The Victorian Age in Literature | Page 5

belong to it in any corporate sense. He was a poor man and an invalid,
with Scotch blood and a strong, though perhaps only inherited, quarrel
with the old Calvinism; by name Thomas Hood. Poverty and illness
forced him to the toils of an incessant jester; and the revolt against
gloomy religion made him turn his wit, whenever he could, in the
direction of a defence of happier and humaner views. In the long great
roll that includes Homer and Shakespeare, he was the last great man
who really employed the pun. His puns were not all good (nor were
Shakespeare's), but the best of them were a strong and fresh form of art.
The pun is said to be a thing of two meanings; but with Hood there
were three meanings, for there was also the abstract truth that would
have been there with no pun at all. The pun of Hood is underrated, like
the "wit" of Voltaire, by those who forget that the words of Voltaire
were not pins, but swords. In Hood at his best the verbal neatness only
gives to the satire or the scorn a ring of finality such as is given by
rhyme. For rhyme does go with reason, since the aim of both is to bring

things to an end. The tragic necessity of puns tautened and hardened
Hood's genius; so that there is always a sort of shadow of that
sharpness across all his serious poems, falling like the shadow of a
sword. "Sewing at once with a double thread a shroud as well as a
shirt"--"We thought her dying when she slept, and sleeping when she
died"--"Oh God, that bread should be so dear and flesh and blood so
cheap"--none can fail to note in these a certain fighting discipline of
phrase, a compactness and point which was well trained in lines like "A
cannon-ball took off his legs, so he laid down his arms." In France he
would have been a great epigrammatist, like Hugo. In England he is a
punster.
There was nothing at least in this group I have loosely called the
Eccentrics that disturbs the general sense that all their generation was
part of the sunset of the great revolutionary poets. This fading glamour
affected England in a sentimental and, to some extent, a snobbish
direction; making men feel that great lords with long curls and
whiskers were naturally the wits that led the world. But it affected
England also negatively and by reaction; for it associated such men as
Byron with superiority, but not with success. The English middle
classes were led to distrust poetry almost as much as they admired it.
They could not believe that either vision at the one end or violence at
the other could ever be practical. They were deaf to that great warning
of Hugo: "You say the poet is in the clouds; but so is the thunderbolt."
Ideals exhausted themselves in the void; Victorian England, very
unwisely, would have no more to do with idealists in politics. And this,
chiefly, because there had been about these great poets a young and
splendid sterility; since the pantheist Shelley was in fact washed under
by the wave of the world, or Byron sank in death as he drew the sword
for Hellas.
The chief turn of nineteenth-century England was taken about the time
when a footman at Holland House opened a door and announced "Mr.
Macaulay." Macaulay's literary popularity was representative and it
was deserved; but his presence among the great Whig families marks
an epoch. He was the son of one of the first "friends of the negro,"
whose honest industry and philanthropy were darkened by a religion of

sombre smugness, which almost makes one fancy they loved the negro
for his colour, and would have turned away from red or yellow men as
needlessly gaudy. But his wit and his politics (combined with that
dropping of the Puritan tenets but retention of the Puritan tone which
marked his class and generation), lifted him into a sphere which was
utterly opposite to that from which he came. This Whig world was
exclusive; but it was not narrow. It was very difficult for an outsider to
get into it; but if he did get into it he was in a much freer atmosphere
than any other in England. Of those aristocrats, the Old Guard of the
eighteenth century, many denied God, many defended Bonaparte, and
nearly all sneered at the Royal Family. Nor did wealth or birth make
any barriers for those once within this singular Whig world. The
platform was high, but it was level. Moreover the upstart nowadays
pushes himself by wealth: but the Whigs could choose their upstarts. In
that world Macaulay found Rogers, with his phosphorescent and
corpse-like