There is May in books for ever;
May will part from Spenser never;
May's in Milton, May's in Prior;
May's in Chaucer, Thompson, Dyer;
May's in all the Italian books;
She has old and modern nooks,
Where she sleeps with nymphs and elves
In happy places they call shelves,
And will rise, and dress your rooms
With a drapery thick with blooms.
Come, ye rains then, if ye will,
May's at home, and with me still;
But come rather, thou, good weather,
And find us in the fields together.
This certainly is redolent of cheer. But he also longs for "manly,
joyous, gipsy June."
O, could I walk round the earth
With a heart to share my mirth,
With a look to love me ever,
Thoughtful much, but sullen never,
I could be content to see
June and no variety;
Loitering here, and living there,
With a book, and frugal fare,
With a finer gipsy time,
And a cuckoo in the clime,
Work at morn, and mirth at noon,
And sleep beneath the sacred moon.
In one of the items in his pleasant book, _Table-Talk_, Hunt speaks for
greater cheerfulness in English literature. He cites Suckling's famous
_A Ballad Upon a Wedding_, in which allusion is made to the once popular
belief that the sun danced on Easter-day:
Her feet beneath her petticoat,
Like little mice, stole in and out,
As if they fear'd the light;
But, Oh! She dances such a way,
No sun upon an Easter-day
Is half so fine a sight.
And then he remarks that it is a pity that we do not have, if not more
such beliefs, yet more such poetry, to stand us instead of them. "Our
poetry," he writes, "like ourselves, has too little animal spirits. It
has plenty of thought and imagination; plenty of night-thoughts, and
day-thoughts too; and in its dramatic circle, a world of action and
character. It is a poetry of the highest order and the greatest
abundance. But though not sombre--though manly, hearty, and even
luxuriant--it is certainly not a very joyous poetry. And the same may be
said of our literature in general. You do not conceive the writers to
have been cheerful men. They often recommend cheerfulness, but rather as
a good and sensible practice than as something which they feel
themselves." A little later he says, "I am only speaking of the rarity
of a certain kind of sunshine in our literature, and expressing a
natural rainy-day wish that we had a little more of it." He thinks there
should be a joyous set of elegant extracts in a score of volumes, "that
we could have at hand, like a cellaret of good wine, against April or
November weather!"
Hunt believed in a "cheerful religion." "We are for making the most of
the present world," he wrote. He had not any gloomy forebodings as to
the things that may come after death. His _London Journal_, as Frank
Carr so well states, "breathed such uniform gladness and hopefulness
that every page is pervaded with an odor of homely sanctity, as of
hidden violets."
And again: He "noticed the flowers when their timorous splendours peeped
through the snow at the first impulse of life in the dark earth, and
when, afterwards, as a mantle they spread their glory over garden and
field; greeted the birds, from the lark's early carol, and the arrival
of the swallows, until the woods became vocal with multitudinous
voices."
As to Hunt's religion, by the way, there has been much discussion. I
have Leigh Hunt's copy of a volume bearing this long title: "_The
Mystical Initiations; or, Hymns of Orpheus, translated from the original
Greek: with a preliminary dissertation on the Life and Theology of
Orpheus_," containing this observation in Hunt's hand-writing:
Mr. Taylor's faith sometimes makes him eloquent; but if he had
united, with his Platonical abstractions, the true Christian power
of socially working at all times, he need not have feared whatever
seemed coming. Platonism and Christianity, if either be thoroughly
understood, are formed admirably to go together. The first shapes
the human being to beauty and imagination, the latter to love and
immortality. The first perfects him individually, the latter to
endless companionship. Platonism lifts the philosopher towards
heaven: Christianity takes up the whole human race, and puts them
there.
I should like to be a worshiper in a Christian temple, in which
whatsoever is good and beautiful should be held, for those reasons,
to be divinely true; in which Plato's unmalignant evil should be
the ground for Christ's all-benevolent good to stand upon; and in
which no more limits should be assigned to whatever was sincere,
loving, and imaginative, than to that boundless and beautiful sky,
which is surely large enough to hold it.
In these days when so many feel forebodings of trouble it is pleasant to
recall that two such men as Robert Louis Stevenson and Leigh Hunt, each
of whom had reason for gloomy thoughts, persisted in looking upon the
bright things of life. Not anywhere in the writings of these two men
will one find them dwelling on their miseries. Per contra, both preached
cheerfulness. In darkest hours they saw the sunshine and the flowers.
Like our own Lincoln, they plucked the thistle and planted the flower
where they thought the flower would grow. The reading of these two
authors is recommended--as is also a better and more intimate
acquaintance with Charles Lamb. Here is a triumvirate that will drive
into outer darkness all fits of the blues. God will be shown to be in
his heaven, and all will be well with the world.
"Hunt," says Shelley, "was one of those happy souls which are the salt
of the earth, and without whom this earth would smell like what it is--a
tomb; who is what others seem."
Hunt viewed his many misfortunes in a kindly spirit, showing us often
what fine things may come to us out of human suffering. It is a
benediction, a peace-compelling exercise to spend an evening with Hunt.
His optimism is catching. One cannot get away from it. He writes of
Samuel Johnson: "How much good and entertainment did not the very
necessities of such a man help to produce us." This is a saying we may
apply to Hunt himself.
_Leigh Hunt's London Journal_, one of his best publications, states that
its object is "Pleasure ... the pleasure recommended alike by the most
doubting experiment, and the most trusting faith--that of making the
utmost of this green and golden world, the smallest particles of whose
surface we have not yet learned to turn to account--that of profiting
alike from the toil that is incumbent on us, and from 'the lilies of the
valley that toil not, neither do they spin.'... We say nothing we do not
think, and manifest no feelings which are not those of our daily life
and our most habitual enjoyments, our talisman against trouble, and our
best reward for exertion--a leaf, a flower, a fine passage of music, or
poetry, or painting, a belief in a thousand capabilities of earth and
man, give us literally as much delight as we say they do. We should not
otherwise have been able to get through 'a sea of troubles,' not to
recommend as we do the loving light that has saved us."
Hunt's motto for his _Indicator_, a publication praised by Charles Lamb,
is a cheerful one: "A dram of sweet is worth a pound of sour." It was
taken from Spenser, one of Hunt's favorites, and was suggested by Mrs.
Novello, mother of Mary Cowden Clarke, as we are told in _Letters to an
Enthusiast_: "By the way, did you know that my mother was the godmother
of the 'Indicator?' She suggested its name, and Leigh Hunt adopted it,
and the passage as a motto which she had pointed out as offering ground
for a good title."
Hunt could get cheerfulness out of a pebble even. "Strike it," he says,
"and you will get something out of him: warm his heart, and out come the
genial sparks that shall gladden your hearth, and put hot dishes on your
table." The brook singeth, states Coleridge in that beautiful stanza:
A voice of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.
And Hunt observes it would not sing so well without the stone.
Then in his light, airy way he calls our attention to that exquisite
little poem by Wordsworth on the fair maiden who died by the river Dove:
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye;
Fair as the star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
And he asks if anything can express a lovelier loneliness, than the
violet half hidden by the mossy stone.
Hunt finds other gentle qualities in a stone, citing the opening lines
of Keats's _Hyperion_, where he describes the dethroned monarch of the
gods, sitting in his exile:
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and Eve's one star,
Sate gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone.
Nothing certainly can be more quiet than a stone. It utters not a
syllable nor a sigh.
Shakespeare had the knack of seeing power in things gentle:
Weariness
Can snore upon the flint, when restive sloth
Finds the down pillow hard.
"If you are melancholy for the first time, you will find upon a little
inquiry that others have been melancholy many times, and yet are
cheerful now," Hunt writes in the _Indicator_. "If you are melancholy
many times, recollect that you have got over all those times."
This is good advice, and true. Exercise is recommended as a promoter of
cheerfulness. Such a high opinion of the value of exercise was held by
Plato that he maintained it was a cure even for a wounded conscience. In
the same article Hunt suggests that one should not want money for
money's sake. Certes, Hunt never craved money for the purpose of
hoarding it. Nearly all his life he needed money acutely, but when a
generous sum came into his possession he did not know how to keep it;
nay, he did not know how to use it properly. He was always "hard up,"
simply because he was a child in money matters. Withal, he was
optimistic and cheerful, even to the extent of remaining at home because
he did not possess the means of purchasing presentable clothing. When
his wife wrote him that after paying for a loaf of bread she would not
have a penny in her pocket, Hunt writes her in a cheerful way. Some of
us with a less keen perception of cheerful situations, or with less
ability to surmount calamities would find it rather difficult to be as
cheerful as Hunt seemed to be.
Hunt's correspondence, both published and unpublished, bears testimony
to his cheerfulness even when the clouds were the darkest. Speaking of
the two volumes of _Correspondence_ edited in 1862 by his son Thornton,
Edmund Ollier, the publisher, thus bears tribute to the man and his
buoyancy of spirit even under very trying circumstances. In these
volumes, he says, "we see him as those who knew him familiarly saw him
in his everyday life. Sometimes overclouded with the shadow of
affliction, but more often bright and hopeful, and at all times taking a
keen delight in beautiful things; in the exhaustless world of books and
art; in the rising genius of young authors; in the immortal language of
music; in trees, and flowers, and old memorial nooks of London and its
suburbs; in the sunlight which came, as he used to say, like a visitor
out of heaven, glorifying humble places; in the genial intercourse of
mind with mind ... A heart and soul so gifted could not but share
largely in the happiness with which the Divine Ruler of the Universe has
compensated our sorrows; and he had loving hearts about him to the last,
to sweeten all."
Hunt's gentleness and cheerfulness are shown in his essays, as well as
in his poetry. Perhaps none of his essays evidences these qualities of
his heart and mind more forcibly than "A Day by the Fire," which was
written for the _Reflector_ in 1812, when he was twenty-eight years of
age. "I am one of those that delight in a fireside," he begins, at once
thereby telling us that he loves kindliness and cheerfulness. For no man
who loves a fire on the hearth, especially a fire made of old wood, can
be a sour old curmudgeon. It is as impossible as it is for one not to
love a sweet little girl.
Hunt would have his fire left quite to itself, without a tea-kettle,
"bubbling and loud-hissing," which "throws up a steamy column," as
Cowper tells it. Such a fire "has full room to breathe and to blaze,"
and he can poke it as he pleases. "Poke it as I please!" he continues.
"Think, benevolent reader, think of the pride and pleasure of having in
your hand that awful, but at the same time artless, weapon, a poker; of
putting it into the proper bar, gently levering up the coals, and seeing
the instant and bustling flame above!"
The use of the poker with one's fire is as natural as shaking hands with
a friend. And
Then shine the bars, the cakes in smoke aspire
A sudden glory bursts from all the fire,
The conscious wight rejoicing in the heat,
Rubs the blithe knees and toasts th' alternate feet.
Writing in _The Companion_ in 1828, he remarks:
A man ... may begin with being happy, on the mere strength of the
purity and vivacity of his pulse: children do so; but he must have
derived his constitution from very virtuous, temperate, and happy
parents indeed, and be a great fool to boot, and wanting in the
commonist sympathies of his nature, if he can continue happy, and
yet be a bad man: and then he could not be bad, in the worst sense
of the word, for his defect would excuse him.
Hunt quotes approvingly this from Hannah More:
Since life's best joys consist in peace and ease,
And though but few can serve, yet all may please,
O let th' ungentle spirit learn from hence,
A small unkindness is a great offence.
"Life," says George Moore, "is a perfect gift, and our duty is to enjoy
it; by doing so we can help others to enjoy."
This was Hunt's philosophy.
* * * * * * *
These quotations from his letters, taken from originals in our
collection, are indicative of his view of life:
Do not be alarmed about the emptiness of your purse on Monday. In
the course of the day you will receive some money at all
events--enough to go on with ... Meantime I send you two sixpence
(mighty sum!) which I have in the last corner of my pocket. You
will not despise them, coming with his heart's love, and his best
thanks for your cheerful letters.--Oct. 4, 1829, to Mrs. Hunt at
Epsom.
Heaven seems to afford us consolatory thought, and show to us
almost certain glimpses of happiness, in proportion as we do its
work with cheerfulness:--and what work is more properly the work of
heaven than that of helping one another to bear our burdens and
strengthen our patience?--Letter, Florence, 4 Nov., 1824, to Bebs,
his wife's sister.
He writes Mrs. Hunt, his "Dearest Molly mine," thus cheerfully:
I have got the twenty guineas, and settled with Hyatt; but I felt
so _new_, with my waistcoat pocket full of sovereigns, and it
seemed such a _charge_, that I thought I had better bring it up to
you myself.
I am again, with bitter heart, forced to disappoint you; but Mr.
Bell says, that "certainly, certainly" (emphatically repeating it)
I shall have the six sovereigns tomorrow morning ... Keep up your
spirits.
I forgot to mention ... that I have still one of the sovereigns
which I brought away with me, as well as five shillings and
sixpence in silver; so that I hope I shall have enough, if not
quite enough, to pay for the fly on Sunday. If not, perhaps you can
borrow a few shillings till the Treasury pay-day.