TRIVIA.

Press, Volume LXVII, Issue 20382, 31 October 1931, Page 13

TRIVIA.

The '-'Manchester Guardian" reports the return to favour of tho pu 11 | "apparently in partnership with those i fashions of dress which, as wo weie [ assured a very few years ago, were so utterly ridiculous that only idiotic Victorians, those slaves of 10 milliner and dressmaker, could evei have consented to wear tliem." I P ie for to think of the pun as coming back, not with the bustle, but witi sherry; to think of its return, not "S the revival of a freak and a monstei, but as tho triumph of sound tasto an*loyalty. The pun has been disparage and sherry neglected; yet there j l / been a few who, like "old Verrall, Flecker's poem, have been content to sit in old gardens, where tho wise May pluck a Spartan flower. Perhaps there is more than superficial affinitv between the pun and sneir , too. It might be traced in a sort o clean, precise forco that belongs 1 both in the perpetually fresh surprise that becomes at cnco a felicity hrm and sure oil itself, in tho mysterious twin faculty of bracing and resolving. Let it be so, or not. Some have honoured sherry more truly than by tipping it into cocktail mixtures, and puns more discreetly than by using them in .snappy headlines: such as "Hod-mei Out," announcing a bricklayers' striu . And now the faithful are vindicated. -XThero was '.'Baffles" Hornung, for instance, to whom Conan Doyle pp-' ( this tribute in his "Memories and Adventures" : No one could say a neater thing than Willie Hornung and his writings never adequately represented the powers of tno mar. These things depend upon the time an' tho fashion, and go fiat iu the telling, but -i remember how, when I showed him the recoru o? someone who claimed to have done a ,^1" red yards under ten seconds, he said: it is ;t" sprinter's error." Golf he could not abide, for ho said it was "unsportsmanlike to hit a sitting ball." His criticism upon mv Shorlock Holmes was: "Though he might bo more humble, there is' no police liM Holmes.' * •K----"But whoever wants to know ll0 ? tr good nuns can lie must go to .Hood. Nobody roads him now; and it miserable to think that he went "out partly because ho made puns, which even' Coleridge called "transcendent. Of course he made bad ones, because they were his living, and he had to pursue it even "in illness and suffeiing, against tho grain," as Canon Ainger says. Out of, the way of busilie "threw off dozens of neat but not unsurpassable ones. When he was expecting tho birth of his nrst child, he wrote to Dilke that he was "every day a step farther to becoming a parent." When ho met Mr fegg publisher he said, "Yours is a very remarkable name, Mr Tegg. I see that you tako an egg after your T." Hut in the wav of business, in his verses, in the succession of his "Comic Annuals," he performed miracies. There was his angler, who fished a stream in vain, drawing not even a "onepound prize" from his "fresh-water lottery," and concluded that "so "Unless a stream" must bo "like St. Mary's, ottery." I hope this does not, even in New Zealand, require a note. Ho was often much more than ingenious: a punster who proved that there is no dissociation of poetry and wit. and that it is not only over the shallows that tho two streams flow together. In the "Ode to Melancholy he wrote. Even the bright extremes of joy Brins on conclusions of disgust, Evon as the blossoms of the May Whoso fragrance ends in must. The illustration, says Ainger, "apart from any remoter intention in the words [that close the two last lines], is admirable; and, as I have said, the latter —suggesting life's sad transitions from liberty to compulsion—may have been sheer coincidence." Hood's finest puns seem not to be sought, but found. They are not elaborated, but open as easily as flowers. In the "Song of the Shirt," where there is no extricating the wit from the pathos, there is this stanza: WhUe underneath the eaves The brooding swallows cling, As if to show me their sunny backs And twit ine with the spring. Burns cries, "Thou'lt break my heart, thou bonny bird!" Hood makes his audacious pun. The angle of the thrust is different; the point is not less sharp. # In "I Remember" Hood describes the poplars near his childhood's homo: I used to think their Blender tops Were close against tho sky: It was o childish ignorance, But now 'tis little joy To know I'm farther off from Heaven Than when I was a boy. It seems hardly fair to call this piece of sweet duplicity what it is, a pun. But Hood takes a single, unnoticeable step, and when he speaks, though the flexible words and tho wit persuade you to say that he has punned again, he has not: Our very hopes belied our leafs, Our fears our hopes belied — We thought her dying when she slept, And sleeping -when she died.

P. T. Palgrave, when he printed "The Death-Bed" in the first issue of the "Golden Treasury," omitted from it the middle group of stanzas, of which this is one, explaining that they were too "ingenious," and therefore not poetry. Perhaps ho did not see tho "ingenuity" of "I Kemember," because he let that in; but Palgravo did queer, school-mastery things. [No Donne —a most culpably ingenious man —no Blake; possibly because Blake had the effrontery to claim that, he was on familiar speaking terms with the angels.] The excision was extraordinary, because, of course, if Hood is to bo considered as a poet at all, he must bo considered as a witty poet. But ono should be just. Palgrave nerved himself to risk the ingenuity and tucked the stanzas back again later.

Hood made puns, much good verso, some good poetry. What else about him? Well, for one thing, he could write at the end of his days like this: My physical debility finds 110 tonic virtuo in a steel pen, otlierwiso X would have written one more paper—a forewarning one against an evil, or the danger of it, arising from a literary movement iu which I ha\» had some share; a one-sided humanity, opposite to that Catholic Shakespearean sympathy which felt with king as well as peasant, an'J duly estimated the mortal temptations oi both stations. Certain classes at the poles of society are already too far asunder: it should bo tho duty of our writers tn draw them nearer by kindly attraction; not to aggravate the existing repulsion, and place a wider moral gulf between Rich and Poor, with Hate on one side and Tear on tlie other. But I am too weak for this task, tlie last I had set myself: it is death that stops my pen, you see, and not the pension. This was written to Sir Robert Peel, through whom ho had been placed on the Civil List. —J.H.E.S.