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

grace," whispered Muzzle.
Fizzle could hold out no longer. Still he tried to look the placid, and to
speak with meekness.
"Pray, how did it come, Brother Muzzle," said Fizzle, "that you
reported I declared in my farewell-sermon it was as easy to preach to
the dead buried six feet under the earth as to the people of
Drowsytown?"
"You have been grossly misinformed, my brother," replied Muzzle. "I
didn't say six feet. I said four feet."
In Hood we have all varieties of wit and humor, both separate and
intermingled.
As we have already observed, the grotesque is that which is most
obviously distinctive in Hood's writings. But in different degrees it is
combined with other elements, and in each combination altered and
modified. The combination which more immediately arrests attention is
that with the ludicrous. In this the genius of Hood seemed to hold a
very festival of antics, oddity, and mirth; all his faculties seemed to rant
and riot in the Saturnalia of comic incongruity. And it is difficult to say
whether, in provoking laughter, his pen or his pencil is the more
effective instrument. The mere illustrations of the subject-matter are in
themselves irresistible. They reach at once and directly the instinctive
sense of the ludicrous, and over them youth and age cachinnate
together. We have seen a little girl, eight years old, laugh as if her heart
would break, in merely looking at the pictures in a volume of Hood.
The printed page she did not read or care to read; what the prints
illustrated she knew nothing about; but her eyes danced with joy and
overran with tears of childish merriment. But in all this luxury of fun,
whether by pen or pencil, no word, idea, image, or delineation obscures
the transparency of innocence, or leaves the shadow of a stain upon the
purest mind. To be at the same time so comic and so chaste is not only
a moral beauty, but a literary wonder. It is hard to deal with the oddities

of humor, however carefully, without casual slips that may offend or
shame the reverential or the sensitive. Noble, on the whole, as
Shakspeare was, we would not in a mixed company, until after cautious
rehearsal, venture to read his comic passages aloud. We may apply the
statement, also, to the comic portions of Burns,--and, indeed, to comic
literature in general. But who has fear to read most openly anything
that Hood ever wrote? or who has a memory of wounded modesty for
anything that he ever read secretly of Hood's? Dr. Johnson says that
dirty images were as natural to Swift as sublime ones were to
Milton;--we may say that images at once lambent and laughable were
those which were natural to Hood. Even when his mirth is broadest, it
is decent; and while the merest recollection of his drollery will often
convulse the face in defiance of the best-bred muscles, no thought
arises which the dying need regret. Who can ever forget "The Lost
Heir," or remember it but to laugh at its rich breadth of natural, yet
farcical, absurdity? The very opening begins the giggle:--
"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