JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT

1784-1859

A STATESMAN, in dedicating a memorial to Leigh Hunt, confessed to little knowledge of his writings. The same admission, as to all but one short poem, might be made by a majority of educated Englishmen. I should like to be able to treat the neglect as reflecting honour on the national genius for having produced authors of such merit, and in such plenty, as to have rendered him superfluous. At all events, any who take up a volume by Leigh Hunt for the first time will be surprised at its rare distinction of style. But they ought to be hurt, if not by regret for a pleasure they have hitherto denied themselves, by some sense of ingratitude to the kindly spirit which devoted itself during long years to the endeavour to entertain a careless public.

Grace is a special quality. It is not the highest. Beings of a lofty nature may be destitute of it. An addition of an excellence will sometimes mar it, or obscure the impression of its presence. Though very far from being a definition of genuine poetry, the Nothing-too-much commonly is part of one. Without claiming for Leigh Hunt that he never offends against the canon, I believe his instinct for it to be generally true. Whatever else his poetry is not, almost invariably it is in perfect taste. I never begin The Story of Rimini without a prejudice against its existence. When Dante had done it all in six dozen inimitable lines, it is sacrilege to pretend to

interpret and develop. Leigh Hunt's own exquisite rendering of the original is itself a sufficient rebuke of his attempt at explaining. Yet I always end by acknowledging to myself that, if it were to be done, the decline or rise from innocent boy-and-girl friendship to passionate love could not have been more delicately shadowed.

The same praise can be bestowed, and without fear here of Dante's awful frown, on the rejuvenescence conferred upon the tragedy of Hero and Leander, an old tale,

and yet as young

And warm with life as ever minstrel sung;

a chronicle as

of two that died last night,

So might they now have liv'd, and so have died;
The story's heart, to me, still beats against its side.2

Grace, again, carries away any suggestion of coarseness in The Gentle Armour, if it cannot, any more than in a better known later poem on the same subject, veil the mediaeval brutalism of the Godiva myth itself. Elsewhere, when an idea of Leigh Hunt's is in itself noble, it resists the temptation to overgrow itself. Roses and lilies, violets, sweetbrier, and poppies in his nineteenth-century garden might have been gathered by Ariel in his roamings from Prospero's Atlantis.3

The kindly instinct does not desert his pen even when the satirist and victim of the elderly royal Adonis turns volunteer Laureate, and sings the prettiest of lullabies over the cradle of a Queen's babe :

Welcome, bud beside the rose,
On whose stem our safety grows;
Welcome, little Saxon Guelph;
Welcome, for thine own small self;

Nought of all the news we sing

Dost thou know, sweet ignorant thing;
Nought of planet's love, nor people's ;
Nor dost hear the giddy steeples
Carolling of thee and thine,

As if heav'n had rain'd them wine.
E'en thy father's loving hand
Nowise dost thou understand,
When he makes thee feebly grasp
His fingers with a tiny clasp ;
Nor dost know thy very mother's
Balmy bosom from another's,

Nor the eyes that, while they fold thee,
Never can enough behold thee.
Mother true and good has she,
Little strong one, been to thee.
She has done her strenuous duty
To thy brain and to thy beauty,
Till thou cam'st a blossom bright,
Worth the kiss of air and light.*

He has deeper strains at his command. Lines simple enough, the doom of universal humanity, he has combined into a grisly portrait of the King of Terrors. No common minor poet's brain could have conceived and drawn it. A grand touch in Mahmoud is the Sultan's acceptance of grief as a subject's indefeasible title to an instant audience : 'Sorrow,' said Mahmoud, 'is a reverend thing;

I recognize its right, as King with King.'

5

Brilliant rays pierce through the somewhat bewildering haze of the controversy between Captain Sword and Captain Pen :

O God! let me breathe, and look up at the sky!

Good is as hundreds, evil as one;

Round about goeth the golden sun.

As for Abou Ben Adhem, it has always been admitted to be a pearl of great price :

Abou Ben Adhem-may his tribe increase-
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold :-
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the presence in the room he said,

:

'What writest thou?'-The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answer'd, 'The names of those who love the Lord.'
'And is mine one?' said Abou, 'Nay, not so,'
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still; and said, 'I pray thee then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow-men.'

The angel wrote, and vanish'd. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,

And show'd the names whom love of God had bless'd,
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest."

An Angel in the House comes not far behind :

How sweet it were, if without feeble fright,
Or dying of the dreadful beauteous sight,
An angel came to us, and we could bear
To see him issue from the silent air

At evening in our room, and bend on ours

His divine eyes, and bring us from his bowers
News of dear friends, and children who have never
Been dead indeed-as we shall know for ever.
Alas! we think not what we daily see
About our hearths,-angels that are to be,
Or may be, if they will, and we prepare
Their souls and ours to meet in happy air,-

A child, a friend, a wife whose soft heart sings
In unison with ours, breeding its future wings.8

The Grasshopper and the Cricket are hymned in lines which might be a version of a Greek epigram if they were not an original English sonnet:

Green little vaulter in the sunny grass,

Catching your heart up at the feel of June,
Sole voice that 's heard amidst the lazy noon,
When even the bees lag at the summoning brass;
And you, warm little housekeeper, who class
With those who think the candles come too soon,
Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune
Nick the glad silent moments as they pass.

Oh sweet and tiny cousins, that belong,

One to the fields, the other to the hearth,

Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strong
At your clear hearts; and both seem given to earth

To ring in thoughtful ears this natural song—

Indoors and out, summer and winter, Mirth.9

When Leigh Hunt pleases he is as saucy as Villon, without it ever pleasing him to raise a blush. But whatever the other attractions of his Muse, grace remains the peculiar and distinguishing property.

In his career, and for his posthumous fame, it was and is a double-edged endowment. I suppose that it was connected in him as a poet with an exceptional capacity for absorbing his entire personal being into certain qualities of his subject. His nature was able to identify itself with whatever was artistically dainty and emotionally beautiful. Hence his elegance as a writer, and probably also his weakness both as writer and as man. No writer was ever less self-centred. He was fashioned to flutter about flowers of fancy and art; sucking, rarely in the depths, their honey; successful in discovering, not in storing it. It is not strange that in his early days hard measure should have been dealt out to such a nature. At his dawn partisanship flayed him with the bitter tongue of Christopher North, as well as providing him, more materially, with a lodging in Horsemonger Lane