upreme 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 inveteracy, upon being "funny,"--though not funny and
nothing else at all. But we should not force this consideration too
far: Hood is a central figure in the group and the period, and the
tendency of the time may be almost as much due to him as he to the
tendency. Mainly, we have to fall back upon his own idiosyncrasy: he
was born with a boundlessly whimsical perception, which he trained into
an inimitable sleight-of-hand in the twisting of notions and of words;
circumstances favored his writing for fugitive publications and
skimming readers, rather than under conditions of greater permanency;
and the result is as we find it in his works. His son expresses the
opinion that part of Hood's success in comic writing arose from his
early reading of _Humphrey Clinker_, _Tristram Shandy_, _Tom Jones_,
and other works of that period, and imbuing himself with their style: a
remark, however, which applies to his prose rather than his poetical
works. Certain it is that the appetite for all kinds of fun, verbal and
other was a part of Hood's nature. We see it in the practical jokes he
was continually playing on his good-humored wife--such as altering into
grotesque absurdity many of the words contained in her letters to
friends: we see it--the mere animal love of jocularity, as it might be
termed--in such a small point as his frequently addressing his friend
Philip de Franck, in letters, by the words, "Tim, says he," instead of
any human appellative[3] Hood reminds us very much of one of
Shakespeare's Fools (to use the word in no invidious sense) transported
into the nineteenth century,--the Fool in _King Lear_, or Touchstone.
For the occasional sallies of coarseness or ribaldry, the spirit of the
time has substituted a _bourgeois_ good-humor which respects the family
circle, and haunts the kitchen-stairs; for the biting jeer, intended to
make some victim uncomfortable, it gives the sarcastic or sprightly
banter, not unconscious of an effort at moral amelioration; for the
sententious sagacity, and humorous enjoyment of the nature of man, it
gives bright thou