Hunt returned home to England in December 1825 to become the grand old man of English letters, survivor from the vanished world of Shelley, Byron, Keats, Lamb and Wordsworth. Carlyle, his neighbour and friend in Chelsea, found him a lovable and good man, but a shallow optimist in his wide-eyed faith in human nature. In spite of pain and suffering, ‘PROVIDENCE,’ he wrote, ‘has some great scheme of happiness.’ He greeted the young Coventry Patmore by exclaiming, ‘This is a beautiful world, Mr Patmore.’ In spite of Shelley’s efforts to convert him to atheism he remained a deist. His sentimentalised version of that mistaken creed, The Religion of the Heart (1832), is an intellectually feeble, now unreadable, version of Victorian piety.
Novelists cause much pain by turning their friends and mistresses into characters in their novels, excusing themselves by pointing out that this was the practice of Tolstoy. In 1852, Dickens, a rich and world-famous author, created in Mr Skimpole, in Bleak House, a recognisable portrait of Hunt in all his weaknesses but stripped of his virtues as a kindly man who worked like a slave to support his family. Skimpole is a feckless layabout who sponges on innocent children, an essentially vicious character. His friend and biographer Forster excused Dickens as carried away by the excitements of his descriptive powers. This won’t wash. With no adequate apology from Dickens Hunt died a wounded man and posterity took the fictional Skimpole as a portrait of the real Hunt.
Leigh Hunt has been perceived as a bit player in the literary life of his time. Holden and Roe restore him centre stage. Roe makes even wider claims. As a poet he was a modernist, an innovator in using simple, everyday language to describe simple, everyday experiences; Larkin and Betjeman are his legatees. Kingsley Amis in a letter to Larkin wrote that Keats was a ‘silly little fool, though superior to Shelley; Hunt was a better man and a poet than either’. Hunt was a master of light prose and poetry. But posterity has not accepted Amis’s judgment. The Oxford Book of Quotations has a dozen or so citations of Hunt; of Keats and Shelley over 200.
Hunt may be the creator of the modern essay but Hazlitt was not only a greater writer; his consistent radicalism has made him a hero of the Left, dear to Michael Foot. The youthful Hunt of the fiery heart had collapsed into the conservatism of old age and even saw himself as a candidate as Poet Laureate — a post he had regarded as absurd when Southey, the repentant Jacobin, accepted it in 1813.
Given Hunt’s Panglossian optimism and his confession that friendship was his passion, it follows that our duty is to attempt to like everyone in the interests of providential harmony and world peace. It is a case of the bland leading the bland. As Burke remarked, there is a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue and becomes a vice.
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