Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 37, November, 1860 | Page 4

most truly,
"THOMAS HOOD."
[Footnote A: The Delta of Blackwood]
STANZAS.
"Farewell, Life! My senses swim, And the world is growing dim;
Thronging shadows cloud the light, Like the advent of the night; Colder,
colder, colder still, Upward steals a vapor chill; Strong the earthly odor
grows,-- I smell the Mould above the Rose!"
"Welcome, Life! The spirit strives! Strength returns, and hope revives!
Cloudy fears and shapes forlorn Fly like shadows at the morn; O'er the
earth there comes a bloom, Sunny light for sullen gloom, Warm
perfume for vapors cold,-- I smell the Rose above the Mould!"
Nothing at first appears more easy than to define and to describe the
genius of Hood. It is strictly singular, and entirely his own. That which
is his is completely his, and no man can cry halves with him, or
quarters,--hardly the smallest fraction. The estimate of his genius,
therefore, puts the critic to no trouble of elaborate discrimination or
comparison. When we think of Hood as a humorist, there is no need
that we should at the same time think of Aristophanes, or Lucian, or
Rabelais, or Swift, or Sterne, or Fielding, or Dickens, or Thackeray.
When we think of him as a poet,--except in a few of his early
compositions,--we are not driven to examine what he shares with
Chaucer, or Spenser, or Shakspeare, or Milton, or Byron, or Coleridge,
or Wordsworth, or any of the poetic masters of literature. Whether as
humorist or as poet, he is in English literature what Richter is in
German literature, "the only one." Then the characteristics of his genius
are outwardly so evident, that, in merely a glance, we fancy we
comprehend them. But the more we think, the more we reflect, the
more the difficulty opens on us of doing full justice to the mind of
Hood. We soon discover that we are dealing, not with a mere punster or
jester, not with a mere master of grimace or manufacturer of broad
grins, not with an eccentric oddity in prose or verse, not with a
merry-andrew who tickles to senseless laughter, not with a spasmodic
melodramatist who writhes in fictitious pain, but that we are dealing
with a sincere, truthful, and most gifted nature,--many-sided,
many-colored, harmonious as a whole, and having a real unity as the

centre of its power. To enter into a complete exposition of such a nature
is not our purpose: we must content ourselves with noting some of its
most striking literary and moral peculiarities. We do not claim for
Hood, that he was a man of profound, wide, or philosophic intellect, or
that for grandeur of imagination he could be numbered among the
godlike; we do not claim that he opened up the deeps of passion, or
brought down transcendent truths from the higher spheres of mind; we
claim for him no praise for science or for scholarship: we merely
maintain, that he was a man of rare humanity, of close, subtile, and
various observation, of good sense and common sense, of intuitive
insight into character, of catholic sympathy with his kind that towards
the lowest was the most loving, of extraordinary social and
miscellaneous knowledge that was always at his command, a thinker to
the fullest measure of his needs, and, as humorist and poet, an
originality and a novelty in the world of genius. This is our general
estimate of Hood. What further we have to say shall be in accordance
with it; and such has been the impressive influence of Hood's writings
upon us, that our thoughts, whether we will or not, are more intent on
their serious than on their comic import.
In all the writings of Hood that are not absolutely serious the grotesque
is a present and pervading element. Often it shows itself, as if from an
irresistible instinct of fantastic extravagance, in the wild and reckless
sport of oddity. Combinations, mental, verbal, and pictorial, to ordinary
mortals the strangest and the most remote, were to Hood innate and
spontaneous. They came not from the outward,--they were born of the
inward. They were purely subjective, the sportive pranks of Hood's
own ME, when that ME was in its queerest moods. How naturally the
impossible or the absurd took the semblance of consistency in the
mental associations of Hood, we observe even in his private
correspondence. "Jane," (Mrs. Hood,) he writes, "is now drinking
porter,--at which I look half savage.....I must even _sip_, when I long to
swig. I shall turn a fish soon, and have the pleasure of angling for
myself." This, if without intention, would be a blunder or a bull. If it
were written unwittingly, the result would be simply ludicrous, and
consign it to the category of humor; but knowingly written, as we are
aware it was, we