Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 37, November, 1860 | Page 8

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