LEIGH HUNT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.*
"I HAVE lived long enough," wrote Leigh Hunt in the preface to his Autobiography, "to discover that autobiography may not only be a very distressing but a puzzling task, and throw the writer into such doubts as to what he should or should not say, as totally to confuse him. What conscience bids him utter, for the sake of the world, may be clear enough; and in obeying it, he must find his consolation for all chances of injury to himself." The fifty-odd years which have elapsed since the first edition of Leigh Hunt's Autobiography was published have shown that the writer executed his task with sufficient literary skill to enlist the interest, and even the affection, of posterity on his side. We see no reason to modify the praise which was given in these columns forty-three years ago to the amended version of the Auto- biography which was issued in the year following the death of its amiable author. "The book," we said then, "is one of the most graceful, racy, and genial chronicles of the incidents and influences of a human life in the English language. The sweetness of temper, the indomitable love and forgiveness, the pious hilarity, and the faith in the ultimate triumph of good, revealed in its pages, show the humane and noble quali- ties of the writer." In the introduction to that edition—from which the present well-edited and finely illustrated reprint is taken—Thornton Hunt, the autobiographer's eldest son, drew a charming and filial picture of Leigh Hunt, which may be commended to the notice of all who have been inclined to form their estimate of his character from the terrible carica- ture which Dickens, with so amazing a lack of taste and good • The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt. Newly Edited by Roger Ingpen. With Portraits. 2 sole. London: A. Constable and Co. [2ls. net.] feeling, introduced under the thinly veiled figure of Harold Skimp°le to the pages of Bleak House. A recollection of the caricature—for which the great novelist had the grace to express a somewhat tardy contrition—is apparent in some of Thornton Hunt's pages. Skimp°le cannot have been very far from his mind when be wrote the following sentences of his
father :—
" His animation, his sympathy with what was gay and pleasur- able, his avowed doctrine of cultivating cheerfulness, were mani- fest on the surface, and could be appreciated by those who knew him in society, most probably even exaggerated as salient traits, on which he himself insisted with a sort of gay and ostentatious wilfulness. In the spirit which made him disposed to enjoy 'anything that was going forward' he would even assume for the evening a convivial aspect, and urge a liberal measure of the wine with the gusto of a bon vivant. Few that knew him so could be aware, not only of the simple and uncoatly sources from which he habitually drew his enjoyments, but of his singularly plain life, extended even to a rule of self-denial. Excepting at intervals when wine was recommended to him, or came to him as a gift of friendship, his customary drink was water, which he would drink with the almost daily repetition of Dr. Armstrong's line, 'Nought like the simple element dilutes.' His dress was always plain and studiously economical. He would excuse the extreme plainness of his diet, by ascribing it to a delicacy of health, which he overrated. His food was often nothing but bread and meat at dinner, bread and tea for two meals of the day, bread alone for luncheon or for supper. His liberal constructions were shown to others, his strictness to himself. If he heard that a friend was in trouble, his house was offered as a 'home ' ; and it was literally so, many times in his life. Sometimes this generosity was repaid with outrageous ingratitude—with scandal- mongering, and even calumnious inventions; he excused the wrong, as the consequence of deficient sense, of early training, or of con- genital fault; • for,' he would remark, it is impossible to say what share, now, X.'s father and mother may have had in his doing so, or what ancestor of X.'s may not have been really the author of my suffering—and his.' When he was once reminded of his sacrifices for others, he answered, as if it dismissed the subject, 'It was only for my own relations ' ; but his memory deceived him extravagantly. It was not that his kindness was undis- criminating; for he drew the line' with much clearness between what he could' do for the mere sake of helping the unfortunate, and the willingness to share whatever he might have with those he really esteemed and loved—not a few. The tenderness of his affection was excessive : it disarmed some of the most reckless; it made him throw a veil of impenetrable reserve over weaknesses of others, from which he suffered in ways most calculated to mortify and pain him, but which he suffered with never-failing kindness, and with silence absolutely unbroken."
It will be readily perceived that a man of whom this could be written even by the partiality of a son—and a son, be it remembered, who was what Victor Hugo called a " temoin de sa vie," and who was peculiarly liable to suffer from the weaknesses of a Skimpole—was far removed from the selfish valetudinarian drawn by the masterly hand of Dickens. The fact is that even Leigh Hunt's virtues took on the guise of faults in the eyes of many of his friends who have left a description of him to the world. Mr. George Smith, with all his genial good sense, could only be scornfully amused by the innate childishness which caused Leigh Hunt, on a memorable visit to the directors of the Bank of England, to condole with them on the hard fate which prevented them from spending the best hours of the summer day in the vicinity of woods and green fields. Carlyle used to keep some sovereigns loose in a tray on his mantelshelf under the name of "Leigh Hunt's sovereigns," explaining to all and sundry that they were so called because they were intended for Hunt to borrow on the numerous occasions when he was short of cash. Leigh Hunt, BA James Payn indignantly exclaimed, would have lent Carlyle as many thousands if he had them, and never breathed the fact to a living soul. The economic virtues are not the highest, perhaps, but it is hard for those who possess them, and who are justifiably proud of eating their bread in the sweat of their brow, to make due allowance for one, like Leigh Hunt, who was congenitally incapable of adding up a bill correctly, or of adjusting the balance between income and expenditure which even Mr. Micawber perceived to lie at the root of worldly happiness. But the study of this autobiography—one of the most charming and frank books of the kind that our language owns—will show the modern reader that, for all his weak- nesses about money, there was good warrant for the esteem and affection with which Leigh Hunt was regarded by those who knew him best. In his preface he reminds all readers of the way to Elysium. "Why, a good old Divine of the Church of England says the approach to it is called -Temper. 'Heaven,' says Dr. Whichcote, is first a temper, and then a place." Of the temperament thus indicated Leigh Hunt had more than the ordinary share. His sunny optimism cast a glamour over not only his own path, but all which intersected it even for a moment. No one could long be angry with so radiant and cheery a mortal, in spite of the faults in taste and errors in judgment which at times threatened to alienate his best friends ; and when to this we add the fund of solid goodness and altruism to which the preceding quotation bears witness, we have the foundation of a very lovable character. Leigh Hunt persistently held "that the value of cheerful opinions is inestimable ; that they will retain a sort of heaven round a man, when everything else might fail him; and that, consequently, they ought to be religiously inculcated in children." Perhaps this temperament is rather born than made ; it is not so easy to educate the saturnine or dyspeptic into optimism as it was to convert the prison cell of "loved Libertas " into a bower of (paper) roses; but the value of the aphorism is incontestable. Leigh Hunt's Autobiography shows him as the apostle of cheerfulness, and so preserves some of the fascination that he exercised in real life. Hence we may agree with Carlyle that it is "a pious, in- genious, altogether human and worthy book imaging throughout, what is best of all, a gifted, gentle, patient and valiant human soul, as it buffets its way through the billows of time, and will not drown, though often in danger ; cannot be drowned, but conquers and leaves a track of radiance behind it."
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