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
consequence with Virtue, to which I firmly believe that Religion and its
establishments, Polity and its establishments, are the formidable though
destructible barriers."[214] Shelley knew of Leigh Hunt first as a
political writer of considerable importance. In this respect he never
ceased to admire him or to be influenced by _The Examiner_ in the campaign
against government corruption. Yet his own equipment of mind and training,
visionary as his theories seem, gave him a power of speculation and grasp
of situation that ignored the limitations of time and space, while Hunt,
with his narrower view, never got beyond the petty and immediate details
of one nation or of one age.
The social improvements which Shelley advocated were Catholic
Emancipation, brought about later, as has been pointed out by Symonds, by
the very means which Shelley foresaw and prophesied; reform of
parliamentary representation[215] similar to that carried into effect in
1832, 1867 and 1882; freedom of the press[216] and repeal of the union of
Great Britain and Ireland; the abolition of capital punishment and of
war.[217] During the fourteen years of Hunt's editorship, among the
reforms for which he fought in _The Examiner_ were the first three of
these measures. He denounced capital punishment and war in the same paper
and later in his poem _Captain Sword and Captain Pen_.[218]
Shelley's moral code was based on an idealized sense of justice, and was a
kind of "natural piety."[219] With one marked exception, he seems to have
been true to the pursuit of it, both in his standards of conduct and in
his relations with others. His life was a model of generosity, purity of
thought, and unselfish devotion. Hunt reported Shelley as having said:
"What a divine religion might be found out, if charity were really the
principle of it, instead of faith."[220] He was atheist only in the sense
of discarding the dogmas of theology and of superstition, and in his
spirit of scientific inquiry. He did not deny the existence in nature of
an all-pervading spirit. Hunt thought the popular misconception of
Shelley's opinions was due to his misapplication of the names of the Deity
and to his identification of them with vulgar superstitions. Of Shelley's
attitude he wrote: "His want of faith in the letter, and his exceeding
faith in the spirit of Christianity, formed a comment, the one on the
other, very formidable to those who chose to forget what Scripture itself
observes on that point."[221] Whether or not Shelley believed in
immortality is still a vexed question and is likely to remain so, since he
had not reached convictions sufficiently stable to permit a formal
statement on his part. Many of the passages in _Adonais_ would lead one to
believe that he did; certainly he did, like Hunt, cling to the idea of the
persistence, in some form or other, of the good and the beautiful. The
close conformity of their views is seen in the latter's two sonnets in