Even in the News of 1805, when he was barely of age, and when he wrote with the dashing confidence of a youth wielding the combined ideas of Sam Johnson and Voltaire, the “damned boy,” as Kemble called him, established a repute for cultivation, consistency, taste, and independence; and he originated a style of contemporary criticism unknown to the newspaper press. In other words, he brought the standards of criticism which had before been confined to the lecture of academies or the library, into the daily literature which aids in shaping men’s judgments as they rise.
We have seen how, under a name borrowed from the Tory party, the Examiner was established, with little premeditation, a literary ambition, and the hope of realizing a modest wage for the work done. It found literature, poetry especially, sunk to the feeblest, tamest, and most artificial of graces,—the reaction upon the long-felt influence left by the debauchery of the Stuarts and the vulgarer coarseness of the early Georges. It found English monarchs and statesmen again forgetting the great lessons of the British constitution, with the press slavishly acquiescing. In 1808, an Irish Major had a “case” against the Horse Guards, of most corrupt and illicit favouritism: the Examiner published the case, and sustained it. In 1809, a change of ministry was announced: the Examiner hailed “the crowd of blessings that might be involved in such a change;” adding, “Of all monarchs, indeed, since the Revolution, the successor of George the Third will have the finest opportunity of becoming nobly popular.” In 1812, on St. Patrick’s day, a loyal band of guests significantly abstained from paying the usual courtesy to the toast of the Prince Regent, and coughed down Mr. Sheridan, who tried to speak up for his royal and forgetful friend. A writer in a morning paper supplied the omitted homage in a poem more ludicrous for its wretched verse than for the fulsome strain in which it called the Prince the “Protector of the Arts,” the “Mæcenas of the Age,” the “Glory of the People,” a “Great Prince,” attended by Pleasure, Honour, Virtue, Truth, and other illustrious vassals. The Examiner showed up this folly by simply turning it into English, and in plain language describing the position and popular estimate of the Prince. For all these various acts the Examiner was prosecuted, with various fortunes; but in the last case it was fined 1,000l., and its editor and publisher, the brothers Leigh and John Hunt, were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. The Examiner was no extravagant or violent paper; its writing was pretty nearly of the standard that would be required now for style, tone, and sentiment; but what would now be a matter of course in cultivated style, elevated tone, and independent sentiment, was then supposed to be not open to writers unprotected by privilege of Parliament. Not that the paper stood alone. Other writers, both in town and country, vied with it in independence; it excelled chiefly, perhaps, in the literary finish which Leigh Hunt imparted to journalism; but it was the more conspicuous for that finish. Its boldness won it high esteem. Offers came from “distinguished” quarters, on the one side, to bribe its silence for the Royal Horse Guards and its peccadilloes; on the other, to supply the proprietors with subscription, support, and retaliatory evidence. The Examiner equally declined all encroachments on its complete independence, which was carried to a pitch of exclusiveness. This conduct told. The journal was thought dangerous to the régime—it was prosecuted, and its success was only the greater. The Court ceased to be what it had been, and the political system changed: the press of England became generally what the Examiner was.
The Reflector was a quarterly journal, based on the Examiner and its corps. Its more literary portion in its turn laid the basis for the Indicator, in which Leigh Hunt designed, with due deference, to revive the essays of the old Spectator and Tatler. The grand distinction was, that in lieu of mere literary recreation, like the illustrious work of Addison, Steele, and Swift, it more directly proposed to indicate the sources of pleasurable association and æsthetical improvement. In the Reflector, the Indicator, Tatler, and subsequent works of the same class, Leigh Hunt was assisted by Lamb, Barnes [afterwards editor of the Times], Aikin, Mitchell [Aristophanes], Keats, Shelley, Hazlitt, and Egerton Webbe,—the last cut short in a career rendered certain by his accomplishments, his music, his wit, and his extraordinary command of language as an instrument of thought. As in Robin Hood’s band, each man could beat his master at some one art, or perhaps more; but none excelled him in telling short stories, with a simplicity, a pathos, and a force that had their prototype less in the tales of Steele and Addison, than in the romantic poets of Italy. Few essayists have equalled, or approached, Leigh Hunt in the combined versatility, invention, and finish of his miscellaneous prose writings; and few, indeed, have brought such varied sympathies to call forth the sympathies of the reader—and always to good purpose,—in favour of kindness, of reflection, of natural pleasures, of culture, and of using the available resources of life. He used to boast that the Indicator laid the foundation for the “two-penny trash” which assumed a more practical and widely popular form under Charles Knight’s enterprise. It has had a host of imitators, but is still special, and keeps its place in the library.
Of his one novel, Sir Ralph Esher, suffice it to say, that he had desired to make it a sort of historical literary essay,—a species of unconcealed forgery, after the manner of a more cultivated and critical Pepys; and that the bookseller persuaded him to make it a novel:—of his dramatic works,—although he had an ambition to be counted among British dramatists, and had a discriminating dramatic taste,—that he combined, with the imperfect grasp of the tangible, a positive indifference to dramatic literature. The dramatic work which is reputed to be the most interesting of his compositions in this style, the Prince’s Marriage, is still unacted and unpublished.
But in regard to the veritable British Parnassus, he had solid work to do, and he did it. Poetry amongst us had sunk to the lowest grade. Leigh Hunt found the mild Hayley, and the mechanical Darwin, occupying the field, Pope the accredited model, and he revolted against the copybook versification, the complacent subserviency and mean moralities of the muse in possession. He had read earnestly and extensively in the classics, ancient and English; he carried with him to prison the Parnaso Italiano, a fine collection of Italian poetical writers, in fifty-two volumes; and he was deeply imbued with the spirit which he found common to the poetical republic of all ages. He selected the episode of Paolo and Francesca, whom Dante places in the Inferno, and whose history was diligently hunted up to tell in the Story of Rimini. In it Leigh Hunt insisted on breaking the set cadence for which Pope was the professed authority, as he broke through the set morals which had followed in reaction upon the licence of many reigns. He shocked the world with colloquialisms in the heroic measure, and with extenuations of the fault committed by the two lovers against the law matrimonial. The offence, too, was perpetrated by a writer condemned to prison for bearding the constituted authorities. The poem and its fate were characteristic of the man and his position in poetical literature. The work was designed as a picture of Italy, and a tale of the natural affections rebelling against a tyranny more corrupt than the licence which it claimed to check. But when he wrote it, the poet had not been in Italy; and afterwards, with habitual anxiety to be “right,” he corrected many mistakes in the scenery—such as “the smoke goes dancing from the cottage trees,” where there are no such cottages as he imagined, and smoke is no feature in the landscape. He also restored the true historical conclusion, and instead of a gentlemanly duel, comme il faut, made the tale end in the fierce double murder by the husband. In its original shape, the Story of Rimini touched many a heart, and created more sensation for its bolder verse and nature than others which followed it; in its amended form it gained in truth to art and fact, and in force of verse and colouring. Leigh Hunt had not the sustained melody and pulpit morals of the Lake School; but he gave the example and encouragement to writers of still greater force and beauty. He vindicated human right against official wrong, and suffered imprisonment, and denunciation more bitter than that poured on Shelley, whose political vindications burst forth with such a torrent of eloquence and imagination in the Revolt of Islam. Leigh Hunt asserted the beauty of natural passion,—but he did it tenderly and obliquely, himself returning from the slightest taste of passion to “the domesticities,” half begging pardon for his hardihood, and thus by implication confessing his naughtiness; and all the while hinting at the delicate subject of his tale by circumstance, rather than following it to its full inspirations. The greater part of the Story of Rimini is scene-painting, as if it were told by some bystander in the street, or some topographical visitor of the place. In the scene where the lovers so dangerously and fatally fall to reading “Launcelot of the Lake,”—“quel giorno non legemmo più avanti”—the larger portion of the canto is devoted to a description of the garden. Leigh Hunt does not, as Keats did, describe the sickening passion that gave the Lamia so ghastly a sense of her own hated form,—nor does he, as in the Lamia, pursue the couple to the place where Love
“Hover’d and buzz’d his wings with fearful roar
Above the lintel of their chamber door.”
If pharisaical critics discovered objectionable “tendencies” in passages—almost in the omitted passages of his writings—they could find no such impetuous and sublime argument as that to which the Revolt of Islam rises in the canto where “the meteor to its far morass returned;” nor such lines as show that a fair authoress, whose book has been “the rage” at Mudie’s, had been among the myriads of Shelley’s readers. But although hesitating himself to plunge into the impetuous torrent of passion, like the fowl mistrustful of its own fitness for so stormy waters, Leigh Hunt was the friend, instigator, and encourager of that rebellion of letters which in the earlier half of our age produced Keats and Shelley, and the poetical literature of the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Others improved upon the example, no doubt, and bore away the “honores.” At a late day, Lord John Russell obtained for Leigh Hunt a royal pension of £200 a year—a most welcome and gratefully acknowledged compensation of time and money torn from him in early years.