Leigh Hunt was turned fifty then, and was Carlyle’s neighbour, living at No. 10 (then No. 4) Upper Cheyne Row. I have seen it said that Leigh Hunt went there in order to be near Carlyle, but his occupancy of that house dates from 1833—the year before Carlyle established himself in Chelsea—and he remained there until 1840, seven years of poverty and worry, when it was literal truth that he was weary and sad, in indifferent health, harassed for want of money, and growing old, yet you find him never losing hope, and always ready on the smallest excuse to rejoice and make light of his troubles. I am afraid Dickens’s caricature of Hunt as Harold Skimpole, and Byron’s contemptuous references to his vanity and vulgarity and the squalor of his easy-going home life (his children, said Byron, “are dirtier and more mischievous than Yahoos,” and writing of their arrival in Italy as Shelley’s guests he observes, “Poor Hunt, with his six little blackguards, are coming slowly up; as usual he turned back once—was there ever such a kraal out of the Hottentot country?”)—I am rather afraid these things have tended to wrong Hunt in our imagination of him, for you learn on other evidence that there is just enough truth in those representations of him to make them seem quite true, and they linger in your mind, and affect your regard and admiration of the man in spite of yourself. But Dickens, with his keen sense of the absurd, had a habit of exaggeration; there was no ill-nature in his laughter—he merely seized on certain of Hunt’s weaknesses and gave them to a character who has none of Hunt’s finer qualities, and it is ridiculous in us and unfair to both men to take that caricature as a portrait. As for Byron—he could not justly appraise Hunt, for he had no means of understanding him. His own way of life was made too easy for him from the first; he was not born to Hunt’s difficulties and disadvantages; his experiences of the world, and therefore his sympathies, were too limited. There is no merit in living elegantly and playing the gentleman when you simply inherit, as the fruits of an ancestor’s abilities, all the conveniences and the money that enable you to do so. On the whole, if you compare their lives, you will realise that Leigh Hunt was by far the greater man of the two, even if Byron was the greater poet, and I am more than a little inclined to agree with Charles Lamb that even as a poet Byron was “great in so little a way. To be a poet is to be the man, not a petty portion of occasional low passion worked up in a permanent form of humanity. Shakespeare has thrust such rubbishy feelings into a corner—the dark, dusty heart of Don John, in the Much Ado about Nothing.”
Shelley never speaks of Leigh Hunt but in the kindliest terms. He was “gentle, honourable, innocent, and brave,” writes Shelley; “one of more exalted toleration for all who do and think evil, and yet himself more free from evil; one of simpler and, in the highest sense of the word, purer life and manners, I never knew.” He is, he says in the Letter to Maria Gisborne:
“One of those happy souls
Which are the salt of the earth, and without whom
This earth would smell like what it is—a tomb.”
Hunt tells in his Autobiography how he came to Chelsea, and gives a glowing description of his house there. He left St. John’s Wood, and then his home in the New Road (now Marylebone Road), because he found the clay soil of the one and the lack of quiet around the other affected his health, or “perhaps it was only the melancholy state of our fortune” that was answerable for that result; anyhow, from the noise and dust of the New Road he removed to Upper Cheyne Row—“to a corner in Chelsea,” as he says, “where the air of the neighbouring river was so refreshing and the quiet of the ‘no-thoroughfare’ so full of repose, that although our fortunes were at their worst, and my health almost at a piece with them, I felt for some weeks as if I could sit still for ever, embalmed in silence. I got to like the very cries in the street, for making me the more aware of it by the contrast. I fancied they were unlike the cries in other quarters of the suburbs, and that they retained something of the old quaintness and melodiousness which procured them the reputation of having been composed by Purcell and others.... There was an old seller of fish, in particular, whose cry of ‘Shrimps as large as prawns’ was such a regular, long-drawn, and truly pleasing melody that, in spite of his hoarse and, I am afraid, drunken voice, I used to wish for it of an evening, and hail it when it came....
LEIGH HUNT’S HOUSE. CHELSEA.
“I know not whether the corner I speak of remains as quiet as it was. I am afraid not; for steamboats have carried vicissitude into Chelsea, and Belgravia threatens it with her mighty advent. But to complete my sense of repose and distance, the house was of that old-fashioned sort which I have always loved best, familiar to the eyes of my parents, and associated with childhood. It had seats in the windows, a small third room on the first floor, of which I made a sanctum, into which no perturbation was to enter, except to calm itself with religious and cheerful thoughts; and there were a few limes in front which, in their due season, diffused a fragrance. In this house we remained seven years; in the course of which, besides contributing some articles to the Edinburgh and Westminster Reviews, and producing a good deal of the book since called The Town, I set up (in 1834) the London Journal, endeavoured to continue the Monthly Repository, and wrote the poem entitled Captain Sword and Captain Pen, the Legend of Florence, and three other plays. Here also I became acquainted with Thomas Carlyle, one of the kindest and best, as well as most eloquent of men.... I believe that what Mr. Carlyle loves better than his fault-finding, with all its eloquence, is the face of any human creature that looks suffering, and loving, and sincere; and I believe further that if the fellow-creature were suffering only, and neither loving nor sincere, but had come to a pass of agony in this life which put him at the mercies of some good man for some last help and consolation towards his grave, even at the risk of loss to repute and a sure amount of pain and vexation, that man, if the groan reached him in its forlornness, would be Thomas Carlyle.”
He wrote that from his personal experience of Carlyle, for whilst they were neighbours at Chelsea they frequently visited each other; and Carlyle, on his part, saw the worst as well as the best of him, from the inside, and was too large-minded and too big a man to judge him by his faults and follies only. He saw how Hunt worked, all the while haunted by pecuniary distresses; unpaid tradesmen knocking at his door and worrying for their debts; once an execution in the house; now and then faced with the humiliation of having to ask for loans of a few shillings to buy the family dinner; his children almost in rags, and himself, as he said bitterly, slighted and neglected by editors and the public, and “carelessly, over-familiarly, or even superciliously treated, pitied or patronised by his inferiors.” Carlyle had known poverty and neglect himself; he was fitted to judge Hunt understandingly, and he judged him justly. “Leigh Hunt was a fine kind of man,” he told Allingham in 1868. “Some used to talk of him as a frivolous fellow, but when I saw him I found he had a face as serious as death.” In his Diary he noted, “Hunt is always ready to go and walk with me, or sit and talk with me to all lengths if I want him. He comes in once a week (when invited, for he is very modest), takes a cup of tea, and sits discoursing in his brisk, fanciful way till supper time, and then cheerfully eats a cup of porridge (to sugar only), which he praises to the skies, and vows he will make his supper of it at home.”
It was Mrs. Carlyle who was severe about the Hunts’ untidy and uncleanly household, and complained of the domestic utensils they borrowed and failed to return, but Carlyle took the position in a more genial spirit, and saw the pity of it and the humour of it also. “Hunt’s house,” he wrote after one of his visits to No. 10 Upper Cheyne Row, “excels all you have ever read of—a poetical Tinkerdom without parallel even in literature. In his family room, where are a sickly, large wife and a whole school of well-conditioned wild children, you will find half-a-dozen old rickety chairs gathered from half-a-dozen different hucksters, and all seemingly engaged, and just pausing, in a violent hornpipe. On these and around them and over the dusty table and ragged carpet lie all kinds of litter—books, papers, egg-shells, scissors, and last night when I was there the torn heart of a quartern loaf. His own room above stairs, into which alone I strive to enter, he keeps cleaner. It has only two chairs, a bookcase, and a writing-table; yet the noble Hunt receives you in his Tinkerdom in the spirit of a king, apologises for nothing, places you in the best seat, takes a window-sill himself if there is no other, and then folding closer his loose-flowing ‘muslin cloud’ of a printed nightgown in which he always writes, commences the liveliest dialogue on philosophy and the prospects of man (who is to be beyond measure ‘happy’ yet); which again he will courteously terminate the moment you are bound to go. A most interesting, pitiable, lovable man, to be used kindly, but with discretion.”