Meet My New Friend

Life is peppered with serendipitous meetings, which sometimes prove long-lasting and rewarding. I believe I had one just the other day. On the basis of some passing reference that I no longer remember, I requested three books from the library (this is the boring part; bear with me):

Essays on Kant and Hume, by Lewis White Beck

David Hume: Philosophical Historian

The Essays of Hume

They all came in on the same day, and having nothing better to do, I drove over to the library to pick them up.

The first was a disappointment. I expected to receive a volume by a world-class expert explicating in detail how Hume was right and Kant was wrong about almost everything. It became obvious immediately that Beck was a Kant enthusiast.

The second was much better. It explores the fact, using the Scottish master's own texts, that although Hume (rightly) debunked the concept of causality, he went on to write a six-volume history of England in which events follow one another in seemingly causal fashion. Recognizing that this was a dense but valuable piece of scholarship, not to be absorbed in an afternoon, I ordered a hardcover copy online--as it happens, the only one currently available in the United States.

But the real surprise was the third volume. I had requested the essays of David Hume, but what I received was the essays of Leigh Hunt! Strange. The call number was correct: 824.0 H94. This volume, published in 1905, was mis-cataloged from the start, and had been sitting on the shelf with the wrong title and the wrong author for more than a century! 

The book still had a card in the front pocket. Someone had checked it out on March 18, 1948. Probably was a surprised as I was when he or she took a look at it.

My first thought was to toss it in the return bin on my way out to the car. But that would be an insult to the workers who had gone to the trouble of retrieving it from the Minitex off-site Minnesota Library Access Center downtown, five miles away, placed it into a gray plastic tub, loaded it onto a truck, and shipped it off to Golden Valley, where another low-paid worker had rolled it out on a metal cart and shelved it in precisely the slot appropriate to the number on my library card.

I had heard of Leigh Hunt, of course.  If you'd asked me, I would have placed him vaguely in the third tier of English essayists of the Romantic era, below Thomas de Quincy (second tier) and also Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt (first tier). But I'd never actually read him. Well, here was my chance.

The first essay in the book was devoted to the geranium sitting on Hunt's window sill. Seven pages on that subject. I liked it. Even on the first page Hunt hits upon one of the cardinal virtues of the geranium: the smell of its leaves (similar to that of a tomato plant) which remain on your fingers after you've touched it.

But Hunt hasn't touched it. He's only thinking about touching it:

"We perceive, in imagination, the scent of those good-natured leaves, which allow you to carry off their perfume on your fingers; for good-natured they are, in that respect above almost all plants, and fittest for the hospitalities of your rooms. The very feel of the leaf has a household warmth in it something analogous to clothing and comfort."

As I read further, this was the tone I encountered throughout: accurate descriptions by a sensitive observer who has moved beyond the "knowing" irony and cynicism  of sophisticated commentators to present us with experience in its freshness and innocence.

Emboldened, I committed myself to a travel piece of 32 pages a little deeper in the collection called "A Walk from Dulwich to Brockham."  I do not know where either of these municipalities are, though I believe Hunt was traversing, on foot, with two companions, a stretch of countryside southeast of London proper that might, today, be referred to as the North Downs.

This essay intrigued me because I have myself written longish essays about places no one has been to, with digressions at every step of the way about flora and fauna, architecture, history, and chance meetings with the locals. I have always wondered whether such things can really hold the interest of someone who hasn't been there. Well, Hunt's piece held mine.

On the one hand, his descriptions are peppered with philosophical asides, for example: "Remoteness is not how far you go in point of ground, but how far you feel yourself from your commonplaces."

He praises out-of-the-way country museums:

In going to see the pictures in a beautiful country village, people get out of their town common-places, and are better prepared for the perception of other beauties, and of the nature that makes them all."  

On the ecclesiastical architecture of the day: "A barn is a more classical building than a church with a fantastical steeple to it."

Passing a field of poppies:

"It looked like a bed for Proserpina glow of melancholy beauty, containing a joy perhaps beyond joy. Poppies, with their dark ruby cups and crowned heads, the more than wine color of their sleepy silk, and the funeral look of their anthers, seem to have a meaning about them beyond other flowers. They look as if they held a mystery at their hearts, like sleeping kings of Lethe."

Hunt is convinced, as are many experts today, that walking itself is the cure for many ills:

"Illness, you know, does not hinder me from walking; neither does anxiety. On the contrary, the more I walk, the better and stouter I become; and I believe if everybody were to regard the restlessness which anxiety creates, as a signal from nature to get up and contend with it in that manner, people would find the benefit of it. This is more particularly the case if they are lovers of Nature, as well as pupils of her, and have an eye for the beauties in which her visible world abounds."

He knows the history of the region, and there are plenty of references to Elizabeth and Charles II, as well as to local grandees that few modern readers will have heard of, but Hunt has a knack for shaping an anecdote to give it meaning regardless of the specifics of the  historical background. He also chats with the coachmen and innkeepers,  and gives them credit for being as sensitive and eager for "the good life" as any blueblood. 

In one village he tours a church with an organ, and learns that the organist is the son of the parish clerk.

"When I asked his sister, a modest, agreeable-looking girl, who showed us the church, whether he could not favor us with a voluntary, she told me he was making hay ! What do you say to that ?"

Hunt presumes that the father too, was a day-laborer, and had been organist before his son took over the job, "out of a natural love of music." He then paints the following scene:

 I had fetched the girl from her tea. A decent-looking young man was in the room with her ; the door was open, exhibiting the homely comforts inside; a cat slept before it, on the cover of the garden well, and there was plenty of herbs and flowers, presenting altogether the appearance of a cottage nest.

At this point Hunt reflects on the role played by music in the lives of these village people:

 "I will be bound that their musical refinements are a great help to the enjoyment of all this; and that a general lift in their tastes, instead of serving to dissatisfy the poor, would have a reverse effect, by increasing the sum of their resources "

Arriving in the village of Streatham, where Samuel Johnson spent a great deal of time with his friends, the Thrales, Hunt makes an effort to find someone with personal impressions of the great man. After a few misfires, he meets up with "a decent-looking old man, with a sharp eye and a hale countenance, who, with an easy, self-satisfied air, as if he had worked enough in his time and was no longer under the necessity of over-troubling himself, sat indolently cracking stones in the road."

Among other bits of minutia, Hunt learns that Johnson would sometimes "have his dinner brought out to him in the park, and set on the ground; and while he was waiting for it, would lie idly, and cut the grass with a knife." According to Hunt's elderly informant, Dr. Johnson's  manners were "very good-natured, and sometimes so childish, that people would have taken him for 'an idiot, like.'”

At another point in his ramble Hunt pondered the case of a local grandee, considered to be generous and kind by the villagers, who nevertheless prohibited access to the local churchyard (except on Sundays) because the path passed in front of his house. "How his act of power squares with his kindness, I do not know," Hunt remarks. "Very good-natured people are sometimes very fond of having their own way."

Hunt's curiosity seems boundless. He even goes so far as to read, and reflect on, the sentiments expressed on the gravestones he passes in the churchyards. Though the story is too complicated to describe in detail, after reviewing the facts related on one such headstone—a story that Hunt suspects his contemporaries would consider unduly sentimental—he delivers the following aside:

"There is more friendship and virtue in the world than the world has yet got wisdom enough to know and be proud of; and few things would please me better than to travel all over England, and fetch out the records of it."

In short, I like this guy: his temperament, his powers of observation, his easy-going style. 

But I was disconcerted to discover that Hunt has developed a reputation as an irresponsible scoundrel.  He is described by the discerning critic John Bayley as "a careless butterfly sort of man, abounding in fine feelings, who loved his fellow men and let them pick up the pieces." 

But wait! Bayley isn't describing Leigh Hunt in this passage. He's describing Harold Skimpole, a character in the novel Bleak House. Dickens claimed he had drawn Skimpole as an exact likeness of his friend Hunt. I rather doubt it. The bio posted by the Poetry Foundation observes that Hunt produced, during the first sixty years of the nineteenth century, "a large body of poetry in a variety of forms: narrative poems, satires, poetic dramas, odes, epistles, sonnets, short lyrics, and translations from Greek, Roman, Italian, and French poems." He was the indefatigable publisher and editor of several liberal magazines, including the influential Examiner, in which he published early works of both Keats and Shelley. He also spent two years in prison as a result of one of his inflammatory editorials.

The bio goes on to state that Hunt "has probably had more influence on the development of the personal essay than any other writer," and describes his Autobiography (1850) as "perhaps his best work and arguably the best autobiography of the century." In another on-line source we read that “his death was simply exhaustion.” 

Hardly sounds like a frivolous and conniving wastrel to me.