CHAPTER I

Revolutionary tendencies of the age—The Reaction—Counter Reform movement—Leigh Hunt—His Ancestry—School days—Career as a Journalist—Imprisonment—Finances—Politics—Religion—Poetry.

Since contemporary social conditions played an important part in the relations of Leigh Hunt with Byron, Shelley, and Keats, a brief survey of the period in question is necessary to an understanding of the forces at play on their intellect and conduct. The English mind had been admirably prepared for the principles of the French Revolution by the progressive tendency since the Revolution of 1688. The new order promised by France was acclaimed in England as one destined to right the wrongs of humanity; through unending progress mankind was to attain unlimited perfection. Upon such a prospect both parties were agreed, and the warnings of Burke were vain when Pitt, rationalizing, led the Tories, and Fox, rhapsodizing, led the Whigs. In 1793, Godwin’s Political Justice, with its anarchistic doctrines of individual perfectibility and of individual self-reliance, rallied more recruits to the standard of liberty, though his theories of community of property and annulment of the marriage bond were somewhat charily received. The early writings of Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge were colored with enthusiasm for the new movement. The agitation and the enactment of reform measures made actual advances towards the expected millennium.

But the excesses of the Revolutionary régime in France bred in England, ever inclined to order, an opposition in many conservative minds that resulted in positive panic at the menace to state and church and property. The reaction swung the pendulum far in the opposite direction from justice and philanthropy. The first two decades of the new century continued to suffer from a counter-reform movement when the actual fright had subsided. During that period, anything which savored of reform was labelled as seditious. At the very beginning of this reaction William Pitt’s efforts for the extension of the franchise were summarily put an end to, and the House of Commons remained as little representative of the English people as formerly. Catholics and Non-Conformists were denied, from the period of the union of Ireland with England in 1800 until 1829, the right to vote and to hold office. Pitt’s efforts to frustrate such discrimination in Ireland were as unavailing as in his own country, for the prejudices and obstinacy of George III, in both instances, neutralized the good intentions of the liberal Ministry. The corrupt influence of the Crown in Parliament was undiminished except by the disfranchisement of persons holding contracts from the crown and of incumbents of revenue offices. The wars with America and with France greatly increased the public debt, threatened the national credit and burdened with taxes an already overburdened people. Oppressive industrial conditions made the life of the masses still more unendurable. The rise of manufacturing and the consequent adoption of inventions that dispensed with much hand labor decreased the number of the employed and reduced wages, while the enormous increase in population during the eighteenth century multiplied the number of the idle and the poor. It is true that the wealth of the country became much greater through the development of new resources, but the profits were distributed among the few and gave no relief to the majority. The government was indifferent to the sufferings of the poor, to the severity of the penal code, to the horrors of the slave traffic. In Great Britain the Habeas Corpus act was suspended, public assemblies were forbidden, the press was more narrowly restricted, right of petition was limited, and the legal definition of treason was greatly extended; in Scotland the barbarous statute of transportation for political offenses was revived; in Ireland industry and commerce were discouraged.

The re-accession of the Tories to power in 1807, followed by their long ascendancy and abuse of power, led inevitably to a revival of the questions of revolution and of reform. Lord Byron, Shelley and Leigh Hunt were among the leaders of this second band of agitators, the “new camp,” as Professor Dowden has designated them. It was their love of humanity, perhaps to a greater degree than their poetic genius and their æsthetic ideals, that made these men akin. Of the four poets with whom we deal Keats alone was comparatively indifferent to the strife about him.

Besides the political background of the times, personal influence and literary imitation enter into consideration in the present study. Especially in the case of Hunt, whose unique personality has been so variously interpreted, a brief biographical review is necessary. James Henry Leigh Hunt was born October 19, 1784, in the village of Southgate, Middlesex. He was descended on the father’s side from “Tory cavaliers” of West Indian adoption, and on the mother’s from American Quakers of Irish extraction—an exotic combination of Celtic and Creole strains which never coalesced but in turn affected his temperament. His father was an engaging and gifted clergyman who quoted Horace and drank claret—a sanguine, careless child of the South who made the acquaintance alike of good society and of debtor’s prisons. This parent’s cheerfulness and courage were his most fortunate legacies to his son; a speculative turn in matters of religion and government and a general financial irresponsibility constituted his most unfortunate legacy. His mother was as shrinking as his father was convivial, but, like her husband, possessed a strong sense of duty and of loyalty. Her son inherited her love of books and of nature. Of his heritage from his parents Leigh Hunt wrote: “I may call myself, in every sense of the word ... a son of mirth and melancholy;... And, indeed, as I do not remember to have ever seen my mother smile, except in sorrowful tenderness, so my father’s shouts of laughter are now ringing in my ears.”[1]

As Leigh Hunt was heir to his ancestry in an unusual degree, so in an extraordinary measure was the child father of the man. The atmosphere of the home, tense with discussions of theology and politics and bitter with hardships of poverty and prisons, gave him a precocious acquaintance with weighty matters and with many miseries. In 1791 he entered Christ’s Hospital. Like Shelley he rebelled against the time-honored custom of fagging, and chose instead a beating every night with a knotted handkerchief. He avoided personal encounters in self-defense, but was valiant enough where others were concerned, or where a principle was involved. Haydon said: “He was a man who would have died at the stake for a principle, though he might have cried like a child from physical pain, and would have screamed still louder if he put his foot in the gutter! Yet not one iota of recantation would have quivered on his lips, if all the elysium of all the religions on earth had been offered and realized to induce him to do so.”[2]

His wonderful power of forming friendships—a power with which the present study is so much concerned—was first developed at Christ’s Hospital. As he sentimentally expressed it, “the first heavenly taste it gave me of that most spiritual of the affections. I use the word ‘heavenly’ advisedly; and I call friendship the most spiritual of the affections, because even one’s kindred, in partaking of our flesh and blood, become, in a manner, mixed up with our entire being. Not that I would disparage any other form of affection, worshipping as I do, all forms of it, love in particular, which in its highest state, is friendship and something more. But if I ever tasted a disembodied transport on earth, it was in those friendships which I entertained at school, before I dreamt of any maturer feeling.”[3] Like Shelley, Hunt had so great an inclination to sentimentalize and idealize friendship that sometimes after the first brief rhapsody of fresh acquaintance he suffered bitter disillusionment. The majority, however, of the ties formed were lasting.[4]