The Shadow of Hazlitt
The Life of William Hazlitt. By P. P. Howe. (Hamish Hamilton. 15s.) A nitruiANT spirit, a critic of genius, a man delighting almost feverishly in the visual arts, ardent for political huinanity and deter- mined to feel truly and to tell what he felt, passed across the literary scene at the beginning of the last century, and died in 1830 at the age of fifty-two. Villainously traduced by his enemies, only spas- modically supported by his friends, ravaged by an unhappy passion the anguished account of which shocked fools and provided knaves with a weapon against him, he disappeared almost completely from the literary horizon for some years after his death: but the lucidity and accuracy of his thought, the solid value of his judgements, the trenchant phrasing of his prose have at length nearly brought him to the position he ought to occupy.
The late P. P. Howe did much to raise Hazlitt to the level to which he belongs, and he deserves all honour for the devoted editorial work he did. The life too, originally published in 1922 and now reprinted, calls for our gratitude. It is meticulously accurate, and one cannot but love the charming "modest scholar" so vividly portrayed in Mr. Frank Swinnerton's gracious introduction. But the book cannot be ranked as a good biography, in the sense that biography is the account of a man's life considered as a work of art. Everything is there, it is true : what Hazlitt did from year to year, and, indeed, from month to month; we know what he wrote at every season, what his bodily movements were; when that intolerably flat writer Crabb Robinson met him at the Lambs, when Haydon chatted with him, when the Cowden Clarkes came across him: but the man himself is not there. His appearance, some of his written words, what certain others sometimes said about him, his publica- tions, his money affairs—all these we are duly informed of, yet some- how the spirit escapes from these pages. It is all extremely carefully done; no source is left untapped; we know, for example, that Bewick did a drawing of him not ip 1822, but in 1824 (it is among the excellent illustrations); we are told how many people bore witness to the fact that he drank only tea and so on; yet we never feel our- selves in the presence of the living Hazlitt; we feel from these pages that we are a little closer, though only a very little, to Words- worth, Lamb and Leigh Hunt. The more Howe wrote about Hazlitt, the fainter the image of his subject became.
The biographer has to be not only imaginative but bold; he must be novelist and dramatist as well as recorder. It is the fashion today to decry Lytton Strachey, who certainly erred sometimes, but who had the right approach, who gave his portrait the form of a work of art. But Howe would not, or at any rate did not, take the plunge; so, since there are no sharp dramatic clashes played out before us (where they occurred is indicated), no sparks are struck. He stated, but he did not imaginatively portray, did not enter into the being of his subject. It is no use informing us that "the first Mrs. Hazlitt secured her husband on the rebound," a hideously vulgar because insensitive phrase, very startling coming from Howe; it is not warming to tell us, The reader will now turn to The Spirit of the Age to see ... " for the reader will certainly do no such thing; nor is it of much imaginative assistance to say that " if we are wise " we shall look for Hazlitt in his work if we want to find him at the end of 1815. Howe, apparently, did not like to speak out; but he must surely have known how fatal it was when dealing with the tragic pity of the Sarah Walker affair merely to refer the reader to the Liber Amoris. Here was Hazlitt laying his quivering soul bare, and we are told nothing of it.
It is a thousand pities, for Howe knew more about Hazlitt than anyone else is likely to know for some time, and he shows•by touches here and there that he might have brought a little balance into the hagiographies written around the other literary notables of the time. The art of biography is very difficult; the dangers are enormous, and Howe might have been frightened by the sight of post- Stracheyans gesticulating ludicrously in the pitfalls that beset the path of the imaginative biographer. His book, however, is extremely valuable; every student.of Hazlitt must have it; all ihe materials for a biography are there—but Howe did not write the biography.
BONAMY DOBREE.
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