The Complete Hazlitt
By V. S. PRITCHETT Lx twenty volumes and an index which is not far from emulating the piety of Cruden's Concordance, the Centenary Hazlitt is complete. It is a monument, as the elegiac phrase runs ; a monument inscribed with the scholarship of Hazlitt's editor. "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair."
The less mighty may look impressed, intimidated, but full of questions. It is interesting to reflect, for instance, that so much of Hazlitt was written for the periodical Press, that he wrote about everything which interested his age, and that precisely this capacity would damn him in the eyes of any modem editor. His subjects are wrong. He has no " angle " but writes about the whole of the matter as if it were being dis- cussed for the first time. Here and there a title out of the hundreds in this edition might catch the editorial eye. "On the Education of Women," is an example. But the opening sentence, devastating as it is : "We do not think a classical education proper for women," threatens a spacious- ness which is the dread of editors and which is alien to the altered interests of our lives.
It is very easy to say that the decline of the periodical essay is a sign of the decline of the dignity of journalism, an indication that literature is no longer wanted, and a symptom of the general lowering of cultural standards since the coming of popular education. This is to argue a continuity of interests from Hazlitt's time to our own, which does not exist. True, Hazlitt was not in the dilemma of the modem writer who is obliged to cultivate two manners, a serious and a popular one. He was never asked to write what are euphemistically called " light " articles. If he boiled the pot it was not under the obligation of producing tripe. He did not have to soften his tune for an editor morbidly afraid of his readers and his advertisement manager, and mealy- mouthedness had not yet been forced upon the Press by a grotesque law of libel. Hazlitt had only one manner, which was a superb infusion of the familiar and impassioned styles, and was as well adapted to the sublime as to some paradoxical note on the civilization of Africa by bringing negresses to Paris.
These differences may be granted. The main bar to Hazlitt now is a deeper incompatibility, and it lies in this : Hazlitt lived in the shadow of the eighteenth century when the world of value was relatively stable. It was the hey- day of literary culture. Men wrote to pronounce judgement. We, on the other hand, live in an age in which the world of fact, of observable phenomena has eclipsed the interest of the world of value. We are dazzled by thousands of fas- cinating new facts ; and the marvel of speaking through the air to another continent is more engrossing than the question of whether we have anything to say. Space, and with space, judgement, have surrendered to time as the governing factor in our view of the world. We clock-in to every thought and action; a plant of specialists, we are fit at the end of the day only for opiates ; for in the time-ridden, the faculty of culti- vating the garden of our values is atrophied. If it is not transitional, the phase must be disastrous. But how far Hazlitt is from us may be seen in his essay on Malthus, or again in another essay on Phrenology. Ile loathed the scientific mind. His curiosity was directed to the philo- sophical "reason for things." It was the attitude of the age and thus he was considered competent to write about every- thing ; from metaphysics to the theatre, from economics to travel, history, civil and criminal legislation, literature, art, current politics and even "the late murders."
The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Centenary Edition. • Edited by P. P. Howe. 21 vols. (Dant. Vols. 20 and 21. £15 15s. Od. the sot.) It is not, as is so often said, that these subjects have become too vast for one man to tackle. It is that the stress has been moved from attitude and judgement to material fact. The thousands of new facts crowd judgement out. We are neither believing nor sceptic. We are concerned merely with seeing things. In Mr. Aldous Huxley's word, we have become a world of voyeurs. And the only immediate contact we have with judgement is in the problem natural to the scientist or voyeur: the problem of co-ordination or organization. Hence the dawning preoccupation with politics—and politics in the sense of economics, its crude raw-material form. It is the first step up the ladder out of the chaos of observation.
It is also argued against Hazlitt that the essay has been replaced by the novel. This is true only in a very limited sense. The novelist and essayist are rarely interchangeable temperaments. What Hazlitt would have made of the novel is depressingly plain from Liber Amoris. He cannot enter others. He is the egotist at large ; all things exist as pegs on which he may hang something of himself. Not the ideal (his word) but Hazlitt getting his teeth into the ideal is the attraction ; and it is also, on occasion, his fault when personal feeling smears the subject. In criticism, egotism gives him the faculty of making the writers his but precludes him from profundity ; he appreciates most perceptively because, in a sense, he is appreciating what has become part of himself. An isolated but not an extreme man, his sanity and common sense impress us as he puts the wit of Beau Brtunmell in its place without forgetting that wit was there, or exposes the trick of La Rochefoucauld. He fails where his atrophied religious sense has left him without incentive to take possession of a subject—the case of Donne. He asserts, with fervour, like a talker delighted with the flights of his own judgement, and half the pleasure we have in his work lies in the feeling we have that judgement has been passed with the personal emphasis associated with the table and not with the impersonal finality of the altar. And even when the ideal is dragged in in all its boredom, it is still with Hazlitt we are dealing and not, as in some other writers, with God.
Because the man is somewhere on almost every page Hazlitt can never be wholly unreadable. His philosophy is dull. The abstract is an obsession, a private heritage possibly from his Unitarian upbringing and his lack of religious sense. To his father's zeal for the American colonists in the War of Independence we may trace Hazlitt's own fanatical hero worship of another enemy—Bonaparte. It is all of a piece with the non-conformist egotist's obsession with his cwn liberty, his conviction that he is the only man in the world. Any chain is an attempt to chain him. Hence the eccentric choice of isolation from his friends based on the conviction that they had "sold the pass." Such egotism leads to a natural incapacity to come to terms with life, and Hazlitt found special merit and sustenance in his unpopularity. "I have had a happy life" he said on his death-bed, after a life of domestic adventure, quarrels, illness, poverty and the casual company of inns. There is no reason to doubt him. The egotist, unless he is of the melancholy kind, is impervious to unhappiness. Such self-sufficiency leaves us both suspicious and unmoved.
That he was aware to some extent of his state is shown in a note printed in the final volume of this edition. He writes that his little boy said he was lost without a book to read, and adds : "So have I wandered about, till now, and, waking from the dream of books at last, don't know what to do with myself." But the dream of books was the egotist's dream of himself. I have looked through the index and I can find no reference to egotism in his work and no essay on it.
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