William Hazlitt
IIAZLITT, the centenary of whose death occurred on I 1- September 18th, is not the most lovable of English essayists, but he is the most virile. Though few writers were ever more self-analytical or self-revealing, we do not feel that we know the man himself as we know Charles Lamb or even Leigh Hunt. We carry Lamb in our hearts when we are not actually reading him. llazlitt exists for us only when we are in his company. Lamb is the loved friend, with whom we can be silent, and whom we still possess when he is absent. Hazlitt is the chance acquaintance, with whom we never establish real intimacy, but whose talk—often conten- tious, but always varied, interesting, and stimulating— delightfully beguiles the hours of a journey.
Lamb was of gentleness all compact. His spirit was at unity with itself. Hazlitt was never at one with himself or with society at large. As with Mrs. Gummidgc, everything went contrarily with him, and he went con- trarily with everything : albeit he had a kind heart at bottom, and pathetically failed to see why people did not like him. He was warped by conflicting impulses, by disappointments that sometimes turned him (by nature a sentimentalist) into a.cynic, and by the inability to expel several monstrous bees front his bonnet. He owed the world a perpetual grudge because it refused to take him at his own valuation. He won at last a fair measure of success, but not in the fields where he most sought or coveted it.
Born at Maidstone in 1778, Hazlitt was the son of a Vnitarian minister, whose fine character deeply impressed itself upon him. His early years were spent itinerantly in England, Ireland, and America, where his father held various charges before settling at Wem, in Shropshire. Hazlitt saw New York before he, so great a Londoner, saw London ; but, though he lived in it during the most plastic years of childhood., the Ness World. made little impression upon him. Ixt 1793, he entered hackney
Theological College, front which he paid frequent visits to his brother John's studio in London. Life at Hackney quickened his inherited passion for metaphysics ; but, being attracted to philosophy rather than theology, he abandoned the idea of the ministry. It is strange that he did not at once turn to art, which was already a rival claimant to his affections. At any rate, he returned to IVem in 1794, and spent most of the next eight years in "doing nothing," as the world stigmatizes that desultory walking, reading, and meditation which form an indis- pensable part of an essayist's education.
It was during this period that, in circumstances im- perishably described by him, he met Coleridge and Wordsworth. Ile soaked himself in their poetry. If, in later years, when its writers had disappointed his early idolatry, he criticized that poetry somewhat savagely, at least he paid it the tribute of intimate knowledge. Hazlitt, a very young man, first knew Coleridge and Wordsworth when they were still in the flush of their Revolutionary fervour. Coleridge in particular seemed to him like a god. Ile lived to sec Coleridge's tine powers dissipated and both collaborators in the Lyrical Ballads turn " traitors " to their Revolutionary faith. It was a " betrayal " which he never forgave, and which greatly embittered him. To hint the course of events counted for nothing. The aftermath of the French Revolution did not damp his fanatical zeal for Bonaparte as the liberator and saviour of mankind. The restoration of the Bourbons moved him to frenzied anger, and became an obsession with which he could not away. " The hag Legitimacy" bestrides his writings, casting shadows in every possible and impossible place. If his Republicanism had been founded in genuine humanitarianism, Hazlites own view of the Revolution might have undergone modi- fication. But "consistency of opinion," which he defends so plausibly in one of his essays, was to hint a sacred obligation, and ideas were greater than realities. For all his eager intercourse with men and affairs, he remained at heart a theorist, who hated kings more than he loved peoples.
Hazlitt thrice tried to build himself a literary monu- ment to his own design. Each had its basis in philosophy. The earliest attempt was published in 1805, after his three years' abortive apprenticeship to art. IIis Essay on the Principles of Haman Action—an elaborate endeavour " to remove a stumbling block in the metaphysical doc- trine of the innate and necessary selfishness of the human mind "—was his first book, and had agitated his thoughts for some :years. In later life he still owned it as his favourite child. But it won few other admirers. In 1893, he sought to epitomize his philosophy in a series of maxims. Characteristics contains some admirably com- pressed and pithy writing, but too often it lapses into lengthy didacticism, while Bonaparte and Fitt (hero and charlatan respectively) obstruct the epigrammatic flow, The book had no sale, and a similar fate befell, three years later, the Life of Napoleon in four volumes. Critics have pronounced this work to be mom readable, and in many ways sounder, than Scott's Life. But adequate material for a full biography was lacking in 1826, and Hazlites adoration of Napoleon would in any case have damned his chance of success.
It was in 1812 that Hazlitt, ceasing to repose upon the hospitality of his father and brother, settled in London with the laudable aim of making his own living. The rest of his life was a period of intensive journalistic activity, his time being divided between London and Winterslow, the Wiltshire village to which he continued to resort long after the divorce from his first wife, who had introduced hint to it. Hr acted as Parliamentary reporter, then as dramatic-and 'art critic, for the Morning Chronicle and other papers ; and soon he was ranging over the whole field of " miscellaneous" writing. He was associated with Leigh Hunt's Examiner, and became the most regular and brilliant contributor to the Edin- burgh before Macaulay. His best-known books—Sketches and Essays', Table Talk, and so on—were compiled from this hasty journeyman's work. "So, here and there, does the architect build better than he knew."
Variety of interest, vitality, independence, and forth- rightness of utterance--these are the qualities that make Hazlitt among the two or three greatest" miscellaneous" writers in the language. No essayist surpasses him in range of theme. His love of metaphysics gave his work 71 philosophical background, which enabled him, if missing sublimity, to attain an inspired or spiritualized common sense. Yet his objectivity was no less remark- able. He may have lacked deep love for his fellow-men ; but he had an unquenchable interest in them, and -an insatiable curiosity for the little as well as the big things of life. He possessed, moreover, an inexhaustible fund of animal spirits. He was equally happy in reading Chaucer or in playing racquets, its discussing an abstract principle of conduct or in watching " the finest sight in the metropolis "—the mail-coaches setting off from Piccadilly. What a companion (as Mr. Birrell suggests) Hazlitt himself must have made on a mail-coach ! At case both in town and country, nothing would miss his eye, and every fresh spectacle along the road would not merely be relished for its own sake, but would start him upon a flow of reminiscence, speculation, and bold opinion. His essays are like good conversation, rising, when occasion demands it, to real eloquence, but too spontaneous and alert, too much immersed in enjoyment of itself, to need any straining after effect. " Style," in his case, could afford to look after itself.
About Hazlitt's " position " as a critic there has never been general lip agreement, though the estimates con- tained in his Lectures on the English Poets have sub- consciously been appropriated by most later commen- tators. Hazlitt was no academician ; there were large gaps in his reading ; and he cared little for aesthetic nice- ties. Moreover, he regarded poetry as being but one of the many good things in this world. These facts account for certain limitations in him. But they made for spon- taneity and xitality, and, wlsen his prejudices did not warp it, he showed a judgment both shrewd and fearless. Because his opinions seem natural enough to-day, we are apt to forget what vision and courage were needed in MS to prefer Chaucer and Spenser to Dryden and Pope, and to place Cowper and Burns above Akenside and Young. Hazlitt was a better critic of dramatic literature than of the actual drama, while, when dealing with art, he displays at least a fine and contagious enthusiasm. No critic in our tongue is better calculated to awaken the interest of ordinary readers alike its art or poetry. As a judge of men, he was—when, once again, his own particular prepossessions did not obtrude thesnselves - -seldom at fault, and The Spirit of the Age, written in his mellowed later years, remains indispensable as a portrait gallery of his period.
As for the man himself, there were some dark corners in his character. Of his two stupid marriages the best that ems be said is that they were not inspired by mercen- ary motives, from which no writer was ever more exempt. No excuse, we fear. tail be found for the squalid Edinburgh episode that is suit I to have cost him a biography by Steven- son. But if, as he himself argued, " sincerity has to .do with the connexion between our words and thoughts; and not between our beliefs and actions," then at least Hazlitt was sincere. If be •did not always practise virtue, he never failed to reverence it. There' must, again, have been solid worth in the man who could become a total abstainer when he-found drink was impairing his faculties, and who, for all his querulousness, could at last win so moving a tribute from Lamb. Nor can he have lacked springs of inward grace who, dying after fifty-two years of turbulence and loneliness, could say with his last breath : " Well,-I've had a happy life."
GILBERT THOMAS.
Previous page
