One has to get
on the right side of his sins and indulgences, his grotesque political
theories, his inconsistencies; but when once one has apprehended the
real character, one is never in any doubt again.
XLVII
There can surely be few pieces of literary portraiture in the world
more unpleasant than the portrait drawn of Byron in 1822 by Leigh Hunt.
It gave great offence to Byron's friends, who insisted upon his noble
and generous qualities, and maintained that Leigh Hunt was taking a
spiteful revenge for what he conceived to be the indignity and
injustice with which Byron had treated him. Leigh Hunt was undoubtedly
a trying person in some ways. He did not mind dipping his hand into a
friendly pocket, and he had a way of flinging himself helplessly upon
the good nature of his friends, a want of dignity in the way he
accepted their assistance, which went far to justify the identification
of him with the very disagreeable portrait which Dickens drew of him,
as Harold Skimpole in _Bleak House_. But for all that he was an
affectionate, candid, and eminently placable person, and if it is true
that he darkened the shadows of Byron's temperament, and insisted too
strongly on his undesirable qualities, there is no reason to think that
the portrait he drew of Byron was not in the main a true one; and it
may be added that a vast amount of generosity and nobility require to
be thrown into the opposite scale before Byron can be rehabilitated or
made worthy of the least admiration and respect.
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