarter of the nineteenth century in our country, in Blake, Burns,
Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Landor, Byron, Keats, and, supreme among
all, Shelley. Something of the same transition may be noticed in the
art of design; the multifarious illustrator in the prior generation is
Stothard,--in the later, Cruikshank. At any rate, in literature, Lamb,
Hood, and then Dickens in his earliest works, the _Sketches by Boz_ and
_Pickwick_, are uncommonly characteristic and leading minds, and bent,
with singular inveteracy, upon being "funny,"--though not funny and
nothing else at all. But we should not force this consideration too
far: Hood is a central figure in the group and the period, and the
tendency of the time may be almost as much due to him as he to the
tendency. Mainly, we have to fall back upon his own idiosyncrasy: he
was born with a boundlessly whimsical perception, which he trained into
an inimitable sleight-of-hand in the twisting of notions and of words;
circumstances favored his writing for fugitive publications and
skimming readers, rather than under conditions of greater permanency;
and the result is as we find it in his works. His son expresses the
opinion that part of Hood's success in comic writing arose from his
early reading of _Humphrey Clinker_, _Tristram Shandy_, _Tom Jones_,
and other works of that period, and imbuing himself with their style: a
remark, however, which applies to his prose rather than his poetical
works. Certain it is that the appetite for all kinds of fun, verbal and
other was a part of Hood's nature. We see it in the practical jokes he
was continually playing on his good-humored wife--such as altering into
grotesque absurdity many of the words contained in her letters to
friends: we see it--the mere animal love of jocularity, as it might be
termed--in such a small point as his frequently addressing his friend
Philip de Franck, in letters, by the words, "Tim, says he," instead of
any human appellative[3] Hood reminds us very much of one of
Shakespeare's Fools (to use the word in no invidious sense) transported
into the nineteenth century,--the Fool in _King Lear_, or Touchstone.
For the occasional sallies of coarseness or ribaldry, the spirit of the
time has substituted a _bourgeois_ good-humor which respects the family
circle, and haunts the kitchen-stairs; for the biting jeer, intended to
make some victim uncomfortable, it gives the sarcastic or sprightly
banter, not unconscious of an effort at moral amelioration; for the
sententious sagacity, and humorous enjoyment of the nature of man, it
gives bright thoughts and a humanitarian sympathy. But, on the whole,
the intellectual personality is nearly the same: seeking by natural
affinity, and enjoying to the uttermost, whatever tends to lightness of
heart and to ridicule--thus dwelling indeed in the region of the
commonplace and the gross, but constantly informing it with some
suggestion of poetry, somewise side-meaning, or some form of sweetness
and grace. These observations relate of course to Hood's humorous
poems: into his grave and pathetic poems he can import qualities still
loftier than these--though even here it is not often that he utterly
forswears quaintness and oddity. The risible, the fantastic, was his
beacon-light; sometimes as delicate as a dell of glow-worms; sometimes
as uproarious as a bonfire; sometimes, it must be said (for he had to
be perpetually writing whether the inspiration came or not, or his
inspiration was too liable to come from the very platitudes and
pettinesses of everyday life), not much more brilliant than a
rush-light, and hardly more aromatic than the snuff of a tallow candle.

[Footnote 3: This "Tim, says he," is a perfect _gag_ in many of Hood's
letters. It is curious to learn what was the kind of joke which could
assume so powerful an ascendant over the mind and associations of this
great humorist. Here it is, as given in the Hood _Memorials_ from _Sir
Jonah Barrington's Memoirs_:--

"'Tim,' says he--
'Sir,' says he--
'Fetch me my hat, says he;
'That I may go,' says he,
'To Timahoe,' says he,
'And go to the fair,' says he,
'And see all that's there,' says he.--
'First pay what you owe,' says he;
'And then you may go,' says he,
'To Timahoe,' says he,
'And go to the fair,' says he,
'And see all that's there,' says he.--
'Now by this and by that,' says he,
'Tim, hang up my hat,' says he."]

We must now glance again at Hood's domestic affairs. His first child
had no mundane existence worth calling such; but has nevertheless lived
longer than most human beings in the lines which Lamb wrote for the
occasion, _On an Infant dying as soon as born_. A daughter followed,
and in 1830 was born his son, the Tom Hood who became editor of the
comic journal _Fun_, and died in 1874. At the time of his birth, the
family was living at Winchmore Hill: thence they removed about 1832, to
the Lake House, Wanstead, a highly picturesque dwelling, but scanty in
domestic comforts. The first of the _Comic Annual_ series was brought
out at Christmas, 1830. In the following couple of years, Hood did some
theatrical work; writing the libretto for an English opera which (it is
believed) was performed at the Surrey Theatre. Its name is now unknown,
but it had a good run in its day; a similar fate has befallen an
entertainment which he wrote for Mathews. He also composed a pantomime
for the Adelphi; and, along with Reynolds, dramatized _Gil Blas_. This
play is understood to have been acted at Drury Lane. The novel of
_Tylney Hall_, and the poem of the _Epping Hunt_, were written at
Wanstead.

Born in comfortable mediocrity, and early inured to narrow fortunes,
Hood had no doubt entered upon the literary calling without expecting
or caring to become rich. Hitherto, however, he seems to have prospered
progressively, and to have had no reason to regret, even in a wordly
sense, his choice of a profession. But towards the end of 1834 a
disaster overtook him; and thenceforth, to the end of his days, he had
nothing but tedious struggling and uphill work. To a man of his buoyant
temperament, and happy in his home, this might have been of no extreme
consequence, if only sound health had blessed him: unfortunately, the
very reverse was the case. Sickly hitherto, he was soon to become
miserably and hopelessly diseased: he worked on through everything
bravely and uncomplainingly, but no doubt with keen throbs of
discomfort, and not without detriment at times to the quality of his
writings. The disaster adverted to was the failure of a firm with which
Hood was connected, entailing severe loss upon him. With his accustomed
probity, he refused to avail himself of any legal immunities, and
resolved to meet his engagements in full eventually; but it became
requisite that he should withdraw from England. He proposed to settle
down in some one of the towns on the Rhine, and circumstances fixed his
choice on Coblentz. A great storm which overtook him during the passage
to Rotterdam told damagingly on his already feeble health. Coblentz,
which he reached in March, 1835, pleased him at first; though it was
not long before he found himself a good deal of an Englishman, and his
surroundings vexatiously German. After a while he came to consider a
German Jew and a Jew German nearly convertible terms; and indulged at
times in considerable acrimony of comment, such as a reader of
cosmopolitan temper is not inclined to approve. He had, however, at
least one very agreeable acquaintance at Coblentz--Lieutenant Philip de
Franck, an officer in the Prussian service, of partly English
parentage: the good-fellowship which he kept up with this amiable
gentleman, both in personal intercourse and by letter, was (as we have
seen) even boyishly vivacious and exuberant. In the first instance Hood
lived at No. 372 Castor Hof, where his family joined him in the Spring
of 1835: about a year later, they removed to No. 752 Alten Graben.

Spasms in the chest now began to be a trying and alarming symptom of
his ill-health, which, towards the end of 1836, took a turn for the
worse; he never afterwards rallied very effectually, though the
fluctuations were numerous--(in November, 1838, for instance, he
fancied that a radical improvement had suddenly taken place)--and at
times the danger was imminent. The unfavorable change in question was
nearly simultaneous with a visit which he made to Berlin, accompanying
Lieutenant de Franck and his regiment, on their transfer to Bromberg:
the rate of travelling was from fifteen to twenty English miles per
diem, for three days consecutively, and then one day of rest. Hood
liked the simple unextortionate Saxon folk whom he encountered on the
route, and contrasted them with the Coblentzers, much to the
disadvantage of the latter. By the beginning of December he was back in
his Rhineland home; but finally quitted it towards May, 1837. Several
attacks of blood-spitting occurred in the interval; at one time Hood
proposed for himself the deadly-lively epitaph, "Here lies one who spat
more blood and made more puns than any other man."

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