TRAGIC LIFE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19734, 31 December 1926, Page 13 (Supplement)

TRAGIC LIFE

“THE PRINCE OF PUNSTERS’ One of the saddest thinge in life is the comedian who could be the tragedian —he who must smile when his he<art is sad, make multitudes laugh when there is bitterness in his soul, act like a scatterbrain when his mind is a concentration of misery. Such a one was Thomas Hood, the great humorist of the last century, the consumptive who proposed as his epitaph “Here lies one who spat more blood and miade more puns than any man living.” After a. long fight against great odds Hood died at the age of 46, after he had made millions laugh. Hood wlas born in London in 1799. His father was a publisher, who had written a couple of novels, so that the future poet was born into an environment of letters. On his mother’s side there was a tendency’ towards consumption, and this he inherited. At the age of thirteen Hood’s school education ceased, but his deep love of relading remained with him. He was put to work in a. business house, but his health was unable to stand up to the strain. He spent some, years in Dundee, where his health improved, and in 1818 he returned to London, where he entered into business with an uncle who was an engraver. His bent was, however, with the sister art. The lure of the pen was more than that of the pencil, and at the age of twenty-two he was appointed sub.-editor of the “London Magazine.’’

He was immediately thrown into contact with some the leading literary men of the time—Cary. Proctor, Allan Cunningham. H azlit t, de Quincey, Lamb and others. With Lamb hr formed a close friendship. Another friend was John Hamilton Reynolds, whose sister he married three years later. In 1840 he wrote to his wife, “I find my position a very cruel one—after all my struggles to be, as I am, almost moneyless, and with a very dim prospect of getting any, but by the sheer exercise of my pen. ... I am tied, hand and foot, and by sheer necessity ready to surrender myself that slave, a bookseller’s hack!” After intense suffer ing he died in 1845. His wife, who hud devoted himself to him, was worn out in health and spirit, and she died eighteen months later

{Such was the melancholy life of him who was perhaps the most widely-read humorous poet of his day. With what bitterness must he have written, bx sheer necessity, the many nonsense verses on which he depended for his liv ing. Yet, to many, it would seem thUt Hood’s genius found its expression, not so much in these as in his serious work, which he was forced practically to abandon. He started off as a serious poet, a follower of Keats, and published between 1821 ami .1823 some of the finest poems of that period. But they were not u success. In 1827 he publish ed a collection of these poems anonymously, but they attracted no attention, and were a financial failure. By chance he had to write some comic verso for the “London Magazine, ” and this was an immediate success. Thereafter he wrote mainly this type of poetry, and for twenty years, in sickness and in health —mainly in sickness—in times of monetary worry, when the world must have seemed a very bitack place, hi* ground out humorous verse that was to make the nation laugh. The sufferer was acting the comedian, and the pub lie, as it always docs, laughed land ap plauded, little glimpsing the author who wrote, sure in the knowledge that death was stealing upon him, slowly at first, but more rapidly and more surclv, as the yctirs advanced. But beneath all his humour, almost hidden by it, there beat the most sen sitive, the kindest and the most tolerant heart —the heart of a man who always felt for the under dog. But where miany a man would kick the top dog aside with brutal rage, Hood would gently admonish him, gently ridicule him—and as a consequence, send him away with his tail between his legs and with remorse in his heart. Where many a mtin would have composed a dirge of regret or a grand symphony of passion, Hood wrote in jazz music—and gained in effectiveness. He hated cant and bigotry of any kind, but he never made the fiatal mistake of opposing intolerance with intolerance; he, never lost his timper —he had that deadly gift of being able to laugh at his opponent ’s anger. Nowhere is the use of this gift better exemplified than in his Ode to Rae, Wilson had publicly upbrtiided Hood for blasphemously using the dove in what was in truth a perfectly innocent simile —the self-righteous gentleman had held that the Divine Spirit, as represented by the dove, had been made fun of. and h c accordingly Accused the gentle Hood of “profaneness and ribaldrv. ” Hood smiled, donned his most padded literary boxing gloves and proceeded to deliver a tremendous knockout punch. The ode is one of the strongest attacks on Pharisaism ever written, ft begins by delineating Hood’s own chaikicter. He says he is Not one of those self-constituted saints. Quacks —not physicians—in the cure of souls, Those pseudo privy councillors of God. Who write down judgments with a pen hard-nibbed. Yet sure of heaven themselves, as if they’d cribbed The impression of St. Peter’s keys in wax.