The essays of Leigh Hunt

Preface

In making this selection from the essays of Leigh Hunt, my aim has partly been to provide a companion volume to the volume of essays which I edited in 1887 for the Scott Library. I have therefore avoided using more than a very few of the essays which I had previously chosen, and I have used these because they seemed specially suitable for a book which is to be illustrated. Here, the illustrator will be seen collaborating with Leigh Hunt in his endeavour to bring vividly before us those aspects of streets, and shops, and theatres, and manners, which change from generation to generation, gaining, from generation to generation, something of the additional interest of things which already belong to the past. The triviality of yesterday becomes, to the reader of to-day, a part of history.

In my selection of 1887 I permitted myself to edit Leigh Hunt with a severity which seems to me now to have been a little excessive. Most of Leigh Hunt's work was written hastily, for publication week by week ; and the consequences of that haste, and of that mode of publication, are visible on every page. With all the instincts of a man of letters, Leigh Hunt was condemned to be, for the most part, a journalist of genius. Everything that he has left is a little unsatisfactory ; we must grope hither and thither, among crowding quotations and ragged references, for those evidences of " graceful fertility, of clearness, vi PREFACE

lovingness, truthfulness, of childlike, open character," which Carlyle divined in the man, and which stamped him, before those exacting eyes, "a man of genius, in a very strict sense of that word, and in all senses which it bears or implies." It seemed to me, when I was making my first selection, that it would be doing a service to Leigh Hunt if I pruned away some of the excrescences which deformed so much of his work. To-day I am inclined to think that it is best, under all circumstances, to leave things as they were written. Every man may then be his own critic, but the writer speaks for himself.

In turning over the old volumes of Once a Week, some years ago, I came upon a poem of Mr George Meredith in the number for December 31, 1859. It was accompanied by a delicate and vigorous woodcut of Millais, who, I believe, afterwards developed the sketch into a painting. The poem has never been reprinted, and as it tells in verse the story which Leigh Hunt told in prose in " The Mountain of the Two Lovers," it may be quoted here by way of commentary.

THE CROWN OF LOVE.

" O might I load my arms with thee, Like that young lover of Romance, Who loved and gain'd so gloriously The fair Princess of France !

Because he dared to love so high,

He, bearing her dear weight, must speed

To where the mountain touch'd the sky : So the proud King decreed.

Unhalting he must bear her on,

Nor pause a space to gather breath,

PREFACE vii

And on the height she would be won ; — And she was won in death !

Red the far summit flames with morn,

While in the plain a glistening Court Surrounds the King who practised scorn

Thro' such a mask of sport.

She leans into his arms ; she lets

Her lovely shape be clasp'd : he fares. God speed him whole ! The knights make bets :

The ladies lift soft prayers.

have you seen the deer at chase?

O have you seen the wounded kite ?

So boundingly he runs his race, So wavering grows his flight.

' My lover ! linger here, and slake Thy thirst, or me thou wilt not win.'

1 See'st thou the tumbled heavens ? they break !

They beckon us up, and in.'

' Ah, hero-love ! unloose thy hold :

O drop me like a cursed thing.' ' See'st thou the crowded swards of gold ?

They wave to us Rose and Ring.'

' O death-white mouth ! O cast me down !

Thou diest ? Then with thee I die.' ' See'st thou the angels with a Crown ?

We twain have reach'd the sky.' "

The greater part of the essays which follow are taken from The Indicator, The Companion and The Seer ; some from The Wishing- Cap Papers, a collection of essays from various magazines, made in America in 1872, and containing some emendations made by Leigh Hunt on his own copies of The Tatler and The Literary Examiner. . One is taken from Men, Women and Books (1849), and five are from the very viii PREFACE

curious and interesting early volume of dramatic criticisms : Critical Essays on the London Theatres ( 1807). The essays from The Indicator, The Companion and The Seer are reprinted in most cases from the latest editions published during the lifetime of Leigh Hunt ; two, however, which he never reprinted, are taken from the original edition .of The Indicator (1819-21).

ARTHUR SYMONS.

C O NX ENTS

PAGE

I

A Dusty Day .....

The East Wind .....

H

Autumnal Commencement of Fires

Country Little Known ....

Far Countries .....

The Old Gentleman ....

The Old Lady .....

A Walk from Dulwich to Brockham

Sunday in the Suburbs ....

Advice to the Melancholy

Of the Sight of Shops . . . . .

A Nearer View of some of the Shops

Coffee-houses and Smoking

On Washerwomen .....

xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Headpiece to Sunday in the Suburbs .

Headpiece to Advice to the Melancholy

Headpiece to Of the Sight of Shops .

Tailpiece to Of the Sight of Shops

" With an easy and endless exactitude of toe "

Headpiece to Coffee-Houses and Smoking

" Impatient waiting for the newspaper"

Headpiece to On Washerwomen

Headpiece to The Butcher

" Walks through an endless round of noise"

Headpiece to Fine Days in January and February

Headpiece to Bad Weather

Headpiece to Rainy-Day Poetry

Headpiece to English and French Females .

"They ran up to her and stood looking and talking"

Headpiece to Poets' Houses ....

Headpiece to On Receiving a Sprig of Laurel from Vaucluse

" While they renew their addresses under the boughs"

Headpiece to On Death and Burial

Headpiece to May-Day

Headpiece to Coaches

" Imparting his knowledge"

" An emblem of all the patience in creation "

Headpiece to Going to the Play Again

Headpiece to Madame Pasta .

"Asa lover" ....

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Headpiece to Mr Kemble

Headpiece to Mrs Siddons

Headpiece to Mr Munden

Headpiece to Mr Mathews

Headpiece to On the Talking of Nonsense

Headpiece to Bookbinding and " Heliodorus "

Headpiece to A Treatise on Devils

" Came up when he was called by art"

Headpiece to The Mountain of the Two Lovers

" I think of an English field "

Headpiece to Twelfth Night .

PAGE

277 282 286

347 355 359

NAMES OF FLOWERS. MYSTERY OF THEIR BEAUTY. In the window beside which we are writing this article, there is a geranium shining with its scarlet tops in the sun, the red of it being the more red for a background of limetrees which are at the same time breathing and panting like airy plenitudes of joy, and developing their shifting depths of light and shade of russet brown and sunny inward gold.

It seems to say, " Paint me!" So here it is.

Every now and then some anxious fly comes near it : — we hear the sound of a bee, though we see none ; and upon looking closer at the flowers, we observe that some of the petals are transparent with the light, while others are left in shade; the leaves are equally adorned after their opaquer fashion, with those effects of the sky, showing their darkbrown rims ; and on one of them a red petal has fallen, where it lies on the brighter half of the shallow green cup, making its own red redder, and the green greener. We perceive, in imagination, the scent of those good-natured leaves, which allow you to carry off their perfume on your fingers ; for good-natured they are, in that respect above almost all plants, and fittest for the hospitalities of your rooms. The very feel of the leaf has a household warmth in it something analogous to clothing and comfort.

Why does not everybody (who can afford it) have a geranium in his window, or some other flower ? It is very cheap ; its cheapness is next to nothing if you raise it from seed, or from a slip ; and it is a beauty and a companion. It sweetens the air, rejoices the eye, links you with nature and innocence, and is something to love. And if it cannot love you in return, it cannot hate you ; it cannot utter a hateful thing, even for your neglecting it ; for though it is all beauty, it has no vanity : and such being the case, and living as it does purely to do you good and afford you pleasure, how will you be able to neglect it ?

But pray, if you choose a geranium, or possess but a few of them, let us persuade you to choose the scarlet kind, the " old original " geranium, and not a variety of it, — not one of the numerous diversities of red and white, blue and white, ivy-leaved, &c. Those are all beautiful, and very fit to vary a large collection ; but to prefer them to the originals of the race is to run the hazard of preferring the curious to the beautiful, and costliness to sound taste. It may be taken as a good general rule, that the most popular plants are the best ; for otherwise they would not have become such. And what the painters call " pure colours," are preferable to mixed ones, for reasons which Nature herself has given when she painted the sky of one colour, and the fields of another, and divided the rainbow itself into a few distinct hues, and made the red rose the queen of flowers. Variations of flowers are like variations in music, often beautiful as such, but almost always inferior to the theme on which they are founded, — the original air. And the rule holds good in beds of flowers, if they be not very large, or in any other small assemblage of them. Nay, the largest bed will look well, if of one beautiful colour ;

while the most beautiful varieties may be inharmoniously mixed up. Contrast is a good thing, but we should first get a good sense of the thing to be contrasted, and we shall find this preferable to the contrast if we are not rich enough to have both in due measure. We do not in general love and honour any one single colour enough, and we are instinctively struck with a conviction to this effect when we see it abundantly set forth. The other day we saw a little garden-wall completely covered with nasturtiums, and felt how much more beautiful it was than if anything had been mixed with it. For the leaves, and the light and shade, offer variety enough. The rest is all richness and simplicity united, — which is the triumph of an intense perception. Embower a cottage thickly and completely with nothing but roses, and nobody would desire the interference of another plant.

Everything is handsome about the geranium, not excepting its nnme ; which cannot be said of all flowers, though we get to love ugly words when associated with pleasing ideas. The word " geranium " is soft and elegant ; the meaning is poor, for it comes from a Greek word signifying a crane, the fruit having a form resembling that of a crane's head or bill. Crane's-bill is the English name of Geranium ; though the learned appellation has superseded the vernacular. But what a reason for naming the flower ! as if the fruit were anything in comparison, or any one cared about it. Such distinctions, it is true, are useful to botanists ; but as plenty of learned names are sure to be reserved for the freemasonry of the science, it would be better for the world at large to invent joyous and beautiful names for these images of joy and beauty. In some instances, we have them ; such as heart's-ease, honeysuckle, marigold, mignonette (little darling), daisy (day's-eye), etc. And many flowers are so lovely, and have associated names otherwise unmeaning so pleasantly with one's memory, that no new ones would sound so well, or seem even to have such proper significations. In pronouncing the words, lilies, roses, pinks, tulips, jonquils, we see the things themselves, and seem to taste all their beauty and sweetness. " Pink," is a harsh petty word in itself, and yet assuredly it does not seem so ; for in the word we have the flower. It would be difficult to persuade ourselves that the word rose is not very beautiful. " Pea " is a poor Chinese-like monosyllable, and "Briar" is rough and fierce, as it ought to be ; but when we think of Sweetpea and Sweet-briar, the words appear quite worthy of their epithets. The poor monosyllable becomes rich in sweetness and appropriation ; the rough dissyllable also ; and the sweeter for its contrast. But what can be said in behalf of liver-wort, blood-wort, dragon's head, devil's bit, and devil in a bush ? There was a charming line in some verses in last week's London Journal, written by a lady.

I've marr'd your blisses,

Those sweete kisses That the young breeze so loved yesterdaye !

I've seen ye sighing, Now ye're dying ; —

Hoiv could I take your prettie lives atvay ?

But you could not say this to dragon's head and devil's

bit—

O dragon's head, devil's bit, blood-wort, — say, How could I take your pretty lives away?

This would be like Dryden's version of the pig-squeaking in Chaucer —

" Poor swine! as if their pretty hearts would break."

The names of flowers in general among the polite, are neither pretty in themselves, nor give us information. The country people are apt to do them more justice. Goldylocks, ladies'-fingers, bright-eye, rose-a-rubie, shepherd'sclock, shepherd' s-purse, sauce-alone, scarlet runners, sopsin-wine, sweet-william, etc., give us some ideas either useful or pleasant. But from the peasantry also come many uncongenial names, as bad as those of the botanists. Some of the latter are handsome as well as learned, have meanings easily found out by a little reading or scholarship, and are taking their place accordingly in popular nomenclatures : as amaranth, adonis, arbutus, asphodel, etc., but many others are as ugly as they are far-fetched, such as colchicum, tagetes, yucca, ixia, mesembryanthemum ; and as to the Adansonias, Browallias, Koempferias, John Tomkinsias, or whatever the personal names may be that are bestowed at the botanical font by their proud discoverers or godfathers, we have a respect for botanists and their pursuits, and wish them all sorts of " little immortalities " except these : unless they could unite them with something illustrative of the flower as well as themselves. A few, certainly, we should not like to displace, Browallia for one, which was given to a Peruvian flower by Linnasus, in honour of a friend of his of the name of Browall ; but the name should have included some idea of the thing named. The Browallia is remarkable for its brilliancy. " We cannot," says Mr Curtis, " do it justice by any colours we have." ] Now why not have called it Browall's Beauty, or Browall's Inimitable ? The other day we were admiring an enormously beautiful apple, and were told it was called " Kirk's Admirable" after the gardener who raised it. We felt the propriety of this name directly. It was altogether to the purpose. There was use and beauty together — the name of the raiser and the excellence of the fruit raised. It is a pity that all fruits and flowers, and animals too, except those with good names, could not be

1 We learn this from the Flora Domestica, an elegant and poetryloving book, specially intended for cultivators of flowers at home.

passed in review before somebody with a genius for christening, as the creatures did before Adam in Paradise, and so have new names given them, worthy of their creation.

Suppose flowers themselves were new ! Suppose they had just come into the world, a sweet reward for some new goodness : and that we had not yet seen them quite developed ; that they were in the act of growing ; had just issued with their green stalks out of the ground, and engaged the attention of the curious. Imagine what we should feel when we saw the first lateral stem bearing off from the main one, or putting forth a leaf. How we should watch the leaf gradually unfolding its little graceful hand ; then another, then another ; then the main stalk rising and producing more ; then one of them giving indications of an astonishing novelty, a bud ! then this mysterious, lovely bud gradually unfolding like the leaf, amazing us, enchanting us, almost alarming us with delight, as if we knew not what enchantment were to ensue : till at length, in all its fairy beauty, and odorous voluptuousness, and mysterious elaboration of tender and living sculpture, shone forth

" the bright consummate flower ! "

Yet this phenomenon, to a mind of any thought and lovingness, is what may be said to take place every day ; for the commonest objects are only wonders at which habit has made us cease to wonder, and the marvellousness of which we may renew at pleasure, by taking thought. Last spring, walking near some cultivated grounds, and seeing a multitude of green stalks peeping forth, we amused ourselves with likening them to the plumes or other headgear of fairies, and wondering what faces might ensue ; and from this exercise of the fancy, we fell to considering how true, and not merely fanciful, those speculations were ; what a perpetual reproduction of the marvellous was carried on by Nature ; how utterly ignorant we were of the causes of the least and most disesteemed of the commonest vegetables ; and what a quantity of life, and beauty, and mystery, and use, and enjoyment, was to be found in them, composed out of all sorts of elements, and shaped as if by the hands of fairies. What workmanship, with no apparent workman ! What consummate elegance, though the result was to be nothing (as we call it) but a radish or an onion, and these were to be consumed, or thrown away by millions ! A rough tree grows up, and at the tips of his rugged and dark fingers he puts forth, — round, smooth, shining, and hanging delicately, — the golden apple, or the cheek-like beauty of the peach. The other day we were in a garden where Indian corn was growing, and some of the cobs were plucked to show us. First one leaf or sheaf was picked off, then another, then another, then a fourth, and so on, as if a fruitseller was unpacking fruit out of papers ; and at last we came, inside, to the grains of the corn, packed up into cucumber-shapes of pale gold, and each of them pressed and flattened against each other, as if some human hand had been doing it in the caverns of the earth. But What Hand !

The same that made the poor yet rich hand (for is it not his workmanship also?) that is tracing these marvelting lines, and which if it does not tremble to write them, it is because Love sustains, and because the heart also is a flower which has a right to be tranquil in the garden of the All- Wise.

A. DUSTY DAY

Among the " Miseries of Human Life," as a wit pleasantly entitled them, there are few, while the rascal is about it, worse than a Great Cloud of Dust, coming upon you in street or road, you having no means of escape, and the carriages, or flock of sheep, evidently being bent on imparting to you a full share of their besetting horror. The road is too narrow to leave you a choice, even if it had two pathways, which it has not : — the day is hot ; the wind is whisking ; you have come out in stockings instead of boots, not being aware that you were occasionally to have two feet depth of dust to walk in : — now, now the dust is on you, — you are enveloped, — you are blind ; you have to hold your hat on against the wind : the carriages grind by, or the sheep go pattering along, baaing through all the notes of their poor gamut ; perhaps carriages and sheep are together, the latter eschewing the horses' legs, and the shepherd's dog driving against your own, and careering over the woolly backs : — Whew ! What a dusting ! What a blinding ! What a whirl ! The noise decreases ; you

A DUSTY DAY 9

stop ; you look about you ; gathering up your hat, coat, and faculties, after apologising to the gentleman against whom you have "lumped," and who does not look a bit the happier for your apology. The dust is in your eyes, in your hair, in your shoes and stockings, in your neck-cloth, in your mouth. You grind your teeth in dismay, and find them gritty.

Perhaps another carriage is coming ; and you, finding yourself in the middle of the road, and being resolved to be master of, at least, this inferior horror, turn about towards the wall or paling, and propose to make your way accordingly, and have the dust behind your back instead of in front ; when lo ! you begin sneezing, and cannot see. You have taken involuntary snuff.

Or you suddenly discern a street, down which you can turn, which you do with rapture, thinking to get out of wind and dust at once ; when, unfortunately, you discover that the wind is veering to all points of the compass, and that, instead of avoiding the dust, there is a ready-made and intense collection of it, then in the act of being swept into your eyes by the attendants on a dust-cart !

The reader knows what sort of a day we speak of. It is all dusty ; — the windows are dusty ; the people are dusty ; the hedges in the roads are horribly dusty, — pitiably, — you think they must feel it ; shoes and boots are like a baker's : men on horseback eat and drink dust ; coachmen sit screwing up their eyes ; the gardener finds his spade slip into the ground, fetching up smooth portions of earth, all made of dust. What is the poor pedestrian to do?

To think of something superior to the dust, — whether grave or gay. This is the secret of being master of any ordinary, and of much extraordinary trouble : — bring a better idea upon it, and it is hard if the greater thought does not do something against the less. When we meet with any very unpleasant person, to whose ways we cannot to A DUSTY DAY

suddenly reconcile ourselves, we think of some delightful friend, perhaps two hundred miles off, — in Northumberland, or in Wales. When dust threatens to blind us, we shut our eyes to the disaster, and contrive to philosophise a bit even then.

" Oh, but it is not worth while doing that."

Good. If so, there is nothing to do but to be as jovial as the dust itself, and take all gaily. Indeed, this is the philosophy we speak of.

" And yet the dust is annoying too. ,,

Well — take then just as much good sense as you require for the occasion. Think of a jest ; think of a bit of verse ; think of the dog you saw just now, coming out of the pond, and frightening the dandy in his new trousers. But at all events don't let your temper be mastered by such a thing as a cloud of dust. It will show, either that you have a very infirm temper indeed, or no ideas in your head.

On all occasions in life, great or small, you may be the worse for them, or the better. You may be made the weaker or the stronger by them ; ay, even by so small a thing as a little dust.

When the famous Arbuthnot was getting into his carriage one day, he was beset with dust. What did he do ? Damn the dust or the coachman ? No ; that was not his fashion. He was a wit, and a good-natured man ; so he fell to making an epigram, which he sent to his friends. It was founded on scientific knowledge, and consisted of the following pleasant exaggeration : —

ON A DUbTY DAY.

The dust in smaller particles arose, Than those which fluid bodies do compose. Contraries in extremes do often meet ; It ivas so dry that you might call it ivet.

Dust at a distance sometimes takes a burnished or tawny aspect in the sun, almost as handsome as the great yellow

A DUSTY DAY n

smoke out of breweries ; and you may amuse your fancy with thinking of the clouds that precede armies in the old books of poetry, — the spears gleaming out, — the noise of the throng growing on the ear, — and, at length, horses emerging, and helmets and flags, — the Lion of King Richard, or the Lilies of France.

Or you may think of some better and more harmless palm of victory, "not without dust" {paima non sine pufoere) ; dust, such as Horace says the horsemen of antiquity liked to kick up at the Olympic games, or as he more elegantly phrases it, " collect " (collegisse juvat ; — which a punster of our acquaintance translated, " kicking up a dust at college") ; or if you are in a very philosophic vein indeed, you may think of man's derivation from dust, and his return to it, redeeming your thoughts from gloom by the hopes beyond dust, and by the graces which poetry and the affections have shed upon it in this life, like flowers upon graves, — lamenting with the tender Petrarch, that " those eyes of which he spoke so warmly," and that golden hair, and " the lightning of that angel smile," and all those other beauties which made him a lover " marked out from among men" — a being abstracted "from the rest of his species," are now " a little dust, without a feeling "—

or repeating that beautiful lyric of the last of the Shakspearian men, Shirley, which they say touched even the thoughtless bosom of Charles the Second : —

death's final conquest.

The glories of our birth and 6tate

Are shadows, not substantial things :

There is no armour against fate ; Death lays his icy hand on kings ;

iz A DUSTY DAY

Sceptre and crown

Must tumble down, And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade.

Some men with swords may reap the field And plant fresh laurels where they kill : But their strong nerves at last must yield, They tame but one another still.

Early or late They stoop to fate, And must give up their murmuring breath, When they ', pale captives, creep to death.

The garlands wither on your brow,

Then boast no more your mighty deeds ; Upon death's purple altar now See where the victor-victim bleeds : All heads must come To the cold tomb : Only the actions of the just Smell siveet, and blossom in the dust.

Most true; but with the leave of the fine poet (which he would gladly have conceded to us), Death's conquest is not " final " ; for Heaven triumphs over him, and Love too, and Poetry ; and thus we can get through the cloud even of his dust, and shake it, in aspiration, from our wings. Besides, we know not, with any exactitude, what or who Death is, or whether there is any such personage, even in his negative sense, except inasmuch as he is a gentle voice, calling upon us to go some journey ; for the very dust that he is supposed to deal in is alive ; is the cradle of other beings and vegetation ; nay, its least particle belongs to a mighty life ; — is planetary, — is part of our star, — is the stuff of which the worlds are made, that roll and rejoice round the sun.

Of these or the like reflections, serious or otherwise, are the cogitations of the true pedestrian composed ; — such

A DUSTY DAY

! 3 are the weapons with which he triumphs over the most hostile of his clouds, whether material or metaphorical ; and, at the end of his dusty walk, he beholdeth, in beautiful perspective, the towel, and the basin and water, with which he will render his eyes, cheeks and faculties, as cool and fresh, as if no dust had touched them ; nay, more so, for the contrast. Never forget that secret of the reconcilements of this life. To sit down, newly washed and dressed, after a dusty journey, and hear that dinner is to be ready "in ten minutes," is a satisfaction — a crowning and measureless content " — which we hope no one will enjoy who does not allow fair play between the harmless lights and shadows of existence, and treat his dust with respect. We defy him to enjoy it, at any rate, like those who do. His ill-temper, somehow or other, will rise in retribution against him, and find dust on his saddle of mutton.