COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN ENGLISH

LEIGH HUNT’S RELATIONS WITH
BYRON, SHELLEY AND KEATS

LEIGH HUNT’S RELATIONS WITH
BYRON, SHELLEY AND KEATS

BY
BARNETTE MILLER, Ph.D.

New York
THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
1910

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1910
By The Columbia University Press
Printed from type April, 1910

Press of
The New Era Printing Company
Lancaster, Pa.

This Monograph has been approved by the Department of English in Columbia University as a contribution to knowledge worthy of publication.

A. H. THORNDIKE,
Secretary.

PREFACE

The relations of Leigh Hunt to Byron, Shelley and Keats have been treated in a fragmentary way in various works of biography and criticism, and from many points of view. Yet hitherto there has been no attempt to construct a whole out of the parts. This led Professor Trent to suggest the subject to me about five years ago. The publication of the results of my investigation has been unfortunately delayed for nearly four years after the work was finished.

I am indebted to Mr. S. L. Wolff for reading the first and second chapters; to Professors G. R. Krapp, W. W. Lawrence, A. H. Thorndike, of Columbia University, and Professor William Alan Nielson, now of Harvard, for suggestions throughout. I am especially glad to have this opportunity to record my gratitude to Prof. Trent, whose inspiration and guidance and kindness from beginning to end have alone made completion of the study possible.

B. M.
Constantinople, Turkey.
March 21, 1910.

CONTENTS

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]

The abridgements of the Spectator, set Hunt as a school task, instilled a dislike of prose-writing that may account for his preference through life for verse composition, although he was by nature less a poet than an essayist. From Cooke’s edition of the British Poets he learned to love Gray, Collins, Thomson, Blair and Spenser—influences responsible in part for his dislike of eighteenth century convention and for his historical prominence in the romantic movement. Spenser later became the literary passion of his life. Other books which he read at this period were Tooke’s Pantheon, Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, and Spence’s Polymetis, three favorites with Keats; Peter Wilkins, Thalaba and German Romances, three favorites with Shelley. Later Hunt and Shelley’s reading was closely paralleled in Godwin’s Political Justice, Lucretius, Pliny, Plato, Aristotle, Voltaire, Condorcet and the Dictionnaire Philosophique. With the years Hunt’s list swelled to an almost incredible degree. It was through books that he knew life.

He left Christ Hospital in 1799. The eight years spent there were his only formal preparation for a literary profession. He greatly regretted his lack of a university education, but he consoled himself by quoting with true Cockney spirit Goldsmith’s saying: “London is the first of Universities.”[5] Through his father’s connections he met many prominent men in London and was made much of. This premature association accounts for some of the arrogance so conspicuous in his early journalistic work, which, in middle life, sobered down into a harmless vanity.

In 1808 Hunt started a Sunday newspaper, The Examiner. The letter tendering his resignation[6] of a position in the office of the Secretary of War, coming from an inexperienced man of twenty-four is pompous in tone and heavy with the weight of his duty to the English nation. His subsequent assurance and boldness resulted in 1812 in his being indicted for a libel of the Prince Regent, afterwards George IV, and in an imprisonment for two years dating from February 15, 1813. His elder brother John, the publisher of the paper, served the same sentence in a separate prison. They shared between them a fine of £1,000. By special dispensation Hunt’s family was allowed to reside with him in prison and, stranger still, he was allowed to continue his work on the libellous journal. At the same time he wrote in jail the Descent of Liberty and part of the Story of Rimini. He transformed his prison yard into a garden and his prison room into a bower by papering the walls with trellises of roses and by coloring his ceiling like the sky. His books and piano-forte, his flowers and plaster casts surrounded him as at home. Old friends gathered about and new ones sought him as a martyr to the liberal cause.

But the picture has a darker side which it is necessary to notice in order to understand Hunt’s personal relations. An imaginative and over-sensitive brain in a feeble body had peopled his childhood with creatures of fear, the precursors of the morbid fancies of later years. From 1805 to 1807 he suffered from a trouble that seems to have been mental rather than physical, probably a form of melancholia or hypochondria. He tortured himself with problems of metaphysics and philosophy. He was haunted with the hallucination that he was deficient in physical courage, and therefore subjected himself to all kinds of tests. At the beginning of his imprisonment he was suffering from a second attack of his malady. The injurious effects upon his health of close confinement at this time can be traced to the end of his life. After his release his morbid fear of cowardice and his habit of seclusion were so strong upon him that for months at a time he would not venture out upon the streets. Yet in spite of all this and of frequent illnesses, his animal spirits were invincible. His optimism was proverbial; indeed, it was a part of his religion. Coventry Patmore tells us that on entering a room and being presented to Hunt for the first time, he received the greeting “This is a beautiful world, Mr. Patmore.”[7] His wonderful fancy colored his life as it colored his poetry. With his flowers and his friends and his fancies he turned life into a perpetual Arcadia. It has been many times asserted that Leigh Hunt was morally weak. His self-depreciation is largely responsible for such assertions. It is true that he fell short of great accomplishment and that he was guilty of small foibles which Haydon exaggerated into “petticoat twaddling and Grandisonian cant.”[8] Yet the struggle and the suffering of his life show more virility and nobility than he is generally credited with, and prove that beneath a veneer of affectation lay strong and healthy qualities.

A second lasting and disastrous result that followed Hunt’s incarceration and that greatly affected his relations with Byron and Shelley was the crippling of his finances. While it cannot be said that he ever showed any real business ability, yet, at the beginning of the trials for libel, his money matters were in fair condition. The heavy fine and costs permanently disabled him. In 1821 his affairs were in such a bad state that, with the hope of bettering them, he left England on a precarious journalistic venture, an injudicious step, the cause of which can be traced to the lingering effects of his labors in the cause of liberalism. From 1834 to 1840 his misfortunes reached a climax. He sold his books to get something to eat. The pain of giving up his beloved Parnaso Italiano was like that of a violinist parting with his instrument. He lived in continual fear of arrest for debt. At the same time, family troubles and ill-health combined to torment him.

In 1844 Sir Percy Shelley gave him an annuity of £120, and in 1847, the same year of the benefit performance of Every Man in His Humour, he was granted through the efforts of Lord John Russell, Macaulay and Carlyle, an annual pension of £200 on the Civil List. There were also two separate grants of £200 each from the Royal Bounty, one from William IV, and the other from Queen Victoria. In his last years there is no mention made of want.[9]

Hunt’s attitude in respect to money obligations was unique, but well-defined and consistent. It was not, as is often inferred, either puling or unscrupulous.[10] He was absolutely incapable of the Skimpole vices.[11] His dilemmas were not due to indolence. On the contrary, he labored indefatigably as results show. The trouble was his “hugger-mugger” management, as Carlyle expressed it. He adopted William Godwin’s doctrine that the distribution of property should depend on justice and necessity, and thought with him that the teachers of religion were pernicious in treating the practice of justice “not as a debt, but as an affair of spontaneous generosity and bounty. They have called upon the rich to be clement and merciful to the poor. The consequence of this has been that the rich, when they bestowed the slender pittance of their enormous wealth in acts of charity, as they were called, took merit to themselves for what they gave, instead of considering themselves delinquents for what they withheld.”[12] Godwin held gratitude to be a superstition.

Consequently, when in need, Hunt thought he had a right to assistance from such friends as had the wherewithal to give. He accepted obligations, as will be shown in the following chapters, much as a matter of course.[13] But even in his worst distresses, he never desired nor accepted promiscuous charity; and he did not always willingly accept aid even from his friends. He refused offers of help from Trelawney. He returned a bank bill sent him by his sister-in-law, £5 sent by De Wilde as part of the Compensation Fund, and $500 presented by James Russell Lowell. In 1832 Reynell forfeited £200 as security for Hunt. Twenty years later, on the payment of the first installment of the Shelley legacy, Hunt discharged the debt.[14] He rejected several offers to pay his fine at the time of his imprisonment.[15] Mary Shelley, who more than any one had cause to complain of Hunt’s attitude in money matters, wrote in 1844 in announcing to him the forthcoming annuity from her son: “I know your real delicacy about money matters.”[16]

In the Correspondence there are mysterious allusions made by Hunt and by his son Thornton to a veiled influence on Hunt’s life, to some one who acted as trustee for him and who, without his knowledge or consent, made indiscriminating appeals in his behalf. The discovery of refusals and repulses led him to write the following to William Story, through whom came Lowell’s offer: “Nor do I think the man truly generous who cannot both give and receive. But, my dear Story, my heart has been deeply wounded, some time back, in consequence of being supposed to carry such opinions to a practical extreme.... It gave me a shock so great that, as long as I live, it will be impossible for me to forego the hope of outliving all similar chances, by conduct which none can misinterpret.”[17]

Leigh Hunt’s work which comes into the period of his association with Byron, Shelley and Keats falls into four divisions: his theatrical criticism, his political journals, his poetry and his miscellaneous essays. The first and the last, although important in themselves, do not enter into his relations with the three men in question and will not be considered here. His political activity is important in his relations with Byron and Shelley; his poetry in his relations with Keats and Shelley.

In Leigh Hunt’s career, the step most significant in its far-reaching effects was the establishment of The Examiner.[18] Its professed object was the discussion of politics. It contained, in addition to foreign and provincial intelligence, criticism of the theatre, of literature, and of the fine arts. Full reports were given of the proceedings in Parliament. At different times, various series of articles appeared, such as the Essays on Methodism by Hunt, and The Round Table by Hunt and Hazlitt. Fox-Bourne says that previous to Hunt’s Examiner there had been weeklies or “essay sheets” such as Defoe, Steele, Addison and Goldsmith had developed, and that there had been dailies or “news sheets” which gave bare facts, but that The Examiner was the first to give the news faithfully in essay style.[19] It soon raised the character of the weeklies. During the first year the circulation reached 2,200, a large number at that time. Carlyle said: “I well remember how its weekly coming was looked for in our village in Scotland. The place of its delivery was besieged by an eager crowd, and its columns furnished the town talk till the next number came.”[20] Redding says “everybody in those days read The Examiner.”[21]

The prospectus contained a severe criticism of contemporary journalism:[22]

“mean in its subserviency to the follies of the day, very miserably merry in its fuss and stories, extremely furious in politics, and quite as feeble in criticism. You are invited to a literary conversation, and you find nothing but scandal and commonplace. There is a flourish of trumpets, and enter Tom Thumb. There is an earthquake and a worm is thrown up.... The gentleman who until lately conducted the Theatrical Department in the News will criticise the Theatre in the Examiner; and as the public have allowed the possibility of Impartiality in that department, we do not see why the same possibility may not be obtained in Politics.”

Then followed a declaration against party as a factor in politics: party, it was declared, should not exist “abstracted from its utility”; in the present day every man must belong to some class; “he is either Pittite or Foxite, Windhamite, Wilberforcite or Burdettite; though, at the same time, two thirds of these disturbers of coffee-houses might with as much reason call themselves Hivites, or Shunamites, or perhaps Bedlamites.”[23] Although The Examiner thus firmly announced its intentions, nevertheless in the heat of political contest it soon became the organ of a group of men known as “reformers,” who were laboring and clamoring for constitutional and administrative improvement. It became the avowed enemy of the Tory party and its journals, and in particular of the ministry during the long Tory ascendancy; the enemy, at times, of royalty itself.

The prospectus likewise announced an intention to reform the manners and morals of the age. Hunt could write a sermon with the same ease as a song or a satire. Horse-racing, cock-fighting and prize-fighting were condemned; most of all the publication of scandal and crime. A passage on advertisements is humorous and still of living interest:

“the public shall neither be tempted to listen to somebody in the shape of wit who turns out to be a lottery-keeper, nor seduced to hear a magnificent oration which finishes by retreating into a peruke, or rolling off into a blacking ball ... and as there is perhaps about one person in a hundred who is pleased to see two or three columns occupied with the mutabilities of cotton and the vicissitudes of leather, the proprietors will have as little to do with bulls and raw-hides, as with lottery-men and wig-makers.”

The editorials, which occupied the foremost columns of the paper, attacked corruption and injustice of every kind without respect of persons, currying favor with neither party nor individual, and laboring above all for the people. International relations and continental conditions were kept track of, but chief prominence was given to domestic affairs. The editor warred against all abuses of power in the cabinet and in all offices under the crown. In particular he attacked with merciless persistence the Prince Regent in regard to his private life and his public conduct, and his brother Frederick the Duke of York, for his inefficiency as Commander-in-Chief of the army.[24] His definition of the English Army was “a host of laced jackets and long pigtails.”[25] He condemned the numerous subsidies of the crown, the royal pensions and salaries for nominal service. He ridiculed the divine right of kings and exposed court scandal and immorality. The chief measures for which he labored were Catholic Emancipation; reform of Parliamentary representation; liberty of the press; reduction and equalization of taxes; greater discretion in increasing the public debt; education of the poor and amelioration of their sufferings; abolition of child-labor and of the slave trade; reform of military discipline, of prison conditions, and of the criminal and civil laws, particularly those governing debtors.

It is not a matter of marvel that the paper made hosts of enemies on every side. Charges of libel quickly followed its onslaughts. Before the paper was a year old a prosecution was begun in connection with the Major Hogan and Mrs. Clarke case,[26] but it was dropped when an investigation was begun by the House of Commons. Within a year’s time after this prosecution a second indictment was brought because of the sentence: “Of all monarchs since the Revolution the successor of George the Third will have the finest opportunity of becoming nobly popular.”[27] The Morning Chronicle copied it, and was indicted, but both cases were dismissed. The third offense was the quotation of an article by John Scott on the cruelty of military flogging[28] but, like the others, this prosecution came to nothing.

The fourth and most disastrous misdemeanor was libel of the Prince Regent, a man of shocking morals and of unstable character. Before his appointment as Regent he had leaned to the Whig party and advocated Catholic Emancipation, but at his accession to power he retained the Tory ministry. The Whigs were greatly angered in consequence, and The Examiner took it upon itself to voice their indignation.[29] At a dinner given at the Freemason’s Tavern on St. Patrick’s day, March 22, 1812, Lord Moira, an old friend of the Prince’s, omitted mentioning him in his speech. Later, when a toast was proposed to the Prince, it was greeted with hisses. Mr. Sheridan, because of Lord Moira’s omission, spoke later in the evening in defense of the Regent, but he, too, was received with hisses. The Morning Chronicle reported the dinner; the Morning Post replied with fulsome praise of the Prince; The Examiner with its usual alacrity joined in the fray and took sides with the Chronicle, dissecting, phrase by phrase, the adulation heaped upon the Prince by the Post. The following is the bitterest part of the polemic against him:

“What person, unacquainted with the true state of the case, would imagine, in reading these astounding eulogies, that this ‘Glory of the people’ was the subject of millions of shrugs and reproaches!—that this ‘Protector of the arts’ had named a wretched foreigner his historical painter, in disparagement or in ignorance of the merits of his own countrymen!—that this ‘Mæcenas of the age’ patronized not a single deserving writer!—that this ‘Breather of eloquence’ could not say a few decent extempore words, if we are to judge, at least, from what he said to his regiment on its embarkation for Portugal!—that this ‘Conqueror of hearts’ was the disappointer of hopes!—that this ‘Exciter of desire’ [bravo! Messieurs of the Post!]—this ‘Adonis in loveliness’, was a corpulent man of fifty!—in short, this delightful, blissful, wise, pleasurable, honourable, virtuous, true and immortal prince, was a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a dispiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country, or the respect of posterity!”[30]

It was said that the chief offense was given by the statement that “this ‘Adonis in loveliness’ was a corpulent man of fifty.” The article, although true, was of doubtful expediency and offensively violent and personal. Further, the unremitting attacks of The Examiner had been neither dignified nor charitable in their searchlight penetration into the Prince’s private affairs.[31] An indictment for libel naturally followed at once. Lord Brougham’s “masterly defense”[32] failed to avert the determined efforts of the prosecution to make an example of the editor and the publisher of The Examiner. They were sentenced to the imprisonment and fine already mentioned. They refused all overtures for alleviation of the sentence:—overtures from the government; from the Whigs who, in the person of Perry of the Morning Chronicle, proposed to obtain a compromise from the prosecution by threatening the Regent with the publication of state secrets from friends; and even from a juror who offered to pay the fine. Leigh Hunt wrote: “I am an Englishman setting an example to my children and my country; and it would be hard, under all these circumstances, if I could not suffer my extremity rather than disgrace myself by effeminate lamentation or worse compromise.”[33] The two Hunts thought that the serving of the sentence would be beneficial to the liberal cause, particularly in increasing the freedom of the press.

The general method of The Examiner was vigorous attack. There was no circumlocution, no mincing of language, but aggressive candour, and, when it was considered necessary, wholesale censure and vituperation. A typical illustration is given in this passage, describing a dinner of the Common Council:

“It is the fashion just now to call Bonaparte Antichrist, the Beast with Seven Heads and Ten Horns, ... but if you wish to see those who have the ‘real mark of the beast’ upon them, go to a City dinner, and after battles for trout and the buffetings for turtle, after the rattling of wine glasses and plethoric throats, after the swillings and the gormandizings, and the maudlin hobs-and-nobs, and the disquisitions on smothered rabbits, and the bloated hectics, and the blinking eyes and slurred voices, and the hiccups, the rantings, and the roars, hear an unwieldy Loan-jobber descanting on our Glorious King and Unshaken Constitution. The stranger, that after this sight, goes to see the beasts in the Tower, is an enemy to all true climax.”[34]

In actual results The Examiner accomplished a great deal in the counter movement for reform. While Hunt had no original or constructive political theory, little power of philosophical or logical thought, and no special equipment besides wide general knowledge, he had great sincerity and courage and a defiant attitude toward corruption of all kinds.[35] He was himself absolutely incorruptible. If he preferred any form of government above another—for he was more interested in the pure administration of an established government than in the form itself—his preference was for a liberal monarchy. Notwithstanding this moderate attitude, The Examiner was accused of radical, even revolutionary opinions. It was charged with being an enemy of the constitution, a traitor to the king, a foe to the established church.[36] Hunt’s positive achievement in political journalism was two-fold: he obtained additional freedom for the press and he elevated journalistic style to a literary level. Monkhouse says that Hunt “established for the first time a paper which fought, and fought effectively, with prejudice and privilege, with superstition and tyranny, which was a bearer of light to all men of Liberal principles in that country, and set the example of the independent thought and fearless expression of opinion, which has since become the very light and power of the press.”[37] Of the Hunt brothers Coventry Patmore writes: “I verily believe that, without the manly firmness, the immaculate political honesty, and the vigorous good sense of the one, and the exquisite genius and varied accomplishments, guided by the all-pervading and all-embracing humanity of the other, we should at this moment have been without many of those writers and thinkers on whose unceasing efforts the slow but sure march of our political, and with it, our social regeneration as a people mainly depends.”[38]

Hunt assisted in bringing about reforms in the interest of the people by calling attention to abuses that demanded investigation, and by advocating correction. His ideas on national finance and practical administration are wonderful when contrasted with his inefficiency in his own affairs. He lacked largeness of perspective and masculine grasp. His work is all the more remarkable when his temperament and tastes are considered; for his was a nature, as Professor Dowden has put it, “framed less for the rough and tumble of English radical politics than for ‘dance and Provençal Song and sunburnt mirth.’” As a factor in the reform movement begun in the first decade of the nineteenth century Leigh Hunt has not yet come into his own.[39] His was no cosmic theory, nor search after the origin of evil, nor magnificent rebellion like Shelley’s and Byron’s; but in his own smaller way he played as courageous and as effective a part in the cause of liberty as those greater spirits.[40]

In 1810, the two brothers had established a quarterly, The Reflector, of much the same nature and creed as The Examiner. It was unsuccessful and was discontinued after the fourth number. It differed from its predecessor in combining literature with politics. Hunt’s reason for this innovation displays a rare power to judge of contemporary movements: “Politics, in times like these, should naturally take the lead in periodical discussion, because they have an importance almost unexampled in history, and because they are now, in their turn, exhibiting their reaction upon literature, as literature in the preceding age exhibited its action upon them.”[41]

Although Hunt continued to be editor of The Examiner until he went to Italy in 1822, his aggressive political activity seemed to die out of him after his release from prison. He was never so prominently again before the public; in 1828, he ceased altogether to write on political questions. He retired more and more into the seclusion of his books, and from about 1849, denied himself to all but a small circle of congenial spirits.

Hunt, like the others of his group, was deeply influenced by the liberal movement in religion as well as in politics. He had seen his father’s progress from the Anglican Church through the Unitarian[42] to the Universalist. At the age of twelve he repudiated the doctrine of eternal punishment and declared himself a believer in the “exclusive goodness of futurity.” In his early manhood he decried the superstition of Catholicism, the intolerance of Calvinism, and the emotionality of Methodism. Yet he acknowledged a Great First Cause and a Divine Paternity. He refused, like Shelley, to recognize the existence of evil, and thought everything finally good and beautiful in nature.[43] He believed that universal happiness would come about through individual excellence, through performance of duty and avoidance of excess. Those who disagreed with him in this respect he considered blasphemers of nature. As Lord Houghton in his address in the cemetery of Kensal Green on the unveiling of a bust of Hunt remarked, he had an “absolute superstition for good.” Similar testimony was borne by R. H. Horne when he said that Chaucer’s “‘Ah, benedicite’ was falling forever from his lips.”[44] His religion was one of charity and cheerfulness, of love and truth, which is but to affirm that the humanitarian moral of Abou Ben Adhem was realized in his own life.[45] On the death of Shelley’s child William, Hunt wrote to the bereaved father: “I do not know that a soul is born with us; but we seem, to me, to attain to a soul, some later, some earlier; and when we have got that, there is a look in our eye, a sympathy in our cheerfulness, and a yearning and grave beauty in our thoughtfulness that seems to say, ‘Our mortal dress may fall off when it will; our trunk and our leaves may go; we have shot up our blossom into an immortal air.’”[46]

Hunt, like Byron and Shelley, had curious ideas about the relation of the sexes, ideas which Hazlitt said, were “always coming out like a rash.”[47] This “crotchet” was taken over likewise from Godwin, who thought it checked the progress of the mind for one individual to be obliged to live for a long period in conformity to the desires of another and therefore disapproved of the marriage relation. But, like Godwin and Shelley, Hunt bowed to the conventions. His life was a singularly pure one.

The influence of Hunt’s poetry upon Keats and Shelley, in its general romantic tendencies, particularly in respect to diction and metre, deserves equal consideration with the influence of his politics upon Shelley and Byron. Juvenilia, a volume of Hunt’s poems collected by his father and issued by subscription in 1801 contains original work and translations which show wide reading for a boy of seventeen and some fluency in versification. Otherwise the writer’s own opinion in 1850 is correct: “My work was a heap of imitations, all but absolutely worthless.... I wrote ‘odes’ because Collins and Gray had written them, ‘pastorals’ because Pope had written them, ‘blank verse’ because Akenside and Thomson had written blank verse, and a ‘Palace of Pleasure’ because Spenser had written a ‘Bower of Bliss.’”[48] Hunt’s chief defect in taste, that of introducing in the midst of highly poetical conceptions, disagreeable physical conditions or symptoms, is as conspicuous in this volume[49] as in his more mature work.

The Feast of the Poets, 1814,[50] is a light satire in the manner of Sir John Suckling’s Session of the Poets. It spares few poets since the days of Milton and Dryden, and it includes in its revilings most of Hunt’s contemporaries. Gifford, the editor of the Quarterly Review, comes in for the worst castigation. It is not remarkable that the satire antagonized people on every side in the literary world as The Examiner had done in the political. Hunt believed that “its offences, both of commission and of omission, gave rise to some of the most inveterate enmities” of his life.[51] It is important in the history to be discussed in a later chapter of the literary feud which resulted in the creation of the so-called Cockney School. Later revisions included some poets who had been intentionally ignored at first in both poems and notes, or who, like Shelley and Keats, naturally would not have been included in the 1814 edition; and it softened down the harsh criticism of those who were unfortunate enough to have been included, except Gifford, whom Hunt could never forgive. The irony is fresh and there are occasional spicy flashes of wit. The narrative is clear and the characterization vivid. Byron pronounced it “the best Session we have.”[52]

The Descent of Liberty,[53] 1815, is a masque celebrating the triumph of Liberty, in the person of the Allies, over the Enchanter, Napoleon. There is little plot or human interest; the natural, the supernatural, and the mythical are confusedly interwoven. The pictorial effect, however, is one of great richness and color, and some of the songs and passages have fine lyrical feeling and melody. It is interesting in this connection to note a vague general resemblance between the Descent of Liberty and Shelley’s Queen Mab (1812-13) in the worship of Liberty, in the hope and promise of her ultimate triumph, and in the wild imagination which Hunt probably never again equalled. It is not likely, however, that Hunt knew Shelley’s poem at the time he was writing his own.

The Story of Rimini, produced in 1816 and dedicated to Lord Byron, is the most important of Hunt’s works in a consideration of his relations with the enemies of the Cockney School[54] and with Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Byron criticised it severely. Shelley thought it carried uncommon and irresistible interest with it, but he agreed with Byron in thinking that the style had fettered Hunt’s genius.[55] Keats wrote a sonnet[56] on Rimini in 1817, and in his own works shows unmistakably the influence of Hunt’s poem in diction and versification.

The story is founded, of course, on the Francesca episode in the fifth canto of the Inferno of Dante. It was a dangerous thing for Hunt to undertake an elaboration of the marvelous episode of Dante. Had he been a man of greater genius it would have been a risk; as it was, he produced a diffuse and sentimental narrative which bears little resemblance to the singular perfection of the original. On the other hand, the Story of Rimini does possess indubitable merits: directness of narrative, minute observation, sensuous richness of pictorial description, and occasional delicate felicity of language.[57] Byron wrote of the third canto which he saw in manuscript:

“You have excelled yourself—if not all your contemporaries—in the canto which I have just finished. I think it above the former books; but that is as it should be; it rises with the subject, the conception seems to me perfect, and the execution perhaps as nearly so as verse will admit. There is more originality than I recollect to have seen elsewhere within the same compass, and frequent and great happiness of expression.” The faults he said were “occasional quaintnesses and obscurity, and a kind of harsh and yet colloquial compounding of epithets, as if to avoid saying common things in a common way.”[58]

October 30, 1815, in reply to these objections Hunt sent forth this defense: “we accomodate ourselves to certain habitual, sophisticated phrases of written language, and thus take away from real feeling of any sort the only language it ever actually uses, which is the spoken language.” At the same time he made a few alterations at Byron’s suggestion.[59] And again the latter wrote: “You have two excellent points in that poem—originality and Italianism.”[60] After the Story of Rimini appeared he wrote to Moore: “Leigh Hunt’s poem is a devilish good one—quaint, here and there, but with the substratum of originality, and with poetry about it that will stand the test.”[61] In 1818 Byron’s opinion had changed somewhat:

“When I saw Rimini in Ms., I told him I deemed it good poetry at bottom, disfigured only by a strange style. His answer was, that his style was a system, or upon system, or some other such cant; and when a man talks of system, his case is hopeless; so I said no more to him, and very little to anyone else. He believed his trash of vulgar phrases tortured into compound barbarisms to be old English[62] ... Hunt, who had powers to make the Story of Rimini as perfect as a fable of Dryden, has thought fit to sacrifice his genius to some unintelligible notion of Wordsworth, which I defy him to explain.[63]... A friend of mine calls ‘Rimini’ Nimini Pimini; and ‘Foliage’ Follyage. Perhaps he had a tumble in ‘climbing trees in the Hesperides’! But Rimini has a great deal of merit. There never were so many fine things spoiled as in ‘Rimini.’”[64]

Hunt had a distinct theory of language based on a few crude principles. As his practical application of them had its effect upon Keats, a somewhat full consideration of them is desirable here. The first and most conspicuous one, promoted by what Hunt called “an idiomatic spirit in verse,”[65] was a preference for colloquial words.[66] He mistook for grace and fluency of diction, a turn of phrase that was without poetic connection and often in very poor taste. In dialogue, particularly, the effect is undignified. This professed doctrine was a fuller development[67] of the statement in the Advertisement to the Lyrical Ballads of 1798: in Hunt’s opinion, Wordsworth failed to consider duly meter in its essential relations to poetry, and while Hunt himself desired a “return to nature and a natural style” he thought that Wordsworth had substituted puerility for simplicity and affectation for nature. Hunt’s acknowledged model for the poem was Dryden,[68] but Hunt’s colloquial phrasing, peculiar diction, elision,[69] and loose expansion approach much more closely to Chamberlayne’s Pharronida (1689) than to anything in Dryden.[70] The following extract is one of many that might be cited as suggestive of Hunt’s Story of Rimini:

“To his cold clammy lips
Joining her balmy twins, she from them sips
So much of death’s oppressing dews, that, by
That touch revived, his soul, though winged to fly
Her ruined seat, takes time to breathe
These sad notes forth: “farewell, my dear, beneath
My fainting spirits sink.”[71]

Occasionally Hunt’s choice of colloquial words fitted the subject, as in the Feast of the Poets, where humor and satire permit such expressions as “bards of Old England had all been rung in,” “twiddling a sunbeam,” “bloated his wits,” “tricksy tenuity” or such words as “smack,” “pop-in” and “sing-song.” His poetical epistles suffer without injury such departures from dignified diction, but in other cases, of which the Story of Rimini is a notable example, a grave subject in the garb of everyday language is degraded into the incongruous and prosaic. It is in physical descriptions that this undignified diction most strikingly violates good taste. Examples are:

“And both their cheeks, like peaches on a tree,
Leaned with a touch together, thrillingly.”
“So lightsomely dropped in, his lordly back,
His thigh so fitted for the tilt or dance.”

Sometimes the prosaic quality of Hunt’s diction is due to its being pitched upon a merely “society” level:

“May I come in? said he:—it made her start,—
That smiling voice;—she coloured, pressed her heart
A moment, as for breath and then with free
And usual tone said, ‘O Yes,—certainly.’”

Such a treatment of the meeting of Paolo and Francesca in the bower is wholly inadequate to the situation and the emotion of the moment. Additional illustrations of his colloquialisms from the Story of Rimini and from other poems of the same period are: “to bless his shabby eyes,” “that to the stander near looks awfully,” “banquet small, and cheerful, and considerate,” “clipsome waist,” “jauntiness behind and strength before” (description of a horse), “lend their streaming tails to the fond air,” “sweepy shape,” “cored in our complacencies,” “lumps of flowers,” “smooth, down-arching thigh,” “tapering with tremulous mass internally.”

Hunt’s second principle to be considered is the excessive use of vague and passionless words. Instances of such words to be found very frequently in his poetry are: fond, amiable, fair, rural, cordial, cheerful, gentle, calm, smooth, serene, earnest, lovely, balmy, dainty, mild, meek, tender, kind, elegant, quiet, sweet, fresh, pleasant, warm, social, and many others of like character.

A third principle was the employment of unusual words; examples are found in the Story of Rimini in the first edition and in other poems produced about this same time. In the Poetical Works, 1832, most of them have been discarded. The preface states that the “occasional quaintnesses and neologisms” which “formerly disfigured the poems did not arise from affectation but from the sheer license of animal spirits”; that they are not worth defending and that he has left only two in the Story of Rimini, “swirl” and “cored.” “Swaling” had been the most famous one in the poem because of the ridicule heaped upon it by the enemies of the Cockney School.

To use ordinary words in an extraordinary sense was a fourth principle. The effect was often extremely awkward. Core passes as a synonym for heart; fry occurs in Rimini in a strange sense; hip and tiptoe are employed with a special Huntian significance. Nouns and adjectives are used as verbs and verbs as nouns and adjectives with an unpoetical effect: cored (verb); drag (noun); frets (noun); feel (noun); patting (adjective); spanning (adjective); lull’d (adjective); smearings; measuring; doings.[72]

The use of compounds is a fifth distinguishing feature. Such combinations are found as bathing-air, house-warm lips, side-long pillowed meekness, fore-thoughted chess, pin-drop silence, tear-dipped feeling.

The sixth and last peculiarity is the preference for adjectives in y and ing, many of them of his own coinage; for adverbs in ly; and for unauthorized or awkward comparatives: examples are plumpy (cheeks), knify, perky, sweepy, farmy, bosomy, pillowy, arrowy, liny, leafy, scattery, winy, globy; hasting, silvering, doling, blubbing, firming, thickening, quickening, differing, perking; lightsomely, refreshfully, thrillingly, kneadingly, lumpishly, smilingly, preparingly, crushingly,[73] finelier, martialler, tastefuller, apter.

The colloquial vocabulary, the familiar tone, and the expansion of thought into phrases and clauses where it would have gained by condensed expression, give to the Story of Rimini a prosaic and eccentric style. Yet Hunt declared he held in horror eccentricity and prosiness.[74]

In a discussion of the influence of Leigh Hunt upon the versification of his contemporaries and successors it is necessary to consider not only his theory but also the active part played by him as a conscious reviver of the older heroic couplet. In this reaction against the school of Pope, as also in the use of blank verse, he showed great independence in discarding approved models. The notes added to the Feast of the Poets in 1814, when it was republished from the Reflector of 1812, are important in this connection. They show a wide familiarity with modern poetry. He writes:

“The late Dr. Darwin, whose notion of poetical music, in common with that of Goldsmith and others, was of the school of Pope, though his taste was otherwise different, was perhaps the first, who by carrying it to the extreme pitch of sameness, and ringing it affectedly in one’s ears, gave the public at large a suspicion that there was something wrong in its nature. But of those who saw its deficiencies, part had the ambition without the taste or attention requisite for striking into a better path, and became eccentric in another extreme; while others, who saw the folly of both, were content to keep the beaten track and set a proper example to neither. By these appeals, however, the public ear has been excited to expect something better; and perhaps there was never a more favourable time than the present for an attempt to bring back the real harmonies of the English heroic, and to restore it to half the true principle of its music, variety. I am not here joining the cry of those, who affect to consider Pope as no poet at all. He is, I confess, in my judgment, at a good distance from Dryden, and at an immeasurable one from such men as Spenser and Milton; but if the author of the Rape of the Lock, of Eloisa to Abelard, and of the Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady, is no poet, then are fancy and feeling no properties belonging to poetry. I am only considering his versification; and upon that point I do not hesitate to say, that I regard him, not only as no master of his art, but as a very indifferent practiser, and one whose reputation will grow less and less, in proportion as the lovers of poetry become intimate with his great predecessors, and with the principles of musical beauty in general.”[75]

The remarks on Pope close with the hope that the imitation of the best work of Dryden, Milton and Spenser “might lead the poets of the present age to that proper mixture of sweetness and strength—of modern finish and ancient variety—from which Pope and his rhyming facilities have so long withheld us.”[76] Hunt closes with an appeal for the return to Italian models, and says that Hayley, in his Triumphs of Temper was “the quickest of our late writers to point out the great superiority of the Italian school over the French.” He protests against the wide influence of Boileau.[77]

The Introduction to the Poetical Works of 1832 contains a concise and technical statement of Hunt’s theory of the heroic couplet. He argues that the triplet tends to condensation, three lines instead of four; that it carries onward the fervor of the poet’s feeling, delivering him from the ordinary laws of his verse, and that it expresses continuity. Of the bracket he says: “I confess I like the very bracket that marks out the triplet to the reader’s eye, and prepares him for the music of it. It has a look like the bridge of a lute.”[78] The use of the Alexandrine in the heroic couplet, he avers, gives variety and energy. Double rhymes are defended on historical grounds. For himself he claims credit as a restorer, not an innovator, and prophesies that the perfection of the heroic couplet is “to come about by a blending between the inharmonious freedom of our old poets in general ... and the regularity of Dryden himself.... If anyone could unite the vigor of Dryden with the ready and easy variety of pause in the works of the late Mr. Crabbe, and the lovely poetic consciousness in the Lamia of Keats ... he would be a perfect master of the rhyming couplet.” A study of the heroic couplet from Dryden to Shelley based on two hundred lines from each poet has yielded the results indicated in the table on the following page.

Professor Saintsbury says: “There is no doubt that his [Hunt’s] versification in Rimini (which may be described as Chaucerian in basis with a strong admixture of Dryden, further crossed and dashed slightly with the peculiar music of the followers of Spenser, especially Browne and Wither) had a very strong influence both on Keats and on Shelley, and that it drew from them music much better than itself. This fluent, musical, many-colored-verse was a capital medium for tale telling.”[79] Professor Herford marks it as the “starting point of that free or Chaucerian treatment of the heroic couplet and of the colloquial style, eschewing epigram and full of familiar turns, which Shelley in Julian and Maddalo, and Keats in Lamia, made classical.”[82] Mr. R. B. Johnson calls it “a protest against the polished couplet of Pope—a protest already expressed to some extent in the Lyrical Ballads, but through Hunt’s influence, guiding the pens of Keats, Shelley and some of his noblest successors.”[83] Mr. A. J. Kent says that “No one-sided sentiment of reaction against our so-called Augustan literature disqualified Leigh Hunt from becoming, as he afterwards became, the greatest master since the days of Dryden of the heroic couplet.”[84] Leigh Hunt’s greatest mistake in the handling of the couplet has been clearly pointed out by Mr. Colvin, who says that he “blended the grave and the colloquial cadences of Dryden, without his characteristic nerve and energy in either.”[85] The late Dr. Garnett said that the ease and variety of Dryden was restored by Hunt to English literature.[86] Monkhouse pointed out that Keats and Shelley, more than Hunt, reaped the rewards of his revivification of the heroic couplet. The diffuseness of the diction of the Story of Rimini results in a movement weaker than Dryden’s and less buoyant than Chaucer’s. Yet the verse is distinguished by a fluency and grace and melody that at times are very pleasing. It had a notable influence on English verse—an influence begun by others but strongly reinforced by Hunt. Further treatment of the influence of Hunt’s diction and versification upon Keats and Shelley is reserved for chapters II and III of the present study.

Hunt’s next poetical work after Rimini was Foliage, published in 1818. It is a collection of original poems under the title Greenwoods, and of translations under the title Evergreens.[87] In the preface Hunt announces the main features to be a love of sociability, of the country, and of the “fine imagination of the Greeks.”[88] The first predilection runs the gamut from “sociability” to “domestic interest” and is the most fundamental characteristic of the author and of his writing. In the preface to One Hundred Romances of Real Life he declares sociability to be “the greatest of all interests.” It rarely failed to crop out when he was writing even on the gravest and most impersonal of subjects. In his intercourse with strangers, this same “sociability,” added to a natural kindliness and sympathy, caused a familiarity of bearing that was often misunderstood. The Nymphs, the longest poem of the volume, is founded on Greek mythology and is interesting in connection with Keats’s poems on classical subjects. Shelley said that the Nymphs was “truly poetical, in the intense and emphatic sense of the word. If 600 miles were not between us, I should say what pity that glib was not omitted, and that the poem is not so faultless as it is beautiful.”[89] In general Shelley overestimated Hunt’s poetry, though he saw some of its affectations. Shorter pieces were epistles to Byron, Moore, Hazlitt and Lamb—a kind of verse in which Hunt excelled, for his attitude and style were peculiarly adapted to the familiar tone permissible in such writing. Among Hunt’s best poems may be counted the sonnets to Shelley, Keats, Haydon, Raphael, and Kosciusko; those entitled the Grasshopper and the Cricket, To the Nile, On a Lock of Milton’s Hair, and the series on Hampstead. The suburban charms of Hampstead were very dear to Hunt and he never tired of celebrating them in poetry and in prose. No amount of derision from the Quarterly or Blackwood’s stopped him. The general characteristics of Foliage are much the same as those of the Story of Rimini. There are poor lines and good ones, never sustained power, and no poetry of a very high order. The subjects themselves are often unpoetical. Hunt obtrudes himself too frequently in a breezy, offhand manner. Byron’s opinion of the book was scathing:

“Of all the ineffable Centaurs that were ever begotten by self-love upon a Nightmare, I think ‘this monstrous Sagittary’ the most prodigious. He (Leigh H.) is an honest charlatan, who has persuaded himself into a belief of his own impostures, and talks Punch in pure simplicity of heart, taking himself (as poor Fitzgerald said of himself in the Morning Post) for Vates in both senses and nonsenses of the word. Did you [Moore] look at the translations of his own which he prefers to Pope and Cowper, and says so?—Did you read his skimble-skamble about Wordsworth being at the head of his own profession, in the eyes of those who followed it? I thought that poetry was an art, or an attribute, and not a profession; but be it one, is that ... at the head of your profession in your eyes?”[90]

Other poems belonging to this period are Hero and Leander and Bacchus and Ariadne in 1819, and a translation of Tasso’s Aminta in 1820. The first two show Hunt’s faculty for poetical narrative and description, and, in common with Keats, a partiality for classical subjects. The three are in no way radically different from the poems already considered.

The Literary Pocket Book which Hunt edited in 1820, 1821 and 1822, the New Monthly Magazine to which he began contributing in 1821, and the Literary Examiner, which he established in 1823, complete the enumeration of his writings during the period of his association with Byron, Shelley and Keats. Beyond the contributions of Shelley and Keats to the first and the reviews of Byron’s poems in the third, they are unimportant here.

CHAPTER II

Keats’s meeting with Hunt—Growth of their friendship—Haydon’s intervention—Keats’s residence with Hunt—His departure for Italy—Hunt’s Criticism of Keats’s poetry—His influence on the Poems of 1817.

It was about the year 1815 that Keats showed to his former school friend, Charles Cowden Clarke, the following sonnet, the first indication the latter had that Keats had written poetry:

“What though, for showing truth to flatter’d state,
Kind Hunt was shut in prison, yet has he,
In his immortal spirit been as free
As the sky-searching lark, and as elate.
Minion of grandeur! think you he did wait?
Think you he nought but prison walls did see,
Till, so unwilling thou unturn’dst the key?
Ah, no! far happier, nobler was his fate!
In Spenser’s halls he stray’d, and bowers fair,
Culling enchanted flowers; and he flew
With daring Milton through the fields of air:
To regions of his own his genius true
Took happy flights. Who shall his fame impair
When thou art dead, and all thy wretched crew?”

This admiration, expressed before Keats had met Hunt, was due to the influence of the Clarke family and to Keats’s acquaintance with The Examiner, which he saw regularly during his school days at Enfield and which he continued to borrow from Clarke during his medical apprenticeship. Clarke later showed to Leigh Hunt two or three of Keats’s poems. Of the reception of one of them (How Many Bards Gild the Lapses of Time) Clarke said:

“I could not but anticipate that Hunt would speak encouragingly, and indeed approvingly, of the compositions—written, too, by a youth under age; but my partial spirit was not prepared for the unhesitating and prompt admiration which broke forth before he had read twenty lines of the first poem.”[91]

Hunt invited Keats to visit him. Of this first meeting between the two men, Clarke wrote:

“That was a red letter day in the young poet’s life, and one which will never fade with me while memory lasts. The character and expression of Keats’s features would arrest even the casual passenger in the street; and now they were wrought to a tone of animation that I could not but watch with interest, knowing what was in store for him from the bland encouragement, and Spartan deference in attention, with fascinating conversational eloquence, that he was to encounter and receive.... The interview, which stretched into three ‘morning calls’, was the prelude to many after-scenes and saunterings about Caen Wood and its neighborhood; for Keats was suddenly made a familiar of the household, and was always welcomed.”[92]

Hunt’s account of the meeting is as follows:

“I shall never forget the impression made upon me by the exuberant specimens of genuine though young poetry that were laid before me, and the promise of which was seconded by the fine fervid countenance of the writer. We became intimate on the spot, and I found the young poet’s heart as warm as his imagination. We read and we walked together, and used to write verse of an evening upon a given subject. No imaginative pleasure was left untouched by us, or unenjoyed; from the recollections of the bards and patriots of old, to the luxury of a summer rain at our window, or the clicking of the coal in the winter-time. Not long afterwards, having the pleasure of entertaining at dinner Mr. Godwin, Mr. Hazlitt, and Mr. Basil Montagu, I showed the verses of my young friend, and they were pronounced to be as extraordinary as I thought them.”[93]

Leigh Hunt discovered Keats, by no means a small thing, for as he himself has said: “To admire and comment upon the genius that two or three hundred years have applauded, and to discover what will partake of applause two or three hundred years hence, are processes of a very different description.”[94] With the same power of prophetic discernment, writing in 1828, he realized to the full the greatness of Keats and predicted that growth of his fame in the future which has since taken place.[95] Keats’s account of his reception is given in the sonnet Keen fitful gusts are whisp’ring here and there:

“For I am brimfull of the friendliness
That in a little cottage I have found;
Of fair hair’d Milton’s eloquent distress,
And all his love for gentle Lycid drown’d;
Of lovely Laura in her light green dress,
And faithful Petrarch gloriously crowned.”

The date of the introduction of Keats to Hunt has been placed variously from November, 1815, to the end of the year 1816. He says:

“It was not at Hampstead that I first saw Keats. It was in York Buildings, in the New Road (No. 8), where I wrote part of the Indicator—and he resided with me while in Mortimer Terrace, Kentish Town (No. 13), where I concluded it. I mention this for the curious in such things, among whom I am one.”[96]

If this statement were correct, it would make the meeting about two or three years later than has generally been supposed, for Leigh Hunt did not move to York Buildings until 1818, and he did not begin work on the Indicator until October, 1819. Clarke states positively that the meeting took place at Hampstead. From this evidence Mr. Colvin has suggested the early spring of 1816 as the most probable date.[97] What seems better evidence than any that has yet been brought forward is a passage in The Examiner of June 1, 1817, in Hunt’s review of Keats’s Poems of 1817, where he says that the poet is a personal friend whom he announced to the public a short time ago (this allusion can only be to an article in The Examiner of December 1, 1816) and that the friendship dates from “no greater distance of time than the announcement above mentioned. We had published one of his sonnets in our paper,[98] without knowing more of him than of any other anonymous correspondent; but at the period in question a friend brought us one morning some copies in verse, which he said were from the pen of a youth.... We had not read more than a dozen lines when we recognized a young poet indeed.” This seems conclusive evidence that the meeting did not take place until the winter of 1816, for Hunt’s testimony written in 1817, when the circumstance was fresh in his mind is certainly more trustworthy than his impression of it at the time that he revised his Autobiography in 1859 at the age of seventy-five years.

The two men, before they came in contact, had much in common, and Hunt’s influence, while in some cases an inspiring force, more often fostered instincts already existing in Keats. Both possessed by nature a deep love of poetry, color and melody, and both “were given to ‘luxuriating’ somewhat voluptuously over the ‘deliciousness’ of the beautiful in art, books or nature.”[99] At the very beginning of their acquaintance, notwithstanding a disparity in age of eleven years, they were wonderfully drawn to each other. Spenser was their favorite poet. Both had a great love for Chaucer, for Oriental fable and for Chivalric romance, and an unusual knowledge of Greek myth. But even at the height of their intimacy, the friendship seems to have remained more intellectual than personal, a fact due no doubt to Keats’s reserve and Hunt’s “incuriousness.”[100] Except for this drawback Hunt considered the friendship ideal. He says: “Mr. Keats and I were old friends of the old stamp, between whom there was no such thing as obligation, except the pleasure of it. He enjoyed the privilege of greatness with all whom he knew, rendering it delightful to be obliged by him, and an equal, but not a greater delight, to oblige. It was a pleasure to his friends to have him in their houses, and he did not grude it.”[101]

Through Hunt, Keats was introduced to a circle of literary men whose companionship was an important factor in his development, notably Haydon, Godwin, Hazlitt, Shelley, Vincent Novello, Horace Smith, Cornelius Webbe, Basil Montagu, the Olliers, Barry Cornwall, and later Wordsworth.

For about a year following the meeting of the two, Hunt undoubtedly exerted the strongest influence of any living man over the young poet. Severn said that Keats’s introduction to Hunt wrought a great change in him and “intoxicated him with an excess of enthusiasm which kept by him four or five years.”[102] Mr. Forman says that “Charles Cowden Clarke, as his early mentor, Leigh Hunt and Haydon as his most powerful encouragers at the important epoch of adolescence, must be credited with much of the active influence that took Keats out of the path to a medical practitioner’s life, and set his feet in the devious paths of literature.”[103] Keats’s interest in his profession had decreased as his knowledge and love of poetry grew. With the publication of his Poems in 1817, and his retirement in April of that year from London to the Isle of Wight “to be alone and improve” himself and to continue Endymion, his decision was finally made in favor of a literary life. Hunt’s aid at this time took the practical form of publishing Keats’s poems in The Examiner and of drawing the attention of the public to them by comments and reviews. Whether he ever paid Keats for any of his contributions to his periodicals is not known.[104] Through the influence of Hunt the Ollier brothers were induced to undertake the publication of Keats’s first volume of poems. It is dedicated to Leigh Hunt in the sonnet Glory and loveliness have passed away. The sestet refers directly to him:

“But there are left delights as high as these,
And I shall ever bless my destiny,
That in a time, when under pleasant trees
Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free
A leafy luxury, seeing I could please
With these poor offerings, a man like thee.”[105]

Hunt replied in the sonnet To John Keats, quoted here in full because of its inacessibility:

“’Tis well you think me truly one of those,
Whose sense discerns the loveliness of things;
For surely as I feel the bird that sings
Behind the leaves, or dawn as it up grows,
Or the rich bee rejoicing as he goes,
Or the glad issue of emerging springs,
Or overhead the glide of a dove’s wings,
Or turf, or trees, or midst of all, repose.
And surely as I feel things lovelier still,
The human look, and the harmonious form
Containing woman, and the smile in ill,
And such a heart as Charles’s wise and warm,—
As surely as all this, I see ev’n now,
Young Keats, a flowering laurel on your brow.”[106]

In 1820, Hunt dedicated his translation of Tasso’s Aminta to Keats.

In spite of a eulogistic article by Hunt running in The Examiners of June 1, July 6 and 13, 1817, and other notices in some of the provincial papers, the Poems sold not very well at first, and later, not at all.[107] Praise from the editor of The Examiner, although offered with the kindest intentions in the world, was about the worst thing that could possibly have happened to Keats, for, politically and poetically, Leigh Hunt was most unpopular at this time;[108] and it was noised abroad that Keats too was a radical in politics and in religion, a disciple of the apostate in his attack on the established and accepted creed of poetry. As a matter of fact, Keats’s interest in politics decreased as his knowledge of poetry increased, although, “as a party-badge and sign of ultra-liberalism,” he, like Hunt, Byron and Shelley continued to wear the soft turn-down collars in contrast to the stiff collars and enormous cravats of the time.[109] In religion Keats vented his dislike of sect and creed on the Kirk of Scotland, as Hunt had on the Methodists. His “simply-sensuous Beauty-worship” Palgrave attributes to the “moral laxity” of Hunt.[110] Unless Palgrave, like Haydon, refers to Hunt’s unorthodoxy in matters of church and state, it is difficult to understand on what evidence he bases this statement; in the first place, a charge of moral laxity is not borne out by the recorded facts of Hunt’s life, but only by such untrustworthy tradition as still lingers in the public mind from the Cockney School articles of Blackwood’s and the Quarterly. Carlyle said that he was of “most exemplary private deportment.”[111] Byron, Shelley and Lamb testified to his virtuous life. In the second place, a close comparison of the works of the two now leads one to conclude that “simply-sensuous Beauty-worship” existed to a much higher degree in Keats than in Hunt, and that so strong an innate tendency would have developed without outward stimulus from any one. While both men sought the good and worshipped the beautiful, Keats, unlike Hunt, recognized somewhat “the burthen and the mystery” of human life.

Keats, during his stay in the Isle of Wight and a visit to Oxford with Bailey in the spring and summer of 1817, worked on Endymion, finishing it in the fall. The letters exchanged between him and Hunt during his absence were friendly, but a feeling of coolness began before his return. In a letter from Margate May 10, 1817, there is a curiously obscure reference to the Nymphs:

“How have you got on among them? How are the Nymphs? I suppose they have led you a fine dance. Where are you now?—in Judea, Cappadocia, or the parts of Lybia about Cyrene? Stranger from ‘Heaven, Hues, and Prototypes’ I wager you have given several new turns to the old saying, ‘Now the maid was fair and pleasant to look on,’ as well as made a little variation in ‘Once upon a time.’ Perhaps, too, you have rather varied, ‘Here endeth the first lesson.’ Thus I hope you have made a horseshoe business of ‘unsuperfluous life,’ ‘faint bowers’ and fibrous roots.”[112]

A letter written by Haydon to Keats, dated May 11, 1817, warned Keats against Hunt, and, with others of its kind, was possibly the insidious beginning of the coolness which followed: “Beware, for God’s sake of the delusions and sophistications that are ripping up the talents and morality of our friend! He will go out of the world the victim of his own weakness and the dupe of his own self-delusions, with the contempt of his enemies and the sorrow of his friends, and the cause he undertook to support injured by his own neglect of character.”[113] A letter in reply from Keats, written the day after he wrote the passage about the Nymphs, accounts for its dissembling tone:

“I wrote to Hunt yesterday—scarcely know what I said in it. I could not talk about Poetry in the way I should have liked for I was not in humour with either his or mine. His self delusions are very lamentable—they have inticed him into a Situation which I should be less eager after than that of a galley Slave,—what you observe thereon is very true must be in time [sic].

Perhaps it is a self delusion to say so—but I think I could not be deceived in the manner that Hunt is—may I die to-morrow if I am to be. There is no greater Sin after the seven deadly than to flatter oneself into the idea of being a great Poet....”[114]

To judge from the testimony of his brother George it is not surprising that Keats succumbed to Haydon’s influence against Hunt: “his nervous, morbid temperament led him to misconstrue the motives of his best friends.”[115] In the last days of his life, his suspicion and bitterness were general. In a letter to Bailey, June, 1818, Keats says: “I have suspected everybody.”[116] January, 1820, he wrote Georgiana Keats, “Upon the whole I dislike mankind.”[117] Haydon may have sincerely believed Hunt’s influence to be injurious because of the latter’s unorthodoxy in matters of religion. He wrote that Keats “could not bring his mind to bear on one object, and was at the mercy of every petty theory that Leigh Hunt’s ingenuity would suggest.... He had a tendency to religion when I first knew him, but Leigh Hunt soon forced it from his mind.... Leigh Hunt was the unhinger of his best dispositions. Latterly, Keats saw Leigh Hunt’s weaknesses. I distrusted his leader, but Keats would not cease to visit him, because he thought Hunt ill-used. This shows Keats’s goodness of heart.”[118] It is not to be regretted that Haydon lessened Keats’s estimate of Hunt’s literary infallibility, for his influence was most injurious in that direction; but it is to be regretted that he impugned a friendship in which Hunt was certainly sincere and by which Keats had benefited.

In September, just before Keats’s return, he seems somewhat mollified and writes to John Hamilton Reynolds of Leigh Hunt’s pleasant companionship; he has failings, “but then his make-ups are very good.”[119]

On his return to Hampstead in October, 1817, Keats found affairs among the circle in a very bad way.[120]

Everybody “seems at Loggerheads—There’s Hunt infatuated—there’s Haydon’s picture in statu quo—There’s Hunt walks up and down his painting room—criticising every head most unmercifully. There’s Horace Smith tired of Hunt. ‘The web of our life is of mingled yarn.’... I am quite disgusted with literary men and will never know another except Wordsworth—no not even Byron. Here is an instance of the friendship of such. Haydon and Hunt have known each other many years.... Haydon says to me, Keats, don’t show your lines to Hunt on any Account or he will have done half for you—so it appears Hunt wishes it to be thought. When he met Reynolds in the Theatre, John told him that I was getting on to the completion of 4,000 lines—Ah! says Hunt, had it not been for me they would have been 7,000! If he will say this to Reynolds, what would he to other people? Haydon received a Letter a little while back on this subject from some Lady—which contains a caution to me, thro’ him, on the subject—now is not all this a most paultry (sic) thing to think about?”[121]

Hunt had tried to persuade Keats not to write a long poem. Keats wrote of this: “Hunt’s dissuasion was of no avail[122]—I refused to visit Shelley that I might have my own unfettered scope; and after all, I shall have the reputation of Hunt’s élève. His corrections and amputations will by the knowing ones be traced in the poem.”[123]

During 1818, Leigh Hunt in his critical work remained silent concerning Keats, probably because of his sincere disapproval of Endymion and secondly, because he realized that his praise would be injurious. The attacks on Hunt in Blackwood’s and the Quarterly had foreshadowed an attack of the same virulent kind on Keats. The realization came with the publication of Endymion. The article on “Johnny Keats,” fourth of the series on the Cockney School in Blackwood’s Magazine, appeared almost simultaneously with his return from Scotland, and the one in the Quarterly in September of the same year. These will be discussed in a later chapter. Suspicions of neglect on the part of Hunt murmured in Keats’s mind like a discordant undertone, although the friendship continued as warm as ever on Hunt’s part. Keats was passive, without, however, the old sense of dependence and trust. December 28, 1817, he writes to his brothers of the “drivelling egotism” of The Examiner article on the obsoletion of Christmas gambols and pastimes.[124] In a journal letter written to George Keats and his wife in Louisville during December and January, 1819, the old liking has become almost repugnance: “Hunt keeps on in his old way—I am completely tired of it all. He has lately published a Pocket Book called the literary Pocket-Book—full of the most sickening stuff you can imagine”;[125] yet Keats suffered himself to become a contributor to this same book with two sonnets, The Human Seasons and To Ailsa Rock. Again in the same letter:

“The night we went to Novello’s there was a complete set-to of Mozart and punning. I was so completely tired of it that if I were to follow my own inclinations I should never meet any of that set again, not even Hunt who is certainly a pleasant fellow in the main when you are with him, but in reality he is vain, egotistical, and disgusting in matters of taste and morals. He understands many a beautiful thing; but then, instead of giving other minds credit for the same degree of perception as he himself possesses,—he begins an explanation in such a curious manner that our taste and self-love is offended continually. Hunt does one harm by making fine things petty and beautiful things hateful. Through him I am indifferent to Mozart, I care not for white Busts—and many a glorious thing when associated with him becomes a nothing.”[126]

Continuing in the same strain:

“I will have no more Wordsworth or Hunt in particular. Why should we be of the tribe of Manasseh when we can wander with Esau? Why should we kick against the Pricks, when we can walk on Roses?... I don’t mean to deny Wordsworth’s grandeur and Hunt’s merit, but I mean to say that we need not to be teazed with grandeur and merit, when we can have them uncontaminated and unobtrusive. Let us have the old Poets and Robin Hood.”[127]

And again:

“Hunt has damned Hampstead and masks and sonnets and Italian tales. Wordsworth has damned the lakes—Milman has damned the old drama—West has damned wholesale. Peacock has damned satire—Ollier has damned Music—Hazlitt has damned the bigoted and the blue-stockinged; how durst the Man?!”[128]

A parody on the conversation of Hunt’s set, in which he is the principal actor, carries with it a ridicule that is unkinder than the bitterness of dislike, and difficult to reconcile with the fact that Keats at the same time preserved the semblance of friendship.[129]

“Scene, a little Parlour—Enter Hunt—Gattie—Hazlitt—Mrs. Novello—Ollier. Gattie:—Ha! Hunt got into your new house? Ha! Mrs. Novello: seen Altam and his wife? Mrs. N.: Yes (with a grin) it’s Mr. Hunt’s isn’t it? Gattie: Hunt’s? no, ha! Mr. Ollier, I congratulate you upon the highest compliment I ever heard paid to the Book. Mr. Hazlitt, I hope you are well. Hazlitt:—Yes Sir, no Sir—Mr. Hunt (at the Music) ‘La Biondina’ etc. Hazlitt, did you ever hear this?—“La Biondina” &c. Hazlitt: O no Sir—I never—Ollier:—Do Hunt give it us over again—divine—Gattie:—divino—Hunt when does your Pocket-Book come out—Hunt:—‘What is this absorbs me quite?’ O we are spinning on a little, we shall floridize soon I hope. Such a thing was very much wanting—people think of nothing but money getting—now for me I am rather inclined to the liberal side of things. I am reckoned lax in my Christian principles, etc., etc., etc., etc.”[130]

Such a dual attitude in Keats can be explained only by a dual feeling in his mind, for it is impossible to believe him capable of deliberate deceit. He may have realized Hunt’s affectation and superficiality and “disgusting taste”; he was probably swayed by Haydon to distrust Hunt’s morals; the suspicions planted by Haydon concerning Endymion rankled; but at the same time Hunt’s charm of personality, and the assistance and encouragement given in the first days of their friendship, formed a bond difficult to break. Of Leigh Hunt’s attitude there can be no doubt, for through his long life of more than threescore years and ten, filled with many friendships of many kinds, he can in no instance be charged with insincerity. There is no conclusive proof on record to show him deserving of the insinuations which Keats believed in respect to Endymion, for Haydon is not trustworthy, and the opinion of a lady given through Haydon may be dismissed on the same grounds.[131] Reynolds’ testimony is not damaging in itself, and in the absence of facts to the contrary may have been wrongly construed by Keats. To the charges against himself, Leigh Hunt has replied in the following passage, “affecting and persuasive in its unrestrained pathos of remonstrance”:[132]

“an irritable morbidity appears even to have driven his suspicions to excess; and this not only with regard to the acquaintance whom he might reasonably suppose to have had some advantages over him, but to myself, who had none; for I learned the other day, with extreme pain, such as I am sure so kind and reflecting a man as Mr. Monckton Milnes would not have inflicted on me could he have foreseen it, that Keats at one period of his intercourse suspected Shelley and myself of a wish to see him undervalued! Such are the tricks which constant infelicity can play with the most noble natures. For Shelley, let Adonais answer. For myself, let every word answer which I uttered about him, living and dead, and such as I now proceed to repeat. I might as well have been told that I wished to see the flowers or the stars undervalued, or my own heart that loved him.”[133]

Hunt’s feeling towards Keats is nowhere better expressed than in his Autobiography: “I could not love him as deeply as I did Shelley. That was impossible. But my affection was only second to the one which I entertained for that heart of hearts.”[134]

Keats’s atonement is contained in the last letter that he ever wrote: “If I recover, I will do all in my power to correct the mistakes made during sickness, and if I should not, all my faults will be forgiven.”[135]

Haydon’s influence over Keats was at its height in 1817 and 1818.[136] His gifts and his enthusiasm, his “fresh magnificence”[137] carried Keats by storm. It was not until about July 1818 that a reaction against Haydon in favor of Hunt set in, brought about by money transactions between Keats and Haydon, and the indifference of the latter in repaying a debt when he knew Keats’s necessity.[138] Keats probably never ceased to feel that Hunt’s influence as a poet had been injurious, as indeed it was, but the relative stability of his two friends adjusted itself after this experience with Haydon. Affairs seem to have been smoothed over with Hunt, and were not disturbed again until a short time before Keats’s departure for Italy, when his morbid suspicions, which even led him to accuse his friend Brown of flirting with Fanny Brawne,[139] seem to have been renewed.

In 1820, Brown, with whom Keats had been living since his brother Tom’s death, went on a second tour to Scotland. Keats, unable to accompany him, took a lodging in Wesleyan Place, Kentish Town, to be near Hunt, who was living in Mortimer Street. Brown says: “It was his choice, during my absence to lodge at Kentish Town, that he might be near his friend, Leigh Hunt, in whose companionship he was ever happy.”[140] In a letter to Fanny Brawne, Keats said Hunt “amuses me very kindly.”[141] It is not likely, judging from this overture, that there had ever been an actual cessation of intercourse, notwithstanding what Keats wrote in his letters; and the act points to a revival of the old feeling on his part. About the twenty-second or twenty-third of June, 1820, Keats left his rooms and moved to Leigh Hunt’s home to be nursed.[142] He remained about seven weeks with the family, when there occurred an unfortunate incident which resulted in his abrupt departure August 12, 1820. A letter of Fanny Brawne’s was delivered to him two days late with the seal broken. The contretemps was due to the misconduct of a servant, but it was interpreted by Keats as treachery on the part of the family. At the moment he would accept no explanations or apologies. He writes of this incident to Fanny Brawne:

“My friends have behaved well to me in every instance but one, and there they have become tattlers, and inquisitors into my conduct: spying upon a secret I would rather die than share it with anybody’s confidence. For this I cannot wish them well, I care not to see any of them again. If I am the Theme, I will not be the Friend of idle Gossips. Good gods what a shame it is our Loves should be put into the microscope of a Coterie. Their laughs should not affect you (I may perhaps give you reasons some day for these laughs, for I suspect a few people to hate me well enough, for reasons I know of, who have pretended a great friendship for me) when in competition with one, who if he should never see you again would make you the Saint of his memory. These Laughers, who do not like you, who envy you for your Beauty, who would have God-bless’d me from you for ever: who were plying me with disencouragements with respect to you eternally. People are revengeful—do not mind them—do nothing but love me.”[143]

In his next letter to her he says:

“I shall never be able to endure any more the society of any of those who used to meet at Elm Cottage and Wentworth Place. The last two years taste like brass upon my Palate.”[144]

The lack of self-control and the distrust seen in these extracts show that Keats was laboring under hallucinations produced by an ill mind and body; the letters from which they have been taken are unnatural, almost terrible, in their passion and rebellion against fate.

Keats moved to the residence of the Brawnes. While he was here the trouble seems to have been smoothed over, for in a letter to Hunt he says: “You will be glad to hear I am going to delay a little at Mrs. Brawne’s. I hope to see you whenever you get time, for I feel really attached to you for your many sympathies with me, and patience at all my lunes.... Your affectionate friend, John Keats.”[145] To Brown he says: “Hunt has behaved very kindly to me”; and again: “The seal-breaking business is over-blown. I think no more of it.”[146] Hunt’s reply is couched in most affectionate terms:

“Giovani [sic] Mio,

“I shall see you this afternoon, and most probably every day. You judge rightly when you think I shall be glad at your putting up awhile where you are, instead of that solitary place. There are humanities in the house; and if wisdom loves to live with children round her knees (the tax-gatherer apart), sick wisdom, I think, should love to live with arms about it’s waist. I need not say how you gratify me by the impulse that led you to write a particular sentence in your letter, for you must have seen by this time how much I am attached to yourself.

“I am indicating at as dull a rate as a battered finger-post in wet weather. Not that I am ill: for I am very well altogether. Your affectionate Friend, Leigh Hunt.”[147]

This was probably the last letter written by him to Keats. In September Keats went to Rome with Severn to escape the hardships of the winter climate, after having declined an invitation from Shelley to visit him at Pisa. In the same month, Hunt published an affectionate farewell to him in The Indicator. An announcement of his death appeared in The Examiner of March 25, 1821. The story of the personal relations of the two men could not be better closed than with the words of Hunt written March 8, 1821, to Severn in Rome when he believed Keats still alive:

“If he can bear to hear of us, pray tell him; but he knows it already, and can put it into better language than any man. I hear that he does not like to be told that he may get better; nor is it to be wondered at, considering his firm persuasion that he shall not survive. He can only regard it as a puerile thing, and an insinuation that he shall die. But if his persuasion should happen to be no longer so strong, or if he can now put up with attempts to console him, tell him of what I have said a thousand times, and what I still (upon my honour) think always, that I have seen too many instances of recovery from apparently desperate cases of consumption not to be in hope to the very last. If he still cannot bear to hear this, tell him—tell that great poet and noblehearted man—that we shall all bear his memory in the most precious part of our hearts, and that the world shall bow their heads to it, as our loves do. Or if this, again, will trouble his spirit, tell him that we shall never cease to remember and love him; and that, Christian or infidel, the most sceptical of us has faith enough in the high things that nature puts into our heads, to think all who are of one accord in mind and heart are journeying to one and the same place, and shall unite somewhere or other again, face to face, mutually conscious, mutually delighted.”[148]

The literary relations of Keats and Hunt will be considered under two heads; first, the criticism of Keats’s writings by Hunt; and second, his direct influence upon them.

On first looking into Chapman’s Homer in The Examiner of December 1st, 1816, was embodied in an article entitled “Young Poets.” It was the first notice of Keats to appear in print and is in part as follows:

“The last of these young aspirants whom we have met with, and who promise to help the new school to revive Nature and

‘To put a spirit of youth in everything,’—

is we believe, the youngest of them all, and just of age. His name is John Keats. He has not yet published anything except in a newspaper, but a set of his manuscripts was handed us the other day, and fairly surprised us with the truth of their ambition, and ardent grappling with Nature.”

In Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries, the last line of the same sonnet—

“Silent upon a peak in Darien”—

is called “a basis of gigantic tranquillity.”[149]

Leigh Hunt’s review of the Poems of 1817[150] was kind and discriminating. He writes characteristically of the first poem, I stood tiptoe, that it “consists of a piece of luxury in a rural spot”; of the epistles and sonnets, that they “contain strong evidences of warm and social feelings.” This comment is quite characteristic of Hunt. He was as fond of finding “warm and social feelings” in the poetry of others as of putting them into his own. In his anxiety he sometimes found them when they did not exist. He continues: “The best poem is certainly the last and the longest, entitled Sleep and Poetry. It originated in sleeping in a room adorned with busts and pictures [Hunt’s library], and is a striking specimen of the restlessness of the young poetical appetite, obtaining its food by the very desire of it, and glancing for fit subjects of creation ‘from earth to heaven.’ Nor do we like it the less for an impatient, and as it may be thought by some irreverend [sic] assault upon the late French school of criticism[151] and monotony.” But Hunt did not allow his affection for Keats or his approval of Keats’s poetical doctrine to blunt his critical acumen. In summarizing he says: “The very faults of Mr. Keats arise from a passion for beauties, and a young impatience to vindicate them; and as we have mentioned these, we shall refer to them at once. They may be comprised in two;—first, a tendency to notice everything too indiscriminately, and without an eye to natural proportion and effect; and second, a sense of the proper variety of versification without a due consideration of its principles.” In conclusion, the beauties “outnumber the faults a hundred fold” and “they are of a nature decidedly opposed to what is false and inharmonious. Their characteristics indeed are a fine ear, a fancy and imagination at will, and an intense feeling of external beauty in its most natural and least inexpressible simplicity.”

Hunt was disappointed with Endymion and did not hesitate to say so. Keats writes to his brothers:

“Leigh Hunt I showed my 1st book to—he allows it not much merit as a whole; says it is unnatural and made ten objections to it in the mere skimming over. He says the conversation is unnatural and too high-flown for Brother and Sister—says it should be simple, forgetting do ye mind that they are both overshadowed by a supernatural Power, and of force could not speak like Francesca in the Rimini. He must first prove that Caliban’s poetry is unnatural. This with me completely overturns his objections. The fact is he and Shelley are hurt, and perhaps justly, at my not having showed them the affair officiously (sic); and from several hints I have had they appear much disposed to dissect and anatomize any trip or slip I may have made.—But who’s afraid? Aye! Tom! Demme if I am.”[152]

Leigh Hunt expressed himself thus in 1828: “Endymion, it must be allowed was not a little calculated to perplex the critics. It was a wilderness of sweets, but it was truly a wilderness; a domain of young, luxuriant, uncompromising poetry.”[153]

La Belle Dame sans Merci, which appeared first in The Indicator,[154] was accompanied with an introduction by Hunt, who says that it was suggested by Alain Chartier’s poem of the same title and “that the union of the imagination and the real is very striking throughout, particularly in the dream. The wild gentleness of the rest of the thoughts and of the music are alike old, and they are alike young.” The Indicator of August 2 and 9, 1820, contained a review of the volume of 1820. The part dealing with philosophy in poetry is of more than passing interest:

“We wish that for the purpose of his story he had not appeared to give in to the commonplace of supposing that Apollonius’s sophistry must always prevail, and that modern experiment has done a deadly thing to poetry by discovering the nature of the rainbow, the air, etc.; that is to say, that the knowledge of natural science and physics, by showing us the nature of things, does away the imaginations that once adorned them. This is a condescension to a learned vulgarism, which so excellent a poet as Mr. Keats ought not to have made. The world will always have fine poetry, so long as it has events, passions, affections, and a philosophy that sees deeper than this philosophy. There will be a poetry of the heart, as long as there are tears and smiles: there will be a poetry of the imagination, as long as the first causes of things remain a mystery. A man who is no poet, may think he is none, as soon as he finds out the first causes of the rainbow; but he need not alarm himself:—he was none before.”[155]

Much the same line of discussion is reported of the conversation at Haydon’s “immortal dinner,” December 28, 1817, when Keats and Lamb denounced Sir Isaac Newton and his demolition of the things of the imagination, Keats saying he “destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism.”[156] The pictorial features of the Eve of St. Agnes were particularly admired by Hunt, as one might be led to expect from the decorative detail of his own narrative poetry. The portrait of “Agnes” (sic for Madeline) is said to be “remarkable for its union of extreme richness and good taste” and “affords a striking specimen of the sudden and strong maturity of the author’s genius. When he wrote Endymion he could not have resisted doing too much. To the description before me, it would be a great injury either to add or to diminish. It falls at once gorgeously and delicately upon us, like the colours of the painted glass.” Of the description of the casement window, Hunt asks “Could all the pomp and graces of aristocracy with Titian’s and Raphael’s aid to boot, go beyond the rich religion of this picture, with its ‘twilight saints’ and its ‘scutcheons blushing with the blood of queens’?” Elsewhere he says that “Persian Kings would have filled a poet’s mouth with gold” for such poetry. Hunt calls Hyperion[157] “a fragment, a gigantic one, like a ruin in the desert, or the bones of the mastodon. It is truly of a piece with its subject, which is the downfall of the elder gods.” Later, in Imagination and Fancy, Hunt declared that Keats’s greatest poetry is to be found in Hyperion. His opinion of the whole is thus summed up:

“Mr. Keats’s versification sometimes reminds us of Milton in his blank verse, and sometimes of Chapman both in his blank verse and in his rhyme; but his faculties, essentially speaking, though partaking of the unearthly aspirations and abstract yearnings of both these poets, are altogether his own. They are ambitious, but less directly so. They are more social, and in the finer sense of the word, sensual, than either. They are more coloured by the modern philosophy of sympathy and natural justice. Endymion, with all its extraordinary powers, partook of the faults of youth, though the best ones; but the reader of Hyperion and these other stories would never guess that they were written at twenty.[158] The author’s versification is now perfected, the exuberances of his imagination restrained, and a calm power, the surest and loftiest of all power, takes place of the impatient workings of the younger god within him. The character of his genius is that of energy and voluptuousness, each able at will to take leave of the other, and possessing in their union, a high feeling of humanity not common to the best authors who can combine them. Mr. Keats undoubtedly takes his seat with the oldest and best of our living poets.”[159]

The more important division of the literary relations of the two men is the direct influence of Hunt’s work upon that of Keats.

On Keats’s prose style Hunt’s influence was very slight and can be quickly dismissed. At one time Keats, affected perhaps by Hunt’s example, thought of becoming a theatrical critic. He did actually contribute four articles to The Champion. Keats’s favorite of Hunt’s essays, A Now, contains several passages composed by Keats. Mr. Forman considers that “the greater part of the paper is so much in the taste and humor of Keats” that he is justified in including it in his edition of Keats. He has also called attention to a passage in Keats’s letter to Haydon of April 10, 1818, which bears a striking likeness to Hunt’s occasional essay style: “The Hedges by this time are beginning to leaf—Cats are becoming more vociferous—Young Ladies who wear Watches are always looking at them. Women about forty-five think the Season very backward.”

The Poems of 1817 show Hunt’s influences in spirit, diction and versification. There are epistles and sonnets in the manner of Hunt. I stood tiptoe upon a little hill opens the volume with a motto from the Story of Rimini. The Specimen of an Induction and Calidore so nearly approach Hunt’s work in manner, that they might easily be mistaken for it. Sleep and Poetry attacks French models as Hunt had previously done. The colloquial style of certain passages is significant of Hunt’s influence upon the poems. A few examples are:

“To peer about upon variety.”[160]
“Or by the bowery clefts, and leafy shelves
Guess where the jaunty streams refresh themselves.”[161]
“The ripples seem right glad to reach those cresses.”[162]
“... you just now are stooping
To pick up the keepsake intended for me.”[163]
“Of this fair world, and all its gentle livers.”[164]
“The evening weather was so bright, and clear,
That men of health were of unusual cheer.”[165]
“Linger awhile upon some bending planks
That lean against a streamlet’s rushy banks,
And watch intently Nature’s gentle doings:
They will be found softer than the ring-dove’s cooings.”[166]
“The lamps that from the high roof’d wall were pendant
And gave the steel a shining quite transcendent.”[167]
“Or on the wavy grass outstretch’d supinely,
Pry ’mong the stars, to strive to think divinely.”[168]

The following are infelicitous passages reflecting Leigh Hunt’s bad taste, especially in the description of physical appearance, or of situations involving emotion:

“... what amorous and fondling nips
They gave each other’s cheeks.”[169]
“... some lady sweet
Who cannot feel for cold her tender feet.”[170]
“Rein in the swelling of his ample might.”[171]
“Nor will a bee buzz round two swelling peaches.”[172]
“... What a kiss,
What gentle squeeze he gave each lady’s hand!
How tremblingly their delicate ankles spann’d!
Into how sweet a trance his soul was gone,
While whisperings of affection
Made him delay to let their tender feet
Come to the earth; with an incline so sweet
From their low palfreys o’er his neck they bent:
And whether there were tears of languishment,
Or that the evening dew had pearl’d their tresses,
He felt a moisture on his cheek and blesses
With lips that tremble, and with glistening eye,
All the soft luxury
That nestled in his arms.”[173]
“... Add too, the sweetness
Of thy honey’d voice; the neatness
Of thine ankle, lightly turned:
With those beauties, scarce discern’d
Kept with such sweet privacy,
That they seldom meet the eye
Of the little loves that fly
Round about with eager pry.”[174]

Descriptive passages in the Huntian style are not infrequent: the opening lines from the Imitation of Spenser[175] are much nearer to Hunt than to Spenser.

“Now morning from her orient chamber came,
And her first footsteps touched a verdant hill,
Crowning its lawny crest with amber flame,
Silv’ring the untainted gushes of its rill;
Which, pure from mossy beds, did down distil
And after parting beds of simple flowers,
By many streams a little lake did fill,
Which round its marge reflected woven bowers,
And in its middle space, a sky that never lowers.”[176]

These lines of Calidore show a like resemblance:

“He bares his forehead to the cool blue sky,
And smiles at the far clearness all around,
Until his heart is well nigh over wound,
And turns for calmness to the pleasant green
Of easy slopes, and shadowy trees that lean
So elegantly o’er the waters’ brim
And show their blossoms trim.”[177]

A third is:

“Across the lawny fields, and pebbly water.”

Single phrases showing the influence of Hunt[178] are: “airy feel,” “patting the flowing hair,” “A Man of elegance,” “sweet-lipped ladies,” “grateful the incense,” “modest pride,” “a sun-beamy tale of a wreath,” “soft humanity,” “leafy luxury,” “pillowy silkiness,” “swelling apples,” “the very pleasant rout,” “forms of elegance.”

The following passages apparently bear as close a resemblance to each other as it is possible to find by the comparison of individual passages from the works of the two men:

“The sidelong view of swelling leafiness
Which the glad setting sun in gold doth dress”[179]

compare with:

“And every hill, in passing one by one
Gleamed out with twinkles of the golden sun:
For leafy was the road, with tall array.”[180]

The Epistles are strikingly like Hunt’s epistles in spirit, diction and metre. Mr. Colvin has pointed out that the one addressed To George Felton Mathew was written in November, 1815, before Keats had met Hunt and before the publication of the latter’s epistles;[181] but Keats may have known them at the time in manuscript through Clarke. The resemblances may also have been due, in part, as in other points of comparison, to an innate similarity of thought and feeling.

That Hunt’s habit of sonneteering and his preference for the Petrarcan form influenced Keats, is attested by the similarity of the latter’s sonnets to Hunt’s in form, subjects, and allusions, and by the direct references[182] to Hunt. On the Grasshopper and the Cricket[183] and To the Nile[184] were written in contest with Hunt. To Spenser is a refusal to comply with Hunt’s request that he should write a sonnet on Spenser.[185] The title of On Leigh Hunt’s Poem, The Story of Rimini[186] speaks for itself.[187]

To put it briefly, the Poems of 1817 show Hunt’s influence in more ways than any equal number of the young poet’s later verses. It is seen in Keats’s subject matter[188] and allusions; in his adoption of a colloquial style and diction; in his absorption of Hunt’s spirit in the treatment of nature and in his attitude toward women; and in his imitation and exaggerated use of the free heroic couplet in Sleep and Poetry, I stood tiptoe, Specimen of an Induction and other poems.

Of the poem Lines on seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair, written in January, 1818, Keats wrote in a letter to Bailey: “I was at Hunt’s the other day, and he surprised me with a real authenticated lock of Milton’s hair. I know you would like what I wrote thereon, so here it is—as they say of a Sheep in a Nursery Book.... This I did at Hunt’s, at his request—perhaps I should have done something better alone and at home.”[189] Leigh Hunt’s three sonnets on the same subject, published in Foliage, have been already spoken of in the preceding chapter.

Endymion shows a decided decrease in the ascendancy of Hunt’s mind over Keats, for the sway of his intellectual supremacy had been shaken before suspicions arose in Keats’s mind as to the disinterestedness of his motives. What influence lingers is seen in the general theory of versification and in the diction, with some trace in matters of taste. A marvellous luxury of imagery, glimpses into the heights and depths of nature, an absorbing love of Greek fable, a deeper infusion of the ideal have superseded what Mr. Colvin has called the “sentimental chirp” of Hunt.[190] Specific passages in Endymion reminiscent of Hunt are rare, but Book III, ll. 23-30 recalls the general descriptive style in the Descent of Liberty and summarizes in a few lines pages of Hunt’s diffuse, spectacular imagery. Once or twice Keats seems to have fallen into the colloquial manner in dialogue:

“But a poor Naiad, I guess not. Farewell!
I have a ditty for my hollow cell.”[191]

Again:

“I own
This may sound strangely: but when, dearest girl,
Thou seest it for my happiness, no pearl
Will trespass down those cheeks. Companion fair!
Wilt be content to dwell with her, to share
This sister’s love with me? Like one resign’d
And bent by circumstance, and thereby blind
In self-commitment, thus that meek unknown:
‘Aye, but a buzzing by my ears has flown,
Of jubilee to Dian:—truth I heard?
Well then, I see there is no little bird.’”[192]

Occasionally there are passages in the bad taste of Hunt, as this example:

“Enchantress! tell me by this soft embrace,
By the most soft completion of thy face,
Those lips, O slippery blisses, twinkling eyes,
And by these tenderest, milky sovereignties—
These tenderest, and by the nectar wine,
The passion—”[193]

Likewise:

“O that I
Were rippling round her dainty fairness now,
Circling about her waist, and striving how
To entice her to a dive! then stealing in
Between her luscious lips and eyelids thin.”[194]

In July, 1820, appeared the volume Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and other Poems. The lingering influence of Hunt is seen in a fondness for the short poetic tale, in the direct and simple narrative style, and in the return in Lamia to the use of the heroic couplet; but that, along with the other poems of the volume, is free from the Huntian eccentricities of manner and diction found in Keats’s earlier works. He had come into his own. In treatment, Lamia is almost faultless in technique and in matters of taste; although Mr. Colvin has pointed out as an exception the first fifteen lines of the second book, which he says have Leigh Hunt’s “affected ease and fireside triviality.”[195] One of the few occurrences of Hunt’s manner is seen in the Eve of St. Agnes.

“Paining with eloquence her balmy side.”[196]

The famous passage in the Eve of St. Agnes describing all manner of luscious edibles is very suggestive of one in Hunt’s Bacchus and Ariadne which enumerates articles of the same kind.[197] It is in this latter poem and in the Story of Rimini that Hunt’s power of description most nearly approximates to that of Keats. In 1831, in the Gentle Armour, Hunt is the imitator of Keats, as Mr. Colvin has already pointed out.[198]

The peculiarities of Keats’s diction are, in the main, two-fold, and may each be traced to a direct influence: first, archaisms in the manner of Spenser[199] and Chatterton; second, colloquialisms and deliberate departures from established usage in the employment and formation of words, in imitation of Leigh Hunt. Keats’s theory so far as he had one, is set forth in a passage in one of his letters: “I shall never become attached to a foreign idiom, so as to put it into my writings. The Paradise Lost, though so fine in itself, is a corruption of our language. It should be kept as it is, unique, a curiosity, a beautiful and grand curosity, the most remarkable production of the world; a northern dialect accommodating itself to Greek and Latin inversions and intonations. The purest English, I think—or what ought to be the purest—is Chatterton’s.”[200]

Keats’s Poems of 1817 show Hunt’s influence in diction more strongly than any of his later works. In the majority of instances, this influence is reflected in the principles of usage rather than in the actual usages, although words and phrases used by Hunt are occasionally found in the writings of Keats. The tendency to a colloquial vocabulary is seen in such words and combinations as jaunty, right glad, balmy pain, leafy luxury,[201] delicious,[202] tasteful, gentle doings, gentle livers, soft floatings, frisky leaps, lawny mantle, patting, busy spirits. Among these words, leafy, balmy, lawny, patting, nest, tiptoe, and variations of “taste” were special favorites with Hunt. A few expressions only of this kind, as “nest,” “honey feel,” “infant’s gums,” are found in Endymion, and almost none at all in the later poems.

Keats used peculiar words with so much greater felicity and in so much greater profusion than Hunt, exceeding in richness and individuality of vocabulary most of the poets of his own time, that one is forced to believe that Spenser’s influence rather than Hunt’s was dominant here. Breaches of taste are confined almost entirely to the Poems of 1817.

Ordinary words used peculiarly include “nips” (they gave each other’s cheeks), “core” (for heart) and “luxury”[203] (with a wrong connotation), nouns and adjectives employed as verbs, and verbs as nouns and adjectives. These devices likewise cannot be credited to Hunt without reservation, since both Spenser and Milton used them; but there is little doubt that in this instance Hunt was an inciting and sustaining influence. Keats resorted to such artifices frequently and continued to do so to the end. Instances of nouns and adjectives employed as verbs are: pennanc’d, luting, passion’d, neighbour’d, syllabling, companion’d, labrynth, anguish’d, poesied, vineyard’d, woof’d, loaned, medicin’d, zon’d, mesh, pleasure, legion’d, companion, green’d, gordian’d, character’d, finn’d, forest’d, tusk’d, monitor. Verbs employed as nouns and adjectives are: shine, which occurs five times, feel, seeing, hush, pry and amaze.

More examples of coined compounds, nouns and adjectives, are to be found in Keats than in Hunt; in his better work as well as in his early productions. A few are: cirque-couchant, milder-mooned, tress-lifting, flitter-winged, silk-pillowed, death-neighing, break-covert, palsy-twitching, high-sorrowful, sea-foamy, amber-fretted, sweet-lipped, lush-leaved.

The last principle is the coining, or choice of, adjectives in y and ing; of adverbs in ly, when, in many instances, adjectives and adverbs already existed formed on the same stem. The frequent use of words with these weak endings gives a very diffuse effect at times in Keats’s early poems. The following are examples: fenny, fledgy, rushy, lawny, liny, nervy, pipy, paly, palmy, towery, sluicy, surgy, scummy, mealy, sparry, heathy, rooty, slumbery, bowery, bloomy, boundly, palmy, surgy, spermy, ripply, spangly, spherey, orby, oozy, skeyey, clayey, and plashy.[204] Adjectives in ing are: cheering, hushing, breeding, combing, dumpling, sphering, tenting, toying, baaing, far-spooming, peering (hand), searing (hand), shelving, serpenting. Adverbs are: scantly, elegantly, refreshingly, freshening (lave), hoveringly, greyly, cooingly, silverly, refreshfully, whitely, drowningly, wingedly, sighingly, windingly, bearingly.

These statements are not very conclusive proof of the frequent occurrences of the same words in the poems of the two men. They are questionable even in regard to the principles of usage themselves, since poets of the same period or young poets may possess the same tendencies. Yet in the light of their relations already discussed the similarity of a number of principles seems convincing proof that Hunt influenced Keats considerably in the principles of diction in his first volume and occasionally in the selection of individual words; and that Keats never entirely freed himself from some of Hunt’s peculiarities. Shelley, in writing of Hyperion to Mrs. Hunt, spoke of the “bad sort of style which is becoming fashionable among those who fancy that they are imitating Hunt and Wordsworth.”[205] Medwin reported Shelley as saying “We are certainly indebted to the Lakists for a more simple and natural phraseology; but the school that has sprung out of it, have spawned a set of words neither Chaucerian nor Spencerian (sic), words such as ‘gib,’ and ‘flush,’ ‘whiffling,’ ‘perking up,’ ‘swirling,’ ‘lightsome and brightsome’ and hundreds of others.”[206]

Keats, following the lead of Hunt, used the free heroic couplet in several of the 1817 poems with a license even greater than Hunt’s. In Endymion he indulged in further vagaries of rhythm and metre that Hunt never dreamed of and in fact greatly disapproved of. Hunt said that “Endymion had no versification.”[207] In its want of couplet and line units, this is not very far from the truth. Writing of it again in 1828, he says: “The great fault of Endymion next to its unpruned luxuriance, (or before it, rather, for it was not a fault on the right side,) was the wilfulness of its rhymes. The author had a just contempt for the monotonous termination of everyday couplets; he broke up his lines in order to distribute the rhyme properly; but going only upon the ground of his contempt, and not having settled with himself any principles of versification, the very exuberance of his ideas led him to make use of the first rhymes that offered; so that, by a new meeting of effects, the extreme was artificial, and much more obtrusive than the one under the old system. Dryden modestly thought, that a rhyme had often helped him to a thought. Mr. Keats in the tyranny of his wealth, forced his rhymes to help him, whether they would or not; and they obeyed him, in the most singular manner, with equal promptitude and ungainliness.”[208] Endymion has been thought by some critics, to have been written under the metrical influence of Chamberlayne’s Pharronida. In the number of run-on lines and couplets—a scheme nearer blank verse than the couplet—there is certainly a striking correspondence. Mr. Forman thinks that Keats knew the poem. Mr. Colvin and Mr. De Selincourt can see no real likeness. There is no proof as yet discovered that Keats ever heard of it.

In Lamia, after the extreme reaction in Endymion, Keats approached nearer to the classic form of the couplet used by Dryden, but still with greater freedom in structure than appears in either Dryden or Hunt. From the evidence of Brown it is probable that Keats imitated Dryden directly and not through the medium of Hunt’s work, but it is very likely that Hunt directed him there in the first instance for a model. Mr. Palgrave says of the metre of Lamia that Keats “admirably found and sustained the balance between a blank verse treatment of the ‘Heroic’ and the epigrammatic form carried to such perfection by Pope.”[209] Leigh Hunt said that “the lines seem to take pleasure in the progress of their own beauty like sea nymphs luxuriating through the water.”[210]

In conclusion, Keats’s early and late employment of the couplet was marked always by greater freedom in the use of run-on couplets and lines, and in the handling of the cæsura than Dryden’s or Hunt’s; he was at first slower than Hunt to employ the triplet and the Alexandrine, but he later adopted them in a larger measure; and he introduced the run-on paragraph and the hemistich independently of Hunt.

CHAPTER III

Shelley

Finnerty Case—Correspondence of Hunt and Shelley—Their Political and Religious Sympathy—Hunt’s Defense of Shelley—Hunt’s Italian Journey—Shelley’s Death—Hunt’s Criticism—Literary Influence—Shelley’s Estimate of Hunt.

The friendship of Shelley and Leigh Hunt is the simple story of an intimacy founded on a common endowment of independence of thought and of capacity for self-sacrifice. Although both were sensitive and shrinking by nature, and preferred to dwell in an isolated world of books and dreams, yet for the sake of abstract principles and for love of humanity, both expended much time and endured much pain in the arena of public strife.

In The Examiners of February 18 and 24, 1811, appeared articles by Hunt on the Finnerty case. Peter Finnerty, Hunt’s successor as editor of The Statesman, had been prosecuted and imprisoned on the charge of libelling Lord Castlereagh. Hunt’s defense drew Shelley’s attention to the case and may have inspired him, it has been suggested, to write his Political Essay on the Existing State of Things. The proceeds went to Finnerty.[211] On March 2 Shelley subscribed to the Finnerty fund and, on the same day, wrote Hunt, whom he had never met, a letter from Oxford, congratulating him on his acquittal from a third charge of libel and proposing that an association should be formed to establish “rational liberty,” to resist the enemies of justice, and to protect each other.[212]

Shelley’s political creed was, in the main, that of William Godwin, with an admixture of Holbach, Volney and Rousseau at first hand.[213] In English philosophic literature he knew Berkeley, Hume, Reid and Locke. His watchword was the cry of the French Revolution, liberty, equality and fraternity, to be gained, not by violence and bloodshed, but by a steady and unyielding resistance of the masses against the corrupt institutions of church and state. Like Godwin, he believed man capable of his own redemption and, with tradition and tyranny overthrown and reason and nature enthroned, he hoped for universal justice and ultimate perfectibility of mankind. His poetry and his prose represent a development from the impassioned and imaginative enthusiasm of an uncompromising youth, who would single-handed revolutionize the world in the twinkling of an eye, to the saner hope of a man who took somewhat into account the necessarily gradual nature of ethical evolution. His chief fallacy lay in the failure to recognize evil as an inherent force in human nature and to acknowledge sect and state, to which he attributed the origin of all error, as inventions of man’s ingenuity. Neither did he perceive the necessity of certain restrictions on the individual for the preservation of law and order. He believed in no distinctions of rank except those based on individual talent and virtue. He wrote in 1811: “I am no aristocrat, nor ‘crat’ at all, but vehemently long for the time when men may dare to live in accordance with Nature and Reason—in consequence with Virtue, to which I firmly believe that Religion and its establishments, Polity and its establishments, are the formidable though destructible barriers.”[214] Shelley knew of Leigh Hunt first as a political writer of considerable importance. In this respect he never ceased to admire him or to be influenced by The Examiner in the campaign against government corruption. Yet his own equipment of mind and training, visionary as his theories seem, gave him a power of speculation and grasp of situation that ignored the limitations of time and space, while Hunt, with his narrower view, never got beyond the petty and immediate details of one nation or of one age.

The social improvements which Shelley advocated were Catholic Emancipation, brought about later, as has been pointed out by Symonds, by the very means which Shelley foresaw and prophesied; reform of parliamentary representation[215] similar to that carried into effect in 1832, 1867 and 1882; freedom of the press[216] and repeal of the union of Great Britain and Ireland; the abolition of capital punishment and of war.[217] During the fourteen years of Hunt’s editorship, among the reforms for which he fought in The Examiner were the first three of these measures. He denounced capital punishment and war in the same paper and later in his poem Captain Sword and Captain Pen.[218]

Shelley’s moral code was based on an idealized sense of justice, and was a kind of “natural piety.”[219] With one marked exception, he seems to have been true to the pursuit of it, both in his standards of conduct and in his relations with others. His life was a model of generosity, purity of thought, and unselfish devotion. Hunt reported Shelley as having said: “What a divine religion might be found out, if charity were really the principle of it, instead of faith.”[220] He was atheist only in the sense of discarding the dogmas of theology and of superstition, and in his spirit of scientific inquiry. He did not deny the existence in nature of an all-pervading spirit. Hunt thought the popular misconception of Shelley’s opinions was due to his misapplication of the names of the Deity and to his identification of them with vulgar superstitions. Of Shelley’s attitude he wrote: “His want of faith in the letter, and his exceeding faith in the spirit of Christianity, formed a comment, the one on the other, very formidable to those who chose to forget what Scripture itself observes on that point.”[221] Whether or not Shelley believed in immortality is still a vexed question and is likely to remain so, since he had not reached convictions sufficiently stable to permit a formal statement on his part. Many of the passages in Adonais would lead one to believe that he did; certainly he did, like Hunt, cling to the idea of the persistence, in some form or other, of the good and the beautiful. The close conformity of their views is seen in the latter’s two sonnets in Foliage[222] addressed to Shelley, where the poet condemns the degrading notions so prevalent concerning the Deity and celebrates the Spirit of Beauty and Goodness in all things. But, in religion as in politics, Shelley was bolder and more speculative than Hunt.

The fine of £1,000 and imprisonment of the Hunt brothers in 1813 drew from Shelley a vehement protest. In a letter to Hogg[223] he lamented the inadequacy of Lord Brougham’s defense and fairly boiled with indignation at “the horrible injustice and tyranny of the sentence” and pronounced Hunt “a brave, a good, and an enlightened man.” He started a subscription with twenty pounds, and later he must have offered to pay the entire fine, for Hunt recorded in his Autobiography that Shelley had made him “a princely offer,”[224] which he declined, as he did not need it. The offer was actuated solely by a hatred of oppression, for the two men had little or no personal knowledge of each other at the time.

It is impossible to decide the exact date of their first meeting. Hunt says that it took place before the indictment for libel on the Prince Regent.[225] This evidence would make it fall sometime between March, 1812, the date of Shelley’s letter mentioned above, and February, 1813, the beginning of the incarceration. But a letter from Shelley to Hunt dated December 7, 1813, demanding if he had made the statement that Milton had died an atheist, from its very formal tone, leads one to believe that they had not met up to that time and that Hunt, writing from memory many years afterwards, made a mistake. Thornton Hunt gives as the immediate cause of the two men coming together, Shelley’s application to Mr. Rowland Hunter, the publisher and stepfather of Mrs. Hunt, for advice regarding the publication of a poem. He referred Shelley to Leigh Hunt. The next meeting was in Surrey Street Gaol. Thornton Hunt, in a delightful reminiscence of Shelley,[226] says that he had no recollection of him among his father’s visitors in prison, but he remembered perfectly the latter’s description of his “angelic” appearance, his classic thoughts, and his dreams for the emancipation of mankind. The real intimacy began after Shelley’s return from the continent in 1816 when Shelley, in search of a house before he settled at Marlow, was the guest of Hunt at Hampstead during a part of December.[227] A close companionship followed uninterruptedly for two years until Shelley went to Italy, and there are recorded in the letters and journals of each many pleasant evenings at Hampstead and at Marlow, filled with poetry and music, with talks on art and trials of wit, with dinners and theater parties. Mary Shelley and Mrs. Hunt became as great friends as their husbands.

When Harriet committed suicide and Shelley went up to London to institute proceedings for possession of their children, Hunt remained constantly with him and gave him as much sympathy and support as it is possible for one fellow-being to extend to another whom all the world has deserted.[228] He attended the Chancery suit and stated Shelley’s position in The Examiner.[229] This sympathy and support, given Shelley in his hour of greatest need and desolation, have never been sufficiently valued in a comparative estimate of the relative indebtedness of the two men. If Shelley gave freely of his money, Hunt, devoid of worldly goods, gave unstintingly, to the detriment of his reputation, of those things which money cannot purchase. That he incurred the displeasure of men in power, and ran the risk of being misunderstood by the public in befriending Shelley, did not deter him for an instant.

During 1817 Shelley made the acquaintance, through Hunt, of the Cockney circle, including Keats, Reynolds, Hazlitt, Brougham, Novello and Horace Smith. The last-named became one of Shelley’s most trusted friends.[230] These new friends enlarged his list of acquaintances considerably, for up to this time he seems to have had no friends except Godwin, Hogg and Peacock.

In the early spring of 1818, the Shelleys went to Italy, melancholy with the thought of separation from the Hunts.[231] The letters from Shelley to Hunt during the next four years form an important part of Shelley’s correspondence.

The part played by Shelley in the invitation extended to Hunt to join Lord Byron and himself in Italy and to become one of the editors of a periodical will be treated minutely in the next chapter. It is sufficient here to say that he was actuated by a desire to better Hunt’s finances and to enjoy his society—a pleasure he had been pining for ever since they had been separated, and, in case of a return to England, regarded as the one joy “among all the other sources of regret and discomfort with which England abounds for me.... Shaking hands with you is worth all the trouble; the rest is clear loss.”[232] Further, he knew that Hunt longed for Italy, and he wished to help Byron in the cause of liberalism. To bring both ends about, he shouldered a burden that he was ill able to bear. An annuity of £200 for the support of his two children, an annuity of £100 to Peacock, perpetual demand for large sums from Godwin, occasional assistance rendered the Gisbornes, partial support of Jane Claremont, loans to Byron, and the support of his family, were the drains already upon him—met, in the main by money raised on post obits at half value.

The amount of Hunt’s indebtedness to Shelley can be estimated only approximately. The first reference to a financial transaction between them after the “princely offer”[233] is to be found in Mary Shelley’s letter of December 6, 1816, in which she wondered that Hunt had not acknowledged the “receipt of so large a sum.” Professor Dowden thinks this may be an allusion to Shelley’s response to an appeal for the poor of Spitalfields which had appeared in The Examiner five days previously.[234] Shelley’s offers to Hunt to borrow £100 from Byron[235] and to stand security for a loan from Charles Cowden Clarke,[236] and an attempt to borrow from Samuel Rogers[237] are not developed by any further facts, but it is necessary to take note of them in a general estimate. Before leaving England, Shelley arranged with Ollier for a loan of £100 for Hunt, a debt which was later liquidated by the sale of the Literary Pocket Book.[238] At some time before leaving England, Shelley also gave Hunt in one year £1,400[239] for the liquidation of his debts, which money was, Medwin says, borrowed from Horace Smith.[240] Unfortunately for Shelley, the sum was insufficient to extricate Hunt from his difficulties. Miss Mitford gives the amount as £1,500, instead of £1,400, and adds that Shelley’s furniture and bedding were swept off to pay Hunt’s creditors;[241] the inaccuracy of the first statement and the lack of any evidence to support the second, lead one to doubt the story. But it is true that Shelley’s income at the time was only £1,000. Even when so far away as Italy, Hunt’s money troubles weighed heavily upon Shelley in a continual regret that he could not set him entirely free from his creditors;[242] he feared that the incredible exertions Hunt was making on The Indicator and on The Examiner, and the privations that he endured, would undermine his health.[243] When Hunt finally decided to go to Italy, Shelley assumed, as a matter of course, the chief responsibility of providing the means.

As early as 1818, when Shelley and Byron met in Venice, the matter of the journal was discussed between them and broached to Hunt. December 22, 1818, Shelley wrote him that Byron wished him to come to Italy and that, if money considerations prevented, Byron would lend him £400 or £500. He added that Hunt should not feel uncomfortable in accepting the offer, as it was frankly made, and that his society would give Byron pleasure and service.[244] Hunt does not seem to have seriously considered the proposition, for there are few references to it in his correspondence of this year. On the renewal of the plan in 1821, Shelley would never have called on Byron for assistance for Hunt if he himself could have provided otherwise, for his opinion of Byron had changed in the meantime.[245] January 25, 1822, Shelley sent £150 for the expenses of the voyage, “within 30 or 40 pounds of what I have contrived to scrape together”;[246] and again on February 23, £250,[247] borrowed with security from Byron. Yet Shelley’s own exchequer at the time was so low that Mary Shelley wrote in the spring: “We are drearily behindhand with money at present. Hunt and our furniture has swallowed up more than our savings.”[248] On April 10 Shelley stated that he was trying to finish Charles the First in order that he might earn £100 for Hunt.

In round numbers it may be calculated that the sum total of Hunt’s indebtedness, exclusive of the yearly bequest of £120 paid by Shelley’s son, was about £2,500, a very large sum in the light of Shelley’s limited resources and other obligations. But it was as ungrudgingly given as it was graciously received. Between the two men there was no distinction of meum and tuum. More remarkable still, Mary Shelley gave as willingly as her husband. If one is inclined to marvel at such an unusual state of affairs, it must be recalled that both men were under the spell of William Godwin’s theories of community of property. Shelley gave as his duty and Hunt received as his due. That the effort involved much deprivation and distress of mind on the part of the giver mars the justice of acceptance by the recipient, retrieved only in part by the belief that Hunt probably did not know the full extent of Shelley’s sacrifice, and the knowledge that the former would gladly have endured as much if the conditions had been reversed. The element of self-sacrifice and delicacy on the part of Shelley in concealing it, in after years only added to the beauty of the gift in Hunt’s eyes, and even at the time he cannot be accused of indifference.[249] Jeaffreson makes the absurd suggestion that Shelley gave the money as a bribe to the editor of a powerful and flourishing literary journal.[250] He thinks dodging creditors was a strong bond of mutual interest between the two men. There is evidence that Hunt was in difficulty at the time and that Shelley left a surgeon’s bill unpaid,[251] but there is no proof extant of deliberate mutual protection. On the contrary, it is most unlikely.

The Hunts sailed from England in November, 1821, and reached Leghorn nearly nine months after first setting out on a voyage which, in its delays and dangers, Byron compared to the “periplus of Hanno the Carthaginian, and with much the same speed”;[252] Peacock to that of Ulysses.[253] Of Shelley’s suggestion to make the trip by sea, Hunt wrote: “if he had recommended a balloon, I should have been inclined to try it.”[254] Hogg, with his characteristic humour, remarked that a journey by land would have taken equally long, since Hunt would have stopped to gather all the daisies by the wayside from Paris to Pisa. Both men looked forward to many years together[255] and Shelley, in his letter of welcome, wrote that wind and waves parted them no more,[256] an assertion which now sounds like a knell of doom. From Leghorn Shelley conveyed the party to Pisa and installed them in the lower floor of Byron’s dwelling, the Lanfranchi Palace.[257] To Shelley fell the difficult task of keeping Lord Byron in heart for the new undertaking and of reviving Hunt’s drooping spirits. Hunt’s funds were all gone and in their place was a debt of sixty crowns. The next few days were full of grave anxiety and foreboding for the future, broken only by a delightful Sunday spent in seeing the Cathedral and the Tower. Of this day Hunt wrote: “Good God! what a day was that, compared with all that have followed it! I had my friend with me, arm-in-arm, after a separation of years: he was looking better than I had ever seen him—we talked of a thousand things—we anticipated a thousand pleasures.”[258] Then came the fatal Monday with its shipwreck of many hopes—in its tragic sequel too well known to need repetition here. Hunt’s last services to his friend were his assistance rendered at the cremation and his contribution of the now famous Latin epitaph “cor cordium.”[259]

With Shelley perished Hunt’s chief hope in life; in the opinion of his son, he was never the same man again. In 1832, at his period of darkest depression, he wrote: “If you ask me how it is that I bear all this, I answer, that I love nature and books, and think well of the capabilities of human kind. I have known Shelley, I have known my mother.”[260] In 1844 he claimed as his proudest title, the “Friend of Shelley.”[261]

The first printed notice of Shelley was in The Examiner of December 1, 1816. Therefore to Hunt belongs in this case, as in that of Keats, the credit of discovery. It is difficult to account for Hunt’s tardiness of recognition,[262] coming as it did six years after Shelley first wrote him, five years after the Finnerty poem, three years after Queen Mab, and two years after the visit in prison.[263] Also Shelley had sent contributions to The Examiner, which Hunt had not accepted, but which he vaguely recalled at the time of writing his first review on Shelley. It was inspired by the announcement of Alastor, and consisted of about ten lines, embodied in the article on Keats and Reynolds already referred to. Hunt pronounced Shelley “a very striking and original thinker.” Shelley’s reply to a letter from Hunt, telling him of the notice, pictures him anxiously scouring the countryside about Bath for the sight of a copy and buoyed up at last by the news of one five miles distant.

This notice was followed by the publication of the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty in The Examiner of January 19, 1817; a notice of the Chancery suit, January 26 and February 2; and an extract from Laon and Cythna, November 30. A review of the Revolt of Islam ran through three numbers, January 25, February 8 and 22, 1818. Shelley’s system of charity and his crusade against tyranny, as set forth in the preface, Hunt loudly applauded. Many extracts were italicized for the guidance of the public. The beauties of the poem were pronounced to be its mysticism, its wildness, its depth of sentiment, its grandeur of imagery, and its varied and sweet versification. In the boldness of speculation and in the love of virtue Hunt saw a resemblance to Lucretius, while in the gloom and imagination of certain passages, particularly in the grandeur of the supernatural architecture, he was reminded of Dante. The defects were pronounced to be obscurity of narrative and sameness of image and metaphor. The review closed with the prophecy “we have no doubt he is destined to be one of the leading spirits of the age.”

The Quarterly Review of May, 1818, accused Shelley[264] of atheism and of dissolute conduct in private life; the same journal of April, 1819, reviewing the Revolt of Islam on the basis of the suppressed version of Laon and Cythna, though it did not fail to appreciate the genius and beauty of the poem, charged Shelley with a predilection for incest and with a frantic dislike for Christianity. It called the support of The Examiner “the sweet undersong of the weekly journal.”[265] The two attacks were met by a strong protest from Hunt,[266] particularly in regard to the part dealing with Shelley’s life. He denied the propriety of such discussion in public criticism and declared that he had never known Shelley to “deviate, notwithstanding his theories, even into a single action which those who differ with him might think blameable.” His life at Marlow was described as spent in “beautiful charity and generosity” and was likened to that of Plato. In 1821 an attack on Shelley by Hazlitt was met by an angry warning from Hunt and a threat to become his public enemy, if the offense were repeated.[267] Hunt’s reason for taking this defensive attitude was that he knew that Shelley suffered greatly from such malignant exploitations and that he would not defend himself; therefore he made his friend’s cause his own and wrote: “I reckon upon your leaving your personal battles to me,”[268] much in the same manner as Shelley had assumed his money troubles.

Following the review of the Revolt of Islam, a notice of Rosalind and Helen and of Lines Written among the Euganean Hills[269] appeared in The Examiner of May 9, 1819. Attention was called to the poet’s optimism and to his great love of nature: “the beauty of the external world has an answering heart, and the very whispers of the wind a meaning.” The Cenci, published in 1820, contained in its dedication a glowing tribute to Hunt, an honour in Shelley’s opinion only in a small degree worthy of his friend.[270] Hunt was intoxicated with the honour and wrote: “I feel as if you had bound, not only my head, but my very soul and body with laurels.”[271] On the subject of the tragedy he was equally enthusiastic: “What a noble book, Shelley, have you given us! What a true, stately, and yet affectionate mixture of poetry, philosophy, and human nature, horror, and all redeeming sweetness of intention, for there is an undersong of suggestion through it all, that sings, as it were, after the storm is over, like a brook in April.”[272] In a public expression of his opinion in The Examiner of March 19, 1820, Hunt pronounced The Cenci the greatest dramatic production of the day. Writing of the drama again in the same journal of July 19 and 26, 1820, he called Shelley “a framer of mighty lines” and continued: “Majesty and Love do sit on one throne in the lofty buildings of his poetry; and they will be found there, at a late and we trust a happier day, on a seat immortal as themselves.”

One of Hunt’s most perfect poems, Jaffár, is inscribed to the memory of Shelley. The praise of Jaffár and his friend’s undying loyalty immediately suggest to the reader that Hunt may have been celebrating his own and Shelley’s friendship. The last review to appear during Shelley’s lifetime by Hunt was that of Prometheus Unbound in three numbers of The Examiner of 1822. A projected review of Adonais alluded to in a letter of Hunt’s does not seem to have seen the light of publication, but a reference in a letter at the time is worth noting: “It is the most Delphic poety I have seen in a long while: full of those embodyings of the most subtle and airy imaginations,—those arrestings and explanations of the most shadowy yearnings of our being.”[273] The well-known account of Shelley’s rescue of a woman on Hampstead Heath was told in The Literary Examiner of August 23, 1823.[274] The same magazine of September 20 of the same year[275] contained the following Sonnet to Percy Shelley, given here because of its general inaccessibility:

“Hast thou from earth, then, really passed away,
And mingled with the shadowy mass of things
Which were, but are not? Will thy harp’s dear strings
No more yield music to the rapid play
Of thy swift thoughts, now turned thou art to clay?
Hark! Is that rushing of thy spirit’s wings,
When (like the skylark, who in mounting sings)
Soaring through high imagination’s way,
Thou pour’dst thy melody upon the earth,
Silent for ever? Yes, wild ocean’s wave
Hath o’er thee rolled. But whilst within the grave
Thou sleepst, let me in the love of thy pure worth
One thing foretell,—that thy great fame shall be
Progressive as Time’s flood, eternal as the sea!”

In Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries appeared the first biographical memoir of Shelley, a sketch of some seventy pages.[276] It shows great appreciation of the fine and gentle qualities of his rare genius and defends some of the weak points of his career. The description of his personal appearance, of the life at Marlowe, and the few anecdotes are often quoted. But on the whole, it lacks the bold strokes of vivid portraiture and it is very disappointing.[277] There was probably no one, with the exception of his wife, who knew Shelley so well as Hunt and who was, therefore, in a position to give as complete and intimate an idea of him. It was Mrs. Shelley’s wish that Hunt should be her husband’s biographer, for she thought that he, “perhaps above all others, understood his nature and his genius.”[278] Hunt, in The Spectator of August 13, 1859, gave as his reason for not writing Shelley’s life that he “could not survive enough persons.” But it is to be questioned if he were fitted for the task. His son did not think that he was because of his attention to details and his irresistible tendency to analysis: “a mind, in short, like that of Hamlet, cultivated rather than corrected by the trials of life, was scarcely suited to comprehend the strong instincts, indomitable will, and complete unity of idea which distinguished Shelley.”[279]

In the Tatler of August 1, 1831, Hunt wrote that “Mr. Shelley was a platonic philosopher, of the acutest and loftiest kind,” and that he belonged to the school of Plato and Æschylus, as Keats belonged to that of Spenser and Milton. Following The Tatler was the preface to The Mask of Anarchy,[280] published in 1832, originally designed for The Examiner in 1819, but laid aside by the editor because he thought the public not discerning enough “to do justice to the sincerity and kindheartedness of the spirit that walked in this flaming robe of verse.” The preface eulogizes the poet’s spiritual nature and his “seraphic purpose of good.” In The Seer, 1841, Shelley’s qualities of heart were pronounced more enduring than his genius.[281]

Imagination and Fancy contained an essay and selections from his poems. Here Hunt makes the curious statement that little in the poems is purely poetical, but rather moral, political, and speculative. It is noteworthy that he predicts, probably for the first time, that, had Shelley lived, he would have been the greatest dramatic writer since the days of Elizabeth, if not, indeed, actually so, through what he did accomplish; a statement often repeated. He says: “If Coleridge is the sweetest of our poets, Shelley is at once the most ethereal and gorgeous, the one who has clothed his thought in draperies of the most evanescent and most magnificent words and imagery.... Shelley ... might well call himself Ariel.”[282] In connection with Shelley’s ethereal qualities, Mrs. James T. Fields quotes Hunt as having said on another occasion that Shelley always seemed to him as if he were “just alit from the planet Mercury, bearing a winged wand tipped with flame.”[283] In Imagination and Fancy, Hunt continues: “Not Milton himself is more learned in Grecisms, or nicer in entomological propriety; and nobody, throughout, has a style so Orphic and primeval.”

It is a touching circumstance that Hunt’s last letter bore reference to Shelley, and that his last effort as a public writer, made only a few days before his death, was in vindication of Shelley’s character.[284] The publication of the Shelley Memorials, 1859, in which Hunt had a part, provoked an unfavorable review in The Spectator. Hunt replied in the next number[285] of the same paper. In particular he asserted Shelley’s truthfulness, which had been assailed in respect to his story of the attempted assassination in Wales. He held that Shelley was not a man to be judged by ordinary rules, but that he was the highest possible exponent of humanity—an approach to divinity.

Hunt’s literary relation with Shelley falls into two divisions; publications written for Hunt’s periodicals, and received by Hunt in order to give Shelley an outlet of expression denied him in the more conservative papers; and second, positive literary imitation. Besides the poems quoted in Hunt’s criticisms of Shelley, the first includes a review of Godwin’s Mandeville,[286] a letter of protest regarding the second edition of Queen Mab,[287] Marianne’s Dream,[288] Song on a Faded Violet,[289] The Sunset,[290] The Question,[291] Good Night,[292] Sonnet, Ye Hasten to the Grave,[293] To —— (Lines to a Reviewer),[294] November, 1815,[295] Love’s Philosophy,[296] and the contributions designed by Shelley for The Liberal and published after his death.[297] Productions which were written for Hunt’s papers, but were not accepted, were Peter Bell the Third, The Mask of Anarchy, Julian and Maddalo, a letter on the persecution of Richard Carlile,[298] letters on Italy, and a review of Peacock’s Rhododaphne. Hunt’s failure to accept what was sent him greatly discouraged Shelley at times: “Mine is a life of failures; Peacock says my poetry is composed of day dreams and nightmares, and Leigh Hunt does not think it good enough for The Examiner.”

On a Fete at Carlton House, an attack on the Prince Regent, though perhaps directly inspired by the account in the dailies of the ball at Carlton House on June 20, 1811, was doubtless influenced by the continued attacks of The Examiner. As there are extant only two or three lines of the poem,[299] it is impossible to judge of the extent of the influence, but in Shelley’s letters to Hogg and to Edward Graham describing the poem, there is resemblance in tone and epithet to The Examiner. A letter from Shelley to Lord Ellenborough on the occasion of Eaton’s sentence for publishing the third part of Paine’s Age of Reason followed a long series of articles by Hunt on the prerogative of liberty of speech.[300]

A meeting of Reformers at Manchester on the sixteenth of August, 1819, for the purpose of discussing quietly the annual meeting of Parliament, universal suffrage, and voting by ballot, was dispersed by military force. Articles setting forth the long sufferings of the Reformers, charging the authorities with wanton bloodshed, and ridiculing the absurd trial of the offenders, appeared in The Examiner of August 22, 29, September 5, 19 and 26. The Mask of Anarchy, written on the occasion of the massacre at Manchester, was sent to Leigh Hunt for publication sometime before the first of November, 1819. The sentiment of both men is the same regarding the affair.

Accounts of the death of the Princess Charlotte and of the executions for high treason at Derby of Brandreth, Ludlam and Turner, after a horrible imprisonment, two articles in The Examiner of November 9, 1819, inspired Shelley’s Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte, sometimes known as We Pity the Plumage, but Forget the Dying Bird, dated November 12 of the same year. Hunt followed with a second article, Death of the Princess Charlotte and Indecent Advantage Taken of It, November 16, 1819. Both writers called attention to the disposition of the public to forget the sufferings of the poor, while it mourned hysterically with royalty; they declared that the administration of justice and the events leading to such crimes were of much greater importance. Three articles in The Examiner of October 17, 24 and 31, 1819, on the trial of Richard Carlile for libel, were followed by an open letter on the same case from Shelley to Hunt dated November 3, 1819. By scattered references it can be seen that Shelley fully agreed with Hunt in his opinion of the Prince Regent and of the Ministers, in his attitude toward the corruption of the court and of the army; and in his proposed regulation of taxes and of the public debt.

Œdipus Tyrannus or Swellfoot the Tyrant, begun August, 1820, succeeded a series of articles, beginning in The Examiner of June 11, 1820, and continuing throughout nineteen numbers,[301] on the subject of George IV’s attempt to divorce his wife.[302] Abhorrence of the king’s perfidy and of his ministers’ support, sympathy for Queen Caroline, and minor details parallel closely Hunt’s version in The Examiner. This passage occurs in the article of June 9: “An animal sets himself down, month after month, at Milan, to watch at her doors and windows, to intercept discarded servants and others who know what a deposition might be worth, and thus to gather poison for one of those venomous Green Bags, which have so long infected and nauseated the people, and are now to infect the Queen.” This seems to be the germ of the passage in Shelley’s poem beginning:

“Behold this bag! it is
The poison Bag of that Green Spider huge,
On which our spies sulked in ovation through
The streets of Thebes, when they were paved with dead.”

Then follows the plot to throw the contents upon the Queen.

The handling of the heroic couplet, employed in the Letter to Maria Gisborne and in Epipsychidon, as well as in Julian and Maddalo,[303] has been already discussed in its relationship to Hunt’s use of the same. Shelley, in a letter to Hunt, explains his position in regard to the language of Julian and Maddalo:

“You will find the little piece, I think, in some degree consistent with your own ideas of the manner in which poetry ought to be written. I have employed a certain familiar style of language to express the actual way in which people talk to each other, whom education and a certain refinement of sentiment have placed above the use of vulgar idioms. I use the word vulgar in its most extensive sense. The vulgarity of rank and fashion is as gross, in its way, as that of poverty, and its cant terms equally expressive of base conceptions, and therefore, equally unfit for poetry. Not that the familiar style is to be admitted in the treatment of a subject wholly ideal, or in that part of any subject which relates to common life, where the passion, exceeding a certain limit, touches the boundary of that which is ideal. Strong passion expresses itself in metaphor, borrowed alike from subjects remote or near, and casts over all the shadow of its own greatness.”[304]

Rosalind and Helen, the Letter to Maria Gisborne, Swellfoot the Tyrant, and Peter Bell the Third[305] show a similar influence. The Letter to Maria Gisborne bears a resemblance to Hunt’s epistolary style, and was written, Mr. Forman thinks, for circulation in the Hunt circle only.[306] It was through Hunt, so Shelley states in the dedication, that he knew the Peter Bells of Wordsworth and of John Hamilton Reynolds. Shelley’s qualified adoption in these poems of Hunt’s theory of poetic language is seen in the choice of a vocabulary in dialogue nearer everyday usage than the more remote one of his other poems. Yet the result does not bear any great resemblance to Hunt. Shelley’s unvarying refinement and sensibility kept him from committing the same errors of taste, but his work suffered rather than gained by an innovation which was probably a concession to his friendship for Hunt and not a strong conviction. With the exception of the descriptive passages, the keynote of these poems is on a lower poetic pitch.

On subjects of Italian art and literature the friends held much the same opinion. At times Shelley seems to have been led by Hunt’s judgment, as in his conclusions regarding Raphael and Michaelangelo.[307] One passage on the Italian poets indicates a possible borrowing of thought and figure on Shelley’s part when he wrote of Boccaccio that he was superior to Ariosto and to Tasso, “the children of a later and colder day.... How much do I admire Boccaccio! What descriptions of nature are those in his little introduction to every new day! It is the morning of life stripped of that mist of familiarity which makes it obscure to us.”[308] Hunt wrote: “Petrarch, Boccaccio and Dante are the morning, noon and night of the great Italian day.”[309]

Poems which refer directly to Hunt are the fourteen lines in the Letter to Maria Gisborne;[310] possibly the fragment, beginning, “For me, my friend, if not that tears did tremble.”[311] A cancelled passage of the Adonais describes Hunt thus:

And then came one of sweet and carnal looks,
Those soft smiles to his dark and night-like eyes
Were as the clear and ever-living brooks
Are to the obscure fountains whence they rise,
Showing how pure they are; a Paradise
Of happy truth upon his forehead low
Lay, making wisdom lovely, in the guise
Of earth-awakening morn upon the brow
Of star-deserted heaven, while ocean gleams below,
······
His song, though very sweet, was low and faint,
A single strain—[312]

The thirty-fifth strophe of the present version refers to Hunt.

Shelley’s last letter had reference to Hunt.[313] His last literary effort was a poem comparing Hunt to a firefly and welcoming him to Italy, just as Hunt’s last letter and last public utterance bore reference to Shelley—strange coincidence, but striking testimony to their mutual devotion. An instance of Shelley’s overestimation of Hunt’s ability is seen in a passage where he says that Hunt excels in tragedy in the power of delineating passion and, what is more necessary, of connecting and developing it, “the last an incredible effort for himself but easy for Hunt.”[314] He greatly valued and trusted Hunt’s affection, at times calling him his best[315] and his only friend.[316] If the tender solicitude and veneration of a beautiful spirit for a man of vastly inferior abilities seems strange, it is but a witness to the humility of true genius.

CHAPTER IV.

Byron’s Politics and Religion—His sympathy with Hunt in prison—His impression of the man—Hunt’s Defense of Byron and Criticism of his works—The Liberal—Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries.

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.”

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]

Moore cautiously refused the offer and the idea lay dormant in Byron’s mind until he met Shelley at Ravenna in 1821. He then proposed that they should establish a radical paper with Leigh Hunt as editor, the three to be equal partners. Power, money, and notoriety were Byron’s chief objects. He frankly acknowledged a desire for enormous gains. He designed to use his proprietory privileges to publish those of his writings that Murray dared not. At the same time Byron had, without doubt, a desire to reform home government and to repay Hunt for his public defense in 1816.[343] He may have wished to please Shelley by asking Hunt.[344] Undoubtedly he valued Hunt’s wide journalistic experience. Moore asserts that in extending the invitation, Byron inconsistently admitted Hunt “not to any degree of confidence or intimacy but to a declared fellowship of fame and interest.”[345] This, like other of Moore’s statements regarding Hunt, is not very plausible in view of the past intimacy.

The most discussed question regarding Byron’s motives in inviting Hunt is the extent of his relation to The Examiner at that time, and Byron’s knowledge of it. Trelawny states that when Byron “consented to join Leigh Hunt and others in writing for the ‘Liberal,’ I think his principal inducement was in the belief that John and Leigh Hunt were proprietors of the ‘Examiner’;—so when Leigh Hunt at Pisa told him that he was no longer connected with that paper, Byron was taken aback, finding that Hunt would be entirely dependent upon the success of their hazardous project, while he himself would be deprived of that on which he had set his heart,—the use of a weekly paper in great circulation.”[346] Moore heard indirectly in 1821 that Byron, Shelley and Hunt were to “conspire together” in The Examiner[347]—a plan nowhere mentioned in the writings of the three men concerned and most unlikely. What Trelawney “thought” conflicts with what Moore “heard.” The suggestions of both are open to doubt. Byron was most assuredly the projector of The Liberal and did not “consent to join Leigh Hunt and others.” Besides, granting that Trelawney’s opinion was based on a statement of Byron’s, even that would not be convincing, since Byron made a number of mis-statements about the matter after he grew weary of it. Questionable as the assertion is, it has been made the basis of accusations against Hunt of deliberate deceit and of breach of contract. Had it been true that there was an understanding of coöperation between the two papers, Byron and Moore would have made much of the charge. Trelawney’s opinion, first noticed by Blackwood’s in March, 1828, has been elaborated by Jeaffreson,[348] and accepted by Leslie Stephen[349] and Kent.[350] Elze, who seems to have labored under the impression that Harold Skimpole was a faithful portraiture of Hunt, states that his connection with Byron began with a falsehood.[351] R. B. Johnson says, in defense of Hunt, that the accusation “is quite unreasonable and contrary to all the evidence.”[352] Monkhouse thinks that it is doubtful if Byron reckoned on the support of the London paper.[353] J. Ashcroft Noble says that Byron had much to say about the Hunts in his letters, “and made the most of all kinds of trivial or imaginary grievances; it is simply incredible that had a grievance of such reality and magnitude as this really existed he would have refrained from mentioning it.” As proof against it, he quotes Byron’s belief in Hunt’s honesty as late as September 1822; and he points out the “obvious absurdity of the idea that in the year 1822 a weekly newspaper could be conducted successfully, or at all, by an editor in Pisa or Genoa.”[354] The strong probability, gathered from all the extant evidence, is that Byron and Shelley, in inviting Hunt to Italy, expected, and very naturally, that he would continue to share in the profits of The Examiner. Shelley, indeed, in a letter dated as late as January 25, 1822, urged Hunt not to leave England without a regular income from that journal[355]—an injunction which Hunt unfairly disregarded. It is also likely that his connection with The Examiner was one of Byron’s reasons in extending the partnership to include Hunt. But it is practically certain that there was no contract nor even understanding as regards the coöperation of The Liberal and the London paper. The question does not therefore, involve Hunt’s honor at all. If Byron expected to profit by the influence of The Examiner, his silence shows a manliness that Noble does not credit him with.

Hunt, in accepting Byron’s offer, was actuated by motives both selfish and unselfish. The fine of £1,000 imposed at the time of his conviction of libel was not all paid; The Indicator had been abandoned; The Examiner was on its last legs; his health was broken by overwork undertaken in the effort not to call upon his friends for aid;[356] an invalid wife and seven children were to be supported by his pen; his brother John was in prison. From January, 1821, to August of the same year he had been unable to write. In accepting Byron’s offer he thought to recover his health in a southern climate, to regain his political influence which had been on the decrease during the last four or five years, and at the same time to aid aggressively the liberal movement.[357] Moreover, he was flattered immensely by the prospective public association with Lord Byron. He had little to lose and a prospect of large gain. Hunt should have weighed more gravely such a step before he embarked on such a hazardous venture with so large a family, but, with a buoyancy and irresponsibility in practical affairs peculiar to himself, he clutched at the new proposition as a way out of all difficulties and did not look beyond immediate necessities. He pictured himself and his family healthy and wealthy in a land he had always sighed for. If the skies lowered, he fancied Shelley always at hand. His description of preparations for the voyage is as airy as his pocketbook was light: “My family, therefore, packed up such goods and chattels as they had a regard for, my books in particular, and we took, with strange new thoughts and feelings, but in high expectation, our journey by sea.”[358]

The part Shelley played in the invitation to Hunt is more difficult of interpretation. The original proposition to become an equal partner in the transaction he never seriously entertained. He consented to become a contributor only. His reasons for his refusal he gave to others, but, for fear of endangering Hunt’s prospects, withheld from Byron; for the same reason he dissembled at times concerning his real feelings. Yet he was equally responsible with Byron in extending the invitation to Hunt, as will be shown later. Although Shelley could not have foreseen the full consequences of such a course of action, he was deficient in frankness toward Byron and undoubtedly sacrificed him somewhat in the transaction to his affection for Hunt. While Byron continued to hold the highest opinion of Shelley, between the time of their meeting in Switzerland and at Ravenna, Shelley had experienced three separate revulsions of feeling.[359] At the time in question his distrust had returned.

Hunt’s pecuniary troubles made their relations still more difficult. This state of affairs between Byron and Shelley must have given Hunt great concern, and Shelley suspecting his distress wrote March 2, 1822: “The aspect of affairs has somewhat changed since the date of that in which I expressed a repugnance to a continuance of intimacy with Lord Byron as close as that which now exists; at least it has changed so far as regards you and the intended journal.”[360]

In January, 1821, Mrs. Hunt wrote Mary Shelley, begging that they might come to Italy. The subject was thus revived and a formal invitation was conveyed in a letter of August 26, 1821, from Shelley to Hunt. It proves beyond a doubt that Byron was the chief projector of the journal:

“He (Byron) proposes that you should come out and go shares with him and me, in a periodical work, to be conducted here; in which each of the contracting parties should publish all their original compositions and share the profits.... There can be no doubt that the profits of any scheme in which you and Lord Byron engage, must, from various, yet co-operating reasons, be very great. As for myself, I am, for the present, only a sort of link between you and him, until you can know each other and effectuate the arrangement; since (to entrust you with a secret which, for your sake, I withhold from Lord Byron), nothing would induce me to share in the profits, and still less, in the borrowed splendor of such a partnership. You and he, in different manners, would be equal, and would bring, in a different manner, but in the same proportion, equal stocks of reputation and success.... I did not ask Lord Byron to assist me in sending a remittance for your journey; because there are men, however excellent, from whom we would never receive an obligation, in the worldly sense of the word; and I am as jealous for my friend as for myself.... He has many generous and exalted qualities, but the canker of aristocracy wants to be cut out.”[361]

Hunt’s answer was full of expectation and hope. He wrote that “Are there not three of us?... We will divide the world between us, like the Triumvirate, and you shall be the sleeping partner, if you will.”[362] To Shelley’s reply of October 6, thanking him for coming, Hunt answered: “You say, Shelley, you thank me for coming. The pleasure of being obliged by those we love is so great that I do not wonder that you continue to muster up some obligation to me, but if you are obliged, how much am I?”[363]

From the beginning of the enterprise Thomas Moore and John Murray scented trouble and made more. They continued their intermeddling after The Liberal was launched, and doubtless ministered to Byron’s vacillation. Hunt and Murray had disagreed over the Story of Rimini[364] and an attack on Southey in The Examiner of May 11 and 18, 1817, had included Murray as well. Moreover, Murray saw in John Hunt,[365] the publisher of the new periodical, a dangerous future rival in his business relations with Byron. After matters became unpleasant in Italy, Murray took his revenge by making public Byron’s letters containing ill-natured remarks about Hunt.[366] The relations of Moore and Hunt had been very friendly[367] but at this juncture both became too proud of having a “noble lord” for a friend.[368]

Moore, writing to Byron in the latter part of 1821, said: “I heard some time ago that Leigh Hunt was on his way to Genoa with all of his family; and the idea seems to be, that you and Shelley and he are to conspire together in The Examiner. I cannot believe this—and deprecate such a plan with all my might. Alone you may do anything, but partnerships in fame, like those in trade, make the strongest party answerable for the deficiencies or delinquencies of the rest, and I tremble even for you with such a bankrupt company.... They are both clever fellows, and Shelley I look upon as a man of real genius; but, I must say again, you could not give your enemies (the ... s ‘et hoc genus omne’) a greater triumph than by joining such an unequal and unholy alliance,”[369] an astounding statement from a man of pronounced liberal views. Byron’s answer of January 24 was indefinite and perhaps intentionally misleading: “Be assured that there is no such coalition as you apprehend.”[370] February 19, Moore advised Byron not to discuss religious matters in the new work, but to confine himself to political theories; “if you have any political catamarans to explode this (London) is your place.”[371] After The Liberal was begun, Moore wrote: “It grieves me to urge anything so much against Hunt’s interest, but I should not hesitate to use the same language to himself were I near him. I would, if I were you, serve him in every possible way but this—I would give him (if he would accept of it) the profits of the same works, published separately—but I would not mix myself up in this way with others. I would not become a partner in this sort of miscellaneous ‘pot au feu’ where the bad flavour of one ingredient is sure to taint all the rest. I would be, if I were you, alone, single-handed and as such, invincible.”[372]

The Hunts started for Italy November 15, 1821, but on account of various setbacks and delays did not really leave the coast of England until May 13, 1822. In the ten months which elapsed between the invitation to Hunt and his arrival, it is not surprising that Byron’s enthusiasm had cooled. He would have withdrawn if he could have done so, although Byron, Trelawny says, was at first more eager than Shelley for Hunt’s arrival.[373] As has already been stated above, affairs between Byron and Shelley had been very strained in January. In the letter of March 2, already referred to, Shelley informed Hunt that matters had improved between Byron and himself and that Byron expressed the “greatest eagerness to proceed with the journal, he dilates with impatience on the delay, and he disregards the opinion of those who have advised him against it.”

Shelley thought that their strained relations would in no way interfere with Hunt’s prospects, and, with what looks a little like double-dealing, that it would be possible for him to preserve what influence he had over the “Proteus” until Hunt arrived: “It will be no very difficult task to execute that you have assigned me—to keep him in heart with the project until your arrival.”[374] April 10, Shelley wrote again to Hunt of Byron’s eagerness for his arrival: “he urges me to press you to depart.” But a reference to the state of affairs in the two households in Italy carries a foreboding note: “Lord Byron has made me bitterly feel the inferiority which the world has presumed to place between us, and which subsists nowhere in reality but in our own talents, which are not our own but Nature’s—or in our rank, which is not our own but Fortune’s.” With his usual humility, Shelley closes the letter with an apology for carrying his jealousy of Byron into Hunt’s relations with him, and says: “You in the superiority of a wise and tranquil nature have well corrected and justly reproved me ... you will find much in me to correct and reprove.”[375] During the summer Shelley continued to shrink more than ever from Byron; June 18 he declared to Hunt that he would not be the link between them for Byron is the “nucleus of all that is hateful.” His one dread was that he might injure Hunt’s prospects.[376] Between April and July Byron’s enthusiasm had again cooled. Trelawny relates that Shelley when he went to Leghorn to meet Hunt, was greatly depressed by Lord Byron’s “shuffling and equivocating,” and, “but for imperilling Hunt’s prospects,” that Shelley would have abruptly terminated their intercourse.[377] On July 4 Shelley wrote to Mary from Pisa that “things are in the worst possible situation with respect to poor Hunt.... Lord Byron must of course furnish the requisite funds at present, as I cannot, but he seems inclined to depart without the necessary explanations and arrangements due to such a situation as Hunt’s. These, in spite of delicacy, I must procure.”[378] This dual attitude of Shelley has been variously viewed. Professor Dowden thinks it a “triumph of diplomacy,”[379] while Jeaffreson deems it a conspiracy of Hunt and Shelley against the innocent and unsuspecting Byron.

Hunt gave the following ominous description of his first call upon Lord Byron: “The day was very hot; the road to Mount Nero was very hot, through dusty suburbs; and when I got there I found the hottest looking house I ever saw. It was salmon colour. Think of this, flaring over the country in a hot Italian sun! But the greatest of all the heats was within. Upon seeing Lord Byron, I hardly knew him, he was grown so fat; and he was longer in recognizing me, I had grown so thin.”[380] Hunt wrote to England that Byron received him with marked cordiality[381] but Shelley’s friend Williams, in his last letter to his wife, stated that Byron treated Hunt vilely and “actually said as much that he did not wish his name to be attached to the work, and of course to theirs”; that his treatment of Mrs. Hunt was “most shameful”; and that his “conduct cut H. to the soul.”[382] The Hunt family was quickly quartered on the ground floor of Byron’s palace, which Byron had furnished at a cost of £60.[383] Shelley’s sensible suggestions to Hunt about his furniture,[384] about the income from The Examiner, and worse still, his delicately given advice that it was not possible for him to bring all of his family, had been ignored.[385]

With Shelley’s tragic death a few days after their arrival, the only “link of the two thunderbolts,”[386] as he had called himself, was broken. Hunt was left in an awkward position which no one could have foreseen. A few days later he wrote to friends at home of Byron’s kindness.[387] In 1828 he gave a different version:

“Lord Byron requested me to look upon him as standing in Mr. S.’s place. My heart died within me to hear him; I made the proper acknowledgment, but I knew what he meant, and I more than doubted whether even in that, the most trivial part of the friendship, he could resemble Mr. Shelley, if he would. Circumstances unfortunately rendered the matter of too much importance to me at the moment. I had reason to fear:—I was compelled to try:—and things turned out as I had dreaded. The public have been given to understand that Lord Byron’s purse was at my command, and that I used it according to the spirit with which it was offered. I did so. Stern necessity and a family compelled me.”[388]

With the magazine scarcely likely to yield an income for some time, it was absolutely necessary for Hunt to get money from somewhere for living expenses and, Shelley gone, there was no one left to tide over the interval but Byron. The latter did not relish the position of sole banker to a family of nine and doled out £70 in small doses through his steward, Hunt says, just as if his “disgraces were being counted.”[389] He was embittered by his position as suppliant and dependent, though there is nothing to show that he was ever refused what he asked for or requested to pay back what he owed.[390]

Hunt’s entire money obligation to Byron has been comprehensively calculated by Galt at £500: £200 for the journey from England, £70 at Pisa for living expenses, the cost of the journey from Pisa to Genoa, and £30 from Genoa to Florence. Galt thought the use of the ground floor a small favor since Byron could use only one floor for himself. Such practices were very common, Italian palaces often being built for that purpose.[391] It is likely that until the step was irrevocable Byron did not correctly gauge Hunt’s resources and the responsibility which he was assuming in transporting a large family to a foreign country. If he did, he expected to share the burden with Shelley. Had Hunt been financially independent, it is probable that he and Byron would have remained on amicable enough terms, for the former asserts that the first time he was treated with disrespect was when Byron knew he was in want.[392] Yet that neither Shelley nor Byron were wholly ignorant of what to expect before Hunt’s arrival in Italy is apparent from Shelley’s letter to Byron, February 15, 1822:

“Hunt had urged me more than once to ask you to lend him this money. My answer consisted in sending him all I could spare, which I have now literally done. Your kindness in fitting up a part of your own home for his accommodation I sensibly felt, and willingly accept from you on his part, but, believe me, without the slightest intention of imposing, or, if I could help it, of allowing to be imposed, any heavier task on your purse. As it has come to this in spite of my exertions, I will not conceal from you the low ebb of my own money affairs in the present moment,—that is, my absolute incapacity of assisting Hunt further. I do not think poor Hunt’s promise to pay in a given time is worth very much, but mine is less subject to uncertainty, and I should be happy to be responsible for any engagement he may have proposed to you.”[393]

Mrs. Hunt seems to have widened further the breach between the two men.[394] She did not speak Italian and the Countess Guiccioli, the head of Byron’s establishment, did not speak English. Neither made any linguistic efforts and consequently there was no intercourse between the families of the two households. This, Hunt later says, was the first cause of diminished cordiality between Byron and himself. The Hunt children were a further cause of trouble. Byron wrote of them to Mrs. Shelley: “They were dirtier and more mischievous than Yahoos. What they can’t destroy with their feet they will with their fingers.”[395] Again he described them as “six little blackguards ... kraal out of the Hottentot country.”[396]

The question of rank was a thorn in the flesh, particularly to Hunt. While in open theory he had no respect for titles, in actual practice he groveled before them. Pride, as he thought, had made him decline all advances from men of rank, but it was more with the air of being afraid to trust himself than with real indifference. His exception, made in the case of Lord Byron, is thus explained: “But talents, poetry, similarity of political opinion, flattery of early sympathy with my boyish writings, more flattering offers of friendship and the last climax of flattery, an earnest waiving of his rank, were too much for me in the person of Lord Byron.”[397] On the renewal of the acquaintance in Italy, the very familiar attitude seen in the dedication of the Story of Rimini, which Hunt himself had decided was “foolish,” was changed at the advice of Shelley to an extremely formal manner of address. Hunt says that Byron did not like the change.[398] As a matter of fact, six years of separation had brought about other more important changes: Byron had grown more selfish and avaricious, Hunt more helpless and vain.