Barnette Miller

“ His apology after Hunt’s death was complete, but it could not destroy the lasting memory of an immortal portrait. He wrote: “a man who had the courage to take his stand against power on behalf of right—who in the midst of the sorest temptations, maintained his honesty unblemished by a single stain—who, in all public and private transactions, was the very soul of truth and honour—who never bartered his opinion or betrayed his friend—could not have been a weak man; for weakness is always treacherous and false, because it has not the power to resist.” ”

“ Like Godwin, he believed man capable of his own redemption and, with tradition and tyranny overthrown and reason and nature enthroned, he hoped for universal justice and ultimate perfectibility of mankind. His poetry and his prose represent a development from the impassioned and imaginative enthusiasm of an uncompromising youth, who would single-handed revolutionize the world in the twinkling of an eye, to the saner hope of a man who took somewhat into account the necessarily gradual nature of ethical evolution. ”

“ It is curious that, in the lives of three such geniuses as Shelley, Byron and Keats a man of lesser gifts and of weaker fibre should have played so large a part as did Leigh Hunt. It is more curious in view of the fact that the period of intimate association in each case extended over only a few years. The explanation must be sought in the accident of the age and in the personality of the man himself. It was an era of stirring action and of strong feeling. Men were clamoring for freedom from the trammels of the past and were pressing forward to the new day. ”

“ It is not strange that Lord Byron, son of an English father and a Scotch mother, born of a long line of adventurous and warlike sailors and illustrious and loyal knights, with a strain of royalty and madness on one side and eccentricity and immorality on the other, should have fallen heir in an unusual degree to a nature whose virtues and vices were complex and contradictory. ”

“ Lord Byron and I are excellent friends, and were I reduced to poverty, or were I a writer who had no claims to a higher station than I possess—or did I possess a higher than I deserve, we should appear in all things as such, and I would freely ask him any favour. Such is not now the case. The daemon of mistrust and pride lurks between two persons in our station, poisoning the freedom of our intercourse. ”

“ An irresistible longing for England and a crisis in the disagreement with John Hunt regarding the proprietary rights of The Examiner and the publication of the Wishing Cap Papers in that paper, made Hunt seize at the first opportunity by which he might return home. From Paris, on his way to England, he wrote: “If I delayed I might be pinned forever to a distance, like a fluttering bird to a wall, and so die in helpless yearning. I have been mistaken. During my strength my weakness perhaps, was only apparent; now that I am weaker, indignation has given a fillip to my strength.” ”

“ In the preface to the Story of Rimini (London, 1819, p. 16) , Hunt says that a poet should use an actual existing language, and quotes as authorities, Chaucer, Ariosto, Pulci, even Homer and Shakespeare. He thought simplicity of language of greater importance even than free versification in order to avoid the cant of art: “The proper language of poetry is in fact nothing different from that of real life, and depends for its dignity upon the strength and sentiment of what it speaks, omitting mere vulgarisms and fugitive phrases which are cant of ordinary discourse.” ”

“ Their laughs should not affect you (I may perhaps give you reasons some day for these laughs, for I suspect a few people to hate me well enough, for reasons I know of, who have pretended a great friendship for me) when in competition with one, who if he should never see you again would make you the Saint of his memory. These Laughers, who do not like you, who envy you for your Beauty, who would have God-bless’d me from you for ever: who were plying me with disencouragements with respect to you eternally. People are revengeful—do not mind them—do nothing but love me. ”

“ His criticism of the three men in question, like his criticisms in general, is distinguished by great fairness and absence of all personal jealousy, by a delicacy of feeling that will not be fully felt until scattered notes and buried prefaces are gathered together. He was animated chiefly by an inborn love of poetry and enjoyment of all beautiful things. If he sometimes fell short in understanding Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, he was perfectly sincere and independent, and pretended nothing that he did not feel. ”

“ Of the Hunt brothers Coventry Patmore writes: “I verily believe that, without the manly firmness, the immaculate political honesty, and the vigorous good sense of the one, and the exquisite genius and varied accomplishments, guided by the all-pervading and all-embracing humanity of the other, we should at this moment [Pg 17] have been without many of those writers and thinkers on whose unceasing efforts the slow but sure march of our political, and with it, our social regeneration as a people mainly depends.” ”

“ One passage on the Italian poets indicates a possible borrowing of thought and figure on Shelley’s part when he wrote of Boccaccio that he was superior to Ariosto and to Tasso, “the children of a later and colder day.... How much do I admire Boccaccio! What descriptions of nature are those in his little introduction to every new day! It is the morning of life stripped of that mist of familiarity which makes it obscure to us.” [308] Hunt wrote: “Petrarch, Boccaccio and Dante are the morning, noon and night of the great Italian day.” ”

“ On the subject of military depravity The Examiner contained the following: “The presiding genius of army government has become a perfect Falstaff, a carcass of corruption, full of sottishness and selfishness, preying upon the hard labour of honest men, and never to be moved but by its lust for money; and the time has come when either the vices of one man must be sacrificed to the military honour of the country, or the military honour of the country must be sacrificed to the vices of one man.” ”

“ But it was reserved to the spirit of atheism of an age, to talk of a Cockney writing a tragedy. When the mind ceases to believe in a Providence, it can believe in anything else; but the pious soul feels that while to dream, even in sleep, that a Cockney had written a successful tragedy, would be repugnant to reason; certainly a more successful tragedy could not be imagined, from the utter destruction of Cockaigne and all its inhabitants. ”

“ By special dispensation Hunt’s family was allowed to reside with him in prison and, stranger still, he was allowed to continue his work on the libellous journal. At the same time he wrote in jail the Descent of Liberty and part of the Story of Rimini. He transformed his prison yard into a garden and his prison room into a bower by papering the walls with trellises of roses and by coloring his ceiling like the sky. His books and piano-forte, his flowers and plaster casts surrounded him as at home. Old friends gathered about and new ones sought him as a martyr to the liberal cause. ”

“ Hunt’s London Journal with disdain. If he has anything to say against us or that gentleman, either conjunctly or severally, let him out with it in some other channel; and I promise him a touch and taste of the crutch. He talks to me of Maga’s desertion of principle; but if he were a Christian—nay, a man—his heart and his head would tell him that the Animosities are mortal, but the Humanities live for ever—and that Leigh Hunt has more talent in his little finger than the puling prig, who has taken upon himself to lecture Christopher North in a scrawl crawling with forgotten falsehoods. ”

“ Hunt’s services of friendship to Byron, Shelley and Keats, his able criticism and just defense of them, have found their reward in the inseparable association of his name with their immortal ones. They easily surpassed him in every department of writing in which they contested, yet the man was strong and alluring enough in his relations with them to prove a determining and, on the whole, beneficent influence in their lives. ”

“ The re-accession of the Tories to power in 1807, followed by their long ascendancy and abuse of power, led inevitably to a revival of the questions of revolution and of reform. Lord Byron, Shelley and Leigh Hunt were among the leaders of this second band of agitators, the “new camp,” as Professor [Pg 3] Dowden has designated them. It was their love of humanity, perhaps to a greater degree than their poetic genius and their æsthetic ideals, that made these men akin. Of the four poets with whom we deal Keats alone was comparatively indifferent to the strife about him. ”

“ Moore, writing to Byron in the latter part of 1821, said: “I heard some time ago that Leigh Hunt was on his way to Genoa with all of his family; and the idea seems to be, that you and Shelley and he are to conspire together in The Examiner. I cannot believe this—and deprecate such a plan with all my might. Alone you may do anything, but partnerships in fame, like those in trade, make the strongest party answerable for the deficiencies or delinquencies of the rest, and I tremble even for you with such a bankrupt company.... ”

“ Byron’s opinion of Keats is too well known to need repetition. He thought there was hope for Barry Cornwall if “he don’t get spoiled by green tea and the praises of Pentonville and Paradise Row. The pity of these men is, that they never lived in high life nor in solitude: there is no medium for the knowledge of the busy or the still world. If admitted into high life for a season, it is merely as spectators—they form no part of the mechanism thereof.” ”

“ Near the close of his life Hunt wrote: “The jests about London and the Cockneys did not affect me in the least, as far as my faith was concerned. They might as well have said that Hampstead was not beautiful, or Richmond lovely; or that Chaucer and Milton were Cockneys when they went out of London to lie on the grass and look at the daisies. The Cockney School is the most illustrious in England; for, to say nothing of Pope and Gray, who were both veritable Cockneys, ‘born within the sound of Bow Bell,’ Milton was so too; and Chaucer and Spenser were both natives of the city. ”

“ In the case of Shelley it was Hunt the man, rather than the writer, that held him. Charm was the magnet in a friendship that, in its perfection and deep intimacy, deserves to be ranked with the fabled ones of old—a love passing the love of woman. [Pg 160] There is no single cloud of distrust or disloyalty in the whole story of their relations.
Second to the personal tie may be ranked Hunt’s influence on Shelley’s politics, greater in this instance than in the case of Byron or Keats. Hunt’s attitude was an important factor in forming Shelley’s political creed. ”

“ The reviews indeed often verge on dullness and stupidity. Neither Gifford nor Southey seemed to have been blessed with the saving grace of humor in dealing with the Cockney School. Blackwood’s, on the other hand, had too much, for whenever one of the so-called Cockneys was mentioned, its contributors wallowed in the mire of coarse buffoonery and cruel satire, disgusting scandal and vulgar parody. The only counter-irritant to such a dose is the clever joking and keen humor ”

“ Since contemporary social conditions played an important part in the relations of Leigh Hunt with Byron, Shelley, and Keats, a brief survey of the period in question is necessary to an understanding of the forces at play on their intellect and conduct. The English mind had been admirably prepared for the principles of the French Revolution by the progressive tendency since the Revolution of 1688. The new order promised by France was acclaimed in England as one destined to right the wrongs of humanity; through unending progress mankind was to attain unlimited perfection. ”

“ He wrote in 1811: “I am no aristocrat, nor ‘crat’ at all, but vehemently long for the time when men may dare to live in accordance with Nature and Reason—in consequence with Virtue, to which I firmly believe that Religion and its establishments, Polity and its establishments, are the formidable though destructible barriers.” [214] Shelley knew of Leigh Hunt first as a political writer of considerable importance. In this respect he never ceased to admire him or to be influenced by The Examiner in the campaign against government corruption. ”