【国外文学】The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood.docx

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1、【国外文学】The Poetical Works of Thomas HoodBiographical IntroductionThere were scarcely any events in the life of Thomas Hood. One condition there was of too potent determining importance life-long ill health; and one circumstance of moment a commercial failure, and consequent expatriation. Beyond this,

2、 little presents itself for record in the outward facts of this upright and beneficial career, bright with genius and coruscating with wit, dark with the lengthening and deepening shadow of death.The father of Thomas Hood was engaged in business as a publisher and bookseller in the Poultry, in the c

3、ity of London a member of the firm of Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe. He was a Scotchman, and had come up to the capital early in life, to make his way. His interest in books was not solely confined to their saleable quality. He reprinted various old works with success; published Bloomfields poems, and de

4、alt handsomely with him; and was himself the author of two novels, which are stated to have had some success in their day. For the sake of the son rather than the father, one would like to see some account, with adequate specimens, of these long-forgotten tales; for the queries which Thomas Hood ask

5、s concerning the piteous woman of his Bridge of Sighs interest us all concerning a man of genius, and interest us moreover with regard to the question of intellectual as well as natural affinity:“Who was his father,Who was his mother?Had he a sister,Had he a brother?”Another line of work in which th

6、e elder Hood is recorded to have been active was the opening of the English book-trade with America. He married a sister of the engraver Mr. Sands, and had by her a large family; two sons and four daughters survived the period of childhood. The elder brother, James, who died early of consumption, dr

7、ew well, as did also one or two of the sisters. It would seem therefore, when we recall Thomas Hoods aptitudes and frequent miscellaneous practice in the same line, that a certain tendency towards fine art, as well as towards literature, ran in the family. The consumption which killed James appears

8、to have been inherited from his mother; she, and two of her daughters, died of the same disease; and a pulmonary affection of a somewhat different kind became, as we shall see, one of the poets most inveterate persecutors. The death of the father, which was sudden and unexpected, preceded that of th

9、e mother, but not of James, and left the survivors in rather straitened circumstances.Thomas, the second of the two sons, was born in the Poultry, on or about the 23d of May, 1799. He is stated to have been a retired child, with much quiet humor; chuckling, we may guess, over his own quaint imaginin

10、gs, which must have come in crowds, and of all conceivable or inconceivable sorts, to judge from the products of his after years; keeping most of these fancies and surprises to himself, but every now and then letting some of them out, and giving homely or stolid bystanders an inkling of insight into

11、 the many-peopled crannies of his boyish brain. He received his education at Dr. Wanostrochts school at Clapham. It is not very clear how far this education extended:? I should infer that it was just about enough, and not more than enough, to enable Hood to shift for himself in the career of authors

12、hip, without serious disadvantage from inadequate early training, and also without much aid thence derived without, at any rate, any such rousing and refining of the literary sense as would warrant us in attributing to educational influences either the inclination to become an author, or the manipul

13、ative power over language and style which Hood displayed in his serious poems, not to speak of those of a lighter kind. We seem to see him sliding, as it were, into the profession of letters, simply through capacity and liking, and the course of events not because he had resolutely made up his mind

14、to be an author, nor because his natural faculty had been steadily or studiously cultivated. As to details, it may be remarked that his schooling included some amount perhaps a fair average amount of Latin. We find it stated that he had a Latin prize at school, but was not apt at the language in lat

15、er years. He had however one kind of aptitude at it being addicted to the use of familiar Latin quotations or phrases, cited with humorous verbal perversions.In all the relations of family life, and the forms of family affection, Hood was simply exemplary. The deaths of his elder brother and of his

16、father left him the principal reliance of his mother, herself destined soon to follow them to the tomb: he was an excellent and devoted son. His affection for one of his sisters, Anne, who also died shortly afterwards, is attested in the beautiful lines named The Deathbed “We watched her breathing t

17、hrough the night.”At a later date, the loves of a husband and a father seem to have absorbed by far the greater part of his nature and his thoughts: his letters to friends are steeped and drenched In “Jane,” “Fanny,” and “Tom junior.” These letters are mostly divided between perpetual family details

18、 and perennial jocularity: a succession of witticisms, or at lowest of puns and whimsicalities, mounts up like so many squibs and crackers, fizzing through, sparkling amid, or ultimately extinguished by, the inevitable shower the steady rush and downpour of the home-affections. It may easily be infe

19、rred from this account that there are letters which one is inclined to read more thoroughly, and in greater number consecutively, than Hoods.The vocation first selected for Hood, towards the age of fifteen, was one which he did not follow up for long that of an engraver. He was apprenticed to his un

20、cle Mr. Sands, and afterwards to one of the Le Keux family. The occupation was ill-suited to his constantly ailing health, and this eventually conduced to his abandoning it. He then went to Scotland to recruit, remaining there among his relatives about five years.? According to a statement made by h

21、imself, he was in a merchants office within this interval; it is uncertain, however, whether this assertion is to be accepted as genuine, or as made for some purpose of fun. His first published writing appeared in the Dundee Advertiser in 1814 his age being then, at the utmost, fifteen and a half; t

22、his was succeeded by some contribution to a local magazine. But as yet he had no idea of authorship as a profession.Towards the middle of the year 1820, Hood was re-settled in London, improved in health, and just come of age. At first he continued practising as an engraver; but in 1821 he began to a

23、ct as a sort of sub-editor for the London Magazine after the death of the editor, Mr. Scott, in a duel. He concocted fictitious and humorous answers to correspondents a humble yet appropriate introduction to the insatiable habit and faculty for out-of-the-way verbal jocosity which marked-off his aft

24、er career from that of all other excellent poets.His first regular contribution to the magazine, in July, 1821, was a little poem To Hope: even before this, as early at any rate as 1815, he was in the frequent practice of writing correctly and at some length in verse, as witnessed by selections, now

25、 in print, from what he had composed for the amusement of his relatives. Soon afterwards, a private literary society was the recipient of other verses of the same order. The lines To Hope were followed, in the London Magazine, by the Ode to Dr. Kitchener and some further poems, including the importa

26、nt work, Lycus the Centaur after the publication of which, there could not be much doubt of the genuine and uncommon powers of the new writer. The last contribution of Hood to this magazine was the Lines to a Cold Beauty. Another early work of his, and one which, like the verses To the Moon, affords

27、 marked evidence of the impression which he had received from Keatss poetry, is the unfinished drama (or, as he termed it, “romance”) of Lamia: I do not find its precise date recorded. Its verse is lax, and its tone somewhat immature; yet it shows a great deal of sparkling and diversified talent. Ho

28、od certainly takes a rather more rational view than Keats did of his subject as a moral invention, or a myth having some sort of meaning at its root. A serpent transformed into a woman, who beguiles a youth of the highest hopes into amorous languid self-abandonment, is clearly not, in morals, the so

29、rt of person that ought to be left uncontrolled to her own devices. Keats ostentatiously resents the action of the unimpassioned philosopher Appollonius in revealing the true nature of the woman-serpent, and dissolving her spell. An elderly pedant to interfere with the pretty whims of a viper when s

30、he wears the outer semblance of a fine woman! Intolerable!(Such is the sentiment of Keats; but such plainly is not altogether the conviction of Hood, although his story remains but partially developed.)By this time it may have become pretty clear to himself and others that his proper vocation and de

31、stined profession was literature. Through the London Magazine, he got to know John Hamilton Reynolds (author of the Garden of Florence and other poems, and a contributor to this serial under the pseudonym of Edward Herbert), Charles Lamb, Allan Cunningham, De Quincey, and other writers of reputation

32、. To Hood the most directly important of all these acquaintances was Mr. Reynolds; this gentleman having a sister, Jane, to whom Hood was introduced. An attachment ensued, and shortly terminated in marriage, the wedding taking place on the 5th of May, 1824. The father of Miss Reynolds was the head w

33、riting-master at Christ Hospital. She is stated to have had good manners, a cultivated mind, and literary tastes, though a high educational standard is not always traceable in her letters. At any rate the marriage was a happy one; Mrs. Hood being a tender and attentive wife, unwearied in the cares w

34、hich her husbands precarious health demanded, and he being (as I have said) a mirror of marital constancy and devotion, distinguishable from a lover rather by his intense delight in all domestic relations and details than by any cooling-down in his fondness. It would appear that, in the later years

35、of Hoods life, he was not on entirely good terms with some members of his wifes family, including his old friend John Hamilton Reynolds. What may have caused this I do not find specified: all that we know of the character of Hood justifies us in thinking that he was little or not at all to blame, fo

36、r he appears throughout a man of just, honorable, and loving nature, and free besides from that sort of self-assertion which invites a collision. Every one, however, has his blemishes; and we may perhaps discern in Hood a certain over-readiness to think himself imposed upon, and the fellow-creatures

37、 with whom he had immediately to do a generation of vipers a state of feeling not characteristic of a mind exalted and magnanimous by habit, or “gentle” in the older and more significant meaning of the term.The time was now come for Hood to venture a volume upon the world. Conjointly with Reynolds,

38、he wrote, and published in 1825, his Odes and Addresses to Great People. The title-page bore no authors name; but the extraordinary talent and point of the work could hardly fail to be noticed, even apart from its appeal to immediate popularity, dealing as it did so continually with the uppermost to

39、pics of the day. It had what it deserved, a great success. This volume was followed, in 1826, by the first series of Whims and Oddities, which also met with a good sale; the second series appeared in 1827. Next came two volumes of National Tales, somewhat after the manner of Boccaccio (but how far d

40、ifferent from his spirit may easily be surmised), which are now little known. The volume containing the Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, Hero and Leander, and some other of Hoods most finished and noticeable poems, came out in 1827. The Midsummer Fairies itself was one of the authors own favorite work

41、s, and certainly deserved to be so, as far as dainty elegance of motive and of execution is concerned: but the conception was a little too ingeniously remote for the public to ratify the authors predilection. The Hero and Leander will be at once recognized as modelled on the style of Elizabethan nar

42、rative poems: indeed Marlow treated the very same subject, and his poem, left uncompleted, was finished by Chapman. Hoods is a most astonishing example of revivalist poetry: it is reproductive and spontaneous at the same time. It resembles its models closely, not servilely significantly, not mechani

43、cally; and has the great merit of resembling them with comparative moderation. Elizabethan here both in spirit and in letter, Hood is nevertheless a little less extreme than his prototypes. Where they loaded, he does not find it needful to overload, which is the ready and almost the inevitable resou

44、rce of revivalists, all but the fewest: on the contrary, he alleviates a little but only a little.In 1829 appeared the most famous of all his poems of a narrative character The Dream of Eugene Aram; it was published in the Gem, an annual which the poet was then editing. Besides this amount of litera

45、ry activity, Hood continued writing in periodicals, sometimes under the signature of “Theodore M.”His excessive and immeasurable addiction to rollicking fun, to the perpetual “cracking of jokes” (for it amounts to that more definitely than to anything else in the domain of the Comic Muse), is a some

46、what curious problem, taken in connection with his remarkable genius and accomplishment as a poet, and his personal character as a solid housekeeping citizen, bent chiefly upon rearing his family in respectability, and paying his way, or, as the Church Catechism has neatly and unimprovably expressed

47、 it, upon “doing his duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him.” His almost constant ill-health, and, in a minor degree, the troubles which beset him in money-matters, make the problem all the more noticeable. The influence of Charles Lamb may have had something to do with i

48、t probably not very much. Perhaps there was something in the literary atmosphere or the national tone of the time which gave comicality a turn of predominance after the subsiding of the great poetic wave which filled the last years of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century in

49、 our country, in Blake, Burns, Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Landor, Byron, Keats, and, supreme among all, Shelley. Something of the same transition may be noticed in the art of design; the multifarious illustrator in the prior generation is Stothard in the later, Cruikshank. At any rate, in literature, Lamb, Hood, and then Dickens in his earliest works, the Sketches by Boz and Pickwick, are uncommonly characteristic and leading minds, and bent, with singular