But it is not necessary to trace Sheridan’s Parliamentary career. Mr Sichel proves, if one can separate them, that it was more important than his career as a man of letters, and for this reason his second volume is even more interesting than his first. What is interesting, of course, is the spectacle of a man who tries to give some shape to his beliefs, and has great opportunities. He had to do what he could with questions like that of the American colonists, of the Irish Union, of Indian government, of the French Revolution, which sprang up one after the other. They have come to be facts now, lying sunk beneath a heap of results; but they were then in the making, composed of the united wills of individuals and shaped by the wills of individuals. This is one source of interest; but it happens very often that we lose sight of the aim in amazement at the spectacle. When Sheridan entered Parliament, Burke and Pitt and Fox, to take the leaders only, gave every question an extraordinary depth and complexity. It seems that we are not tracing ideas, but watching a gigantic drama, like those old Homeric combats where the motive may be the sack of Troy, but in which the episodes represent every phase of human life. Sometimes the central figure is undraped; and we have to contemplate the absurd or touching spectacle of a gentleman afflicted with the gout - ‘a poor, bare, forked animal’, touched in his mind, too, who for the moment represents humanity. There are strange anecdotes in the Duchess of Devonshire’s diary. The King began to go mad, and said ‘the Prince of Wales is dead, so women may be honest’. He made Sir George Baker go down on his knees to look at the stars; he ordered a ‘tye wig, and danc’d with Dr Reynolds’; the courtiers had to pretend that he could play chess when he could only play draughts, and that they had all been a little mad and wore strait waistcoats themselves. Such contrasts abound, but if we know enough there appears to be some order in the tumult; it is shaped something after a human form. We need only observe out of what elements the conduct of a public man is made.
Sheridan, in spite of his vanity and irresponsibility, had an unwavering sense of something more stable than any private advantage. He could look beyond his own life, and judge clearly of things to come. Again and again we find him on the side of reform, courageous and ‘unpurchaseable’, a statesman whose views grew wider as he aged. And yet, how strangely little traits of character, small vices unchecked since boyhood, assert themselves and corrupt his actions! The speech upon the Begums of Oude, which made great men tremble and women cry with ecstasy, lacks something essential, for all its thunder of eloquence. Years afterwards he met Warren Hastings, shook his hand, and begged him to believe that ‘political necessity’ had inspired some of his rage. When Hastings ‘with greaty gravity’ asked him to make that sentence public, he could only ‘mutter’, and get out of it as best he might. It is the same with his friendship for the Regent; he could not care for anything for its own sake. The man was a Prince, girt about with romance, and hung with stars and ribbons; Mrs Fitzherbert was a woman, beautiful and in distress; his sympathies were volatile, and he moved in a world of gems and decorations, which might be had for the asking. Yet gold was too gross to tempt him; he craved for love, confidence, and demonstrative affection in the face of the world. What he asked he could not get, or perhaps he asked it of the wrong people. From the first an uneasy note sounds beneath the rest. The beautiful Mrs Sheridan implored him, when they began to rise, to let his friends know of their poverty. He had not the courage to do it, and she was led on to bet and to flirt. ‘Oh, my own,’ she wrote him, ‘‘ee can’t think how they beat me every night.’ He condoned her frailties with the tact of a perfect gentleman. But once in the race there was no standing still. The Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Bessborough, Lady Elizabeth Foster - all the great ladies and the brilliant young men were there to egg him on. At their pressure such a fountain of wit and satire and imagery sprang from his lips as no one else could rival. His face might grow fiery and his nose purple, but his voice kept its melody to the end. Yet, in spite of all this, he was never at his ease, and always conscious of a certain misfit. When he stood on the Down where, twenty years before, he had fought and lain wounded, he considered his situation:
What an interval has passed since, and scarcely one promise that I then made to my own soul have I attempted to fulfil... The irregularity of all my life and pursuits, the restless, contriving temper with which I have persevered in wrong pursuits and passions makes [some words erased, of which ‘errors’ is legible] reflexion worse to me than even to those who have acted worse.
He thought he could foresee the ‘too probable conclusion’, but even his imagination, though made intense by sorrow, could hardly have foreseen the end. Perhaps it was the humour of it that he could not have foreseen. He became ‘Old Sherry’ to the younger generation, and was to be met ‘half seas over’, a disreputable figure, but still talking divinely, a battered Orpheus, but still a very polite gentleman, a little bewildered by the course of events, and somewhat disappointed by his lot. He fell into sponging houses, escaped ingeniously from the ‘two strange men’ who had followed him all his life, and begged as eloquently as ever, with a touch of Irish brogue in his voice. They are going to put the carpets out of window, and break into Mrs Sheridan’s room, and take me’ he wrote, but was sanguine on the morrow. Then he lay dying, and the prescriptions were unopened in the bare parlour, and ‘there were strange people in the hall’. But so long as life promised adventures Sheridan had a part to act, and could welcome a future. It is not in any event that his tragedy lay, for there is something ludicrous in the stupidity of fate which never fits the fortune to the desert and blunts our pain in wonder. The tragedy lies in making promises, and seeing possibilities, and in the sense of failure. There at least the pain is without mixture. But one does not fail so long as one sees possibilities still, and the judgment on our failure is that which Byron murmured when he heard that Sheridan was dead, and praised his gifts and greatness - ‘But alas, poor human nature!’
Thomas Hood.
At the same time that Keats and Lamb were writing there flourished - so thick that even men like these showed little higher than the rest - a whole forest of strenuous and lusty human beings, journalists, artists, or people simply who happened to live then and rear their children. What profuse clamour, what multitudinous swarms of life a wise biographer can call up for us from fields long since shorn and flat if he will take for his subject one of these mortals it is really bewildering for a moment to consider. A student of letters is so much in the habit of striding through the centuries from one pinnacle of accomplishment to the next that he forgets all the hub-bub that once surged round the base; how Keats lived in a street and had a neighbour and his neighbour had a family - the rings widen infinitely; how Oxford-street ran turbulent with men and women while de Quincey talked with Ann. And such considerations are not trivial if only because they had their effect upon things that we are wont to look upon as isolated births, and to judge, therefore, in a spirit that is more than necessarily dry. Mr Jerrold’s life of Thomas Hood gives rise to a number of such reflections, both because he has written with delightful good taste and discrimination and because his subject, after all, belonged almost the whole of him to the race of the mortals. If it had not been for his two or three poems perhaps he would have sunk with the rest of them, with the load of albums and annuals and their makers, or would have survived as some half mythical comic figure, the father of a few good stories and the author of innumerable puns. There is even something nugatory about the facts of his life; they suggest, in the easy ordinary way in which they fit and succeed each other, that there were hundreds of Thomas Hoods, sons of middle-class parents, apprenticed to engravers, with a turn for writing verse or prose; kindly domestic young men, who if they did take to letters - their parents were well advised in dissuading them - would make no mark there, but fill endless columns satisfactorily. Such, to a great extent, was the life of Hood; but there was just that exaggeration of temper or fortune in it that made him, while he was one of a class, typical of it also. H
e was impelled by his gifts and his feelings to travel the whole course that slighter men trod partly, until he achieved something significant and completed his symbol.
As a boy he showed an abnormal facility; if he went away on a holiday he sent home profuse letters full of descriptions. Already the surface show of life tickled him with its incongruities; and at a time when most boys are aping some older writer he was simply observing with a lively eye what went on round him and scribbling it down in sheets of fresh easy prose. He laughed at his fellow lodgers, or stood at the window and took off the people whom he saw passing on their way to church. The study of character (I mean of amusing ones) I enjoy exceedingly,’ he wrote when he was sixteen, and in the same spirit he dashed off a long poem on the town of Dundee, in imitation of the ‘New Bath Guide’. No one could doubt where his gift would lead him, in spite of the engraving; and when he was twenty-two some papers, accepted by the London Magazine, definitely determined him, as Mr Jerrold thinks, to trust entirely to his pen. From that time onward his life was the complex life of a busy journalist. There was no respite, scarcely any partition; for where are we to seek the events of his life but in his writings? And when we read him we must remember his wife and children, his ill-health, the ceaseless pressure of money cares. If a particular style pleased the public he must continue it, though the mood was spent; and as his first success was made in the ‘Whims and Oddities’ he had still, as he says, to ‘breathe his comic vein’. ‘Could Hood at this moment have taken some editorial appointment [writes Mr Jerrold] we might have had more of his best and less of that journeyman work.’ That is a very moderate statement of the regret that bursts from our lips at many stages of this panting, hard-driven career: but in our desire to round the picture, to possess our tragedy, are we not inclined to fall into the fallacy to which Thackeray gave shape in his paper ‘On a joke I once heard from the late Thomas Hood’? He speaks of the grinning and tumbling, ‘through sorrow, through exile, poverty, fever, depression’, ‘the sad marvellous picture of courage, of honesty, of patient endurance, of duty struggling against pain’ - until in our compassion we forget very likely the true spirit of the man, his exuberance and brilliancy, the odd vulgar humour of a cockney life, the practical jokes and the supper parties. ‘O Hood, Hood, you do run on so!’ exclaimed poor Mrs Hood, half inarticulate, at one of these feasts. The very fact that he gave himself with such pliancy to the drudgery of a journalist’s life proves that there was something in the nature of his gift and temperament akin to it.
And when we turn to his writing we can surely discover there signs, not only of work ‘pumped out’, but of ideas springing gladly to the surface at the cheerful command of throbbing presses and fast falling sheets. No other invitation could have sounded quite so aptly to a man with a brain full of puns. But it is largely on account of these puns, we are told, that Hood is now so little read. Indeed, the portent is one that strikes the attention directly, and it must be held to typify something fundamental in the constitution of his mind. For his puns divide themselves into two classes or degrees; the greater part of them are simply happy matchings of sound in which there is so thin a burden of meaning that the contrast is almost purely verbal.
Alas; they’ve taken my beau Ben
To sail with old Benbow
But there are others in which the pun is the result of some strange association in Hood’s mind of two remote ideas, which it is his singular gift to illustrate by a corresponding coincidence of language.
Even the bright extremes of joy
Bring on conclusions of disgust;
Like the sweet blossoms of the May,
Whose fragrance ends in must.
These lines are taken from one of his most serious poems, that on Melancholy, and serve to illustrate, compactly, a remarkable tendency - perhaps it is the remarkable tendency - of his thought. They show how the original leaning of his mind was really to wild and incongruous associations, grotesque and monstrous conceits, not in words only, but in human life, such as those we see so strikingly displayed in poems like ‘Eugene Aram’, ‘The Haunted House’, and ‘The Last Man’. And also we may discover a certain superficiality of conception, which suffers him to find such contrasts as the verbal one of ‘may’ and ‘must’ adequate, and makes him so supersensitive to the surface inflections of language as he was sensitive to the influence of contemporary writers. The influence of Lamb is clear in his prose, of Keats in his verse, and Coleridge one may guess affected his thought more deeply than either.
From these poems Sir Francis Burnand has lately published in the Red Letter Library a selection which gives a fair representation of the different moods in which Hood sang. They are broadly farcical, or romantic, or satirical or wildly fantastical; and there are the two famous poems which admirers of Hood will scarcely classify at all except by calling them inspired. The ‘Song of the Shirt’ in particular makes Sir Francis ‘positively disinclined to dwell upon any other serious poems of Hood’s be it even the “Bridge of Sighs” ‘; and he has some quarrel with Thackeray for the way in which he dwelt upon Hood’s perverse love of ‘comicalities’. He points out that it was the jesting that paid, and that Hood was forced to make an income. But what perhaps is overlooked is the necessary relationship between Hood’s fun and Hood’s tragedy; you could not have the one without the other - if he laughed in this way he must cry in that - and the faults which we find in his light verse surely reproduce themselves in his serious poems. Thus, the reason why we cannot, with deference to Sir Francis Burnand, accept the ‘Song of the Shirt’ as an enduring masterpiece is because of the slight cheapness of effect, tending to the melodramatic, which has something in common with the verbal dexterity, the supersensitive surface of mind already noticed. Such lines as
Sewing at once, with a double thread,
A shroud as well as a shirt.
or,
A little weeping would ease my heart,
But in their briny bed
My tears must stop, for every drop
Hinders needle and thread!
go straight, as he says, to our hearts; but not to the noblest part of them. ‘Ruth’ or The Death Bed’ touches a higher note. You must honour and pity so fine a nature, so honest and brilliant a mind, stung now to impulsive and passionate utterance by the sorrows of the world, now to irrepressible showers of merriment by its oddities. But in the most solid of his work the sharp blade of his own circumstance is always wearing through. You do not find all of him in his work; you rise from it unsatisfied, to ask what were the accidents of his life that made him write so. Mr Jerrold’s book, then, is a valuable addition to our knowledge of Hood, and anyone who has had occasion to consult the Memorials by his son and daughter will perceive at once how much all readers in the future must be indebted to Mr Jerrold’s laborious research and good judgment. A life was needed, and he has provided it.
Praeterita.
That an abridgement of ‘Modern Painters’ should lately have been published may be held to prove that while people still want to read Ruskin, they have no longer the leisure to read him in the mass. Happily, for it would be hard to let so great a writer recede from us, there is another and much slighter book of Ruskin’s, which contains as in a teaspoon the essence of those waters from which the many-coloured fountains of eloquence and exhortation sprang. ‘Praeterita’ - ‘outlines of scenes and thoughts perhaps worthy of memory in my past life’ as he called it - is a fragmentary book, written in a season of great stress towards the end of his life, and left unfinished. It is, for these reasons perhaps, less known than it should be; yet if anybody should wish to understand what sort of man Ruskin was, how he was brought up, how he came to hold the views he did, he will find it all indicated here; and if he wishes to feel for himself the true temper of his genius, these pages, though much less eloquent and elaborate than many others, preserve it with exquisite simplicity and spirit.
Ruskin’s father was ‘an entirely honest’ wine merchant, and his mother wa
s the daughter of the landlady of the Old King’s Head at Croydon. The obscurity of his birth is worth notice because he paid some attention to it himself, and it influenced him much. His natural inclination was to love the splendour of noble birth and the glamour of great possessions. Sitting between his father and mother when they drove about England in their chariot taking orders for sherry, he loved best to explore the parks and castles of the aristocracy. But he owned manfully, if with a tinge of regret, that his uncle was a tanner and his aunt a baker’s wife. Indeed, if he reverenced aristocracy and what it stood, or should stand for, he reverenced still more the labours and virtues of the poor. To work hard and honestly, to be truthful in speech and thought, to make one’s watch or one’s table as well as tables and watches can be made, to keep one’s house clean and pay one’s bills punctually were qualities that won his enthusiastic respect. The two strains are to be found conflicting in his life and produce much contradiction and violence in his work. His passion for the great French cathedrals conflicted with his respect for the suburban chapel. The colour and warmth of Italy fought with his English puritanical love of order, method and cleanliness. Though to travel abroad was a necessity to him, he was always delighted to return to Herne Hill and home. Again, the contrast finds expression in the marked varieties of his style. He is opulent in his eloquence, and at the same time meticulous in his accuracy. He revels in the description of changing clouds and falling waters, and yet fastens his eye to the petals of a daisy with the minute tenacity of a microscope. He combined, or at least there fought in him, the austerity of the puritan and the sensuous susceptibility of the artist. Unluckily for his own peace of mind, if nature gave him more than the usual measure of gifts and mixed them with more than her usual perversity, his parents brought him up to have far less than the usual power of self-control. Mr and Mrs Ruskin were both convinced that their son John was to become a great man, and in order to insure it they kept him like any other precious object, in a cardboard box wrapped in cotton wool. Shut up in a large house with very few friends and very few toys, perfectly clothed, wholesomely nourished and sedulously looked after, he learned, he said, ‘Peace, obedience, faith,’ but on the other hand, ‘I had nothing to love... I had nothing to endure... I was taught no precision nor etiquette of manners... Lastly and chief of evils, my judgment of right and wrong, and power of independent action, were entirely undeveloped; because the bridle and blinkers were never taken off me.’ He was not taught to swim, that is to say, but only to keep away from the water.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 501
