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. Its singularities are nowhere more apparent than in the mutations of his friendships.
Prior to his acquaintance with Hunt, Byron had taken his seat in the House of Lords and had made speeches against the framebreakers of Nottingham and in behalf of Catholic emancipation. A month after their meeting he made a third speech introducing Major Cartwright’s petition for reform in Parliament. The second and third of these measures, in particular, were warmly advocated by The Examiner, with which paper Byron was familiar, as references in his letters show. It is therefore not hazardous to surmise that his sympathy with liberal policies, alien to his Tory blood and aristocratic spirit, was due, in part at least, to this influence. Byron’s political principles on the whole were as evanescent and intermittent as a will-o’-the-wisp.[317] His chief tenets were the assertion of the individual; antagonism against all authority; a striving after freedom. Brandes, Elze and Treitscke agree in attributing his political enthusiasm to the intense passion of his nature rather than to his moral convictions.[318] His religious convictions were as fugitive as his political and, like those of Hunt and other advanced thinkers of the age, seem to have been without deference to any existing creed or dogma. At his gloomiest moments he confessed that he denied nothing but doubted everything. Hunt says of Byron’s religion that he “did not know what he was.... He was a Christian by education, he was an infidel by reading. He was a Christian by habit, but he was no Christian upon reflection.”[319] The phrase, “I am of the opposition” applies to his religion as well as to his politics, as indeed it serves as the key-note to almost every action of his life.
Leigh Hunt has given a characteristic account of his first sight of Byron “rehearsing the part of Leander,” in the River Thames sometime before he went to Greece in 1809:
“I saw nothing in Lord Byron at that time, but a young man, who, like myself, had written a bad volume of poems; and though I had sympathy with him on this account, and more respect for his rank than I was willing to suppose, my sympathy was not an agreeable one; so, contenting myself with seeing his lordship’s head bob up and down in the water, like a buoy, I came away. Lord Byron when he afterwards came to see me in prison, was pleased to regret that I had not stayed. He told me, that the sight of my volume at Harrow had been one of his incentives to write verses, and that he had had the same passion for friendship which I had displayed in it. To my astonishment he quoted some of the lines, and would not hear me speak ill of them.”[320]
Hunt’s Juvenilia, beyond having served as one of the incentives to the writing of Byron’s Hours of Idleness, does not seem to have affected it. For Hunt’s undercurrent of friendship and cheerfulness were substituted Byron’s prevailing notes of amorousness and melancholy.
The actual acquaintance of the two men did not begin until 1813, when Thomas Moore, since 1811 a staunch admirer of Hunt’s political courage and of his literary talent, and one of the visitors welcomed to Surrey Gaol, mentioned the circumstances of his imprisonment to Lord Byron, likewise a sympathizer with the attitude of The Examiner towards the Prince Regent. Mr. Cordy Jeaffreson[321] thinks that it was this reckless sympathy with the libeller of the Prince Regent that led Byron to reprint with The Corsair, eight lines addressed in 1812 to the Princess Charlotte, Weep, daughter of a Royal Line. The retaliation of one of the Tory papers goaded Byron to write in return an article which strongly resembles Hunt’s famous libel[322] on the Prince Regent. Byron expressed a wish to call on Hunt with Moore, and a visit followed on May 20, 1813.[323] Five days later Hunt wrote:
“I have had Lord B. here again. He came on Sunday, by himself, in a very frank, unceremonious manner, and knowing what I wanted for my poem [Story of Rimini] brought me the last new Travels in Italy in two quarto volumes, of which he requests my acceptance, with the air of one who did not seem to think himself conferring the least obligation. This will please you. It strikes me that he and I shall become friends, literally and cordially speaking: there is something in the texture of his mind and feelings that seems to resemble mine to a thread; I think we are cut out of the same piece, only a little different wear may have altered our respective naps a little.”[324]
With the pride of a sycophant in the presence of a lord Hunt relates that Byron would not let the footman carry the books but gave “you to understand that he was prouder of being a friend and a man of letters than a lord. It was thus by flattering one’s vanity he persuaded us of his own freedom from it: for he could see very well, that I had more value for lords than I supposed.”[325] In June of the same year Hunt invited Byron, Moore and Mitchell to dine with him in prison. Among several others who came in during the evening was Mr. John Scott, later a severe critic of Byron in The Champion.[326] Many years after Moore, in his Life of Byron, wrote of the gathering with venom, recalling Scott as an assailant of Byron’s “living fame, while another [Hunt] less manful, would reserve the cool venom for his grave.”[327]
Byron esteemed Hunt greatly during the first year of their acquaintance. His advances show a desire for intimacy which goes far toward contradicting the statements sometimes made that the overtures were on Hunt’s side only.[328] Byron expressed himself thus at the time:
“Hunt is an extraordinary character and not exactly of the present age. He reminds me more of the Pym and Hampden times—much talent, great independence of spirit, and an austere, yet not repulsive, aspect. If he goes on qualis ab incepto, I know few men who will deserve more praise or obtain it. I must go and see him again—a rapid succession of adventures since last summer, added to some serious uneasiness and business, have interrupted our acquaintance; but he is a man worth knowing; and though for his own sake, I wish him out of prison, I like to study character in such situations. He has been unshaken and will continue so. I don’t think him deeply versed in life:—he is the bigot of virtue (not religion) and enamoured of the beauty of that ‘empty name,’ as the last breath of Brutus pronounced and every day proves it. He is perhaps, a little opinionated, as all men who are the center of circles, wide or narrow—the Sir Oracles—in whose name two or three are gathered together—must be, and as even Johnson was: but withal, a valuable man, and less vain than success and even the consciousness of preferring ‘the right to the expedient,’ might excuse.”