Leigh Hunt's Relations with Byron, Shelley and Keats — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Leigh Hunt's Relations with Byron, Shelley and Keats
John Stuart Mill · en
As Leigh Hunt was heir to his ancestry in an unusual degree, so in an
extraordinary measure was the child father of the man. The atmosphere of
the home, tense with discussions of theology and politics and bitter with
hardships of poverty and prisons, gave him a precocious acquaintance with
weighty matters and with many miseries. In 1791 he entered Christ's
Hospital. Like Shelley he rebelled against the time-honored custom of
fagging, and chose instead a beating every night with a knotted
handkerchief. He avoided personal encounters in self-defense, but was
valiant enough where others were concerned, or where a principle was
involved. Haydon said: "He was a man who would have died at the stake for
a principle, though he might have cried like a child from physical pain,
and would have screamed still louder if he put his foot in the gutter! Yet
not one iota of recantation would have quivered on his lips, if all the
elysium of all the religions on earth had been offered and realized to
induce him to do so."[2]
His wonderful power of forming friendships--a power with which the present
study is so much concerned--was first developed at Christ's Hospital. As
he sentimentally expressed it, "the first heavenly taste it gave me of
that most spiritual of the affections. I use the word 'heavenly'
advisedly; and I call friendship the most spiritual of the affections,
because even one's kindred, in partaking of our flesh and blood, become,
in a manner, mixed up with our entire being. Not that I would disparage
any other form of affection, worshipping as I do, all forms of it, love in
particular, which in its highest state, is friendship and something more.
But if I ever tasted a disembodied transport on earth, it was in those
friendships which I entertained at school, before I dreamt of any maturer
feeling."[3] Like Shelley, Hunt had so great an inclination to
sentimentalize and idealize friendship that sometimes after the first
brief rhapsody of fresh acquaintance he suffered bitter disillusionment.
The majority, however, of the ties formed were lasting.[4]