SOURCE: Blainey, Ann. “The Pit of Talent.” In her The Farthing Poet: A Biography of Richard Hengist Horne 1802-84. A Lesser Literary Lion, pp. 82-95. London: Longmans, 1968.

[In the following excerpt, Blainey examines the success of Horne's plays The Death of Marlowe and Gregory VII, and considers his friendship with literary figures Leigh Hunt and Thomas Carlyle.]

The New Year of 1838 brought no comfort: another year and another birthday, his thirty-fifth. Only five years off official middle age, he felt he had achieved so little. Physically he already seemed middle-aged: his face had acquired that ageless-aged look it was to keep for another twenty years. Bald on the top of his head, his auburn curls falling to his collar, the trained moustachios drooping elegantly, the heavy-lidded blue eyes more sadly spaniel-like than ever: the effect was calculatedly Shakespearian, he looked a poet. His small body, inclined to paunchy fat, was still lithe, invigorated by regular exercise and by frequent holidays with his mother, at the sea where he swam almost regardless of the weather, and at Loughton where he walked long distances in Epping Forest. His health was good, his vitality enormous. Mentally and intellectually the picture was less pleasing.

Only five years of literary recognition lay behind him, and that only partial: and behind that again stretched wasted years of literary disappointment, personal depression, and disordered nerves. At thirty-five he had to his credit two published plays, a short book, several pamphlets, an ephemeral collection of articles in monthly magazines, and a tin trunk crammed with manuscripts that would never see the light of a publisher. His youth was almost gone and he had virtually nothing to show for it, for at his back were always the shadows of his literary masters, Shelley and Keats, who had crammed lifetimes of work and experience into their short lives. Though they lacked public recognition no one could say they had failed to develop their gifts. The same could not be said of their disciple.

Even the relative success of Horne's new play could not soften his sense of failure. This new play was The Death of Marlowe, printed by the Repository's printer and part owner, Reynell, and dedicated to Leigh Hunt. Clad in pale grey paper wrappers it was sent with the author's compliments to appreciative friends: Fox, Southwood Smith, Thomas Talfourd, and of course to that dearest of friends, Mary Gillies, inscribed ‘from her friend R. H. Horne’. The reviews that followed were almost all that its author could have wanted; and justly so for The Death of Marlowe—the only one of his tragedies he ever saw acted, and possibly the only one actable—contains his writing at its best: swift, clear and vigorous.

As with Cosmo, he had chosen a theme vibrant with personal implications. Marlowe was the poet destroyed by an ignorant and resentful public, victimized for that sensitivity of feeling and unconventionality of vision that is part of the poetic temperament and from which all poets must suffer. Horne's Marlowe is made to die at the hands of a tavern scoundrel embodying all the qualities of an unsympathetic public; contemptuous of the poet's genius, resentful of his power, playing on his vulnerable poetic sensibility. Horne's Marlowe is made to also the victim of love, slain for loving a woman forbidden to him by society. Even so exalted a love as Marlowe's for the prostitute Cecilia is haunted by punishment and death.

Leigh Hunt reviewed The Death of Marlowe in the Repository, responding to the dedication with words of praise, and congratulating its author for daring to present a prostitute with a ‘heart in her bosom’. ‘It is a masterly specimen,’ he wrote, ‘of the concentration of a world of life, passion and sympathy,’ and he went on to pay his fellow disciple of the Elizabethan dramatists the compliment of declaring it would have delighted Marlowe's contemporaries ‘to the content of their stout and truly refined souls’. Another poet-dramatist with an Elizabethan soul, the ageing Walter Savage Landor, added his praises to Hunt's, exclaiming it had given him ‘more delight than any other dramatic or poetical work in the last twenty years’. (Horne had saved Landor's Examination of William Shakespeare from neglect with a glowing review in the Repository the previous year, so he may have felt he was returning the favour.) Congratulations came from all sides; Marlowe was Horne's unequivocal success. Yet in the midst of it all he was apologising to the experienced playwright Thomas Talfourd that he was afraid ‘the roughness of the execution would have subjected me to your censure’. This may have been more than polite modesty, for Marlowe is the simplest of his plays and Horne always tended to confuse simplicity with ineptness and complexity with polish.

Yet praise from friends, however sincere, was not enough to balance the malevolent fates. Nor could he cast depression forcibly from the mind; he believed no peace ever came from arbitrarily shutting out painful emotions. In February 1838, dark and wintry, he sat in his shabby room overlooking the narrow, dreary cobbles of Charlotte Street, and felt the burdens of the poetic life engulf him. He had seldom felt more wretched—probably not since those devastating depressions after his return from Mexico and after his love affair with A. And it was in this state that he sought help from a writer he had long admired: Thomas Carlyle, author of Sartor Resartus and the newly published History of the French Revolution.

Nothing was more precious to Horne than a sympathy shared with a nature and intelligence he believed similar to his own. He believed he had found it now in this dour Scottish genius whose ‘incomprehensible’ Sartor Resartus had appeared the same year as The False Medium and with a similarly depressing reception. Carlyle was seven years older than Horne, the son of a poor Scottish farmer, and had known, for most of his life, poverty, illness, melancholia, and religious doubts. He had abandoned his study for the ministry, been unhappy as a schoolteacher and earned little success so far as a writer. Beset by nameless fears, he could accept neither conventional Christianity nor atheism and had no peace of mind until, walking in Edinburgh's Leith Walk in the midsummer of 1822 after weeks of sleeplessness and depression, he had a curious spiritual experience that led to a view of life holding many of the elements of Horne's own.

Carlyle's literary guides were the German Romantics—Horne's were the English—and their doctrines on the role of genius were remarkably similar. Both believed in suffering, self-renunciation, and devotion to duty. Life owed no man happiness, according to Carlyle; man's only hope of peace lay, not in logic or speculation, but in acceptance of misfortune, rejection of self-interest, and dedication to work. Unconventionally religious, he believed that all things in the universe were symbols of God, whose divine spirit successively revealed itself in those men of genius whom he named the Heroes: a ‘perpetual Priesthood from age to age’ which governed the progress of mankind and revealed anew the eternal truths to man. It was a priesthood, moreover, which would welcome martyrdom as the common fate of Heroes. Nevertheless the Hero, in Carlyle's eyes, was by no means necessarily equatable with the poet: indeed of the Poet he was decidedly dubious. As Carlyle grew older he was prone, as Horne would note with dismay, to ‘utter his anathema against poetry’. He despised Keats and Shelley, loathed Hazlitt, was to be called the prophet of the anti-Romantics for his stand against extravagant flights of poetry into a private emotion and fantasy that was totally divorced from reality. Despite this Horne was quick to see that there was nothing basically uncongenial in Carlyle's doctrines. They were, in essentials, the same as his own.

He had already met Carlyle. It happened that Carlyle had read in the Repository, early in 1837, Horne's poem “Delora” and had remarked to his neighbour Leigh Hunt that the author had ‘a fierce nature. … May the gods grant him strength and patience to work it into firm metal and cast it into a shape that shall be perenniel’. He had admired also Horne's “Thought for Michael Angelo”, also appearing in the Repository, which had treated the subject of artistic genius, transposing the Eternal and Divine to finite human terms with (in Carlyle's opinion) ‘fervid conception’ and ‘fine sentiment’. Hunt had passed the praise on to Horne who, conscious of their shared sympathies, had returned the compliment by quoting, on the title page of The Death of Marlowe, lines from the French Revolution which summed up their mutual belief in the divine essence of genius: ‘He was a Man, fiery—real, from the great fire—bosom of Nature herself.’ Thereafter, with Hunt as intermediary, a meeting between the two writers had been arranged and, a few months after his first visit to Hunt's home, Horne had walked once more along the Thames to meet a writer whose sympathies matched his own. He had gone first to Hunt's house and, at a ‘trifle before six’ on a dark December evening, had been escorted around the corner into number 5 Cheyne Row and the precise domestic world of Thomas and Jane Carlyle. There Hunt had introduced him to his hosts and to a fellow guest, a motherly, brown-haired little woman with an ear trumpet, that formidable authoress and political economist, Harriet Martineau.

The Carlyles being people of strict domestic habits, it is not difficult to reconstruct Horne's visit. Visitors for tea ate bread-and-butter and biscuits and jam laid out on a table before the fire in the charming sitting-room looking into the street. Honoured guests, ‘capable of communion’, were invited to fill their pipes from the tobacco jar on the mantelpiece and smoke with their host beside the fire. (It is not recorded if Horne were so honoured, though he was addicted to smoking and at the age of fifty is said to have won a marathon smoking match which almost finished his opponent.) What fascinated Harriet Martineau about the evening was the contrasting appearance and personalities of the host and male guests: the ‘homely manliness’ of Leigh Hunt, with his smooth grizzled hair, fine countenance and rapid conversation; the rugged face of Carlyle ‘steeped in genius’; and Horne, the contrived eccentric in the presence of two natural ones, with his ‘perfectly white complexion, and somewhat coxcombical curling whiskers and determined picturesqueness’.

In Horne's eyes Hunt was the philosopher of Hope, Carlyle the Philosopher of the Unhopeful. While the impossible optimist chirped among his books and cabbages, the ingrained pessimist fought dark life-struggles further down the street—two men seemingly so opposed yet with considerable affection and respect for one another. Horne, caught in a type of emotional and intellectual tug-of-war between them, sharing great but different sympathies with each, venerated them both, though at times this tug-of-war made him uncomfortable. He was always to remember an evening spent watching them arguing with ‘that mixture of pleasantry and profundity … and that perfect ease and good nature, which distinguishes each of these men’. Then they had left ‘the close room, candles and arguments’ and gone out into the starry night. ‘There,’ Hunt had shouted, ‘look up there! Look at that glorious harmony, that sings with infinite voices an eternal song of hope in the soul of man.’ Carlyle had looked up and replied in his Scottish accent, ‘Eh! it's a sad sight.’ Horne, faced with a choice between the two opinions, was drawn reluctantly toward Carlyle: to the ‘sad sight’—‘infinite worlds, each full of struggling and suffering beings—of beings who had to die … knowing not whence it came or whither it goeth’. He would rather have believed with Hunt, but the compulsions in his nature drew him inevitably to Carlyle.

In his gloom, in February 1838, Horne did not hesitate to set his miseries before Carlyle and beg for advice. The prompt reply was a forerunner of that celebrated advice Carlyle was to give in his lectures—and later his book—on the Hero. It was both comforting and elating:

I think that those bitter experiences you allude to are more or less, especially in these times, the lot of all men whatsoever that have any true talent to yet unfold. They are hard to bear; but useful, nay perhaps merciful and indispensible. The infernal pride that is in all of us needs to be trained into a celestial, into a silent, patient, blessed one—like what Christian people call humility, the beginning of all good, as I take it, in Art and Creation for us sons of Adam. Let us consider it as schooling; let us learn our lesson! For a true man, to whom talent is the great and sacred object, not the mere reputation of his talent, there can ultimately be no evil in these things. For such a man, considering what criticism is in our time, criticism can do nothing so kind as misconstrue him, abuse him, neglect him … Forward, therefore, and fear nothing. The way will be smooth or rough; but the step being stout, the progress is not doubtful.

To Horne, sunk in depression at Charlotte Street, the way was decidely rough; yet reading Carlyle's letter he felt it grow the smoother. Longing to share his feelings with one he knew would feel them similarly, he sent the letter to Mary Gillies. He was not disappointed. She reacted as strongly as he had hoped, and though it was late at night she sent him a reply that he came to treasure almost as much as Carlyle's letter. She too had been profoundly affected by Carlyle's advice:

I feel it quite refreshing to heart and soul [she told him] … these are things to help one on one's way, and the appreciation of men such as he is all one wants, as earnest of the appreciation of all afterwards. They are like the mountain tops, as someone or other said, that catch the light first, which is afterwards spread over all.

Yet she could not condone all Carlyle said. True to her femininity, she could not look forward to the prospect of his martyrdom with the same equanimity. It might be weak of her but ‘Oh to see you out of the hard world and working to change it.’ Horne was grateful for her female concern, but, as usual, he knew Carlyle was right. The hard world was by no by means finished with him yet. His only hope lay in trying to come once more to terms with his destiny.

Literary frustration and disappointment were losing their edge with time. He was coming partially to accept once more that neglect and suffering were the normal life of the poet and, with that perverse pleasure that was never far distant with him, to find a positive satisfaction in this sign of his genius. For the next three years, fortunately, some of the sense of his own calamities was to be submerged in coping with those of his friends: chief among them was Leigh Hunt, chronically poor and a financial nuisance to his friends for years. In the past people had been amazingly generous to Hunt, and Shelley alone was reputed to have given him huge sums of money—gifts which prompted John Trelawny's celebrated quip that Hunt certainly had been Shelley's dearest friend. To help Hunt was a thankless task: it was like trying to rescue a drowning man, according to Byron, who persisted in throwing himself back into the water. Hunt had no time, he told thrifty Thomas Carlyle, for that mean virtue of thrift, consequently he had no compunction in squandering gifts. All he asked was that, when he had the means, he should be allowed to help his friends as they helped him; since he seldom had the means, and it was usually his friends' money anyway, this was scarcely a reciprocal arrangement. Certainly, though, it must be allowed that he did fulfil this obligation and when Horne was financially troubled in 1840 Hunt was the first to offer help.

Hunt, as Horne biblically put it, was a lily of the field, who accepted ‘poverty as the normal condition’ and sat at home ‘in an easy chair under the cheerful belief that he should always ride over his troubles somehow!’ And much as Horne might sympathize with this attitude, for he himself was a muddler, he could not help but be as exasperated as those others in the past who had also tried to help Hunt. It was a testimony to his affection for the man, and to the growth of his own tact and patience, that their friendship survived so well during those years in which he helped to manage Hunt's finances.

Horne had become concerned in Hunt's poverty partly because of his flourishing friendship and admiration for the ageing writer, partly because of his devotion to the cause of writers, and partly because he already knew two others who were patient patrons of Hunt. In recent years Thomas Talfourd and John Forster had been amongst Hunt's financial backers, these two being by now among Horne's close friends. Thomas Noon Talfourd was forty-three years old, amiable and intelligent and determined: an orator of note, a well-known dramatist and a successful barrister, who had come as a shy lad from a poor country family to study law at Inner Temple Lane, not far from Charles Lamb's rooms, and become the essayist's close friend and first biographer. Like Southwood Smith, the family physician to numerous literary people, Talfourd, the family lawyer, could have written the most fascinating of memoirs had he been prepared to violate professional secrecy. Like Smith, however, he was a man of unquestionable integrity who went on serving his friends, his profession, and the cause of writers, loyally and discreetly until in his sixtieth year, while sitting in his scarlet judge's robes addressing a jury, death claimed him.

Forster was a less attractive figure. The ‘tall, ardent, noticeable young fellow’—as Fox had described him when Horne first brought him to Craven Hill—had advanced phenomenally since those True Sun days. At twenty-six, without money or genius, but with talent, ambition and colossal self-confidence, matched by almost total insensitivity, he had become literary and drama critic on the prominent Examiner and invaluable friend to numerous literary people. This large, pug-nosed young man with his mane of dark hair, intense eyes, and slight stoop—said to be copied from his friend and idol, the actor Macready—cultivated friends as professionally as he pursued his journalism. He had learned the knack of making himself indispensable and the ‘knack’, so one friend, Harrison Ainsworth, put it, ‘of making people do as he liked whether they liked it or not’. Alert, energetic, a great organizer, he nevertheless owed his rapid rise as much to these carefully acquired friends as to his own merits. Horne described it as ‘an opossum-like, bough-by-bough ascent’, the friends, like rungs on a ladder, each used as a means to reach the next, yet none relinquished unless his celebrated tactlessness did it for him. For Forster, rather surprisingly for one so dependent on friendships, was notoriously arrogant and insensitive; and it was not without reason that he had been nicknamed ‘arbitrary gent’ and ‘beadle of the world’ by the literary wits. His behaviour to Hunt, however, was much in his favour and one of his greatest virtues in Horne's eyes, and Forster gladly acknowledged his debt to Hunt, the first distinguished writer he had ever known, for introducing him to literary circles.

At first Bulwer, Talfourd and Forster had helped Hunt for private reasons: out of friendship, pity and admiration for his past, rather than out of cold principles or concern for a larger cause. But as the decade ended they were infected by the change—a change they had in part helped bring about—in the Professional Authors' crusade. What in 1830 had been a voice or two in a wilderness of scorn or indifference was now a crowd of voices. The idea of authors by profession had taken fire. Its old leaders still led it: Bulwer, Forster and even Horne, his right established by The False Medium and by his propaganda in the Repository on behalf of neglected genius.

Various reasons are given for this sudden burst of interest among writers concerning their status. The social climate may have been favourable, and writers and wage-workers alike combined in efforts to throw off their oppression by means of collective effort. Cheaper printing may have helped their status, as the larger stream of books from faster and cheaper presses brought them before a greater public. There were ambitious young men, too, among their ranks, risen from humble backgrounds, determined to make something of themselves and conscious that to achieve this they in turn must first make something of their profession; young men like Forster and those other young journalists Horne had known on The True Sun. Parliament, since the 1832 reforms, was also opened now to the writer. Bulwer, Talfourd and Benjamin Disraeli, the celebrated son of the great champion of Professional Authors, were literary parliamentarians who put in action the writers' demands for copyright laws and the abolition of the theatrical monopoly. They, for their part, were eager to raise the writers' social rank so as not to disgrace their parliamentary standing. These causes combined to produce an unconscious sporadic movement that within the next ten years would become conscious and organized, led by its early leaders, Horne included, and by those ambitious, obscurely born young writers like Charles Dickens and Forster.

A life devoted to humanity's welfare through the medium of literature (the authors believed) also deserved humanity's recognition and protection. Hunt had given such a life and humanity's response had been, predictably, neglect. Consciously or unconsciously—probably the latter—Talfourd and Forster were looking for a guinea-pig through which to press the writers' general claim on society. And Hunt was perfect for this purpose. His genius went unquestioned in a time that was not producing geniuses, his reputation was nowadays respectable, and no tamer unrewarded genius existed. He was perfectly content to see his present poverty and past renown paraded as his friends thought fit; if anything, he delighted in it. From private pity Forster's and Talfourd's efforts grew into the Leigh Hunt Private List, its aim to give a weekly allowance of £3—a lump sum being clearly fatal to one of Hunt's proclivities—and in time ‘to get such names and feelings implicated in it, as may help to obtain L. H. his rightful renumeration “for labour performed” from the Government’. In 1838 Horne joined Talfourd as the Private List's third trustee.

Horne's motives in joining were undoubtedly sincere, though it would have been hypocritical if he had claimed that the notice it brought him was unwelcome. Enlisting subscribers he met people he might otherwise never have met: some fashionable, like the literary dandy Abraham Hayward, some politically famous, like Lord Holland, presumably approached because of his connections with Hunt's political past. The Private List ought to have been a pleasure for Horne; he had reckoned, however, without Hunt's wife. Marianne Hunt would seem to have been the least attractive of females: among Hunt's male contemporaries there is scarcely a favourable remark about her. She was reputed to be slovenly, dishonest, nagging, complaining and improvident, snobbish, malicious, a hypochondriac and possibly an alcoholic. Yet to give the poor woman her due, she had managed—somewhat haphazardly it must be admitted—to rear numerous children through a gypsy existence of constant poverty and uncertainty; she had steered them through the term in Surrey gaol, uneasy communal living with Shelley and Byron, and a nightmare voyage to Italy when, thought to be dying, she was huddled into tiny quarters with children, husband, and the family belongings. Life with Hunt would have been trying for any woman and to one of her limited nature and mentality very much so; she no doubt coped the only way she could.

This seems partly to explain, even if it does not excuse, her behaviour over the Private List. At first she appeared to welcome Horne as one of the few of her husband's friends not hostile to her. She would send him coy little letters about her concern for Hunt's health, her hopes for the fund, or invitations to call and discuss it even though her husband would not be home. Horne was undoubtedly flattered. But as time passed the discreetly coy tone of the letters changed. Horne began to think her calculating and provoking. He discovered she was not keeping proper accounts or receipts. Most disquieting of all, she began to accuse him and his fellow trustees behind their backs of cheating her and keeping back the weekly allowance. He repeatedly found himself forced to reprimand her, and rebukes such as this became typical: ‘I received a letter from a Subscriber to the “Private List” some weeks ago, who asked if it were true you had received nothing from the “Private List” fund for the last eight months … the little memorandum of payment you sent me will not answer … you omitted to say what had been received.’ Marianne Hunt was not to be trusted and Horne felt himself forced to be continually on guard in an extremely trying situation.

The Private List was not properly under way until early in 1839, though its organization had begun earlier. In the meantime Horne had been occupying himself with his usual journalism and his usual amusements. He researched into the history of copyright for Talfourd whose campaign for adequate copyright law earned him—as Charles Dickens put it, dedicating his Pickwick Papers to him—the gratitude of all ‘who devote themselves to the most precarious of all pursuits’. He went often to the theatre, which was enjoying a burst of vitality with Macready's appointment as new manager of Covent Garden theatre. There, taking breath after his violent quarrel with Alfred Bunn, his former employer and the proprietor of Drury Lane theatre, Macready indulged his remarkable talent for imaginative and visually beautiful productions of Shakespeare. Horne joined those who thronged to see Macready's Henry V, King Lear, and The Tempest, and showered the stage with flowers. John Forster had been so moved by his idol's reception he had burst into tears, and Hunt too had been moved to tears by the exquisite settings of the plays. Sitting beside him in a box at The Tempest Horne had watched the tears on his cheeks as he exclaimed it was all too beautiful. Afterwards, with Hunt, Talfourd, and Forster, Horne had frequented the actors' green-rooms and dressing-rooms, often with the desire of talking to Macready, for the actor was still the main hope for his plays. The desire to be an acted dramatist had never been stronger, especially as he watched plays by Talfourd or Browning or other acquaintances put on by Macready and joined parties of congratulatory friends in the dressing-rooms after. If they could be acted why could not he!

Elsewhere the theatrical scene was causing annoyance to all who, like Horne, felt concerned by the state of English drama. At Drury Lane Alfred Bunn had imported the renowned American lion-tamer, Van Amburgh, who played to crowded houses and to the new Queen herself. Horne and his fellow dramatists were furious at the American's popularity, seeing in it a further sign of the decadence of public taste, and Horne was responsible for a sly and malicious, tongue-in-cheek biography of Van Amburgh supposedly by an admirer named Ephraim Watts. Published anonymously, it was highly praised by the more radical literary journals.

Most of Horne's theatrical energies were going into his latest play, Gregory VII. Never had his attitude to a play been more intense. He was determined that Gregory—as he told Fox—would be perfect ‘this side of the Ideal’. When he sent the finished manuscript to Fox in 1838 he had put months of careful work into it, and Fox's reaction was consequently all the more irritating. Fox considered the play wrong in principle and philosophy. Horne was never happy with outspoken criticism, and on this occasion least of all. He dashed off a reply full of unconcealed annoyance—the tone of many of his more recent letters to Fox—snapping that he had no intention of bringing out a tragedy wrong in principle and would he and Eliza kindly keep their views to themselves and not influence John Forster who admired the play. Fortunately a short stay by the sea at Margate calmed his nerves. He returned with a reconstructed last act and a more equable frame of mind, ready in a rather shamefaced manner to patch up relations with Eliza and Fox once more. It was noticeable, however, when the play was finally published in 1840 that Fox—unlike Carlyle, Hunt, Forster and the actor Charles Kemble—received no editorial acknowledgement or complimentary copy. Horne merely sent him an over-hearty letter explaining that, as he could barely afford to pay the printer, no free copies were available.

It was not surprising that Fox, the confirmed opponent of despots, found Gregory VII ambiguous. Horne wrote as a disciple of both Carlyle and Shelley, trapped in that Romantic ambiguity which allowed its adherents at the same time to glorify the tyrant and condemn tyranny. The result was a hero of disquieting morality. For it cannot be doubted Horne saw Gregory VII as a hero, excusing his ruthlessness to Hunt as a product of barbaric times, and even asking Carlyle to include him in his public lectures on the Hero in 1840. He had taken his plot, as usual, partly from history, partly from his own invention. (He claimed always that his plays were the essence of the best histories, an audience being more likely to accept from fact those ‘universal truths’ which they might not believe in fiction.) His play told the story of Gregory, risen from a poor monk to become an eleventh-century pope, unifying and strengthening his Church by violent, unscrupulous means justified as the working of divine will. Obsessed and destroyed by the monomania of belief in his divine destiny, supported by the devotion of a noble, idealistic woman, the echoes of Mary Gillies and of Horne himself are unmistakable. When Gregory is afire

… with all—exterminating wrath,
And armed invulnerably 'gainst man and fiend
By this high mission, acted in God's eye,
And with His nostrils' breath impelled …

he is Horne, releasing those energies and ambitions frustrated by real life, vicariously exploiting that violent sadistic side to his nature. Power preoccupied him, the tyrant fascinated him: it was a vision of himself that would not be banished.

He had shifted meanwhile from dingy Soho to more comfortable lodgings in the fashionable area of Gloucester Place, Portman Square: a narrow street with its pleasant three-storeyed houses, their first floors decked with iron balustrades. Horne lived in number seventy-four, near a house occupied by a family whose eldest daughter, an invalid who night after night bent her dark ringlets over Greek translations and Romantic poets, would soon exercise such influence over his own life and English literature. The family was named Moulton Barrett, the daughter the celebrated Elizabeth Barrett, Robert Browning's future wife.

Gregory VII continued to be polished, but by the end of 1838 another tyrant ruled Horne's desk. Significantly, it was Napoleon, the bogeyman of his youth and the hero of his early manhood—thanks to those fanatical Napoleonic supporters Ireland and Hazlitt. Horne's life seemed to have been lived under the shadow of Napoleon, either sinister or glorious, and now at the mature age of thirty-six he prepared to examine him intellectually. He began a biography of Napoleon, turning to use those views on biographical method he had laid down years before in the Repository. They are views worth repeating, not only for what light they throw on Horne's work, but because they could profitably be heeded by biographers today.

To collect, arrange, and studiously, perhaps elegantly, elaborate all the facts, dates, anecdotes and other materials, many a man can do this; … A fine biography can only be written by one who enters into the private as well as the public character of the object of his work. He must know the man as well as the circumstances. He can only do this by identifying himself with the thoughts, feelings, and actions, of the individual in question. He must actually resemble him in some points of character; must deeply appreciate all the chief qualities for which he was eminent, and possess sufficient imagination to comprehend and combine, where the broken or insecure chain of facts leaves shadows and shortcomings beyond the grasp of the analytical mind. In short, when he has carefully collected all the raw material of facts, he must see the truth shining clear through the contradictory evidence, through the real as well as the apparent contradictions of character; must be able to separate principles from acts, as well as trace them into each other, and have the manhood to write down in plain words the full result of his investigations.

They are admirable rules; and as Horne seemed capable of obeying them, what a superb biography he might have written! His sensibility enabled him to project himself into another personality. The ways in which he believed he resembled Napoleon were many: their mutual belief that the old must be destroyed to clear the way for the new, their awareness of their heroic mission, their boundless ambition, even the physical fact of their short stature—a point on which Horne was so sensitive in himself, and which he shared with his other hero, Gregory. There could be doubt, in theory, that he had sympathy, imagination, and an instinctive understanding of a being he believed was so like himself.

He was scrupulously careful over the collection of the facts. He wrote for help on sources to young William Hazlitt—that synonym of ‘self-interest’—who, as a student of Napoleon like his father, was able to make a list of books. He wrote also to Carlyle, who sent an equally long list with pungent critical comments, remarking that Scott's Napoleon was what ‘an English Tory Justice of the Peace might form over his nuts and wine’ and Hazlitt's adoring biography was much too ‘speculative and didactic’ and gave ‘little image of the man and his environment’. Mary Gillies's help was further enlisted and she spent many hours in the British Museum working on the sources.

In theory Horne ought to have seen the biographical truth shining abundantly clear. In fact he did not. The book was ruined by mediocrity and a fanatical devotion to Hazlitt's prejudiced biography, written in agony of mind and body not long before its author's death. Horne worshipped Hazlitt and Hazlitt worshipped Napoleon: it seemed to follow with emotional logic that he too must worship Napoleon in the same way that Hazlitt had done, and this proved his undoing. Nor did he appear to value objectivity as a biographical quality: significantly, it was not mentioned in the list of biographer's prerequisites and possibly he would have considered it too near to lack of sympathy. Competently put together, but unoriginal, hopelessly biased, evasive of moral implications, his book presented Napoleon, like Gregory, as the divinely-inspired iconoclast whose wars ‘have ministered / Unto the health of nations’. Its lasting interest is rather as a mirror of Horne's mind, in which the tyrant and the tyrant-hater wrought conflicting havoc with his emotions.

Notes

Horne's Athleticism: [Richard Henry Horne hereafter,] RH, ‘Lectures on London Celebrities’, ms, [The Mitchell Library, Public Library of New South Wales, Sydney hereafter,] ML.

‘Death of Marlowe’: first published in Monthly Repository, new series, 9, (1837), 128ff, and then as The Death of Marlowe. A Tragedy, in One Act (London, 1837); Leigh Hunt's review, Monthly Repository, new series, 9 (1837), 365; Landor's comment cited in RH, ‘Syllabus of Lectures’, pamphlet, 1875, in author's possession; RH to Thomas Talfourd, December 24, 1837, Henry E. Huntington Library.

Thomas Carlyle: RH ed., A New Spirit of the Age, [1844] op. cit., vol. 2, 253ff; RH, preface to a projected volume of poems, March 1852, ms, ML; Thomas Carlyle, ‘On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History’, published with Sartor Resartus (Everyman edn., 1948), pp. 383ff.

Horne Meets Carlyle: Leigh Hunt to RH, December 8, 1837, Iowa State University Library; RH to Hunt, December 12, 1837, Hunt mss, British Museum; RH, ‘Thought for Michael Angelo’, Monthly Repository, new series, 11 (1837), 422; David Masson, Memories of London in the Forties (Edinburgh, London, 1908), 491; Harriet Martineau, Autobiography (London, 1877), vol. 1, 381.

Carlyle and Hunt Contrasted: RH ed., A New Spirit of the Age, op. cit., vol 2, 278-80.

Carlyle Advises Horne: Carlyle to RH, February 26, 1838, Yale University Library; Mary Gillies to RH, envelope post-marked February 1838, ms letter in author's possession.

Hunt's Poverty: RH, ‘Leigh Hunt. In Memoriam’, Southern Cross (Sydney), December 3, 1859; P. Quennell, Byron in Italy, op. cit., p. 212.

Talfourd: RH ed., A New Spirit of the Age, vol. 1, ch. 8; Sylva Norman, Flight of the Skylark: The Development of Shelley's Reputation (Oklahoma University Press, 1954), p. 151n.

John Forster: RH, ‘John Forster. His early life and friendships’, Temple Bar, April 1876. (An unedited version of the article appeared under the same title in Appleton's Journal, 8, April 1876, 15.) Malcolm Elwin, Savage Landor (New York, 1941), p. 301.

Cause of Authors by Profession: K. J. Fielding, ‘Thackeray and the “Dignity of Literature”’, Times Literary Supplement, September 19 and 26, 1958.

Hunt Private List: letters between RH and Mrs Hunt 1838-40, Hunt mss, British Museum; RH to Talfourd, July 29, 1839, Harvard College Library; RH to Mrs Hunt, dated November 2, Iowa State University Library; list of subscribers to Leigh Hunt Private List, ML.

Horne and the Theatre: RH, ‘The Burlesque and the Beautiful’, Contemporary Review, 18 (1871), 394; J. C. Trewin, Mr Macready, op. cit., 161; RH (pseud., identifiable at ML), Ephraim Watts, The Life of Van Amburgh: The Brute Tamer. With Anecdotes of His Extraordinary Pupils (London, undated); review of Van Amburgh in Monthly Chronicle, August 1838, p. 84.

Gregory the Seventh: H-F, September 5 and 12, 1838, April 24, 1840; RH to John Forster, draft letter March 9, 1844, ML; RH, Gregory VII: A Tragedy (London, 1840).

Horne's Views on Biography: RH, review of Forster's Eminent British Statesmen in Monthly Repository, 10 (1836), 461.

Biography of Napoleon: William Hazlitt to RH, December 19, 1838, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne; Carlyle to RH, December 19, 1838, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne; RH, ‘Napoleon's Remains’, poem in The Monthly Magazine, third series, 5 (1841), 103; RH ed., The History of Napoleon (London, 1841), two vols.