The Song of the Shirt and The Bridge of Sighs are by far the most popular of Hood’s poems. They have the great merit of perfect truth of feeling. Handling subjects which tempt to sentiment, and even to that excess of sentiment known in the language of slang as ‘gush,’ they are wholly free from anything false or weak or merely lachrymose. Pity makes the verse, but it is the pity of a manly man. The Haunted House, first published in the opening number of Hood’s Magazine, stands at the head of the writer’s poetry of pure imagination. Few pieces can rival it for eeriness of impression, and few exhibit such delicate skill in the choice of details in description. The centipede, the spider, the maggots, the emmets, the bats, the rusty armour and the tattered flags, all help to deepen the sense of desolation and decay. This piece, with the more serious ones already mentioned, and a few others, such as Ruth and The Death-Bed, are Hood’s best title to fame. The growth in their relative number as time went on, the increasing wealth of imagination and the greater flexibility of verse, all show that Hood was to the end a progressive poet. If he had lived longer and enjoyed better health his fame might have been very great. He was the victim of the transition, and through tardiness of recognition and the want of any influence to draw him out, he failed to leave a sufficient body of pure and great poetry to sustain permanently a high reputation. As the author of a few pieces with the unmistakable note of poetry he can never be quite forgotten.
Laman Blanchard
(1804-1845).
Passing mention may be accorded along with Hood to Laman Blanchard, a very minor poet, who showed the same combination of seriousness with fun. He was an agreeable writer, but not, even at his best, a distinguished one.
Winthrop Mackworth Praed
(1802-1839).
The man of closest affinity to Hood was Winthrop Mackworth Praed, who began by contributing at school to The Etonian, and continued at Cambridge to write for Knight’s Quarterly Magazine. He entered Parliament, and if he had lived he would probably have risen to eminence there. Praed belongs to the class of writers of vers de société of which Prior is the earlier and Locker-Lampson the later master; and it is not too much to say that he surpasses both. It is a species of verse well adapted to such a period as that in which Praed lived. Great earnestness is not required, and is even fatal to it. The qualities essential to success are culture, good-breeding, wit and lightness of touch. Praed had them all. The cleverness and wit and delicacy which nature had given him were all increased by the influence of his school and university, where he acquired all the grace of scholarship without any of the ponderosity of learning. But Praed had one more gift, without which his verses must have taken a lower place—the gift of a refined poetic fancy. It is this that gives his wit its special charm, and it is this too that saves his verse from being that merely of a very clever and refined jester. The well-known character of The Vicar is one of the best examples of this combination of feeling with lightness. Herein we detect the difference between Praed’s wit and the wit of Hood. The latter commonly separated jest from earnest, and gave himself wholly over to one or the other. He is far the more pronounced punster. The pleasant surprises of Praed’s verse usually arise from some delicate turn of thought rather than from a twisting of words. Hood’s fun is sometimes almost boisterous, Praed’s is never so. As regards the lighter verse, the advantage on comparison is all on the side of the younger man. But there is no other aspect to Praed. Notwithstanding the undertone of seriousness, notwithstanding too the strange power of that masterpiece of the grotesque, The Red Fisherman, it remains doubtful whether he had the capacity to be more than what he is, the prince of elegant and refined writers of light verse. Hood is indubitably a poet.
Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton
(1809-1885).
It is likewise as a writer of vers de société that Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton, is best known, and is happiest. But though he shines as a writer of what may be called, without disparagement, poetical trifles, there is also a serious strain by no means contemptible in his verse. Strangers Yet is a fine specimen of pathos. In Poems, Legendary and Historical, however, Houghton is less successful, and the best of them do not bear comparison with Aytoun’s Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, which belong to the same class. Houghton’s critical work in prose is on the whole more valuable than his verse, for there his culture told, and the lack of high imagination is less felt.
Richard Harris Barham
(1788-1845).
Richard Harris Barham represents a type of humour much broader than that of Praed. His Ingoldsby Legends have enjoyed a popularity wider, probably, than that of any other humorous verse of the century. They are clever, rapid in narrative, and resourceful in phrase and in rhyme. Yet a certain want of delicacy in the wit and of melody in the verse is evident when we compare them with the work of Hood and Praed, or that of such later humorists as Calverley, or J. K. Stephen, or Lewis Carroll. Barham’s last composition, ‘As I laye a-thynkynge,’ contains the promise of success if he had written serious poetry.
Hartley Coleridge
(1796-1849).
Hartley Coleridge was a poet of a totally different type; and we must ascribe the fact that he never redeemed his early promise to hereditary weakness of will rather than to any adverse influence of the time. Against the latter he had a defence that did not in the same measure shield any other contemporary. He was the special inheritor of the great traditions of the so-called Lake school; and he was cradled in poetry. His infancy and childhood are celebrated both by his father and by Wordsworth. Derwent Coleridge tells a story of his brother, which shows that Wordsworth accurately described Hartley as one ‘whose fancies from afar are brought,’ and who made ‘a mock apparel’ of his words. ‘Hartley, when about five years old, was asked a question about himself being called Hartley. “Which Hartley?” asked the boy. “Why! is there more than one Hartley?” “Yes,” he replied, “there’s a deal of Hartleys.” “How so?” “There’s Picture-Hartley (Hazlitt had painted a portrait of him) and Shadow-Hartley, and there’s Echo-Hartley, and there’s Catch-me-fast Hartley”; at the same time seizing his own arm very eagerly.’ Evidently this boy lived in a world of day-dreams, in a ‘perpetual perspective.’ The problem of the education of such a young idealist is a difficult one; but it seems clear that its principle ought to have been a judicious, not a harsh or pedantic, regularity. His father’s aspiration of ‘wandering like a breeze’ was not for him. But instead, Hartley’s actual education was irregular and desultory. Nothing was done to improve his natural defect and to discipline his will; and weakness of will wrecked his life. The fellowship he had won at Oriel College was forfeited for intemperance, and he never conquered the habit, but sank from depth to depth, a pitiable example of genius gone to waste.
Though Hartley Coleridge wrote prose as well, his name is now associated only with his poems. A volume of these was published in 1833. It was marked Vol. I., but no second ever appeared. The poems however were re-edited, with additions, by Derwent Coleridge, in 1851. Hartley Coleridge nowhere shows the supreme poetic gift his father possessed; but as in sheer genius the elder Coleridge was probably superior to any contemporary, so Hartley seems to have been the superior by endowment of any poet then writing, Tennyson and Browning alone excepted. Weakness of will, unfortunately, doomed him to excel only in short pieces, and to be far from uniform in these. It would have been wiser to omit the section of ‘playful and humorous’ pieces. But the sonnets are very good, and some of them are excellent. A few of the songs take an equally high rank, especially the well-known She is not fair to outward view, and ’Tis sweet to hear the merry lark. There are many suggestions of Wordsworth, but Hartley Coleridge is not an imitative poet. Without any striking originality he is fresh and independent. His verse betrays a gentle and kindly as well as a sensitive character. He evidently felt affection for all living things, and especially for all that was weak, whether from nature, age, or circumstance. Some of this feeling turns back, as it were, upon himself, in the numerous and often pathetic poems in which he appears to be contemplating his own