LEIGH HUNT AND BARRY CORNWALL
IT has recently become the fashion
to speak disparagingly of Leigh Hunt as a poet, to
class him as a sort of pursuivant or shield-bearer
to Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. Truth to tell,
Hunt was not a Keats nor a Shelley nor a Coleridge,
but he was a most excellent Hunt. He was a delightful
essayist quite unsurpassed, indeed, in his
blithe, optimistic way and as a poet deserves
to rank high among the lesser singers of his time.
I should place him far above Barry Cornwall, who has
not half the freshness, variety, and originality of
his compeer.
I instance Barry Cornwall because
there has seemed a disposition since his death to
praise him unduly. Barry Cornwall has always struck
me as extremely artificial, especially in his dramatic
sketches. His verses in this line are mostly
soft Elizabethan echoes. Of course a dramatist
may find it to his profit to go out of his own age
and atmosphere for inspiration; but in order successfully
to do so he must be a dramatist. Barry Cornwall
fell short of filling the rôle; he got no further than
the composing of brief disconnected scenes and scraps
of soliloquies, and a tragedy entitled Mirandola,
for which the stage had no use. His chief claim
to recognition lies in his lyrics. Here, as in
the dramatic studies, his attitude is nearly always
affected. He studiously strives to reproduce
the form and spirit of the early poets. Being
a Londoner, he naturally sings much of rural English
life, but his England is the England of two or three
centuries ago. He has a great deal to say about
the “falcon,” but the poor bird has the
air of beating fatigued wings against the bookshelves
of a well-furnished library! This well-furnished
library was if I may be pardoned a mixed
image the rock on which Barry Cornwall
split. He did not look into his own heart, and
write: he looked into his books.
A poet need not confine himself to
his individual experiences; the world is all before
him where to choose; but there are subjects which he
had better not handle unless he have some personal
knowledge of them. The sea is one of these.
The man who sang,
The sea! the sea! the
open sea!
The blue, the fresh,
the ever free!
(a couplet which the Gifted Hopkins
might have penned), should never have permitted himself
to sing of the ocean. I am quoting from one of
Barry Cornwall’s most popular lyrics. When
I first read this singularly vapid poem years ago,
in mid-Atlantic, I wondered if the author had ever
laid eyes on any piece of water wider than the Thames
at Greenwich, and in looking over Barry Cornwall’s
“Life and Letters” I am not so much surprised
as amused to learn that he was never out of sight of
land in the whole course of his existence. It
is to be said of him more positively than the captain
of the Pinafore said it of himself, that he was hardly
ever sick at sea.
Imagine Byron or Shelley, who knew
the ocean in all its protean moods, piping such thin
feebleness as
“The blue, the fresh, the ever free!”
To do that required a man whose acquaintance
with the deep was limited to a view of it from an
upper window at Margate or Scarborough. Even
frequent dinners of turbot and whitebait at the sign
of The Ship and Turtle will not enable one to write
sea poetry.
Considering the actual facts, there
is something weird in the statement,
I ’m on the sea!
I ’m on the sea!
I am where I would ever
be.
The words, to be sure, are placed
in the mouth of an imagined sailor, but they are none
the less diverting. The stanza containing the
distich ends with a striking piece of realism:
If a storm should come
and awake the deep,
What matter? I
shall ride and sleep.
This is the course of action usually
pursued by sailors during a gale. The first or
second mate goes around and tucks them up comfortably,
each in his hammock, and serves them out an extra
ration of grog after the storm is over.
Barry Cornwall must have had an exceptionally
winning personality, for he drew to him the friendship
of men as differently constituted as Thackeray, Carlyle,
Browning, and Forster. He was liked by the best
of his time, from Charles Lamb down to Algernon Swinburne,
who caught a glimpse of the aged poet in his vanishing.
The personal magnetism of an author does not extend
far beyond the orbit of his contemporaries. It
is of the lyrist and not of the man I am speaking
here. One could wish he had written more prose
like his admirable “Recollections of Elia.”
Barry Cornwall seldom sounds a natural
note, but when he does it is extremely sweet.
That little ballad in the minor key beginning,
Touch us gently, Time!
Let us glide adown thy
stream,
was written in one of his rare moments. Leigh
Hunt, though not without questionable mannerisms,
was rich in the inspiration that came but infrequently
to his friend. Hunt’s verse is full of natural
felicities. He also was a bookman, but, unlike
Barry Cornwall, he generally knew how to mint his
gathered gold, and to stamp the coinage with his own
head. In “Hero and Leander” there
is one line which, at my valuing, is worth any twenty
stanzas that Barry Cornwall has written:
So might they now have
lived, and so have died;
The story’s
heart, to me, still beats against its side.
Hunt’s fortunate verse about
the kiss Jane Carlyle gave him lingers on everybody’s
lip. That and the rhyme of “Abou Ben Adhem
and the Angel” are spice enough to embalm a
man’s memory. After all, it takes only a
handful.