Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 37, November, 1860 | Page 7

pun to a sharpness that
would have left wounds as deep as thought, and could have added a
poison to it that would have kept them rankling as long as memory
lasted. The secret of his power in the pun is, that he does not rest in the
analogy of sound alone, but seeks also for analogy of significance.
Generally there is a subtile coincidence between his meaning and what
the sound of the pun signifies, and thus the pun becomes an amusing or
illustrative image, or a most emphatic and striking condensation of his
thought. "Take care of your cough," he writes to his engraver, "lest you
go to coughy-pot, as I said before; but I did not say before, that nobody
is so likely as a wood-engraver to cut his stick." Speaking of his wife,
he says,--"To be sure, she still sticks to her old fault of going to sleep
while I am dictating, till I vow to change my _Woman_uensis for a
_Man_uensis." How keenly and well the pun serves him in burlesque,
in his comic imitations of the great moralist! He hits off with inimitable
ridicule the great moralist's dislike to Scotland. Boswell inquired the
Doctor's opinion on illicit distillation, and how the great moralist would
act in an affray between the smugglers and the excise. "If I went by the
letter of the law, I should assist the customs; but according to the
_spirit_, I should stand by the contrabandists." The Doctor was always
very satirical on the want of timber in the North. "Sir," said he to the
young Lord of Icombally, who was going to join his regiment, "may
Providence preserve you in battle, and especially your nether limbs!
You may grow a walking-stick here, but you must import a wooden
leg." At Dunsinnane the old prejudice broke out. "Sir," said he to
Boswell, "Macbeth was an idiot; he ought to have known that every
wood in Scotland might be carried in a man's hand. The Scotch, Sir, are
like the frogs in the fable: if they had a log, they would make a king of
it." We will quote here a stanza which contains quite a serious
application of the pun; and for Hood's purpose no other word could so
happily or so pungently express his meaning. The poem is an "Address
to Mrs. Fry"; and the doctrine of it is, that it is better and wiser to teach
the young and uncorrupted that are yet outside the prison than the
vicious and the hardened who have got inside it. Thus he goes on:--

"I like your chocolate, good Mistress Fry! I like your cookery in every
way; I like your Shrove-tide service and supply; I like to hear your
sweet Pandeans play; I like the pity in your full-brimmed eye; I like
your carriage and your silken gray, Your dove-like habits, and your
silent preaching; But I don't like your Newgatory teaching."
Hood had not only an unexampled facility in the discovery of analogies
in a multitude of separate resemblances and relations, but he had an
equal facility of tracing with untiring persistency a single idea through
all its possible variations. Take, for example, the idea of _gold_, in the
poem of "Miss Kilmansegg," and there is hardly a conceivable
reference to gold which imagination or human life can suggest, that is
not presented to us.
But this play of words and thought would, after all, be in itself little
more than serious trifling, a mere exhibition of mental and verbal
ingenuity. It would be a kind of intellectual and linguistical dexterity,
which would give the author a singularity and supremacy above the
world. It would make him the greatest of mental acrobats or jugglers,
and he might almost deserve as eminent a reputation as a similar class
of artists in bodily achievements; possibly he might claim to be ranked
with the man who cooked his dinner and ate it on a tight rope over the
Niagara Rapids, or with the man who placed a pea-nut under a
dish-cover and turned it into the American eagle. Such, however, is not
Hood's case. In all feats of mental and verbal oddity, he does, indeed,
rank the highest,--but that is the very lowest of his attainments. His
pranks do verily cause us to laugh and wonder; but there is also that
ever in his pranks which causes us to think, and even sometimes to
weep. In much of his that seems burlesque, the most audacious, there
are hidden springs of thought and tears. Often, when most he seems as
the grimed and grinning clown in a circus girded by gaping spectators,
he stops to pour out satire as passionate as that of Juvenal, or morality
as eloquent and as pure as that of Pascal.