THE LIFE AND REMAINS OF THEODORE HOOK.
THEODORE Roos. may be placed at the head of that class of "wits," almost peculiar to England, who applied their talents to political purposes, and contributed more perhaps than oratory or hope towards keeping their party together in bad times, by enlisting the laughers on its side, giving a bond of union to its followers by uttering their prejudices in a spicy and popular form, and feeding their anger or worse passions by peppering the sore places of their enemies. Single songs under the Stuarts (especially under Charles the Second) may display a deeper knowledge of men and much larger ideas of the English constitution and of government in gene- ral-in both which things poor Hook was rather deficient ; Hanbury Wil- Hams, we think, had a nicer perception of the humorous in character; and Moore a more sparkling play of wit with refinement of manner : but all these men were amateurs or guerillas. They wrote when they pleased, and what they pleased ; they could wait for a subject and the vein to handle it, and not send it forth till they had worked it up to their ideas of finish. For some years Theodore Hook was at it week after week, as "regular as the Sunday came" ; and if much was coarse, much trivial and dependent upon the time, and much animated by what he would have called the spirit of Flankeyism, the palm of readi- ness and fluency must be awarded him ; while a mere selection from his political jeux d'esprit rival or exceed in balk the whole labours of his rivals, and in merit certainly equal, and we think surpass them. If he be compared with Moore especially, Theodore Hook will be found to ex- cel in substance, directness, and vigour ; he is thinking of his work and its object, not of the pretty way in which he is doing it ; while, strange to say of such a farceur, he seems animated by a more earnest spirit than Moore-to be really indignant against the follies or vices he assails : and probably he was for the time, or in theory. He appears to have had from inheritance and early association the player's notions of loyalty, and he got such ideas of religion as such a mind could entertain from the connexion of "Church and State," and the fact of his brother being a (political and polemical) Dean.
In his life Theodore Hook bore a strong generic resemblance to the race whom our ancestors called " wits "; especially in the indiffer- ence shown towards his difficulties by those whom he amused. The day had indeed gone by when a man of his varied and popular powers was frequently indebted to the " treats" of his friends for his meals, had often no other bed than a bulk or a bundle of straw in a lodging-house, and fur- nished the satirist with similes for the swiftness or dexterity with which he eluded the bailiffs. But his life, if less visibly poor and wretched, was as harassed as theirs ; while the state he at one time affected, and " the appearances" he always kept up, introduced into his embarrass- ments an element of large and varied difficulties, from which the older authors were freed. In Hook's ease the distresses seemed the result'of folly produced by Fate. What could possess him to take the house of a lortl, to live like a lord, and to entertain lords, it is difficult to tell : his literary celebrity, and his social powers of amusing-perhaps excelling those of Mathews himself, would always have procured him the lords and the living; and his domestic establishment was not, according to his biographer, one that could 4nduce him to cultivate a connexion for the purpose of in- troducing his family. In this gulf of magnificent living, was not only swallowed up the 2,000/. a year be drew from the John Bull during the zenith of its popularity, and the large sums he gained from his novels, but a good many future gains that were never realized. This was his way of doing things, according to Mr. Barham.
"The great success of Mr. Hook's first novels, and the large sums they bronght him in, proved, indirectly, as is too often the case with literary men, the cause of much of his subsequent embarrassment: his better judgment was completely dazzled by the prospect that appeared to open; he seemed to think that by virtue of his pen an almost unlimited income was placed at his command; and he launched out accordingly into expenses, and adopted a style of hospitality, that in- duced the most disastrous consequences. His first step was to give up, in 1827, his moderate establishment at Putney, and hire a large and fashionable mansion in Cleveland Row, belonging to his friend Lord Lowther, but in the hands at that time of the late Captain Marryat. For this he paid 2001. a year, and immediately laid out between two and three thousand pounds in furniture and decorations; ac- cepting bills for the amount, and trusting to the returns from the John Bull and other publications for the wherewith to meet them. This was his great error, and one which no amount of exertion sufficed to repair. Ready money became scarce, supplies were to be raised at any cost; his account with the paper was overdrawn, and the patience of his co-proprietors exhausted; fresh engagements were in consequence entered into, and advances obtained from the publishers.
" The proceeds of his intellectual resources being thus mortgaged and fore- stalled, and his energies in consequence withdrawn from the Bull in favour of more pressing claimants, the sale of the paper, together with his clear profit of two thousand a year, began rapidly to sink. Straitened and reduced, he remain- ed nevertheless, for a time, unwilling to retrench: there was but one alternative, and he became speedily entangled in the meshes of usurers and bill-discounters, and all the obscene tribe of vampires that feed on the extravagant and necessitons. It is not, however, without a feeling of satisfaction, that we are enabled to trace much of the pecuniary distress in which he became so early and apparently so in- explicably involved, to the imprudence or ill fortune of others. In 1831, we find him soliciting advances from his publishers, on the ground of a loss of upwards of 1,5001. sustained during the year by the bankruptcy of two or three friends.' His connexion with one firm in particular plunged him into sudden and con- siderable difficulty: he had undertaken the editorship of some literary specula- tion, and bad received large sums, in paper, on account, most of which had been paid into the hands of his upholsterers; when the failure of the house, just as these bills were becoming due, entailed upon him quite unexpectedly the necessity of finding the money to meet them."
Much of Hook's improvidence may be traced to the circumstances and training of his early years. He lost his mother in boyhood. His father, a prolific and popular musical composer in his day, allowed him to do pretty much as he pleased. After the education of boarding-schools and a short sojourn at Harrow, where be got such learning as he had, (for in a brief career at college, subsequently, he acquired nothing,) Mr. Hook im- pressed Theodore into the service of the theatre. In his sixteenth year he was associated with his father in the concoction of a musical drama in two acts, announced as "The Soldier's Return, or What can Beauty do: the Overture and Music entirely new, composed by Mr. Hook." The acting of an Irishman by Jack Johnstone floated the puerile piece, and Theodore received 501. as his share. This was in 1805 ; and henceforth the stripling became a dramatic author and "man upon town "-free of the theatres before and behind the curtain-the pet of the green-room; with a literary celebrity enough to introduce him into society, and amu- sing powers to enlarge his visiting-list, till it extended, Mr. Barham says through Sheridan, to Carlton House; while he was known for fracas and "hoaxes" that would not have been tolerated in his later days. The expenses of this kind of life were maintained on credit, till his appoint- ment, in 1813, to the Treasurership of the Mauritius. The source of this patronage is obscure: a more scandalous appointment, be the source what it might, can scarcely be imagined ; and so it turned out. In 1817, a deficiency of many thousands in the colonial chest was discovered ; and after an inquiry of several months, Hook was sent in custody to Eng- land; where he arrived in January 1819. Upon this incident the pre- sent work throws no new light, as to whether Hook or his subordinate was the defaulter; all that is clear is the loss of the money. But when Mr. Barham acquits Hook on the score of the difficulty of getting through so large a sum (between 9,0001. and 12,0001.) in a small co- lony without attracting attention, he forgets his English debts and his taste for gaining.
On his return to England, 'Hook at first remained under a cloud, and took quiet lodgings in Somers Town. There he continued, notwithstand- ing the success of the John Bull, started in 1820, until his arrest as a defaulter in 1823. In 1825 he was discharged from custody, and took a house at Putney, on a scale not incommensurate with his then income ; but removed in 1827, as we have seen already, to Cleveland Row' and at a time when his income, we suspect, was not increasing. During those years, he appears to have lived a life of continfial excitement from literary exertion, social improvisation, the pleasures of the table, and em- barrassed affairs. Mr. Barham, whose father knew him well, gives a picture of his life during the latter part of it, which with a little soften- ing might possibly apply to a large portion of his career. I' We may venture to supply, by way of specimen, a sketch; by no means over- charged, of one of those restless life-exhausting days in which the seemingly iron energies of Theodore Hook were prematurely consumed. A late breakfast—his spirits jaded by the exertions of yesterday, and further depressed by the impend- ing weight of some pecuniary difficulty; large arrears of literary toil to be made up; the meal sent away untested; everypower of his mind forced and strained for the next four or five hours upon the subject that happens to be in hand—then a rapid drive to town and a visit, first to one club, where, the centre of an admiring circle, his intellectual faculties are again upon the stretch, and again aroused and sustained by artificial means; the same thing repeated at a second—the same drain and the same supply—a ballot or general meeting' at a third, the chair taken by Mr. Hook,—who, as a friend observes, addresses the members, produces the accounts, audits and passes them, gives a succinct statement of the prospects and finances of the society, parries an awkward question, extinguishes a grumbler, confounds an opponent, proposes a vote of thanks' to himself, seconds, carries it, and 'returns thanks' with a vivacious rapidity that entirely confounds the unorganized schemes of the minority; then a chop in the committee-room, and ' just one tumbler of brandy and water,' or two; and we fear the catalogue would not always close there. " Off next to take his place at some lordly banquet, where the fire of wit is to be stirred again into dazzling blaze, and fed by fresh supplies of potent stimu- lants. Lady A— has never heard one of his delightful extempores: the piano- forte is at hand—we have seen it established with malice prepense in the dining- room when he has been expected; fresh and more vigorous efforts of fancy, me- mory, and application, are called for—all the wondrous machinery of the brain taxed and strained to the very utmost—smiles and applause reward the exertion: and perhaps one more chanson, if he has shown himself thoroughly i' the vein, is craved as a special favour; or possibly, if the call has been made too early or too late, some drill-witted gentleman hints that he is a little disappointed in Mr. Hook; and the host admits that he has not been so happy as he has known him. He retires at last, but not to rest—not to home. Half an hour at Crockford's is proposed by some gay companion as they quit together: we need not continue the picture; the half-hour is quadrupled, and the excitement of the preceding evening is as nothing to that which now ensues; whether he rises from the table winner or loser, by the time belies reached Fulham the reaction is complete, and in a state of utter prostration, bodily and mental, he seeks his pillow; to tan, perhaps, precisely a similar course on the morrow."
The result might have been predicted. Notwithstanding an iron-con- stitution, he died at the age of fifty-one, apparently of "gin-liver," a dis- ease which, originating insmmoderate doses of alcohol, impairs the diges- tion, destroys the function of the liver, and induces death by something like inanition.
The Life of Theodore Hook is rather a slight affair. Mr. Barham is deficient in largeness and plan ; there is no method, and some chro- nological- confusion in his structure. As a dramatist, Hook is rather under- rated by his biographer : his novels are much overrated; for in their " hu- mours " they were not much better than clever caricatures, and his _serious parts were substantially melodramas; he founded no school of his own, and was not eminent in any other. Hook's fame must rest upon his political jeux d'esprit ; and that kind of celebrity is continually waning. Even now, many of his fugitive pieces can only be read with zest by those who remember the time when they were produced and the persons they satirized. But many, it should be said, have a humour, a breadth, and a felicity, that promise as much permanence as such productions can attain. The second volume, devoted to what is called the Remains, consists of prose and poetical selections from the John Bull, made by Hook him- self before his death, but the publication of which was suspended. The papers-were subsequently considered by Mr. Barham, who omitted some as too personal ; but it is probable that he lopped too freely. We miss several things thit were better and not more personal than some which are printed : and after all, perhaps, Hook's personalities have been exaggerated. There was, no doubt, a sensual coarseness about the na- ture of Hook, which made his attacks offensive to taste and sometimes to propriety ; but those who remember the caricatures and other assaults upon George the Fourth and his Court, or read the Satirical and Hu- morous Poems of Thomas Moore, may doubt whether Hook stands alone in-personality.
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