Part 13

It is very difficult to be severe with William Hazlitt, who was towards himself so outspokenly severe. Every stricture upon him, as well as every defence to be urged for it, may be taken out of his own mouth. Even the _Liber Amoris_, as must always have been discerned, demonstrates not only his weakness, but his essential uprightness and innocence. His vindication is written large in _Depth and Superficiality_, in _The Pleasures of Hating_, in _The Disadvantage of Intellectual Superiority_. His “true Hamlet” is as faithful a sketch of the author as is Newman’s celebrated definition of a gentleman. Hazlitt says a tender word for Dr. Johnson’s prejudices which covers and explains many of his own. Who can call him irritable, recalling the splendid exposition of merely selfish content, in the opening paragraphs of the essay on _Good Nature_? Yet, with all his lofty and endearing qualities, he had a warped and soured mind, a constitutional disability to find pleasure in persons or in conditions which were quiescent. He would have every one as mettlesome and gloomily vigilant as he was himself. His perfectly proper apostrophe to the lazy Coleridge at Highgate to “start up in his promised likeness, and shake the pillared rottenness of the world,” is somewhat comic. Hazlitt’s nerves never lost their tension; to the last hour of his last sickness he was ready for a bout. Much of his personal grief arose from his refusal to respect facts as facts, or to recognize in existing evil, including the calamitous perfumed figure of Turveydrop gloriously reigning, what Vernon Lee calls “part of the mechanism for producing good.” He bit at the quietist in a hundred ways, and with choice venom. “There are persons who are never very far from the truth, because the slowness of their faculties will not suffer them to make much progress in error. These are ‘persons of great judgment.’ The scales of the mind are pretty sure to remain even when there is nothing in them.” He was a natural snarler at sunshiny people with full pockets and feudal ideas, like Sir Walter, who got along with the ogre What Is, and even asked him to dine. In fact, William Hazlitt hated a great many things with the utmost enthusiasm, and he was impolite enough to say so, in and out of season. The Established Church and all its tenets and traditions were only less monstrous in his eyes than legendry, mediævalism, and “the shoal of friars.” He knew, from actual experience, the loyalty and purity of the early Unitarians, and he praised these with all his heart and tongue. As far as one can make out, he had not the remotest conception of the breadth and texture of Christianity as a whole. His theory, for he practised no creed except the cheap one of universal dissent, was a faint-colored local Puritanism; and that, as the Merry Monarch (an excellent judge of what was not what!) reminds us, is “no religion for a gentleman.” But more than this, Hazlitt had no apprehension of the supernatural in anything; he was very unspiritual. It is curious to see how he sidles away from the finer English creatures whom he had to handle. Sidney almost repels him, and he dismisses Shelley, on one occasion, with an inadequate but apt allusion to the “hectic flutter” of his verse. Living in a level country with no outlook upon eternity, and no deep insight into the human past, nor fully understanding those who had wider vision and more instructed utterance than his own, it follows that beside such men as those just named, then as now, Hazlitt has a crude villageous mien. He had his refined sophistications; chief among them was a surpassing love of natural beauty. But he relished, on the whole, the beef and beer of life. The normal was what he wrote of with “gusto”; a word he never tired of using, and which one must use in speaking of himself. While he is an admirable arbiter of what is or is not truly intellectual, he is all at sea when he has to discuss, for instance, emotional poetry, or, what is yet more difficult to him, poetry purely poetic; its inevitable touch of the fantastic, the mystical, puts his wits completely to rout. The stern, lopsided, and magnificent article on Shelley’s _Posthumous Poems_ in the _Edinburgh Review_ for July, 1824, and his impatience with Coleridge at his best, perfectly exemplify this limitation. Despite his partiality for Rousseau and certain of the early Italian painters, most of the men whose genius he seizes upon and exalts with unerring success are the men who display, along with enormous acumen and power, nothing which betokens the morbid and exquisite thing we have learned to call modern culture. Hazlitt, fortunately for us, was not over-civilized, had no cinque-cento instincts, and would have groaned aloud over such hedonism as Mr. Pater’s. Homespun and manly as he is, who can help feeling that his was but an imperfect development? that, as Mr. Arnold said so paternally of Byron, “he did not know enough”? He lacked both mental discipline and moral governance. He has the wayward and appealing Celtic utterance; the manner made of largeness and simpleness, all shot and interwoven with the hues of romanticism. Prodigal that he is, he cannot stoop to build up his golden piecemeal, or to clinch his generalizations, thrown down loosely, side by side. Esoteric thrift is not in him, nor the spirit of co-operation, nor the sweetest of artistic anxieties, that of marching in line. He has a knight-errant pen; his glad and chivalrous services to literature resemble those of an outlaw to the commonwealth. Despite his personal value, he stands detached; he is episodic, and represents nothing.

“The earth hath bubbles as the water hath, And this is of them.”

He misses the white station of a classic; for the classics have equipoise, and inter-relationship. But it is great cause for thankfulness that William Hazlitt cannot be made other than he is. Time can not take away his height and his red-gold garments, bestow on him the “smoother head of hair” which Lamb prayed for, and shrivel him into one of several very wise and weary _précieux_. No: he stalks apart in state, the splendid Pasha of English letters.

Hazlitt boasts, and permissibly, of genuine disinterestedness: “If you wish to see me perfectly calm,” he remarks somewhere, “cheat me in a bargain, or tread on my toes.”[70] But he cannot promise the same behavior for a sophism repeated in his presence, or a truth repelled. In his sixth year he had been taken, with his brother and sister, to America, and he says that he never afterwards got out of his mouth the delicious tang of a frost-bitten New England barberry. It is tolerably sure that the blowy and sunny atmosphere of the young republic of 1783-7 got into him also. Liberalism was his birthright. He flourishes his fighting colors; he trembles with eagerness to break a lance with the arch-enemies; he is a champion, from his cradle, against class privilege, of slaves who know not what they are, nor how to wish for liberty. But he cannot do all this in the laughing Horatian way; he cannot keep cool; he cannot mind his object. If he could, he would be the white devil of debate. There are times when he speaks, as does Dr. Johnson, out of all reason, because aware of the obstinacy and the bad faith of his hearers. Morals are too much in his mind, and, after their wont, they spoil his manners. Like the Caroline Platonist, Henry More, he “has to cut his way through a crowd of thoughts as through a wood.” His temper breaks like a rocket, in little lurid smoking stars, over every ninth page; he lays about him at random; he raises a dust of side-issues. Hazlitt sometimes reminds one of Burke himself gone off at half-cock. He will not step circumspectly from light to light, from security to security. Some of his very best essays, as has been noted, have either no particular subject, or fail to follow the one they have. Nor is he any the less attractive if he be heated, if he be swearing

“By the blood so basely shed Of the pride of Norfolk’s line,”

or scornfully settling accounts of his own with the asinine public. When he is not driven about by his moods, Hazlitt is set upon his fact alone; which he thinks is the sole concern of a prose-writer. Grace and force are collateral affairs. “In seeking for truth,” he says proudly, in words fit to be the epitome of his career, “I sometimes found beauty.”

_The Edinburgh Review_, in an article written while Hazlitt was in the full of his activity, summed up his shortcomings. “There are no great leading principles of taste to give singleness to his aims, nor any central points in his mind around which his feelings may revolve and his imaginations cluster. There is no sufficient distinction between his intellectual and his imaginative faculties. He confounds the truths of imagination with those of fact, the processes of argument with those of feeling, the immunities of intellect with those of virtue.” Here is an admirable arraignment, which goes to the heart of the matter. Hazlitt himself corroborates it in a confession of gallant directness: “I say what I think; I think what I feel.” It is this fatal confusion which makes his course now rapid and clear, anon clogged with vagaries, as if his rudder had run into a mesh of sea-weed; it is this which deflects his judgments, and leads him, in the shrewd phrase of a modern critic, to praise the right things for the wrong reasons. Hazlitt’s prejudices are very instructive, even while he bewails Landor’s or Cobbett’s, and tells you, as it were, with a tear in his eye, when he has done berating the French, that, after all, they are Catholics; and as for manners, “Catholics must be allowed to carry it, all over the world!” His exquisite treatment of Northcote, a winning old sharper for whom he cared nothing, is all due to his looking like a Titian portrait. So with the great Duke: Hazlitt hated the sight of him, “as much for his pasteboard visor of a face as for anything else.” One of his justifications for adoring Napoleon was, that at a levee a young English officer named Lovelace drew from him an endearing recognition: “I perceive, sir, that you bear the name of the hero of Richardson’s romance.” If you look like a Titian portrait, if you read and remember Richardson, you may trust a certain author, who knows a distinction when he sees it, to set you up for the idol of posterity. Hazlitt thought Mr. Wordsworth’s long and immobile countenance resembled that of a horse; and it is not impossible that this conviction, twin-born with that other that Mr. Wordsworth was a mighty poet, is responsible for various gibes at the august contemporary whose memory owes so much to his pen in other moods.

He is the most ingenuous and agreeable egoist we have had since the seventeenth-century men. It must be remembered how little he was in touch outwardly with social and civic affairs; how he was content to be the always young looker-on. There was nothing for him to do but fall back, under given conditions, upon his own capacious entity. The automaton called William Hazlitt is to him a toy made to his hand, to be reached without effort; the digest of all his study and the applicable test of all his assumptions. He knew himself; he could, and did, with decorum, approve or chastise himself in open court. “His life was of humanity the sphere.” His “I” has a strong constituency in the other twenty-five initials. In this sense, and in our current cant, Hazlitt is nothing if not subjective, super-personal. His sort of sentimentalism is an anomaly in Northern literature, even in the age when nearly every literary Englishman of note was variously engaged in baring his breast. Whether he would carp or sigh, he will still hold you by the button, as he held host and guest, master and valet, to pour into their adjacent ears the mad extravagances of the _Liber Amoris_. He gets a little tired at his desk, after battling for hours with the slow and stupid in behalf of the beauty ever-living; he wants fresh air and a reverie; he must digress or die. And from abstractions bardic as Carlyle’s, he runs gladly to his own approved self. This very circumstance, which lends Hazlitt’s pages their curious blur and stain, is the same which stamps his individuality, and gives those who are drawn towards him at all an unspeakably hearty relish for his company. What shall we call it?—the habit, not maudlin in him, of speaking out, of draining his well of emotion for the benefit of the elect; nay, even of delicate lyric whimperings, beside which

“Poore Petrarch’s long-deceasèd woes”

take on a tinsel glamour. As the dancing-girl carries her jewels, every one in sight as she moves, so our “Faustus, that was wont to make the schools ring with _Sic probo_,” steps into the forum jingling and twinkling with personalia. He is quite aware of the figure he may cut: he does not stumble into an intimacy with you because he is absent-minded, or because he is liable to an attack of affectation. He is as conscious as Poussin’s giants, whom he once described as “seated on the tops of craggy mountains, playing idly on their Pan’s pipes, and knowing the beginning and the end of their own story.” Many sentences of his, from their structure, might be attributed to Coleridge, the single person from whom Hazlitt admits to have learned anything;[71] but there is no mistaking his _note émue_: that is as obvious as the syncopations in a Scotch tune, or the long eyes of Orcagna’s saints.

He wishes you to know, at every breathing-space, “how ill’s all here about my heart; but ’tis no matter.” Laying by or taking up an old print or folio, he loosens some fond confidence to that surprised novice, the common reader. Like Shelley here, as in a few other affectionate absurdities, the prince of prose, turning from his proper affairs, assures you that he, too, is human, hoping, unhappy; he also has lived in Arcadia. It is in such irrelevancies that he is fully himself, Hazlitt freed, Hazlitt autobiographic, “his chariot-wheels hot by driving fast.”[72] Who can forget the parentheses in his advices to his little son, about the scholar having neither mate nor fellow, and the god of love clapping his wings upon the river-bank to mock him as he passes by? Or the noble and moving passage in _The Pleasures of Painting_, beginning with “My father was willing to sit as long as I pleased,” and ending with the longing for the revolution of the great Platonic year, that those times might come over again! He freshens with his own childhood the garden of larkspur and mignonette at Walworth, and “the rich notes of the thrush that startle the ear of winter . . . dear in themselves, and dearer for the sake of what is departed.” You care not so much for the placid stream by Peterborough as for his own wistful pilgrimage to the nigh farmhouse gate, where the ten-year-old Grace Loftus (his much-beloved mother, who survived him) used to gaze upon the setting sun. And in a choric outburst of praise for Mrs. Siddons, the splendor seems to culminate less in “her majestic form rising up against misfortune, an antagonist power to it” (what a truly Shakespearean breadth is in that description!); less in the sight of her name on the play-bill, “drawing after it a long trail of Eastern glory, a joy and felicity unutterable,” than in the widening dream of the happy lad in the pit, in his sovereign vision “of waning time, of Persian thrones and them that sat on them”; in the human life which appeared to him, of a sudden, “far from indifferent,” and in his “overwhelming and drowning flood of tears.” He can beautify the evening star itself, this innovator, who records that after a tranced and busy day at the easel, the day of Austerlitz, he watched it set over a poor man’s cottage with other thoughts and feelings than he shall ever have again. There is nothing of _le moi haïssable_ in all this. It is deliberate naturalism; the rebellion against didactics and “tall talk,” the milestone of a return, parallel with that of Wordsworth, to the fearless contemplation of plain and near things. But in a professing logician, is it not somewhat peculiar? When has even a poet so centred the universe in his own heart, without offence?

Hazlitt threw away his brush, as a heroic measure, because he foresaw but a middling success. Many canvases he cut into shreds, in a fury of dissatisfaction with himself. Northcote, however, thought his lack of patience had spoiled a great painter. He was too full of worship of the masters to make an attentive artisan. The sacrifice, like all his sacrifices, great or small, left nothing behind but sweetness, the unclouded love of excellence, and the capacity of rejoicing at another’s attaining whatever he had missed. But the sense of disparity between supreme intellectual achievement and that which is only

## partial and relative, albeit of equal purity, followed him like a

frenzy. Comparison is yet more difficult in literature than in art, and Hazlitt could take some satisfaction in the results of his second ardor. He felt his power most, perhaps, as a critic of the theatre. English actors owe him an incalculable debt, and their best spirits are not unmindful of it. He was reasonably assured of the duration and increase of his fame. Has he not, in one of his headstrong digressions, called the thoughts in his _Table-Talk_ “founded as rock, free as air, the tone like an Italian picture?” Even there, however, the faint-heartedness natural to every true artist troubled him. He went home in despair from the spectacle of the Indian juggler, “in his white dress and tightened turban,” tossing the four brass balls. “To make them revolve round him at certain intervals, like the planets in their spheres, to make them chase one another like sparkles of fire, or shoot up like flowers or meteors, to throw them behind his back, and twine them round his neck like ribbons or like serpents; to do what appears an impossibility, and to do it with all the ease, the grace, the carelessness imaginable; to laugh at, to play with the glittering mockeries, to follow them with his eye as if he could fascinate them with its lambent fire, or as if he had only to see that they kept time to the music on the stage—there is something in all this which he who does not admire may be quite sure he never really admired anything in the whole course of his life. It is skill surmounting difficulty, and beauty triumphing over skill. . . . It makes me ashamed of myself. I ask what there is that I can do as well as this? Nothing.” A third person must give another answer. The whole passage offers a very exquisite parallel; for in just such a daring, varied, and magical way can William Hazlitt write. The astounding result, “which costs nothing,” is founded, in each case, upon the toil of a lifetime. Hazlitt’s style is an incredible thing. It is not, like Lamb’s, of one warp and woof. It soars to the rhetorical sublime, and drops to hard Saxon slang. It is for all the world, and not only for specialists. Its range and change incorporate the utmost of many men. The trenchant sweep, the simplicity and point of Newman at his best, are matched by the pages on _Cobbett_, on _Fox_, and _On the Regal Character_; and there is, to choose but one opposite instance, in the paper _On the Unconsciousness of Genius_, touching Correggio, a fragment of pure eloquence of a very ornate sort, whose onward bound, glow, and volley can give Mr. Swinburne’s _Essays and Studies_ a look as of sails waiting for the wind. The same hand which fills a brief with epic cadences and invocations overwrought, throws down, often without an adjective, sentence after sentence of ringing steel: “Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity, and afraid of being overtaken by it.” “It is not the omission of individual circumstance, but the omission of general truth, which constitutes the little, the deformed, and the short-lived in art.” The man’s large voice in these aphorisms is Hazlitt’s unmistakably. If it be not as novel to this generation as if he were but just entering the lists of authorship, it is because his fecundating mind has been long enriching at second-hand the libraries of the English world. He comes forth, like another outrider, Rossetti, so far behind his heralds and disciples, that his mannered utterance seems familiar, and an echo of theirs. For it may be said at last, thanks to the numerous reprints of the last seven years, and thanks to a few competent critics, whom Mr. Stevenson leads, that Hazlitt’s robust work is in a fair way to be known and appraised, by a public which is a little less unworthy of him than his own. His method is entirely unscientific, and therefore archaic. If we can profit no longer by him, we can get out of him cheer and delight: and these profit unto immortality. Meanwhile, what mere “maker of beautiful English” shall be pitted against him there where he sits, the despair of a generation of experts, continually tossing the four brass balls?

It has been said often by shallow reviewers, and is said sometimes still, that Hazlitt’s style aims at effect; as if an effect must not be won, without aiming, by a “born man of letters,” as Mr. Saintsbury described him, “who could not help turning into literature everything he touched.”[73] The “effect,” under given conditions, is manifest, unavoidable. Once let Hazlitt speak, as he speaks ever, in the warmth of conviction, and what an intoxicating music begins!—wild as that of the gypsies, and with the same magnet-touch on the sober senses: enough to subvert all “criticism and idle distinction,” and to bring back those Theban times when the force of a sound, rather than masons and surveyors, sent the very walls waltzing into their places.