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Prose


                    Notes          influence of society or nature upon their own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a
                                   sort of reduplication from that community.” The poets, in other words, are those who express the
                                   truest vision of humanity — the most comprehensively integrated and the most accordant with
                                   “pleasure.” And this vision the rest of society receives and assimilates to itself. Thus it is that the
                                   poets, “who imagine and express this indestructible order,” become the institutors, the founders,
                                   the teachers, and the prophets.  For Shelley, then, the poets are practical people of thought and
                                   action leading forward the evolutionary march of human knowledge and institu tions. And when
                                   we are looking for sources of Leigh Hunt’s literary principles we might remember this essay.
                                   Shelley, a true genius, provided a coherent, rational structuring of literary principles, including
                                   answers to those questions that occupied several of the greater romantic writers: what is a poet?
                                   and what does a poet do? And to this structure, in part, Leigh Hunt, a man of taste and common
                                   sense, assimilated his own thought. If we accept this view of the matter, we can get a little closer
                                   to understanding what quality Hunt possessed that enabled him to be the great discoverer, nurturer,
                                   and introducer of literary genius to his age. Remember again Shelley’s remark: “There is a certain
                                   order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of mimetic representation, from which the
                                   hearer and spectator receive an intenser and purer pleasure than from any other: the sense of an
                                   approximation to this order has been called taste by modern writers.”
                                   Let us turn now to the essay by Hunt’s other great critical friend, who commended him for his
                                   “fineness of tact and sterling sense.” Begin again with the passage from “On Genius and Common
                                   Sense” quoted earlier. “Tact, finesse, is nothing but the being completely aware of the feeling
                                   belonging to certain situations, passions, &c. and the being consequently sensible to their slightest
                                   indications or movements in others.” Just as Shelley did, Hazlitt bases his model of human
                                   experience and thought in “feeling,” or what the British empirical philosophers called impression.
                                   He says, “in art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason; that is,
                                   from the impression of a number of things on the mind, which impression is true and well-
                                   founded though you may not be able to analyze or account for it in the several particulars” [my
                                   emphasis]. A little further on he calls these impressions “the immediate stamp of nature.” The
                                   single or unified impression that results from “the impression of a number of things” clearly
                                   involves a synthesis of many elements into an integrated experience which includes a power to
                                   respond, express, or, as he says, “judge.” Hazlitt elaborates more fully upon the power of judgment
                                   and expression at the level of ordinary experience, the level he calls “common sense.” “Common
                                   sense is the just result of the sum-total of such unconscious impressions in the ordinary occurrences
                                   of life, as they are treasured up in the memory, and called out by the occasion. Genius and taste
                                   depend upon much the same principle exercised on loftier ground and in more unusual
                                   combinations.”
                                   “Common sense” for Hazlitt is a powerful and firm guide to action. It is the “just result” of “the
                                   sum-total” of the unconscious impressions that constitute experience. Common sense, then, is
                                   accurate human feeling, directly representative of a pure humanity uncontaminated by prejudice,
                                   false refinement, or vulgar opinion. It is easily tainted, but in persons of genuine tact or finesse it
                                   can function as “the prophetic spirit of common sense.” And it is on the basis of this common
                                   sense that loftier acts of genius or taste occur. Hunt stood between Hazlitt and Shelley, these
                                   literary men of genius, highly regarded by both for powers of taste and judgment, remarkable
                                   because grounded in a pure and honest common sense. As a critic, editor, and representer of
                                   ideals they believed in, according to their own testimony, these men found none more capable of
                                   understanding and supporting them — and their genius — than Leigh Hunt.
                                   To follow this last point a little further, let us consider Hazlitt’s other term. If Hunt is exemplary
                                   of common sense, fineness of tact, indeed “sterling” sense, what is it that sets “genius” apart?
                                   Hazlitt says the man of real genius “has the feeling of truth already shrined in his own breast, and
                                   his eye is still bent on nature to see how she expresses herself.’’ Based on his own self-awareness,



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