be a thing of two meanings; but with Hood there were three
meanings, for there was also the abstract truth that would have been
there with no pun at all. The pun of Hood is underrated, like the "wit"
of Voltaire, by those who forget that the words of Voltaire were not
pins, but swords. In Hood at his best the verbal neatness only gives to
the satire or the scorn a ring of finality such as is given by rhyme.
For rhyme does go with reason, since the aim of both is to bring things
to an end. The tragic necessity of puns tautened and hardened Hood's
genius; so that there is always a sort of shadow of that sharpness
across all his serious poems, falling like the shadow of a sword.
"Sewing at once with a double thread a shroud as well as a shirt"--"We
thought her dying when she slept, and sleeping when she died"--"Oh God,
that bread should be so dear and flesh and blood so cheap"--none can
fail to note in these a certain fighting discipline of phrase, a
compactness and point which was well trained in lines like "A
cannon-ball took off his legs, so he laid down his arms." In France he
would have been a great epigrammatist, like Hugo. In England he is a
punster.

There was nothing at least in this group I have loosely called the
Eccentrics that disturbs the general sense that all their generation was
part of the sunset of the great revolutionary poets. This fading glamour
affected England in a sentimental and, to some extent, a snobbish
direction; making men feel that great lords with long curls and whiskers
were naturally the wits that led the world. But it affected England also
negatively and by reaction; for it associated such men as Byron with
superiority, but not with success. The English middle classes were led
to distrust poetry almost as much as they admired it. They could not
believe that either vision at the one end or violence at the other could
ever be practical. They were deaf to that great warning of Hugo: "You
say the poet is in the clouds; but so is the thunderbolt." Ideals
exhausted themselves in the void; Victorian England, very unwisely,
would have no more to do with idealists in politics. And this, chiefly,
because there had been about these great poets a young and splendid
sterility; since the pantheist Shelley was in fact washed under by the
wave of the world, or Byron sank in death as he drew the sword for
Hellas.

The chief turn of nineteenth-century England was taken about the time
when a footman at