From Temple Bar. LEIGH HUNT. Leigh Hunt was one of the poets who have their portion of praise in this life. Such writers are not always unjustly treated; they had their day, and enjoyed their credit; they were listened to by their own generation, and pitched their voices for its hearing, but they have not Fame's speaking-trumpet to reach our ears too. It would be rash to say that Joanna Baillie, Hayley, Southey, Bailey (I name them at random), did not deserve the reputation which they once enjoyed because they are little read, or less read, now. The immortals will have their immortality, and those who have done some particular thing supremely well will sit at their feet. Readers will always be found for Cowper, Jane Austen, Sterne, Charles Lamb. But Charles Lamb's friends-Leigh Hunt among them-are beginning to be forgotten, rather because they have gone out of fashion than for any better cause. I remember some thirty years ago, in the pleasant suburb of Kensington, gay with elm-trees and hedgerows, where some of the streets had only one side, and in which you often passed from rows of new drab-colored houses to green fields and country lanes, a cottage facing the south, with a little gate in front of it, a bow window, a porch with creepers, a garden and trees at the back; and we were told that Jenny Lind once lived there. It has gone long ago; but whilst it stood it was the home of art and romance. It did not suit this spreading building age, but it served for beauty and use forty years ago. That cottage reminds me of the gentle suburban life of Leigh Hunt. He marked a moment in literature, the transition from the aristocracy to the democracy of letters. He was only a mortal, though he lived with the immortals; but he has his place near them, and does not deserve to be altogether lost in the crowd. He was a vagabond of literature, a hack of genius. He wrote about everything: politics, economics, Shakespeare, Byron, Italy, scenery, art, the Quattro Poeti, the modern writers, actors, and singers, the drama, the stage. He wrote so rapidly and indiscriminately, turning out his articles as the baker turns out his rolls, that the commonplace of the printer's boy, waiting below for copy, might have been invented for him. Writing was as easy to him as talking-and how he talked, Carlyle and Hazlitt have told us. "He talked," says Carlyle, "like a singing-bird. . . . His talk was often literary, biographical, autobiographical, wandering into criticism, reform of society, progress, etc., free, cheery, idly melodious as bird on high." Hazlitt writes: He has a fine vinous spirit about him, and tropical blood in his veins; but he is better at his own table. He has a great flow of pleasantry and delightful animal spirits; but his hits do not tell like Lamb's you cannot repeat them next day. . . He sits at the head of a party with great gaiety and grace; has an elegant manner and turn of features; is never at a lossaliquando sufflaminandus erat . . . laughs with great glee and good humor. understands the point of an equivoque or an observation immediately. . . . If he have a fault, it is that he does not listen so well as he speaks, is impatient of interruption, and is fond of being looked up to, without considering by whom. Leigh Hunt was not an immense talker like Coleridge and Carlyle, a wit like Rogers and Sydney Smith, an authority like Johnson and Hallam, a detailer of reminiscences, a chronicler, an accepted critic of art and letters, an asker of questions, an arguer for victory-all acknowledged species in the category of talkers, and good in their place-but a talker who was never tedious, because he was always fluent and graceful, and talked with, not only to, his company. And when he sat down with his conversational pen to talk about his life, he was not in a hurry for the printer, and could call upon memory and imagination to reproduce the good company he had kept, and the memorable things which he had seen and heard. He gives us in his autobiography, not only his own life, but what is the chief charm of a good biography, a picture of the time as well as the man. We should not care so much for even Boswell's Johnson if we did not find him in the company of Burke, Goldsmith, Sir Joshua, and his other playmates. Hunt always kept good company. He was the intimate triend of Shelley and Keats, above all, of Charles Lamb; the associate of James and Horace Smith, of Fuseli, Campbell, Charles Mathews, Theodore Hook, and a score besides; of Byron, whose brilliancy scorched him, of Coleridge, whom he quizzed and admired, of Wordsworth, whom he quizzed and respected. To have had such friends is a sufficient testimonial to his genius and his heart. We use the word "genius" advisedly. Leigh Hunt was a man of genius, not a mere product of literature and cleverness. He had little creative power, not a high originality; he reflected more than he invented; his experience was limited by the circumstances of his life -the desk, the prison, the comfortless home and wasted over too wide a field of letters. But two qualities put him above the ranks of journeymen, and give him a share in the laurels of genius: insight into the character of persons and literary works; and vividness of expression, never staled by the daily habit of writing, nor diluted with vulgar sentiment. What makes Leigh Hunt delightful reading is his own grace of style-felt most when he is least conscious of it-his gaiety, his appreciation of character, his kindliness, and, above all, his gift of love and admiration for the dear friends, his superiors in genius, but not his superiors in humanity and generosity, and freedom from envy or jealousy. And it is due to him to remember that, though Keats, Shelley, and Lamb distanced him, he showed them the way over a new country. Since the object of this paper is to attempt some appreciation of Leigh Hunt's character and personality, as well as of his place in literature, we will here try to recall something of the impression which he produced on those who knew him well. And first must come the picture drawn by Carlyle in his "Reminiscences:" Dark complexion, . . . copious, clean, strong, black hair, beautifully-shaped head, fine, beaming, serious, hazel eyes, seriousness and intellect the main expression of his face. . . . He would lean on his elbow against the mantelpiece (fine, clean, elastic figure, too, he had, five feet ten or more) and look around him nearly in silence before taking leave for the night, "As if I were a Lar," said he once, "or permanent household god here!" An(such his polite, aerial-like way). other time, rising from his Lar attitude, he repeated (voice very fine), as if in spirit of parody, yet with something of very sad perceptible, "While I to sulphurous and penal fire" as the last thing before vanishing. Poor Hunt! no more of him. ... Elsewhere Carlyle speaks of him as having "a fine, chivalrous, gentlemanly carriage, polite, affectionate, respectful (especially to her), and yet so free and natural." . . . "A gifted, gentle, patient, and valiant human soul." him Trelawny found "a gentleman and something more." Emerson thought him and De Quincey "the finest mannered of all the English men of letters." Lowell and Hawthorne enjoyed his company. William Bell Scott, who visited him at Chelsea with George Lewes, describes the old poet as he sat in his armchair by his frugal fireside, with his books, his piano, his bronze inkstand, and his pot of primroses-a "mild, even-natured, and unfortunate man," talking still of Keats and Shelley, Fiesole, "Kubla Khan" and its author, and yet welcoming youthful promise. To Browning, when the public would neither read nor hear him, and to Rossetti, in his early essays in poetry, Leigh Hunt's generous encouragement was worth something. Too much space is commonly given in biographies to parentage and origin. There is an inverted family pride, very little resembling that of Sir Walter Elliott of Kellynch, and based, unlike that, upon reason, which chronicles worth rather than nobility of blood, and sometimes pleases itself in finding in the vagaries of ancestors a justification for its own eccentricities. Partly in jest, partly with an idea that there may be something in it, Leigh Hunt, in his autobiography, introduces us to adventurers in the New World, a Hebrew professor at Oxford, Cavaliers driven (perhaps transported) to the West Indies by Cromwell, Irish Kings, a mythical "merchant theefe," who fought against Sir Andrew Barton, and more authentically to a family of Barbadoes traders and clergymen, the last of whom, his father, had a narrow escape from being tarred and feathered at Philadelphia as a supporter of King George. It is easy to construct a pedigree by judicious selection of "pet ancestors." Leigh Hunt had himself no great belief in pedigrees, and we need go no further back than his father, who turns up in London, after his Pennsylvanian adventures, a rhetorical and unorthodox clergyman, fond of good books, good company, and good living, with something of a Charles Honeyman incapacity for meeting his creditors, "always scheming, never performing," a martyr for his opinions, and ill-consoled by a Loyalist pension of £100-which he soon mortgaged away- "for the loss of seven or eight times as much in America." His The first room which Leigh Hunt remembered was a prison. "We struggled on," he says, "between quiet and disturbance, between placid readings" -his father had a fine voice and delivery, and delighted in reading aloud passages from old English divines"and frightful knocks at the door, and sickness, and calamity, and hopes, which hardly ever forsook us." bringing up was thus not unlike that of Sterne-adversity in a humorous shape - an education not pointing in the direction of the Roman or British virtues of economy, consistency, and regularity, subordination of hope to foresight, and of whims to designs; but likely to foster independence of thinking, animal spirits, that eutrapelia which Matthew Arnold translated as "elasticity," and a readiness to turn to any form of intellectual interest which did not take the shape of business, or "ticket and label" this happygo-lucky spirit "among the acquiescent." Hope, rather of a Micawber character, sprang eternal in the breasts of the Hunts, and tempered the troubles into which a faulty arithmetic too often brought them. His mother was a woman of a tender heart and a fine spirit. Her son records how, on a winter day, she took off her flannel petticoat and gave it to a poor woman-a better deed than that of St. Martin, for he only gave half his cloak and got no harm, whereas she gave all her garment and was rheumatic ever after. "Saints have been made for charities no greater." She stood at her husband's side in all the vicissitudes of fortune which brought him lower and lower, changed her opinions with his, and took the consequences, in a time when to be a Unitarian or a Republican was unpopular and even dangerous. Leigh Hunt was sickly as a child, though he afterwards enjoyed good health, maintained by strict temperance. He was (he tells us) constitutionally timid, but had a stock of intellectual and moral courage which helped him to hold up his head among bigger and stronger boys at Christ's Hospital, and which never forsook him. Courage of this kind has none of the gaiety of animal pugnacity. It is reflective, and combative on principle, not by temper, and it is apt to become pedantic and to be looked upon as conceited. Leigh Hunt's martyrdoms always had a tinge of affectation, real or apparent, and we wonder why he should have chosen to go to prison when many a man as honest but more robust would have kept out. His natural gentleness, oddly combined with zeal for the oppressed, indignation at injustice, and a tender conscience, made him a political combatant on the unpopular side, and a sufferer in consequence. But we need not pity him too much, for he found a paradoxical pleasure in suffering, all the more, it may be, because his friends did not always see the need of it. Leigh Hunt and his brother were three times prosecuted for attacks upon the government in the Examiner, and three times-at heavy cost to themselves -acquitted. The passage which at last brought down the rigors of the law upon him-not unjustly, for libel must take the consequences, nor yet unhappily, for the memory of George IV. has never got over it-runs as follows: What person, unacquainted with the true state of the case, would imagine, in reading these astounding eulogies, that this "glory of the people" was the subject of millions of shrugs and reproaches! that this "protector of the arts" had named a wretched foreigner his historical painter, in disparagement or in ignorance of the merits of his own countrymen! that this "Mæcenas of the age" patronized not a single deserving writer! that this "breather of eloquence" could not say a few decent extempore words, if we are to judge, at least, from what he said to his regiment on its embarkation for Portugal; that this "conqueror of hearts" was the disappointer of hopes! that this "exciter of desire" (bravo! messieurs of the Post), this "Adonis in loveliness" was a corpulent man of fifty! In short, this delightful, blissful, wise, pleasurable, honorable, virtuous, true, and immortal prince was a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity. To prison he must go; and-which he had not foreseen - apart from his brother John, the sharer of his offence and its punishment. He tells the story of his gaol with much humor, though unconscious that the figure he himself presents is a trifle ridiculous. Charles Lamb's admiration of it must have had a touch of irony. We cannot fancy him enjoying such a sentimental dungeon, or confusing fact and fiction as his friend did. ... cases were set up, with their busts, and flowers and a pianoforte made their appearance, perhaps there was not a handsomer room on that side of the water. Charles Lamb declared there was no other such room, except in a fairy tale. But I possessed another surprisewhich was a garden. There was a little yard outside the room, railed off from another belonging to a neighboring yard. This yard I shut in with green palings, adorned it with a trellis, bordered it with a thick bed of earth from a nursery, and even contrived to have a grass plot. The earth I filled with flowers and young trees. There was an apple-tree, from which we managed to get a pudding the second year. As to my flowers, they were allowed to be perfect. Thomas Moore, who came to see me with Lord Byron, told me he had seen no such heart's-ease. I bought the "Parnaso Italiano" while in prison,"-(it cost him £30, and ten years later he talked of selling it for half the sum, to buy bread)-"and used often to think of a passage in it while looking at this miniature piece of horticulture: Mio picciol orto, A me sei vigna, e campo, e selva e prato. BALDI. My little garden, To me thou'rt vineyard, field, meadow and wood. Here I wrote and read in fine weather, sometimes under an awning. In autumn my trellises were hung with scarletrunners, which added to the flowery investment. I used to shut my eyes in my armchair and effect to think myself hundreds of miles away. So complacent a temper sweetens adversity; and if Leigh Hunt had been a bachelor of private fortune, no one could have objected to his amusing himself with a Cockney Arcadia. But when we hear that his wife with her eldest boy, not only shared this captivity, but that she actually gave birth to another child in these incongruous quarters, we are reminded, for all Dickens's disclaimer, of Harold Skimpole, and inclined to think that if indeed Hunt was not in the novelist's mind, the world was not very far wrong in seeing a likeness between the "amazing prisoner and invalid" who "issued out of a bower of roses," and the sen I papered the walls with a trellis of roses; I had the ceiling colored with clouds and sky; the barred windows I screened with Venetian blinds; and when my book-timentalist of "Bleak House." |