December 2, 1813, he wrote to Hunt: “It is my wish that our acquaintance, or, if you please to accept it, friendship, may be permanent.... I have a thorough esteem for that independence of spirit which you have maintained with sterling talent, and at the expense of some suffering.”[329] Cordial intercourse between the two men continued after Hunt’s removal from Surrey Gaol to lodgings in Edgeware Road, where Byron became one of his most frequent visitors and correspondents. In the Hunt household Byron laid aside his ordinary reserve. There are records of his riding the children’s rocking horse; of presents of game; loans of books; letters presented from a Paris correspondent for The Examiner; and gifts of boxes and tickets for Drury Lane Theatre, of which he was one of the managers. This last Hunt would not accept for fear of sacrificing his critical independence. In Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, Hunt claims that this familiarity proceeded from an “instinct of immeasureable distance.”[330]
It was not until Byron’s matrimonial difficulties in 1816 that Hunt, inert and depressed from his long confinement, bestirred himself to return a single one of the calls. Byron’s separation from his wife in 1816 and the subsequent scandal aroused in Hunt that instinctive protection and active loyalty for friends abused, already discussed in a review of his relations with Keats and Shelley. The conjugal troubles and libertinism of the Prince Regent had brought forth only scorn and vituperation from the editor of The Examiner, but difficulties of equal notoriety at closer range in the lives of his friends evoked only sympathy and protection. He asserted that there was no positive knowledge as to the cause of the trouble and much depraved speculation, envy and falsehood, yet “had he [Byron] been as the scandal-mongers represented him, we should nevertheless, if we thought our arm worth his using, have stood by him in his misfortunes to the last.”[331] A prophecy of a near reconciliation and a too-gushing picture of renewed domesticity are somewhat grotesque in the light of later events. For this defense Byron was very grateful. January 12, 1822, he wrote that Scott, Jeffrey and Leigh Hunt “were the only literary men of numbers whom I know (and some of whom I have served,) who dared venture even an anonymous word in my favour, just then ... the third was under no kind of obligation to me.”[332] Hunt’s opinion in the matter underwent a transformation after the fateful Italian visit; he then declared that Byron wooed with genius, married for money, and strove for a reconciliation because of pique.[333]
The Story of Rimini, which had been submitted to Byron from time to time and which was dedicated to him, appeared likewise in 1816. Byron seems to have accepted the familiar tone of the inscription at the time in all good faith “as a public compliment and a private kindness”[334] although Blackwood’s of March, 1828, states, perhaps not seriously, that Byron in his copy had substituted for Hunt’s name “impudent varlet.” As late as April 11, 1817, Byron wrote from Italy that he expected to return to Venice by Ravenna and Rimini that he might take notes of the scenery for Hunt.[335]
But a letter to Moore from Venice, June 1, 1818, seems to mark a disillusionment on the part of Byron:
“Hunt’s letter is probably the exact piece of vulgar coxcombry that you might expect from his situation. He is a good man with some practical element in his chaos, but spoilt by the Christ Church Hospital and a Sunday newspaper to say nothing of the Surrey Gaol, which converted him into a martyr.... Of my friend Hunt, I have already said that he is anything but vulgar in his manners [336]]; and of his disciples, therefore, I will not judge of their manners from their verses. They may be honourable and gentlemanly men for what I know; but the latter quality is studiously excluded from their publications.”[337]
Hunt did not see or hear from Byron from 1817 until 1821. No further mention of Hunt occurs in Byron’s writings during this period except the reference to his influence on Barry Cornwall’s Sicilian Story and Marcian Colonna,[338] and another to the Cockney School in Byron’s controversy with Bowles. In explanation of this break in the intercourse Hunt said, in 1828, that “Byron had become not very fond of his reforming acquaintances.”[339]
Hunt’s criticism of Byron’s writings was not an important factor in his early literary development, as was the case with Shelley and Keats. Yet it deserves brief attention. The Examiner of October 18, 1812, contained the address of Byron on the opening of the Drury Lane Theatre and a commendation of its “natural domestic touch” and of its independence. Hunt’s Feast of the Poets as it appeared first in The Reflector contained no mention of Byron. The separate edition of 1814 devoted seven pages of the added notes to a wordy discussion of his work and to personal advice. Byron in a letter of February 9, 1814, thanked Hunt for the “handsome note.” The next mentions of Bryon were in The Examiner: a notice of his ode on Napoleon April 24, 1814; Illustrations of Lord Byron’s Works on September 4 of the same year; an elegy, Oh Snatched Away in Beauty’s Bloom, April 23, 1815; The Renegade’s Feelings Among the Tombs of Heroes, March 3, 1816; and finally, an announcement of an opera founded on The Corsair, August 31, 1817. A review of the first and second cantos of Don Juan appeared in The Examiner of October 31, 1819. Byron’s extraordinary variety and sudden transition of mood, his power in wielding satire and humor, his knowledge of human nature in its highest and lowest passions, his contribution to the mock-heroic and the sincere, the “strain of rich and deep beauty” in the descriptions were pointed out. Any immoral tendency is denied: “The fact is at the bottom of these questions, that many things are made vicious which are not so by nature; and many things made virtuous, which are only so by calling and agreement; and it is on the horns of this self-created dilemma, that society is continually writhing and getting desperate!” The Examiner of August 26, 1821 containing a critique of the third and fourth cantos of Don Juan, condemned the “careless contempt of canting moralists.” January 23, 1820, there was a notice in The Examiner telling of Byron’s munificence to a shoemaker; in comment The Examiner said: “His lordship’s virtues are his own. His frailties have been made for him, in more respects than one, by the faults and follies of society.” January 21, 1822, appeared a reprint of My Boat Is on the Shore; April 22, the two stanzas from Childe Harold beginning, Italia, Oh! Italia; April 29, Byron’s Letters on Bowles’s Strictures on Pope; May 26, a review of two of Bowles’s letters to Byron; July 29, an article entitled Sketches of the Living Poets.[340] The last gave a biographical account of Byron. The general traits of his poety were said to be passion, humour, and learning. It criticized the narrative poems as “too melodramatic, hasty and vague.” Hunt’s summary of the dramas and of Don Juan shows excellent judgment: “For the drama, whatever good passages such a writer will always put forth, we hold that he has no more qualifications than we have; his tendency being to spin every thing out of his own perceptions, and colour it with his own eye. His Don Juan is perhaps his best work, and the one by which he will stand or fall with readers who see beyond time and toilets. It far surpasses, in our opinion, all the Italian models on which it is founded, not excepting the far famed Secchia Rapita.”[341] On June 2, 1822, The Examiner reviewed Cain. The article is chiefly a discussion of the origin of evil. The issue of September 30 contained a reprint of America; that of November 18 denied Byron’s authorship of Anastasius. From July 5, 1823, to November 29 of the same year, there appeared in the Literary Examiner friendly criticisms of the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth cantos of Don Juan. The reviews consisted chiefly of extracts and a summary of the narrative.
The Liberal.
A letter from Lord Byron dated December 25, 1820, had proposed to Thomas Moore to set up secretly, on their return to London, a weekly newspaper for the purpose of giving
“the age some new lights upon policy, poesy, biography, criticism, morality, theology, and all other ism, ality and ology whatsoever. Why, man, if we were to take to this in good earnest, your debts would be paid off in a twelvemonth, and by dint of a little diligence and practice, I doubt not that we could distance the common-place blackguards who have so long disgraced common sense and the common reader. They have no merit but practice and imprudence, both of which we may acquire; and, as for talent and culture, the devil’s in’t if such proofs as we have given of both can’t furnish out something better than the ‘funeral baked meats’ which have coldly set forth the breakfast table of Great Britain for so many years.”[342]