Stevenson's Perfect Virtues

STEVENSON’S PERFECT VIRTUES

Gentleness and cheerfulness are the perfect virtues.

Stevenson was right. There is not a more admirable trait in one’s character than that of cheerfulness. Combined with that other virtue named by Stevenson, gentleness, and what more is needed to make a companionable and a beloved man.

These two attributes were possessed in an emphatic way both by Stevenson and by Leigh Hunt. That’s why some of us are so fond of Hunt. That’s why he is growing in esteem as he is becoming better known to lovers and students of the literature produced in England during the first half of the nineteenth century.

For it is certain that Hunt is coming into his own. First editions of his writings year by year are advancing in price. They are becoming scarce and in some instances exceedingly difficult to obtain. Catalogues of rare book dealers are listing fewer of his works, and when quotations are made they invariably are in advance of those of a year or two ago.

The cultivation of cheerfulness frequently is enjoined throughout his writings. He had many visitors in his home, attracted there by his personal qualities and by his gentleness of heart. He was fond of music, which formed a staple in the entertainment and the conversation.

Barry Cornwall (B. W. Procter), a long time intimate friend, in his Recollections of Men of Letters, mentions the evenings at Hunt’s house: “Hunt never gave dinners, but his suppers of cold meat and salad were cheerful and pleasant; sometimes the cheerfulness (after a ‘wassail bowl’) soared into noisy merriment. I remember one Christmas or New Year’s evening, when we sat there till two or three o’clock in the morning, and when the jokes and stories and imitations so overcame me that I was nearly falling off my chair with laughter. This was mainly owing to the comic imitations of Coulson, who was usually so grave a man. We used to refer to him as an encyclopedia, so perpetually, indeed, that Hunt always spoke of him as ‘The Admirable Coulson!’ This vis comica left him for the most part in later life, when he became a distinguished lawyer.”

It was this same Barry Cornwall who introduced Hawthorne to Hunt, a charming account of Hawthorne’s visit being recorded in Our Old Home. “I rejoiced to hear him say,” he writes, “that he was favored with most confident and cheering anticipations in respect to a future life; and there were abundant proofs, throughout our interview, of an unrepining spirit, resignation, quiet relinquishment of the worldly benefits that were denied him, thankful enjoyment of whatever he had to enjoy, and piety, and hope shining onward into the dusk – all of which gave a reverential cast to the feeling with which we parted from him. I wish he could have had one draught of prosperity before he died.”

There are many of us ready to give expression to the same wish.

Speaking of Hunt’s Autobiography, a book second only in interest to Boswell’s Johnson said Carlyle, this caustic writer had the grace to say that the reader might find in that book “the image of 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.”

The Spectator, London, said this autobiography was one of the most graceful and genial chronicles of the incidents 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 qualities of the writer.”

This appreciation of Hunt is in contrast with the portrait drawn by Dickens in Bleak House, where the character of Harold Skimpole was so patent a caricature of Hunt that mutual friends promptly remonstrated with the author, and this influenced Dickens, in the later numbers of the monthly parts in which the book was issued, to modify his picture.

In writing of his father after his death, Thornton evidently had in mind this ungenerous act of Dickens when he penned these sentences: “His consideration, his sympathy with what was gay and pleasurable, his avowed doctrine of cultivating cheerfulness were manifest on the surface, and could only 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 who knew him so could be aware, not only of the simple and uncostly 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 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.”

Apropos of this, it is of interest to note that his house was an asylum for Keats for weeks, at a time when the young poet was sick in body and mind. It was Leigh Hunt who gave Keats, in the Examiner, the first favorable review he received.

It is but fair to note that Dickens later disclaimed any intent to portray in Harold Skimpole the foibles of Leigh Hunt. I have several letters from Dickens to Hunt making delicate reference to the subject. As late as June 28, 1855, four years prior to Hunt’s death, Dickens wrote: “I hope you will not now think it necessary to renew that painful subject with me. There is nothing to remove from my mind – I hope, nothing to remove from yours. I thought of the little notice which has given you (I rejoice most heartily to find) so much pleasure – as the best means that could possibly present themselves of enabling me to express myself publicly about you as you would desire. In that better and unmistakable association with you by name, let all end.”

Shortly after the death of Hunt Dickens made it a point to say in his All the Year Round that it was the graces and charms of manner of Hunt, “which had many a time delighted him, and impressed him as being unspeakably whimsical and attractive,” that were recalled when the character in question was drawn, and that he had no thought “that the admired original would ever be charged with the imaginary vices of the fictitious creature” – an explanation that does not clear the great novelist.

Dickens also bears tribute to Hunt’s cheerfulness despite the reasons he had for sadness. “His life was, in several respects, a life of trouble, though his cheerfulness was such that he was, upon the whole, happier than some men who have had fewer griefs to wrestle with.” In Hunt’s correspondence, Dickens saw evidence that he was “sometimes over-clouded with the shadow of affliction, but more often bright and hopeful, and at all times sympathetic: taking a keen delight in all beautiful things – in the exhaustless world of books and art, in the rising genius of young authors, in the immortal language of music, in trees and flowers, and old memorial nooks of London and its suburbs; in the sunlight which came, as he used to say, like a visitor out of heaven, glorifying humble places.”

“The very philosophy of cheerfulness,” says R. H. Horne, in A New Spirit of the Age, “and the good humour of genius imbue all his prose papers from end to end.”

Says Thornton, his eldest son: “Leigh Hunt’s whole teaching of himself as well as others, inculcated the promotion of cheerfulness as a duty, not for the selfish gain of the one man himself, but for the sake of making the happier atmosphere for others and rendering the more perfect homage to the Author of all good and happiness.”

Here is another picture of the cheerful situation, taken from “Our Cottage,” which appeared in The New Monthly Magazine for September, 1836:

“We burn old wood, and read old books” – there’s the kindly cheerfulness that is appealing. Isn’t that a picture to drive hence any thought of sadness?

His son, Thornton, felicitously said that all his life he was striving to open more widely the door of the library, and the windows that look out upon nature. He loved the green fields of suburban London, and never was more happy than when sauntering along the leafy lanes. With books for companions and nature for inspiration, how can any mortal be other than cheerful.

All the literary men of his time delighted in his society. All were his friends. Many a mention is made of the happy and cheerful gatherings at his home. Hazlitt speaks of “the vinous quality of his mind” as producing a fascination and an intoxication at once upon those who came in contact with him.

Professor Dowden, on the other hand, says it was not a heavy wine, but a bright, light wine that coursed through his veins —

It is natural for one acquainted with the writings of Leigh Hunt to associate him with cheerfulness, for kindness and cheerfulness are to be found in everything he wrote. Even in his letters in which he tells of some of his perplexities there is found the optimistic note.

Which recalls what Hunt wrote of associations with Shakespeare. It is quite natural to associate the idea of Shakespeare with anything which is worth mention. “Shakespeare and Christmas” are two ideas that fall as happily together as “wine and walnuts.” “Shakespeare and May,” and “Shakespeare and June” call up many essays about spring and violets. One may say “Shakespeare and Love,” and put himself at once in the midst of a bevy of bright damsels, as sweet as rosebuds. “Shakespeare and Life” puts before one the whole world of youth, and spirit, and life itself.

“Hunt and Cheerfulness” are inseparable in the mind of one who knows the story of his life and its struggles.

There’s the cheerful note in this rondeau which appeared in The New Monthly Magazine, 1838:

The Jennie here immortalized is said to have been Jane Welsh Carlyle.

Perhaps Hunt’s most quoted poem is his “Abou Ben Adhem,” in which he asks the angel to “write me as one that loves his fellow-men.” This is typical of his life’s attitude to mankind. He had a kindly feeling for all. The line was placed on his tombstone in Kensal Green Cemetery by those who knew him best, his friends feeling that it most fittingly indicated the kindliness of his character.

This poem rightly is considered the most meritorious of all Hunt wrote, and it is quoted here because we love it:

The cheerful note is sounded in many of his poems:

If the rains prolong unduly the winter, he can love May in books; for

This certainly is redolent of cheer. But he also longs for “manly, joyous, gipsy June.”

In one of the items in his pleasant book, Table-Talk, Hunt speaks for greater cheerfulness in English literature. He cites Suckling’s famous A Ballad Upon a Wedding, in which allusion is made to the once popular belief that the sun danced on Easter-day:

And then he remarks that it is a pity that we do not have, if not more such beliefs, yet more such poetry, to stand us instead of them. “Our poetry,” he writes, “like ourselves, has too little animal spirits. It has plenty of thought and imagination; plenty of night-thoughts, and day-thoughts too; and in its dramatic circle, a world of action and character. It is a poetry of the highest order and the greatest abundance. But though not sombre – though manly, hearty, and even luxuriant – it is certainly not a very joyous poetry. And the same may be said of our literature in general. You do not conceive the writers to have been cheerful men. They often recommend cheerfulness, but rather as a good and sensible practice than as something which they feel themselves.” A little later he says, “I am only speaking of the rarity of a certain kind of sunshine in our literature, and expressing a natural rainy-day wish that we had a little more of it.” He thinks there should be a joyous set of elegant extracts in a score of volumes, “that we could have at hand, like a cellaret of good wine, against April or November weather!”

Hunt believed in a “cheerful religion.” “We are for making the most of the present world,” he wrote. He had not any gloomy forebodings as to the things that may come after death. His London Journal, as Frank Carr so well states, “breathed such uniform gladness and hopefulness that every page is pervaded with an odor of homely sanctity, as of hidden violets.”

And again: He “noticed the flowers when their timorous splendours peeped through the snow at the first impulse of life in the dark earth, and when, afterwards, as a mantle they spread their glory over garden and field; greeted the birds, from the lark’s early carol, and the arrival of the swallows, until the woods became vocal with multitudinous voices.”

As to Hunt’s religion, by the way, there has been much discussion. I have Leigh Hunt’s copy of a volume bearing this long title: “The Mystical Initiations; or, Hymns of Orpheus, translated from the original Greek: with a preliminary dissertation on the Life and Theology of Orpheus,” containing this observation in Hunt’s hand-writing:

Mr. Taylor’s faith sometimes makes him eloquent; but if he had united, with his Platonical abstractions, the true Christian power of socially working at all times, he need not have feared whatever seemed coming. Platonism and Christianity, if either be thoroughly understood, are formed admirably to go together. The first shapes the human being to beauty and imagination, the latter to love and immortality. The first perfects him individually, the latter to endless companionship. Platonism lifts the philosopher towards heaven: Christianity takes up the whole human race, and puts them there.

I should like to be a worshiper in a Christian temple, in which whatsoever is good and beautiful should be held, for those reasons, to be divinely true; in which Plato’s unmalignant evil should be the ground for Christ’s all-benevolent good to stand upon; and in which no more limits should be assigned to whatever was sincere, loving, and imaginative, than to that boundless and beautiful sky, which is surely large enough to hold it.

In these days when so many feel forebodings of trouble it is pleasant to recall that two such men as Robert Louis Stevenson and Leigh Hunt, each of whom had reason for gloomy thoughts, persisted in looking upon the bright things of life. Not anywhere in the writings of these two men will one find them dwelling on their miseries. Per contra, both preached cheerfulness. In darkest hours they saw the sunshine and the flowers. Like our own Lincoln, they plucked the thistle and planted the flower where they thought the flower would grow. The reading of these two authors is recommended – as is also a better and more intimate acquaintance with Charles Lamb. Here is a triumvirate that will drive into outer darkness all fits of the blues. God will be shown to be in his heaven, and all will be well with the world.

“Hunt,” says Shelley, “was one of those happy souls which are the salt of the earth, and without whom this earth would smell like what it is – a tomb; who is what others seem.”

Hunt viewed his many misfortunes in a kindly spirit, showing us often what fine things may come to us out of human suffering. It is a benediction, a peace-compelling exercise to spend an evening with Hunt. His optimism is catching. One cannot get away from it. He writes of Samuel Johnson: “How much good and entertainment did not the very necessities of such a man help to produce us.” This is a saying we may apply to Hunt himself.

Leigh Hunt’s London Journal, one of his best publications, states that its object is “Pleasure … the pleasure recommended alike by the most doubting experiment, and the most trusting faith – that of making the utmost of this green and golden world, the smallest particles of whose surface we have not yet learned to turn to account – that of profiting alike from the toil that is incumbent on us, and from ‘the lilies of the valley that toil not, neither do they spin.’… We say nothing we do not think, and manifest no feelings which are not those of our daily life and our most habitual enjoyments, our talisman against trouble, and our best reward for exertion – a leaf, a flower, a fine passage of music, or poetry, or painting, a belief in a thousand capabilities of earth and man, give us literally as much delight as we say they do. We should not otherwise have been able to get through ‘a sea of troubles,’ not to recommend as we do the loving light that has saved us.”

Hunt’s motto for his Indicator, a publication praised by Charles Lamb, is a cheerful one: “A dram of sweet is worth a pound of sour.” It was taken from Spenser, one of Hunt’s favorites, and was suggested by Mrs. Novello, mother of Mary Cowden Clarke, as we are told in Letters to an Enthusiast: “By the way, did you know that my mother was the godmother of the ‘Indicator?’ She suggested its name, and Leigh Hunt adopted it, and the passage as a motto which she had pointed out as offering ground for a good title.”

Hunt could get cheerfulness out of a pebble even. “Strike it,” he says, “and you will get something out of him: warm his heart, and out come the genial sparks that shall gladden your hearth, and put hot dishes on your table.” The brook singeth, states Coleridge in that beautiful stanza:

And Hunt observes it would not sing so well without the stone.

Then in his light, airy way he calls our attention to that exquisite little poem by Wordsworth on the fair maiden who died by the river Dove:

And he asks if anything can express a lovelier loneliness, than the violet half hidden by the mossy stone.

Hunt finds other gentle qualities in a stone, citing the opening lines of Keats’s Hyperion, where he describes the dethroned monarch of the gods, sitting in his exile:

Nothing certainly can be more quiet than a stone. It utters not a syllable nor a sigh.

Shakespeare had the knack of seeing power in things gentle:

“If you are melancholy for the first time, you will find upon a little inquiry that others have been melancholy many times, and yet are cheerful now,” Hunt writes in the Indicator. “If you are melancholy many times, recollect that you have got over all those times.”

This is good advice, and true. Exercise is recommended as a promoter of cheerfulness. Such a high opinion of the value of exercise was held by Plato that he maintained it was a cure even for a wounded conscience. In the same article Hunt suggests that one should not want money for money’s sake. Certes, Hunt never craved money for the purpose of hoarding it. Nearly all his life he needed money acutely, but when a generous sum came into his possession he did not know how to keep it; nay, he did not know how to use it properly. He was always “hard up,” simply because he was a child in money matters. Withal, he was optimistic and cheerful, even to the extent of remaining at home because he did not possess the means of purchasing presentable clothing. When his wife wrote him that after paying for a loaf of bread she would not have a penny in her pocket, Hunt writes her in a cheerful way. Some of us with a less keen perception of cheerful situations, or with less ability to surmount calamities would find it rather difficult to be as cheerful as Hunt seemed to be.

Hunt’s correspondence, both published and unpublished, bears testimony to his cheerfulness even when the clouds were the darkest. Speaking of the two volumes of Correspondence edited in 1862 by his son Thornton, Edmund Ollier, the publisher, thus bears tribute to the man and his buoyancy of spirit even under very trying circumstances. In these volumes, he says, “we see him as those who knew him familiarly saw him in his everyday life. Sometimes overclouded with the shadow of affliction, but more often bright and hopeful, and at all times taking a keen delight in beautiful things; in the exhaustless world of books and art; in the rising genius of young authors; in the immortal language of music; in trees, and flowers, and old memorial nooks of London and its suburbs; in the sunlight which came, as he used to say, like a visitor out of heaven, glorifying humble places; in the genial intercourse of mind with mind … A heart and soul so gifted could not but share largely in the happiness with which the Divine Ruler of the Universe has compensated our sorrows; and he had loving hearts about him to the last, to sweeten all.”

Hunt’s gentleness and cheerfulness are shown in his essays, as well as in his poetry. Perhaps none of his essays evidences these qualities of his heart and mind more forcibly than “A Day by the Fire,” which was written for the Reflector in 1812, when he was twenty-eight years of age. “I am one of those that delight in a fireside,” he begins, at once thereby telling us that he loves kindliness and cheerfulness. For no man who loves a fire on the hearth, especially a fire made of old wood, can be a sour old curmudgeon. It is as impossible as it is for one not to love a sweet little girl.