not mean Leigh Hunt by Harold Skimpole. Yet he owns that he took
the light externals of the character from Leigh Hunt, and surely
it is by those light externals that the bulk of mankind will
always recognise character. Besides, it is to be observed that
the vices of H. S. are vices to which L. H. had, to say the
least, some little leaning, and which the world generally
attributed to him most unsparingly. That he had loose notions of
_meum_ and _tuum_; that he had no high feeling of independence;
that he had no sense of obligation; that he took money wherever
he could get it; that he felt no gratitude for it; that he was
just as ready to defame a person who had relieved his distress
as a person who had refused him relief--these were things which,
as Dickens must have known, were said, truly or falsely, about
L. H., and had made a deep impression on the public mind.
Now Macaulay has not always been leniently judged; but I do not think
that, with the single exception of Croker's case, he can be accused of
having borne hardly on the moral character of any one of his
contemporaries. He had befriended Leigh Hunt in every way; he had got
him into the _Edinburgh_; he had lent (that is to say given) him money
freely, and I do not think that his fiercest enemy can seriously think
that he bore Hunt a grudge for having told him, as he himself records,
that the "Lays" were not so good as Spenser, whom Macaulay in one of the
rare lapses of his memory had unjustly blasphemed, and whom Leigh Hunt
adored. To my mind, if there were any doubt about Dickens's intention,
or about the fitting in a certain sense of the cap, this testimony of
Macaulay's would settle it. But I cannot conceive any doubt remaining in
the mind of any person who has read Leigh Hunt's works, who has even
read the Autobiography. Of the grossest faults in Skimpole's character,
such as the selling of Jo's secret, Leigh Hunt was indeed incapable, and
the insertion of these is at once a blot on Dickens's memory and a kind
of excuse for his disclaimer; but as regards the lighter touches the
likeness is unmistakable. Skimpole's most elaborate jests about "pounds"
are hardly an exaggeration of the man who gravely and more than once
tells us that his difficulties and irregularities with money came from a
congenital incapacity to appreciate arithmetic, and who admits that
Shelley (whose affairs he knew very well) once gave him no less than
fourteen hundred pounds (that is to say some sixteen months of Shelley's
income at his wealthiest) to clear him, and that he was not cleared,
though apparently he gave Shelley to understand that he was.
There are many excuses for him which Skimpole had not. His own pleas of
tropical blood and so forth will not greatly avail. But the old
patron-theory and its more subtle transformation (the influence of
which is sometimes shown even by Thackeray in the act of denouncing it),
to the effect that the State or the public, or somebody, is bound to
look after your man of genius, had bitten deep into the being of the
literary man of our grandfathers' time. Anybody who has read _Thomas
Poole and his Friends_ must have seen how not merely Coleridge, of whose
known liability to the weakness the book furnished new proofs, but even,
to some extent and vicariously, the austere Wordsworth, cherished the
idea. But for the most part, men kept it to themselves. Leigh Hunt never
could keep anything to himself, and he has left record on record of the
easy manner in which he acted on his beliefs.
For this I own that I care little, especially since he never borrowed
money of me. There is a Statute of Limitations for all such things in
letters as well as in law. What is much harder to forgive is the
ill-bred pertness, often if not always innocent enough in intention, but
rather the worse than the better for that, which mars so much of his
actual literary work. When almost an old man he wrote--when a very old
man he quotes, with childlike surprise that any one should see anything
objectionable in them--the following lines:
Perhaps you have known what it is to feel longings,
To pat buxom shoulders at routs and mad throngings--
Well--think what it was at a vision like that!
A grace after dinner! a Venus grown fat!
It would be almost unbelievable of any man but Leigh Hunt that he
placidly remarks in reference to this impertinence that "he had not the
pleasure of Lady Blessington's acquaintance," as if that did not make
things ten times worse. He had laid the foundation of not a few of the
literary enmities he suffered from, by writing, thirty years earlier, a
"Feast of the Poets," on the pattern of Suckling, in which he took,
though much more excusably, the same kind of ill-bred liberties; and
similar things abound in his works. It is scarcely surprising that the
good Macvey Napier (rather awkwardly, and giving Macaulay much trouble
to patch things up) should have said that he would like a
"gentleman-like" article from Mr. Hunt for the _Edinburgh_; and the
taunt about the Cockney School undoubtedly derived its venom from this
weakness of his. Lamb was not descended from the kings that long the
Tuscan sceptre swayed, and had some homely ways; Keats had to do with
livery-stables, Hazlitt with shady lodging-houses and lodging-house
keepers. But Keats might have been, whatever his weaknesses, his own and
Spenser's Sir Calidore for gentle feeling and conduct; the man who
called Lamb vulgar would only prove his own vulgarity; and Hazlitt,
though he had some darker stains on his character than any that rest on
Hunt, was far too potent a spirit for the fire within him not to burn
out mere vulgarity. Leigh Hunt I fear must be allowed to be now and
then merely vulgar--a Pogson of talent, of genius, of immense
amiability, of rather hard luck, but still of the Pogsons, Pogsonic.
As I shall have plenty of good to say of him, I may as well despatch at
once whatever else I have to say that is bad, which is little. The
faults of taste which have just been noticed passed easily into
occasional, though only occasional, faults of criticism. I do not
recommend anybody who has not the faculty of critical adjustment, and
who wants to like Leigh Hunt, to read his essay on Dante in the _Italian
Poets_. For flashes of crass insensibility to great poetry it is
difficult to match anywhere, and impossible to match in Leigh Hunt. His
favourite theological doctrine, like that of Béranger's hero, was, _Ne
damnons personne_. He did not like monarchy, and he did not understand
metaphysics. So the great poet, who, more than any other great poet
except Shakespeare, grows on those who read him, receives from Leigh
Hunt not an honest confession, like Sir Walter's, that he does not like
him, which is perhaps the first honest impression of the majority of
Dante's readers, but tirade upon tirade of abuse and bad criticism.
Further, Leigh Hunt's unfortunate necessity of preserving his own
journalism has made him keep a thousand things that he ought to have
left to the kindly shade of the newspaper files--a cemetery where, thank
Heaven, the tombs are not open as in the other city of Dis. The book
called _Table Talk_, for instance, contains, with a little better
matter, chiefly mere rubbish like this section:
BEAUMARCHAIS
Beaumarchais, author of the celebrated comedy of "Figaro," an
abridgment of which has been rendered more famous by the music
of Mozart, made a large fortune by supplying the American
republicans with arms and ammunition, and lost it by
speculations in salt and printing. His comedy is one of those
productions which are accounted dangerous, from developing the
spirit of intrigue and gallantry with more gaiety than
objection; and they would be more unanimously so, if the good
humour and self-examination to which they excite did not suggest
a spirit of charity and inquiry beyond themselves.
Leigh Hunt tried almost every conceivable kind of literature, including
a historical novel, _Sir Ralph Esher_, several dramas (one or two of
which, the "Legend of Florence" being the chief, got acted), and at
nearly the beginning and nearly the end of his career two religious
works, or works on religion, an attack on Methodism and "The Religion of
the Heart." All this we may not unkindly brush away, and consider him
first as a poet, secondly as a critic, and thirdly as what can be best,
though rather unphilosophically, called a miscellanist.
Few good judges nowadays, I think, would deny that Leigh Hunt had a
certain faculty for poetry, and fewer still would rank it very high. To
something like, but less than, the tunefulness of Moore, he joined a
very much better taste in models and an infinitely wider and deeper
study of them. There is no doubt that his 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-coloured
verse was a capital medium for tale-telling, and Leigh Hunt is always at
his best when he employs it. The more varied measures and the more
ambitious aim of "Captain Sword and Captain Pen" seem to me very much
less successful. Not only was Leigh Hunt far from strong enough for a
serious argument, but the cheery, sentimental optimism of which he was
one of the most persevering exponents--the kind of thing which
vehemently protests that in the good time coming nobody shall be damned,
or starved, or put in prison, or subjected to the perils of villainous
saltpetre, or prevented from doing just what he likes, and that all
existence ought to be and shortly will be a vaguely refined beer and
skittles--did not lend itself very well to verse. Nor are Hunt's lyrics
particularly strong. His best thing by far is the charming trifle (the
heroine being, it has been said and also denied, Mrs. Carlyle) which he
called a "rondeau," though it is not one.
Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in:
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put _that_ in!
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I'm growing old--but add,
Jenny kissed me.
Even here it may be noticed that though the last four lines could hardly
be bettered, the second couplet is rather weak. Some of Leigh Hunt's
sonnets, especially that which he wrote on the Nile in rivalry with
Shelley and Keats, are very good.
It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,
Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream;
And times and things, as in that vision, seem
Keeping along it their eternal stands;--
Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd-bands
That roamed through the young earth, the glory extreme
Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam,
_The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands._
Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong,
As of a world left empty of its throng,
And the void weighs on us; and then we wake,
And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along
'Twixt villages, and think how we shall take
Our own calm journey on for human sake.
This was written in 1818, and I think it will be admitted that the
italicised line is a rediscovery of a cadence which had been lost for
centuries, and which has been constantly borrowed and imitated since.
Every now and then he had touches of something much above his usual
style, as in the concluding lines of the whimsical "flyting," as the
Scotch poets of the fifteenth century would have called it, between the
Man and the Fish:
Man's life is warm, glad, sad, 'twixt loves and graves,
Boundless in hope, honoured with pangs austere,
Heaven-gazing; and his angel-wings he craves:
The fish is swift, small-needing, vague yet clear,
A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapped in round waves,
Quickened with touches of transporting fear.
As a rule, however, his poetry has little or nothing of this kind, and
he will hold his place in the English _corpus poetarum_, first, because
he was an associate of better poets than himself; secondly, because he
invented a medium for the poetic tale which was as poetical as Crabbe's
was prosaic; thirdly, because of all persons perhaps who have ever
attempted English verse on their own account, he had the most genuine
affection for, and the most intimate and extensive acquaintance with,
the triumphs of his predecessors in poetry. Of prose he was a much less
trustworthy judge, as may be instanced once for all by his pronouncing
Gibbon's style to be bad; but of poetry he could tell with an
extraordinary mixture of sympathy and discretion. And this will
introduce us to his second faculty, the faculty of literary criticism,
in which he is, with all his drawbacks, on a level with Coleridge, with
Lamb, and with Hazlitt, his defects as compared with them being in each
case made up by compensatory, or more than compensatory, merits.
How considerable a critic Leigh Hunt was, may be judged from the fact
that he himself confesses the great critical fault of his principal
poem--the selection, for amplification and paraphrase, of a subject
which has once for all been treated with imperial and immortal brevity
by a great poet. With equal ingenuousness and equal truth he further
confesses that, at the time, he not only did not see this fault, but was
critically incapable of seeing it. For there is that one comfort about
this discomfortable and discredited art of ours, that age at any rate
does not impair it. The first sprightly runnings of criticism are never
the best; and in the case of all really great critics, from Dryden to
Sainte-Beuve, the critical faculty has gone on constantly increasing.
The chief examples of Leigh Hunt's critical accomplishment are to be
found in the two books called respectively, _Wit and Humour_, and
_Imagination and Fancy_, both being selections from the English poets,
with critical remarks interspersed as a sort of running commentary. But
hardly any book of his is quite barren of such examples; for he neither
would, nor indeed apparently could, restrain his desultory fancy from
this as from other indulgences. His criticism is very distinct in kind.
It is almost purely and in the strict and proper sense æsthetic--that is
to say, it does hardly anything but reproduce the sensations produced
upon Hunt himself by the reading of his favourite passages. As his sense
of poetry was extraordinarily keen and accurate, there is perhaps no
body of "beauties" of English poetry to be found anywhere in the
language which is selected with such uniform and unerring judgment as
this or these. Even Lamb, in his own favourite subjects and authors,
misses treasure-trove which Leigh Hunt unfailingly discovers, as in the
now pretty generally acknowledged case of the character of De Flores in
Middleton's "Changeling." And Lamb had a much less wide and a much more
crotchety system of admissions and exclusions. Macaulay was perfectly
right in fixing, at the beginning of his essay on the dramatists of the
Restoration, upon this catholicity of Hunt's taste as the main merit in
it; and it is really a great pity that the two volumes referred to were
not, as they were intended to be, followed up by others respectively
devoted to Action and Passion, Contemplation, and Song. But Leigh Hunt
was sixty when he planned them, and age, infirmity, perhaps also the
less pressing need which the comparative affluence of his later years
brought, prevented the completion. It has also to be remarked that Hunt
is much better as a taster than as a professor or expounder. He says
indeed many happy things about his favourite passages, but they
evidently represent rather afterthought than forethought. He is not good
at generalities, and when he tries them is apt, instead of flying (as
an Ariel of criticism should do), to sprawl. Yet it was impossible for a
man who was so almost invariably right in particulars, to go very wrong
in general; and the worst that can be said of Leigh Hunt's general
critical axioms and conclusions is that they are much better than the
reasons that support them. For instance, he is probably right in calling
the famous "intellectual" and "henpecked you all" in "Don Juan," "the
happiest triple rhyme ever written." But when he goes on to say that
"the sweepingness of the assumption completes the flowing breadth of the
effect," he goes very near to talking nonsense. For most people,
however, a true opinion persuasively stated is of much more consequence
than the most elaborate logical justification of it; and it is this that
makes Leigh Hunt's criticism such excellent good reading. It is
impossible not to feel that when a guide (which after all a critic
should be) is recommended with cautions that, though an invaluable
fellow for the most part, he is not unlikely in certain places to lead
the traveller over a precipice, it is a very dubious kind of
recommendation. Yet this is the way in which one has to speak of Jeffrey
and Hazlitt, of Wilson and De Quincey. Of Leigh Hunt it need hardly ever
be said; for in the unlucky diatribes on Dante above cited, the most
unwary reader can see that his author has lost his temper and with it
his head. As a rule he avoids the things that he is not qualified to
judge, such as the rougher and sublimer parts of poetry. Of its
sweetness and its music, of its grace and its wit, of its tenderness and
its fancy, no better judge ever existed than Leigh Hunt. He jumped at
such things, when he came near them, almost as involuntarily as a needle
to a magnet.
He was, however, perhaps most popular in his own time, and certainly he
gained most of the not excessive share of pecuniary profit which fell to
his lot, as what I have called a miscellanist. One of the things which
have not yet been sufficiently done in the criticism of English literary
history, is a careful review of the successive steps by which the
periodical essay of Addison and his followers during the eighteenth
century passed into the magazine-paper of our own days. The later
examples of the eighteenth century, the "Observers" and "Connoisseurs,"
the "Loungers" and "Mirrors" and "Lookers-On," are fairly well worth
reading in themselves, especially as the little volumes of the "British
Essayists" go capitally in a travelling-bag; but the gap between them
and the productions of Leigh Hunt, of Lamb, and of the _Blackwood_ men,
with Praed's schoolboy attempts not left out, is a very considerable
one. Leigh Hunt is himself entitled to a high place in the new school so
far as mere priority goes, and to one not low in actual merit. He
relates himself, more than once, with the childishness which is the good
side of his Skimpolism, how not merely his literary friends but persons
of quality had special favourites among the miscellaneous papers of the
_Indicator_, like (he would certainly have used the parallel himself if
he had known it or thought of it) the Court of France with Marot's
Psalms. This miscellaneous work of his extends, as it ought to do, to
all manner of subjects. The pleasantest example to my fancy is the book
called _The Town_, a gossiping description of London from St. Paul's to
St. James's, which he afterwards followed up with books on the West End
and Kensington, and which, though of course second-hand as to its facts,
is by no means uncritical, and by far the best reading of any book of
its kind. Even the Autobiography might take rank in this class; and the
same kind of stuff made up the staple of the numerous periodicals which
Leigh Hunt edited or wrote, and of the still more numerous books which
he compounded out of the dead periodicals. It may be that a severe
criticism will declare that, here as well as elsewhere, he was more
original than accomplished; and that his way of treating subjects was
pursued with better success by his imitators than by himself. Such a
paper, for instance, as "On Beds and Bedrooms" suggests (and is dwarfed
by the suggestion) Lamb's "Convalescent" and other similar work. "Jack
Abbott's Breakfast," which is, or was, exceedingly popular with Hunt's
admirers, is an account of the misfortunes of a luckless young man who
goes to breakfast with an absent-minded pedagogue, and, being turned
away empty, orders successive refreshments at different coffee-houses,
each of which proves a feast of Tantalus. The idea is not bad; but the
carrying out suits the stage better than the study, and is certainly far
below such things as Maginn's adventures of Jack Ginger and his friends,
with the tale untold that Humphries told Harlow. "A Few Remarks on the
Rare Vice called Lying" is a most promising title; he must be a very
good-natured judge who finds appended to it a performing article. "The
Old Lady" and "The Old Gentleman" were once great favourites; they seem
to have been studied from Earle's _Microcosmography_, not the least
excellent of the books that have proceeded from foster-children of
Walter de Merton, but they are over-laboured in particulars. So too are
"The Adventures of Carfington Blundell" and "Inside of an Omnibus."
Leigh Hunt's humour is so devoid of bitterness that it sometimes becomes
insipid; his narrative so fluent and gossiping that it sometimes becomes
insignificant. His enemies called him immoral, which appears to have
been a gross calumny so far as his private life was concerned, and is
certainly a gross exaggeration as regards his writing. But he was rather
too much given to dally about voluptuous subjects with a sort of
chuckling epicene triviality. He is so far from being passionate that he
sometimes becomes almost offensive. He is terribly apt to labour a
conceit or a prettiness till it becomes vapid; and his "Criticism on
Female Beauty," though it contains some extremely sensible remarks, also
contains much which is suggestive of Mr. Tupman. Yet his miscellaneous
writing has one great merit (besides its gentle playfulness and its
untiring variety) which might procure pardon for worse faults. With no
one perhaps are those literary memories which transform and vivify life
so constantly present as with Leigh Hunt. Although the world was a
perfectly real thing to him, and not by any means seen only through the
windows of a library, he took everywhere with him the remembrances of
what he had read, and they helped him to clothe and colour what he saw
and what he wrote. Between him, therefore, and readers who themselves
have read a good deal, and loved what they have read not a little, there
is always something in common; and yet probably no bookish writer has
been less resented by his unbookish readers as a thruster of the
abominable things--superior knowledge and superior scholarship--upon
them. Some vices of the snob Leigh Hunt undoubtedly had, but he was
never in the least a pretentious snob. He quotes his books not in the
spirit of a man who is looking down on his fellows from a proper
elevation, but in the spirit of a kindly host who is anxious that his
guests should enjoy the good things on his table.