Three months were spent in Pisa after Shelley’s death. In September the two families left for Genoa, travelling in separate parties and, on their arrival, settling in separate homes, the Hunts with Mrs. Shelley. From this time on there was little intercourse between Byron and Hunt. October 9, 1822, Byron wrote to England and denied that all three families were living under one roof. He said that he rarely saw Hunt, not more than once a month.[399] Hunt to the contrary said that they saw less of each other than in Genoa yet “considerable.”[400] Although at no time was there an open breach, yet cordiality and sympathy were wholly lost on both sides in the strain of the financial situation. They failed of agreement even on impersonal matters. Byron had looked forward with great pleasure to Hunt’s companionship. Before they met he had written: “When Leigh Hunt comes we shall have banter enough about those old ruffiani, the old dramatists, with their tiresome conceits, their jingling rhymes, and endless play upon words.”[401] This pleasant anticipation was not realized, for Hunt’s sensitiveness in petty matters and Byron’s scorn of Hunt’s affectation and of his ill-bred personal applications,[402] or so the hearer interpreted them, reduced safe topics to Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Even a mutual admiration of Pope and Dryden was forgotten. Literary jealousy and vanity fed the flames. Hunt was unable to appreciate manhood of Byron’s virile type, and he did not try to conceal the fact from one who was hungry for praise. On the other hand, Byron did not render to Hunt the homage he was accustomed to receive from the Cockney circle and had nothing but contempt for all his works except the Story of Rimini. A statement in the anonymous Life of Lord Byron, published by Iley, that the misunderstanding was the result of a criticism by Hunt of Parisina in the Leghorn and Lucca newspapers and that Byron never spoke to him after the discovery[403] is a fabrication as unsubstantial as the greater part of the other statements in the same book. Hunt denied the charge. His sole connection with Parisina was that he supplied the incident of the heroine talking in her sleep,[404] a device that he had already made use of in Rimini.
On his arrival in Italy Hunt wrote back to England that Byron entered into The Liberal with great ardor, and that he had presented the Vision of Judgment to his brother and himself for their mutual benefit.[405] Yet four days later in a letter to Moore Byron wrote: “Hunt seems sanguine about the matter but (entre nous) I am not. I do not, however, like to put him out of spirits by saying so, for he is bilious and unwell. Do, pray, answer this letter immediately. Do send Hunt anything in prose or verse of yours, to start him handsomely—and lyrical, irical, or what you please.”[406] At the time of Trelawny’s first visit after the work had begun, Byron said impatiently: “It will be an abortion,” and again in Trelawny’s presence he called to his bull-dog on the stairway, “Don’t let any Cockneys pass this way.”[407] Sometime previous to October his endurance must have given way completely, for in that month Hunt wrote that Byron was again for the plan.[408] In January Byron urged John Hunt to employ good writers for The Liberal that it might succeed.[409] March 17, 1823, Byron, in a letter to John Hunt, said that he attributed the failure of The Liberal to his own contributions and that the magazine would stand a better chance without him. He desired to sever the partnership if the magazine was to be continued.[410] His constant vacillation in part supports the charge made by Hunt that Byron under protest contributed his worse productions in order to make a show of coöperation.[411] Insinuations from Moore and Murray had fallen on fertile ground and had persuaded Byron that the association jeopardized his reputation. Hobhouse, Byron’s friend, joined his dissenting voice to theirs, and “rushed over the Alps” to add to his disapproval.[412] Hazlitt’s account of the conspiracy of Byron’s friends against The Liberal is very fiery.[413]
The first number of The Liberal appeared October 15, 1822. There were three subsequent numbers. Byron’s contributions were his brilliant and masterly satire, the Vision of Judgment, Heaven and Earth, A Letter to the Editor of my Grandmother’s Review, The Blues, and his translation of the first canto of Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore. Murray had withheld the preface to the Vision of Judgment and this omission, combined with an unwise announcement in The Examiner of September 29, 1822, by John Hunt, made the reception even worse than it might otherwise have been. Hunt said the Vision of Judgment “played the devil with all of us.”[414] Shelley had made ready for the forthcoming magazine his exquisite translation of Goethe’s May Day Night and a prose narrative, A German Apologue. These appeared in the first number. Hunt’s best contributions were two poems, Lines to a Spider and Mahmoud. Letters from Abroad are good in spots only. His two satires, The Dogs and The Book of Beginners, are pale reflections in meter and tone of Don Juan and Beppo combined. The Florentine Lovers is a good story spoiled. Rhyme and Reason, The Guili Tre, and the rest are purely hack work, with the possible exceptions of the translation from Ariosto and the modernization of the Squire’s Tale. Hazlitt contributed Pulpit Oratory, On the Spirit of Monarchy, a pithy dissertation On the Scotch Character, and a delightful reminiscence of Coleridge in My First Acquaintance with Poets. Mrs. Shelley wrote A Tale of the Passions, Mme. D’Houdetot, and Giovanni Villani, all rather stilted and heavy. Charles Browne contributed Shakespear’s Fools. A number of unidentified prose articles and poems, many of the latter translations from Alfieri, completed the list.
The causes of the failure of The Liberal were very complex, but quite obvious. There was no definite political campaign mapped out, no proportion outlined for the various departments, no assignments of individual responsibility, no attempt to cater to the public appetite or to mollify the public prejudices for expediency’s sake, and an utter want of harmony among its supporters. Each contributor rode his own hobby. Each vented his private spleen without regard to the common good. It was a vague, up-in-the-air scheme, wholly lacking in coördination and common sense. Byron’s fickleness and want of genuine interest in a small affair among many other greater ones; the disappointment of both Byron[415] and Hunt in not realizing the enormous profits that they had looked forward to—although Hunt wrote later that the “moderate profits” were quite enough to have encouraged perseverance on the part of Byron; Hunt’s ill-health and unhappy situation which rendered it difficult for him to write; John Hunt’s inexperience as a bookseller; the general unpopularity of the editor, the publisher, and the contributors; and last, the pent-up storm of rage from the press which greeted the first number of The Liberal,[416] were other reasons that contributed to its ultimate downfall. In seeking Hunt for the editor of such a venture, as Gait had pointed out,[417] Byron had mistaken his political notoriety for solid literary reputation.
Hunt, notwithstanding his confession[418] of an inability to write at his best and of his brother’s inexperience, throws the burden of failure solely on Byron. He asserts that The Liberal had no enemies and, worst of all, that Byron when he foresaw hostility and failure, gave him and his brother the profits that they might carry the responsibility of an “ominous partnership”[419]—a statement ungenerously distorted by bitter memories, for when John Hunt was prosecuted for the publication of the Vision of Judgment, Byron offered to stand trial in his stead. Neither does Hunt state that Byron’s contributions were gratis and that the “moderate profits” enabled him and his brother to pay off some of their old debts.[420] Byron, strong with the prescience of failure, likewise shifted the blame to other shoulders and with the aid of a strong imagination tried to persuade himself and his friends that the Hunts had projected the affair and that he had consented in an evil hour to engage in it;[421] that they were the cause of the failure; that his motives throughout had been philanthropic only in nature;[422] and that he was sacrificing himself for others. Such statements are inventions born of self-accusation and of self-defense. The worst that can be said of Byron from beginning to end of the affair is that he was not conscientious in his endeavors to make the journal a success; that, after it failed, he evaded financial responsibility by placing barriers of coldness and ungraciousness between Hunt and himself.
On October 9, 1822, he wrote to Moore that he had done all he could for Hunt “but in the affairs of this world he himself is a child”;[423] “As it is, I will not quit them (the Hunts) in their adversity, though it should cost me my character, fame, money, and the usual et cetera.... Had their journal gone on well, and I could have aided to make it better for them, I should then have left them; after my safe pilotage off a lee shore, to make a prosperous voyage by themselves. As it is, I can’t, or would not, if I could, leave them amidst the breakers. As to any community of feeling, thought, or opinions between L. H. and me, there is little or none; we meet rarely, hardly ever; but I think him a good-principled and able man.[424]... You would not have had me leave him in the street with his family, would you? And as to the other plan you mention, you forget how it would humiliate him—that his writings should be supposed to be dead weight! Think a moment—he is perhaps the vainest man on earth, at least his own friends say so pretty loudly; and if he were in other circumstances I might be tempted to take him down a peg; but not now—it would be cruel.[425]... A more amiable man in society I know not, nor (when he will allow his sense to prevail over his sectarian principles) a better writer. When he was writing his Rimini I was not the last to discover its beauties, long before it was published. Even then I remonstrated against its vulgarisms; which are the more extraordinary, because the author is anything but a vulgar man.”[426] During April, 1823, the Countess of Blessington had a conversation with Byron in which he said that while he regretted having embarked in The Liberal, yet he had a good opinion of the talents and principles of Hunt, despite their diametrically opposed tastes.[427] On April 2, 1823, he wrote that Hunt was incapable or unwilling to help himself; that he could not keep up this “genuine philanthropy” permanently; and that he would furnish Hunt with the means to return to England in comfort.[428] There is no proof that Byron ever made such an offer to Hunt. The purchase money of Hunt’s journey home was Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries. On July 23, 1823, Byron went to Greece. The Hunts, provided by him with £30 for the trip, left Genoa about the same time for Florence, where they were literally stranded, in ill-health and without sufficient means for support,[429] until their departure for England in September, 1825. The suffering there and the foul calumny at home magnified in Hunt’s mind[430] the indignity and injustice that had been put upon him and warped his sense of gratitude and honor in the whole affair. He wrote from Florence: “The stiffness of age has come into my joints; my legs are sore and fevered; and I sometimes feel as if I were a ship rotting in a stagnant harbour.”[431] Mrs. Shelley protested to Byron concerning his treatment of Hunt[432] but she received no further satisfaction than the statement that he had engaged in the journal for good-will and respect for Hunt solely.[433]
The publisher Colburn in 1825 made Hunt an advance of money for the return journey, to be repaid by a volume of selections from his own writings preceded by a biographical sketch.[434] An irresistible longing for England and a crisis in the disagreement with John Hunt regarding the proprietary rights of The Examiner and the publication of the Wishing Cap Papers in that paper, made Hunt seize at the first opportunity by which he might return home. From Paris, on his way to England, he wrote: “If I delayed I might be pinned forever to a distance, like a fluttering bird to a wall, and so die in helpless yearning. I have been mistaken. During my strength my weakness perhaps, was only apparent; now that I am weaker, indignation has given a fillip to my strength.”[435] From his severance with The Examiner and the publication of Bacchus in Tuscany in 1825, Hunt was idle until 1828. Then, pressed by his obligation to Colburn and stung by the misrepresentations of the press regarding his relations with Byron in Italy, he scored even, as he thought, by producing Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, the blunder of his life and the one blot upon his honor. In addition to the part dealing with Byron, it contained autobiographical reminiscences and memoirs of Shelley, Keats, Moore, Lamb and others. It went rapidly through three editions. The body of the work is a discussion of the defects of Byron’s character and a detailed analysis of his actions. In brief, he is charged with insincerity in the cause of liberty; an impatience of any despotism save his own; a vain pride of rank, although his friends were of humble origin; a “libelling all around” of friends; an ignorance of real love, consanguineous or sexual; coarseness in speaking of women or to them;[436] a voluptuous indolence; weak impulses; a habit of miscellaneous confidences and exaggeration; untruthfulness; susceptibility to influence; avarice even in his patriotism and debauchery; a willingness to receive petty obligations; jealousy of the great and small; no powers of conversation and a want of self-possession; bad temper and self-will; an inordinate desire for flattery; egotism and love of notoriety. More petty accusations are excess in his eating and drinking, though Hunt complains that Byron would not “drink like a lord”; his fondness for communicating unpleasant tidings; his inclination to the mock heroic; his effeminacy and old-womanish superstition; his easily-aroused suspicions; his imitativeness in writing poetry; his slight knowledge of languages; his physical cowardice. The virtues of this monster, small in number and grudgingly allowed, were admitted to be good horsemanship, good looks, a delicate hand, amusing powers of mimicry, pleasantry in his cups, masterly swimming. Unfortunately these statements were usually damned with a “but” or “yet.”
While it is now generally believed that many of the accusations made by Hunt were true,[437] inasmuch as they are confirmed in large part by contemporary evidence, and as truthfulness was one of Hunt’s dominant traits, yet, on the other hand, it is quite necessary to make large allowance for the point of view and the color given by prejudice and bitterness of spirit. That Hunt told only the truth does not justify the injury in the slightest, for he had slept under Byron’s roof and eaten of his bread. The obligations conferred were not exactly those of benefactor to suppliant; they were perhaps no more than Hunt’s due in the light of the responsibility voluntarily assumed by Byron; yet they could not be destroyed or forgotten because of a refusal to acknowledge them. Worse still, Hunt’s motives proceeded from impecuniosity and revenge. Such petty gossip of private affairs was worthy of a smaller and meaner soul. That Hunt did not have the sanction of his own judgment and conscience is clearly seen in the preface to the first edition where he confesses an unwilling hand and gives as a reason for the change of scheme a too long holiday taken after the advance of money from Colburn. He says that the book would never have been written at all, or consigned to the flames when finished, if he could have repaid the money.[438] His one poor defense is that “Byron talked freely of me and mine,” that the public had talked, and that Byron knew how he felt.[439]
The book had a very large circulation. But Hunt, who had hoped to defend himself in this manner from the calumnies afloat since the failure of The Liberal, brought down a storm of abuse from the press that resulted in his degradation and Byron’s canonization. Moore’s welcome was a poem, The Living Dog and the Dead Lion.[440] Hunt’s friends replied with The Giant and the Dwarf.[441] In his life of Byron published some years later, Moore speaks reservedly of the book, merely saying it had sunk into deserved oblivion.[442]
Hunt’s public apology and reparation, in so far as such lay in his power, were first made in 1847 in A Saunter Through the West End: “No. 140 (formerly No. 13 of what was Piccadilly Terrace) was the last house which Byron inhabited in England. Nobody needs to be told what a great wit and fine poet he was: but everybody does not know that he was by nature a genial and generous man spoiled by the most untoward circumstances in early life. He vexed his enemies, and sometimes his friends; but his very advantages have been hard upon him, and subjected him to all sorts of temptations. May peace rest upon his infirmities, and his fame brighten as it advances.”[443] In 1848, he wrote in praise of the Ave Maria stanza in Don Juan.[444] And finally and completely in his Autobiography he apologized for the heat and venom of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries: