Barnette Miller

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 [a statement repeated again in 1822[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

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:

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:

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:

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.

Three months were spent in Pisa after Shelley’s death. In September the two families left for Genoa, travelling in separate parties and, on their arrival, settling in separate homes, the Hunts with Mrs. Shelley. From this time on there was little intercourse between Byron and Hunt. October 9, 1822, Byron wrote to England and denied that all three families were living under one roof. He said that he rarely saw Hunt, not more than once a month.[399] Hunt to the contrary said that they saw less of each other than in Genoa yet “considerable.”[400] Although at no time was there an open breach, yet cordiality and sympathy were wholly lost on both sides in the strain of the financial situation. They failed of agreement even on impersonal matters. Byron had looked forward with great pleasure to Hunt’s companionship. Before they met he had written: “When Leigh Hunt comes we shall have banter enough about those old ruffiani, the old dramatists, with their tiresome conceits, their jingling rhymes, and endless play upon words.”[401] This pleasant anticipation was not realized, for Hunt’s sensitiveness in petty matters and Byron’s scorn of Hunt’s affectation and of his ill-bred personal applications,[402] or so the hearer interpreted them, reduced safe topics to Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Even a mutual admiration of Pope and Dryden was forgotten. Literary jealousy and vanity fed the flames. Hunt was unable to appreciate manhood of Byron’s virile type, and he did not try to conceal the fact from one who was hungry for praise. On the other hand, Byron did not render to Hunt the homage he was accustomed to receive from the Cockney circle and had nothing but contempt for all his works except the Story of Rimini. A statement in the anonymous Life of Lord Byron, published by Iley, that the misunderstanding was the result of a criticism by Hunt of Parisina in the Leghorn and Lucca newspapers and that Byron never spoke to him after the discovery[403] is a fabrication as unsubstantial as the greater part of the other statements in the same book. Hunt denied the charge. His sole connection with Parisina was that he supplied the incident of the heroine talking in her sleep,[404] a device that he had already made use of in Rimini.

On his arrival in Italy Hunt wrote back to England that Byron entered into The Liberal with great ardor, and that he had presented the Vision of Judgment to his brother and himself for their mutual benefit.[405] Yet four days later in a letter to Moore Byron wrote: “Hunt seems sanguine about the matter but (entre nous) I am not. I do not, however, like to put him out of spirits by saying so, for he is bilious and unwell. Do, pray, answer this letter immediately. Do send Hunt anything in prose or verse of yours, to start him handsomely—and lyrical, irical, or what you please.”[406] At the time of Trelawny’s first visit after the work had begun, Byron said impatiently: “It will be an abortion,” and again in Trelawny’s presence he called to his bull-dog on the stairway, “Don’t let any Cockneys pass this way.”[407] Sometime previous to October his endurance must have given way completely, for in that month Hunt wrote that Byron was again for the plan.[408] In January Byron urged John Hunt to employ good writers for The Liberal that it might succeed.[409] March 17, 1823, Byron, in a letter to John Hunt, said that he attributed the failure of The Liberal to his own contributions and that the magazine would stand a better chance without him. He desired to sever the partnership if the magazine was to be continued.[410] His constant vacillation in part supports the charge made by Hunt that Byron under protest contributed his worse productions in order to make a show of coÖperation.[411] Insinuations from Moore and Murray had fallen on fertile ground and had persuaded Byron that the association jeopardized his reputation. Hobhouse, Byron’s friend, joined his dissenting voice to theirs, and “rushed over the Alps” to add to his disapproval.[412] Hazlitt’s account of the conspiracy of Byron’s friends against The Liberal is very fiery.[413]The first number of The Liberal appeared October 15, 1822. There were three subsequent numbers. Byron’s contributions were his brilliant and masterly satire, the Vision of Judgment, Heaven and Earth, A Letter to the Editor of my Grandmother’s Review, The Blues, and his translation of the first canto of Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore. Murray had withheld the preface to the Vision of Judgment and this omission, combined with an unwise announcement in The Examiner of September 29, 1822, by John Hunt, made the reception even worse than it might otherwise have been. Hunt said the Vision of Judgment “played the devil with all of us.”[414] Shelley had made ready for the forthcoming magazine his exquisite translation of Goethe’s May Day Night and a prose narrative, A German Apologue. These appeared in the first number. Hunt’s best contributions were two poems, Lines to a Spider and Mahmoud. Letters from Abroad are good in spots only. His two satires, The Dogs and The Book of Beginners, are pale reflections in meter and tone of Don Juan and Beppo combined. The Florentine Lovers is a good story spoiled. Rhyme and Reason, The Guili Tre, and the rest are purely hack work, with the possible exceptions of the translation from Ariosto and the modernization of the Squire’s Tale. Hazlitt contributed Pulpit Oratory, On the Spirit of Monarchy, a pithy dissertation On the Scotch Character, and a delightful reminiscence of Coleridge in My First Acquaintance with Poets. Mrs. Shelley wrote A Tale of the Passions, Mme. D’Houdetot, and Giovanni Villani, all rather stilted and heavy. Charles Browne contributed Shakespear’s Fools. A number of unidentified prose articles and poems, many of the latter translations from Alfieri, completed the list.

The causes of the failure of The Liberal were very complex, but quite obvious. There was no definite political campaign mapped out, no proportion outlined for the various departments, no assignments of individual responsibility, no attempt to cater to the public appetite or to mollify the public prejudices for expediency’s sake, and an utter want of harmony among its supporters. Each contributor rode his own hobby. Each vented his private spleen without regard to the common good. It was a vague, up-in-the-air scheme, wholly lacking in coÖrdination and common sense. Byron’s fickleness and want of genuine interest in a small affair among many other greater ones; the disappointment of both Byron[415] and Hunt in not realizing the enormous profits that they had looked forward to—although Hunt wrote later that the “moderate profits” were quite enough to have encouraged perseverance on the part of Byron; Hunt’s ill-health and unhappy situation which rendered it difficult for him to write; John Hunt’s inexperience as a bookseller; the general unpopularity of the editor, the publisher, and the contributors; and last, the pent-up storm of rage from the press which greeted the first number of The Liberal,[416] were other reasons that contributed to its ultimate downfall. In seeking Hunt for the editor of such a venture, as Gait had pointed out,[417] Byron had mistaken his political notoriety for solid literary reputation.

Hunt, notwithstanding his confession[418] of an inability to write at his best and of his brother’s inexperience, throws the burden of failure solely on Byron. He asserts that The Liberal had no enemies and, worst of all, that Byron when he foresaw hostility and failure, gave him and his brother the profits that they might carry the responsibility of an “ominous partnership”[419]—a statement ungenerously distorted by bitter memories, for when John Hunt was prosecuted for the publication of the Vision of Judgment, Byron offered to stand trial in his stead. Neither does Hunt state that Byron’s contributions were gratis and that the “moderate profits” enabled him and his brother to pay off some of their old debts.[420] Byron, strong with the prescience of failure, likewise shifted the blame to other shoulders and with the aid of a strong imagination tried to persuade himself and his friends that the Hunts had projected the affair and that he had consented in an evil hour to engage in it;[421] that they were the cause of the failure; that his motives throughout had been philanthropic only in nature;[422] and that he was sacrificing himself for others. Such statements are inventions born of self-accusation and of self-defense. The worst that can be said of Byron from beginning to end of the affair is that he was not conscientious in his endeavors to make the journal a success; that, after it failed, he evaded financial responsibility by placing barriers of coldness and ungraciousness between Hunt and himself.

On October 9, 1822, he wrote to Moore that he had done all he could for Hunt “but in the affairs of this world he himself is a child”;[423] “As it is, I will not quit them (the Hunts) in their adversity, though it should cost me my character, fame, money, and the usual et cetera.... Had their journal gone on well, and I could have aided to make it better for them, I should then have left them; after my safe pilotage off a lee shore, to make a prosperous voyage by themselves. As it is, I can’t, or would not, if I could, leave them amidst the breakers. As to any community of feeling, thought, or opinions between L. H. and me, there is little or none; we meet rarely, hardly ever; but I think him a good-principled and able man.[424]... You would not have had me leave him in the street with his family, would you? And as to the other plan you mention, you forget how it would humiliate him—that his writings should be supposed to be dead weight! Think a moment—he is perhaps the vainest man on earth, at least his own friends say so pretty loudly; and if he were in other circumstances I might be tempted to take him down a peg; but not now—it would be cruel.[425]... A more amiable man in society I know not, nor (when he will allow his sense to prevail over his sectarian principles) a better writer. When he was writing his Rimini I was not the last to discover its beauties, long before it was published. Even then I remonstrated against its vulgarisms; which are the more extraordinary, because the author is anything but a vulgar man.”[426] During April, 1823, the Countess of Blessington had a conversation with Byron in which he said that while he regretted having embarked in The Liberal, yet he had a good opinion of the talents and principles of Hunt, despite their diametrically opposed tastes.[427] On April 2, 1823, he wrote that Hunt was incapable or unwilling to help himself; that he could not keep up this “genuine philanthropy” permanently; and that he would furnish Hunt with the means to return to England in comfort.[428] There is no proof that Byron ever made such an offer to Hunt. The purchase money of Hunt’s journey home was Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries. On July 23, 1823, Byron went to Greece. The Hunts, provided by him with £30 for the trip, left Genoa about the same time for Florence, where they were literally stranded, in ill-health and without sufficient means for support,[429] until their departure for England in September, 1825. The suffering there and the foul calumny at home magnified in Hunt’s mind[430] the indignity and injustice that had been put upon him and warped his sense of gratitude and honor in the whole affair. He wrote from Florence: “The stiffness of age has come into my joints; my legs are sore and fevered; and I sometimes feel as if I were a ship rotting in a stagnant harbour.”[431] Mrs. Shelley protested to Byron concerning his treatment of Hunt[432] but she received no further satisfaction than the statement that he had engaged in the journal for good-will and respect for Hunt solely.[433]

The publisher Colburn in 1825 made Hunt an advance of money for the return journey, to be repaid by a volume of selections from his own writings preceded by a biographical sketch.[434] An irresistible longing for England and a crisis in the disagreement with John Hunt regarding the proprietary rights of The Examiner and the publication of the Wishing Cap Papers in that paper, made Hunt seize at the first opportunity by which he might return home. From Paris, on his way to England, he wrote: “If I delayed I might be pinned forever to a distance, like a fluttering bird to a wall, and so die in helpless yearning. I have been mistaken. During my strength my weakness perhaps, was only apparent; now that I am weaker, indignation has given a fillip to my strength.”[435] From his severance with The Examiner and the publication of Bacchus in Tuscany in 1825, Hunt was idle until 1828. Then, pressed by his obligation to Colburn and stung by the misrepresentations of the press regarding his relations with Byron in Italy, he scored even, as he thought, by producing Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, the blunder of his life and the one blot upon his honor. In addition to the part dealing with Byron, it contained autobiographical reminiscences and memoirs of Shelley, Keats, Moore, Lamb and others. It went rapidly through three editions. The body of the work is a discussion of the defects of Byron’s character and a detailed analysis of his actions. In brief, he is charged with insincerity in the cause of liberty; an impatience of any despotism save his own; a vain pride of rank, although his friends were of humble origin; a “libelling all around” of friends; an ignorance of real love, consanguineous or sexual; coarseness in speaking of women or to them;[436] a voluptuous indolence; weak impulses; a habit of miscellaneous confidences and exaggeration; untruthfulness; susceptibility to influence; avarice even in his patriotism and debauchery; a willingness to receive petty obligations; jealousy of the great and small; no powers of conversation and a want of self-possession; bad temper and self-will; an inordinate desire for flattery; egotism and love of notoriety. More petty accusations are excess in his eating and drinking, though Hunt complains that Byron would not “drink like a lord”; his fondness for communicating unpleasant tidings; his inclination to the mock heroic; his effeminacy and old-womanish superstition; his easily-aroused suspicions; his imitativeness in writing poetry; his slight knowledge of languages; his physical cowardice. The virtues of this monster, small in number and grudgingly allowed, were admitted to be good horsemanship, good looks, a delicate hand, amusing powers of mimicry, pleasantry in his cups, masterly swimming. Unfortunately these statements were usually damned with a “but” or “yet.”

While it is now generally believed that many of the accusations made by Hunt were true,[437] inasmuch as they are confirmed in large part by contemporary evidence, and as truthfulness was one of Hunt’s dominant traits, yet, on the other hand, it is quite necessary to make large allowance for the point of view and the color given by prejudice and bitterness of spirit. That Hunt told only the truth does not justify the injury in the slightest, for he had slept under Byron’s roof and eaten of his bread. The obligations conferred were not exactly those of benefactor to suppliant; they were perhaps no more than Hunt’s due in the light of the responsibility voluntarily assumed by Byron; yet they could not be destroyed or forgotten because of a refusal to acknowledge them. Worse still, Hunt’s motives proceeded from impecuniosity and revenge. Such petty gossip of private affairs was worthy of a smaller and meaner soul. That Hunt did not have the sanction of his own judgment and conscience is clearly seen in the preface to the first edition where he confesses an unwilling hand and gives as a reason for the change of scheme a too long holiday taken after the advance of money from Colburn. He says that the book would never have been written at all, or consigned to the flames when finished, if he could have repaid the money.[438] His one poor defense is that “Byron talked freely of me and mine,” that the public had talked, and that Byron knew how he felt.[439]

The book had a very large circulation. But Hunt, who had hoped to defend himself in this manner from the calumnies afloat since the failure of The Liberal, brought down a storm of abuse from the press that resulted in his degradation and Byron’s canonization. Moore’s welcome was a poem, The Living Dog and the Dead Lion.[440] Hunt’s friends replied with The Giant and the Dwarf.[441] In his life of Byron published some years later, Moore speaks reservedly of the book, merely saying it had sunk into deserved oblivion.[442]Hunt’s public apology and reparation, in so far as such lay in his power, were first made in 1847 in A Saunter Through the West End: “No. 140 (formerly No. 13 of what was Piccadilly Terrace) was the last house which Byron inhabited in England. Nobody needs to be told what a great wit and fine poet he was: but everybody does not know that he was by nature a genial and generous man spoiled by the most untoward circumstances in early life. He vexed his enemies, and sometimes his friends; but his very advantages have been hard upon him, and subjected him to all sorts of temptations. May peace rest upon his infirmities, and his fame brighten as it advances.”[443] In 1848, he wrote in praise of the Ave Maria stanza in Don Juan.[444] And finally and completely in his Autobiography he apologized for the heat and venom of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries:

“I wrote nothing which I did not feel to be true, or think so. But I can say with Alamanni, that I was then a young man, and that I am now advanced in years. I can say, that I was agitated by grief and anger, and that I am now free from anger. I can say, that I was far more alive to other people’s defects than to my own, and that I am now sufficiently sensible of my own to show to others the charity which I need myself. I can say, moreover, that apart from a little allowance for provocation, I do not think it right to exhibit what is amiss, or may be thought amiss, in the character of a fellow-creature, out of any feeling but unmistakable sorrow, or the wish to lessen evils which society itself may have caused.

“Lord Byron, with respect to the points on which he erred and suffered (for on all others, a man like himself, poet and wit, could not but give and receive pleasure), was the victim of a bad bringing up, of a series of false positions in society, of evils arising from the mistakes of society itself, of a personal disadvantage (which his feelings exaggerated), nay, of his very advantages of person, and of a face so handsome as to render with strong tendencies of natural affection,” and declared that his fickleness had been “nurtured by an excessively bad training.” In exoneration of Hunt he said that if “disappointment and the fervour of a new literary work—which often draws the pen beyond its original intention—led Leigh Hunt into a book that was too severe, perhaps too one-sided in its views, he himself afterwards corrected the one-sidedness, and recalled to mind the earlier and undoubtedly the more correct impression he had had of Lord Byron.” I, 202-203.him an object of admiration. Even the lameness, of which he had such a resentment, only softened the admiration with tenderness.

“But he did not begin life under good influences. He had a mother, herself, in all probability, the victim of bad training, who would fling the dishes from table at his head, and tell him he would be a scoundrel like his father. His father, who was cousin to the previous lord, had been what is called a man upon town, and was neither rich nor very respectable. The young lord, whose means had not yet recovered themselves, went to school, noble but poor, expecting to be in the ascendant with his title, yet kept down by the inconsistency of his condition. He left school to put on the cap with the gold tuft, which is worshipped at college:—he left college to fall into some of the worst hands on the town:—his first productions were contemptuously criticised, and his genius was thus provoked into satire:—his next were overpraised, which increased his self-love:—he married when his temper had been soured by difficulties, and his will and pleasure pampered by the sex:—and he went companionless into a foreign country, where all this perplexity could repose without being taught better, and where the sense of a lost popularity could be drowned in license.

“I am sorry I ever wrote a syllable respecting Lord Byron which might have been spared. I have still to relate my connection with him, but it will be related in a different manner. Pride, it is said, will have a fall; and I must own, that on this subject I have experienced the truth of the saying. I had prided myself—I should pride myself now if I had not been thus rebuked—on not being one of those who talk against others. I went counter to this feeling in a book; and to crown the absurdity of the contradiction, I am foolish enough to suppose that the very fact of my so doing would show that I had done it in no other instance! that having been thus public in the error, credit would be given me for never having been privately so! Such are the delusions inflicted on us by self-love. When the consequence was represented to me as characterized by my enemies, I felt, enemies though they were, as if I blushed from head to foot. It is true I had been goaded to the task by misrepresentation:—I had resisted every other species of temptation to do it:—and, after all, I said more in his excuse, and less to his disadvantage, than many of those who reproved me. But enough. I owed the acknowledgment to him and to myself; and I shall proceed on my course with a sigh for both, and I trust in the good will of the sincere.”[445]