With Shelley perished Hunt’s chief hope in life; in the opinion of his son, he was never the same man again. In 1832, at his period of darkest depression, he wrote: “If you ask me how it is that I bear all this, I answer, that I love nature and books, and think well of the capabilities of human kind. I have known Shelley, I have known my mother.”[260] In 1844 he claimed as his proudest title, the “Friend of Shelley.”[261]
The first printed notice of Shelley was in The Examiner of December 1, 1816. Therefore to Hunt belongs in this case, as in that of Keats, the credit of discovery. It is difficult to account for Hunt’s tardiness of recognition,[262] coming as it did six years after Shelley first wrote him, five years after the Finnerty poem, three years after Queen Mab, and two years after the visit in prison.[263] Also Shelley had sent contributions to The Examiner, which Hunt had not accepted, but which he vaguely recalled at the time of writing his first review on Shelley. It was inspired by the announcement of Alastor, and consisted of about ten lines, embodied in the article on Keats and Reynolds already referred to. Hunt pronounced Shelley “a very striking and original thinker.” Shelley’s reply to a letter from Hunt, telling him of the notice, pictures him anxiously scouring the countryside about Bath for the sight of a copy and buoyed up at last by the news of one five miles distant.
This notice was followed by the publication of the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty in The Examiner of January 19, 1817; a notice of the Chancery suit, January 26 and February 2; and an extract from Laon and Cythna, November 30. A review of the Revolt of Islam ran through three numbers, January 25, February 8 and 22, 1818. Shelley’s system of charity and his crusade against tyranny, as set forth in the preface, Hunt loudly applauded. Many extracts were italicized for the guidance of the public. The beauties of the poem were pronounced to be its mysticism, its wildness, its depth of sentiment, its grandeur of imagery, and its varied and sweet versification. In the boldness of speculation and in the love of virtue Hunt saw a resemblance to Lucretius, while in the gloom and imagination of certain passages, particularly in the grandeur of the supernatural architecture, he was reminded of Dante. The defects were pronounced to be obscurity of narrative and sameness of image and metaphor. The review closed with the prophecy “we have no doubt he is destined to be one of the leading spirits of the age.”
The Quarterly Review of May, 1818, accused Shelley[264] of atheism and of dissolute conduct in private life; the same journal of April, 1819, reviewing the Revolt of Islam on the basis of the suppressed version of Laon and Cythna, though it did not fail to appreciate the genius and beauty of the poem, charged Shelley with a predilection for incest and with a frantic dislike for Christianity. It called the support of The Examiner “the sweet undersong of the weekly journal.”[265] The two attacks were met by a strong protest from Hunt,[266] particularly in regard to the part dealing with Shelley’s life. He denied the propriety of such discussion in public criticism and declared that he had never known Shelley to “deviate, notwithstanding his theories, even into a single action which those who differ with him might think blameable.” His life at Marlow was described as spent in “beautiful charity and generosity” and was likened to that of Plato. In 1821 an attack on Shelley by Hazlitt was met by an angry warning from Hunt and a threat to become his public enemy, if the offense were repeated.[267] Hunt’s reason for taking this defensive attitude was that he knew that Shelley suffered greatly from such malignant exploitations and that he would not defend himself; therefore he made his friend’s cause his own and wrote: “I reckon upon your leaving your personal battles to me,”[268] much in the same manner as Shelley had assumed his money troubles.
Following the review of the Revolt of Islam, a notice of Rosalind and Helen and of Lines Written among the Euganean Hills[269] appeared in The Examiner of May 9, 1819. Attention was called to the poet’s optimism and to his great love of nature: “the beauty of the external world has an answering heart, and the very whispers of the wind a meaning.” The Cenci, published in 1820, contained in its dedication a glowing tribute to Hunt, an honour in Shelley’s opinion only in a small degree worthy of his friend.[270] Hunt was intoxicated with the honour and wrote: “I feel as if you had bound, not only my head, but my very soul and body with laurels.”[271] On the subject of the tragedy he was equally enthusiastic: “What a noble book, Shelley, have you given us! What a true, stately, and yet affectionate mixture of poetry, philosophy, and human nature, horror, and all redeeming sweetness of intention, for there is an undersong of suggestion through it all, that sings, as it were, after the storm is over, like a brook in April.”[272] In a public expression of his opinion in The Examiner of March 19, 1820, Hunt pronounced The Cenci the greatest dramatic production of the day. Writing of the drama again in the same journal of July 19 and 26, 1820, he called Shelley “a framer of mighty lines” and continued: “Majesty and Love do sit on one throne in the lofty buildings of his poetry; and they will be found there, at a late and we trust a happier day, on a seat immortal as themselves.”
One of Hunt’s most perfect poems, Jaffár, is inscribed to the memory of Shelley. The praise of Jaffár and his friend’s undying loyalty immediately suggest to the reader that Hunt may have been celebrating his own and Shelley’s friendship. The last review to appear during Shelley’s lifetime by Hunt was that of Prometheus Unbound in three numbers of The Examiner of 1822. A projected review of Adonais alluded to in a letter of Hunt’s does not seem to have seen the light of publication, but a reference in a letter at the time is worth noting: “It is the most Delphic poety I have seen in a long while: full of those embodyings of the most subtle and airy imaginations,—those arrestings and explanations of the most shadowy yearnings of our being.”[273] The well-known account of Shelley’s rescue of a woman on Hampstead Heath was told in The Literary Examiner of August 23, 1823.[274] The same magazine of September 20 of the same year[275] contained the following Sonnet to Percy Shelley, given here because of its general inaccessibility:
“Hast thou from earth, then, really passed away,
And mingled with the shadowy mass of things
Which were, but are not? Will thy harp’s dear strings
No more yield music to the rapid play
Of thy swift thoughts, now turned thou art to clay?
Hark! Is that rushing of thy spirit’s wings,
When (like the skylark, who in mounting sings)
Soaring through high imagination’s way,
Thou pour’dst thy melody upon the earth,
Silent for ever? Yes, wild ocean’s wave
Hath o’er thee rolled. But whilst within the grave
Thou sleepst, let me in the love of thy pure worth
One thing foretell,—that thy great fame shall be
Progressive as Time’s flood, eternal as the sea!”
In Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries appeared the first biographical memoir of Shelley, a sketch of some seventy pages.[276] It shows great appreciation of the fine and gentle qualities of his rare genius and defends some of the weak points of his career. The description of his personal appearance, of the life at Marlowe, and the few anecdotes are often quoted. But on the whole, it lacks the bold strokes of vivid portraiture and it is very disappointing.[277] There was probably no one, with the exception of his wife, who knew Shelley so well as Hunt and who was, therefore, in a position to give as complete and intimate an idea of him. It was Mrs. Shelley’s wish that Hunt should be her husband’s biographer, for she thought that he, “perhaps above all others, understood his nature and his genius.”[278] Hunt, in The Spectator of August 13, 1859, gave as his reason for not writing Shelley’s life that he “could not survive enough persons.” But it is to be questioned if he were fitted for the task. His son did not think that he was because of his attention to details and his irresistible tendency to analysis: “a mind, in short, like that of Hamlet, cultivated rather than corrected by the trials of life, was scarcely suited to comprehend the strong instincts, indomitable will, and complete unity of idea which distinguished Shelley.”[279]
In the Tatler of August 1, 1831, Hunt wrote that “Mr. Shelley was a platonic philosopher, of the acutest and loftiest kind,” and that he belonged to the school of Plato and Æschylus, as Keats belonged to that of Spenser and Milton. Following The Tatler was the preface to The Mask of Anarchy,[280] published in 1832, originally designed for The Examiner in 1819, but laid aside by the editor because he thought the public not discerning enough “to do justice to the sincerity and kindheartedness of the spirit that walked in this flaming robe of verse.” The preface eulogizes the poet’s spiritual nature and his “seraphic purpose of good.” In The Seer, 1841, Shelley’s qualities of heart were pronounced more enduring than his genius.[281]
Imagination and Fancy contained an essay and selections from his poems. Here Hunt makes the curious statement that little in the poems is purely poetical, but rather moral, political, and speculative. It is noteworthy that he predicts, probably for the first time, that, had Shelley lived, he would have been the greatest dramatic writer since the days of Elizabeth, if not, indeed, actually so, through what he did accomplish; a statement often repeated. He says: “If Coleridge is the sweetest of our poets, Shelley is at once the most ethereal and gorgeous, the one who has clothed his thought in draperies of the most evanescent and most magnificent words and imagery.... Shelley ... might well call himself Ariel.”[282] In connection with Shelley’s ethereal qualities, Mrs. James T. Fields quotes Hunt as having said on another occasion that Shelley always seemed to him as if he were “just alit from the planet Mercury, bearing a winged wand tipped with flame.”[283] In Imagination and Fancy, Hunt continues: “Not Milton himself is more learned in Grecisms, or nicer in entomological propriety; and nobody, throughout, has a style so Orphic and primeval.”