NB. The following essay is taken from
the place of its first publication: William Hazlitt, Selected Essays, ed. George Sampson, Cambridge University Press,
1917, pp. ix-xxxviii. It is reproduced here for my own pleasure as well as with
the ulterior motive that people unfamiliar with Hazlitt might read it and
decide to rectify this omission in their reading lives.
A
General Sketch of Hazlitt’s Life and Writings
Parentage and
Birth
Early in the year 1778
there lived at Maidstone, in the county of Kent, a very excellent Dissenting
minister named William Hazlitt. He represented a union of the three kingdoms,
for he was born at Shronell, in Tipperary, educated at Glasgow (where Adam
Smith was then a professor), and appointed to minister in England. The Pastor
was about forty-one. His wife, Grace Loftus of Wisbech, nine years his junior,
was said to have been a beauty and to have resembled the younger Pitt – we must
reconcile the statements as we can. What is certain is that she was an
excellent wife and mother. There were two surviving children, John, then nearly
eleven, and Margaret, six-and-a-half. The little family lived in amity, and in
such happiness as may be enjoyed by people of strict and lofty principle
inhabiting a lax and Laodicean world.
The times were troubled.
George III, in natural intelligence a very limited monarch, and in purpose
largely shaped and directed by his very German mother, was steadily labouring
to substitute for constitutional government in England the sort of personal
rule we shall find compendiously described in Macaulay’s essay on Frederic. He
had been partially successful, and one consequence of his personal kingship was
then pursuing its course. The war against the American colonists was nearly
three years old, and what may be called its crucial point was reached almost at
the very moment we are now considering; for in February 1778 France signed a
treaty with the Americans and threw her sea power into the scale against
England. The war was popular in the worst sense. It was popular with the mob,
who like to enjoy a cheap and extensive victory, and have therefore no objection
to the bullying of a small power by a greater, when the greater is their own.
The American war had seemed to promise this spectacle; and so its tragic
failure had made the crowd both angry with disappointment and eager for
reprisals.
But there was a minority.
There were some, like Burke and Chatham, who from the beginning of trouble had
urged a policy of magnanimity upon a court and government to which magnanimity
was a thing incomprehensible. The reverses had caused some wavering in this
party. It was felt by many that there could be no drawing back after the
intervention of France; on the other hand it was urged that every additional
moment of civil war made peace more remote and costly. Among the sincere and
consistent pro-Americans was the Rev. William Hazlitt of Maidstone; and to his
zeal on the unpopular side we must doubtless attribute the disunion that
presently appeared in his congregation.
At this moment the little
family in the Rose Yard manse received an addition for on the 10th
of April, 1778, into a world of foreign war, colonial revolution and domestic
discord, was born a boy, William Hazlitt, the future essayist, critic and
revolutionist. Wordsworth was then eight, Scott six, Coleridge five and Lamb three.
A day or two before Hazlitt’s birth, the great Chatham, rewarded by his
sovereign for a life of patriotic labour with the title “trumpet of sedition,”
had fallen, a dying man, on the floor of the House of Lords. Within a few
weeks, two even greater than Chatham passed over – Voltaire in May, Rousseau in
July. The old heroes were falling, but, across the Channel, new champions were
preparing for the coming combat. Mirabeau was then twenty-nine, Robespierre
twenty and Danton eighteen. Far away in his Mediterranean island, a small boy,
Napoleon Buonaparte, aged seven, was eagerly looking forward to the military
school whither he was to go in the following year.
Ireland and
America
The disagreement among the
congregation at the Earl Street Meeting House in Maidstone became acute; and to
avoid creating a schism, the Minister resigned his charge in 1780, and sought a
new sphere of labour at Bandon, County Cork, in the island of his birth. Here he
was even more unhappy, for his feelings as well as his principles were outraged
by the ill-treatment to which American prisoners were subjected. The indignant
Pastor called public attention to these outrages, and so we shall not be
surprised to learn that he soon found it necessary to leave not merely Ireland
but the British Islands. Across the western waters lay a refuge for sturdy
independents. In January 1783 preliminaries of peace were signed, and a new
republic entered the assembly of nations. Three months later, when the child
William was a little short of five, the Hazlitt family set sail for America.
They reached New York on May 26th, and proceeded on a two days’
waggon journey to Philadelphia.
The Pastor found no settled
employment, and the family migrated often – from Philadelphia back to New York,
thence to Boston, thence to Weymouth, thence to New Dorchester. The Pastor
himself travelled further still. Over a wide area from Maine to Maryland he
preached and lectured, contributing much to that spread of Unitarianism in
America for which his more famous acquaintance Dr Priestley afterwards got most
of the credit. There was near Weymouth a pleasant old nonagenarian named Gay,
who had held that one ministerial charge for nearly seventy years. Him it was
thought that Hazlitt might succeed; but the old gentleman clung to life and
pulpit so immovably that Hazlitt resolved to return to England. He set sail in
the October of 1786, and arrived in December. Almost immediately the
sempiternal Gay died. The Hazlitt family remained in America for nearly another
year – till July 1787, in fact, when they left Boston for England, reaching it
the next month. William was then a little over nine.
We must be grateful to the
vital obstinacy of the Rev. Ebenezer Gay. Had he been cut off prematurely in
the early nineties the Hazlitts would probably have settled for life in New
England, and William would have been the first of American essayists. But he
would not have been the Hazlitt that we know. Hazlitt without the strong
stimulus of European art, literature and politics would have been merely the
pallid simulacrum of our Hazlitt. In the country of Jonathan Edwards he would
have become probably a theologian, and almost certainly a metaphysician,
unread, and perhaps unreadable, in either capacity. As it was, America did a
little for him. It counted for something that the champion of popular
government had spent his early impressionable years in the first of modern Republics,
one of a family self-exiled from the iniquities of European kingdoms. Naturally
there is little to record of the boy’s life during this transatlantic period,
though it happens that his earliest surviving composition is a letter, in
which, at the age of nine, he reaches the melancholy conclusion that the
discovery of America was a mistake, and that the country should have been left
to the aboriginal inhabitants[1].
London and
Wem
The first London lodging of
the family was in Walworth, – not the sordid and swarming Walworth of to-day, but
the semi-rural Walworth of Mr Wemmick. There, the flowers, cates and cream of
the Montpelier Tea Gardens, once a Paradise of pleasure, and now utterly
submerged beneath a dingy tide of brick, so stamped themselves on the boy’s
mind, that all his later joy in these “suburb delights” took their colour from
the gorgeous summer hues of that first garden of his innocence[2].
Later in the year 1787 the Pastor got a settled charge at Wem in Shropshire,
and here for several years the growing boy remained, going to school, studying
with his father, and learning French with the girls of a neighbouring family.
These children he visited when they returned to Liverpool, and there he first
encountered one abiding love and pleasure of his life – the theatre. Kemble and
Dignum and Suett, players celebrated in many an essay later, swam like new
planets into his astonished vision. He was then twelve or thirteen, and most of
those few years had been passed far from the pleasures of cities. The
Nonconformists of a century ago did not all anathematize the theatre. We hear
of theatrical visits at Wem, and the reverend Pastor spoke with frequent
admiration of one famous player – the Mrs Pritchard whom we know from Boswell.
Theology and
Art
It seems to have been
assumed that William was to follow his father into the ministry, and so in 1793
he was entered as a student at the Hackney Theological College. The curriculum
there, as far as his letters show, was in the best sense liberal. The classics
agreeably mitigated the austerities of theology, and Hazlitt seems to have been
a diligent student, though he managed astutely to substitute some cherished
speculations on the political nature of man for the graver feats of exegesis
expected from him. But his real education was received outside the Hackney
walls. His brother John, now twenty-six, was established in London as a painter
and miniaturist. The young theologian of Hackney of course paid many visits to
the studio in Rathbone Place, and there encountered not only the frank-speaking
and free-thinking men who gather in the rooms of young painters, but visions of
the world of art, with all its happy industry and its association with beauty.
The hands that should have been employed in penning theses became busy with the
brushes. It was canvas, not sermon-paper that the boy longed to be filling, and
so a crowning disappointment was preparing for the good old man in Shropshire.
William heard the call, not of Samuel, but of Giotto. A wistful passage written
many years later throws some light on the perturbations of this period. It is
long, but it is so significant that it must be quoted at length:
The greatest misfortune
that can happen among relations is a different way of bringing up, so as to set
one another’s opinions and characters in an entirely new point of view. This
often lets in an unwelcome day-light on the subject, and breeds schisms,
coldness and incurable heart-burnings in families. I have sometimes thought
whether the progress of society and march of knowledge does not do harm in this
respect, by loosening the ties of domestic attachment, and preventing those who
are most interested in, and anxious to think well of one another, from feeling
a cordial sympathy and approbation of each other’s sentiments, manners, views,
&c., than it does good by any real advantage to the community at large. The
son, for instance, is brought up to the church, and nothing can exceed the pride
and pleasure the father takes in him, while all goes on well in this favourite
direction. His notions change, and he imbibes a taste for the Fine Arts. From
this moment there is an end of anything like the same unreserved communication
between them. The young man may talk with enthusiasm of his “Rembrandts,
Correggios, and stuff”: it is all Hebrew
to the elder; and whatever satisfaction he may feel in hearing of his son’s
progress, or good wishes for his success, he is never reconciled to the new
pursuit, he still hankers after the first object that he had set his mind upon.
Again, the grandfather is a Calvinist, who never gets the better of his
disappointment at his son’s going over to the Unitarian side of the question.
The matter rests here, till the grandson, some years after, in the fashion of
the day and “infinite agitation of men’s wit,” comes to doubt certain points in
the creed in which he has been brought up, and the affair is all abroad again.
Here are three generations made uncomfortable and in a manner set at variance,
by a veering point of theology, and the officious meddling biblical critics! (Table Talk, “On the Knowledge of
Character.”)
Hazlitt’s
Seeding Time
A year after his entry into
the Hackney College, Hazlitt turned his back for ever upon ministry and
theology, retired to Wem, where he passed the next few years, ostensibly doing
nothing, but actually busy with reading, painting, walking, brooding and
struggling to express himself in words. A volume entitled An Essay on the Principles of Human Action, etc. (published in
1805) occupied his busy mind and tasked his unready pen; but he had the
infinite leisure of youth, and his slow progress troubled him little. It is of
this and the succeeding period that he writes in the following passage:
For many years of my life I
did nothing but think. I had nothing else to do but solve some knotty point, or
dip in some abstruse author, or look at the sky, or wander by the pebbled
sea-side –
To see the
children sporting on the shore.
And hear the
mighty waters rolling evermore.
I cared for nothing, I wanted
nothing. I took my time to consider whatever occurred to me, and was in no
hurry to give a sophistical answer to a question – there was no printer’s devil
waiting for me. I used to write a page or two perhaps in half a year; and
remember laughing heartily at the celebrated experimentalist Nicholson, who
told me that in twenty years he had written as much as would make three hundred
octavo volumes. If I was not a great author, I could read with ever fresh
delight, “never ending, still beginning,” and had no occasion to write a
criticism when I had done. If I could not paint like Claude, I could admire “the
witchery of the soft blue sky” as I walked out, and was satisfied with the
pleasure it gave me. If I was dull, it gave me little concern: if I was lively,
I indulged my spirits. I wished well to the world, and believed as favourably
of it as I could. I was like a stranger in a foreign land, at which I looked
with wonder, curiosity and delight, without expecting to be an object of
attention in return. I had no relation to the state, no duty to perform, no ties
to bind me to others: I had neither friend nor mistress, wife or child. I lived
in a world of contemplation, and not of action. (Table Talk, “On Living to Oneself.”)
There were epochs in his young life
marked by the days of delight when he first discovered certain treasures of
great literature – the sentiment of Rousseau, the grandeur of Burke, the
majesty of Milton. A sort of furious intensity characterised all he did from
the days of childhood, when he fell ill through the excited exhaustion of his
first studies in Latin, to the later time of manhood, when he drenched his body
with the energy of his racquet-playing and inflamed his mind with the
fierceness of his political fervour. Few men have hated so vigorously; few have
enjoyed so gloriously; and for his much love much will be forgiven him. As the
man, so the youth; and we discern him dimly in these days of adolescence, hot
with pent-up and unknown powers, eager, yet baffled and inarticulate, lonely,
yet happy with books and brushes, out of sympathy with his excellent father,
and thinking himself steadily into a belief that he had a gift for philosophy.
There are many melancholy and companionless youths who cherish the same
delusion. Cheerfulness comes breaking in with the responsibilities of manhood.
Meanwhile, in the great world beyond Wem, a new generation was springing up. In
1798, Hazlitt’s wonder-year, when he himself was twenty, Byron was ten, Shelley
six and Keats three.
His First
Acquaintance with Poets
And now there came to
Hazlitt the revelation that opened his heart and mind and taught him to know
himself. In 1798 he met Coleridge. The ever delightful essay in which he
describes this meeting stands first in the present volume and makes any further
account worse than unnecessary. The many who date an epoch in their own lives
from a first reading of Biographia
and Lyrical Ballads will always feel
a peculiar affection for this essay, which wonderfully recaptures the thrill of
youth, and mingles with its rapture so much mature and humorous wisdom. From the
extent of our own vast debt to the mere printed pages of poetry and criticism
we can measure the ecstasy with which young Hazlitt made his first acquaintance
with poets and drank in the utterances of their own living lips. With the boy
in Comus he could say:
How charming
is divine philosophy!
Not harsh,
and crabbèd as dull fools suppose,
But musical
as is Apollo’s lute.
And a
perpetual feast of nectar’d sweets
Where no
crude surfeit reigns.
It is Coleridge who is the hero of the
story, as he always will be to ardent youth, – Coleridge “in the dayspring of
his fancies with hope like a fiery pillar before him.” At that date it was
gloriously apparent that the head of Coleridge was in the heavens; it was less
obvious that his feet were in the mire of a road down to ignoble sloth and
moral suicide. Coleridge was still Mirandola, not yet Micawber. Wordsworth is
less attractive to the youthful mind. He seems gaunt, frigid and set, as if he
had never been young. We have to turn often to those delightful early books of The Prelude to remind ourselves of
Wordsworth’s fiery, volcanic, youth.
Pictures and
Paris
To Hazlitt the wisdom of
these poets had the weight of those few years’ seniority that mean so much to
the boy of twenty. He kindled his zeal anew at the altar fire of their genius.
He felt that he must do something instantly. The talk of Coleridge turned his
mind again towards philosophy, and made that unfinished and apparently interminable
Essay on the Principles of Human Action
a reproach to him. This he began anew, though as a sort of parergon, for he now
solemnly chose painting, and especially portraiture, as his life work. He went
to his brother in London where, in the same palpitating year, a new revelation
awaited him, – the glory of great art made manifest in the Titians, Rembrandts,
Rubens and Vandycks of the Orleans collection then on exhibition in Pall Mall
and the Lyceum. More than ever inflamed, he tramped the country, to paint if he
could, and certainly to see the pictures in great collections. Startled
flunkeys tried in vain to check the excited young man who would insist on
penetrating to the picture galleries of noble connoisseurs. Hazlitt wanted to
see pictures, and, in his own wild way, almost fought to see them. So
impressive was he in this artistic phase, that one trusting merchant in
Liverpool was moved to offer him a hundred guineas for copies of certain
pictures in the Louvre. It is scarcely necessary to say that he accepted. To
Hazlitt Paris was simply Paradise writ small. Everything was propitious. The
year was 1802 and Paris was at its greatest. The first phase of the war had
been concluded by the Peace of Amiens. France was enjoying the only real
emotions of tranquillity she had known since the first blows had fallen on the
gates of the Bastille. There was an air of liberty new-gained yet
well-established. Napoleon had just been declared First Consul for life and the
Louvre was overflowing with the spoils of his Italian triumph. The city was
crowded with visitors. English ladies and gentlemen flocked eagerly to see the
land and people they had been tenacious in fighting, and listened, in Court and
Salon, to stories of the Revolution related by Marshals of France who had been
poor citizens or private soldiers at the time of the great upheaval.
In Paris, then, from
October 1802 to January 1803, Hazlitt lived and worked, poor, cold and hungry,
but intensely happy. He did not see Napoleon, nor did he penetrate to the
distinguished circles of rank and fashion; but he breathed the charged
electrical atmosphere, and rejoiced. He returned to England duly certified as
the copyist of some ten or dozen pictures specified in a document signed by M.
le Directeur Général du Musée Central des Arts, and epically dated “le 12
Pluviose, an 11.” It was at this time that he made the acquaintance of one who
was to prove his truest friend, one who spoke well of him when many spoke ill,
who helped him in material need, and closed his eyes when peace came at last to
his tempestuous spirit. There were many to whom Charles Lamb in various ways
did good; there were few to whom his genial and wholesome influence was more
beneficial than to Hazlitt; and Hazlitt knew it. Sometime friends of our author
are often enough pilloried, not to say crucified, in his vengeful paragraphs;
but it is impossible to read his references to Lamb without discerning
unaltered admiration and something like affection. Hazlitt became one of the
intimates who met at Lamb’s weekly gatherings. He quarrelled, in time, with all
of them, even with Lamb himself, though in this instance the enmity was neither
long nor bitter. Like most shy and oversensitive natures, Hazlitt was easily
irritated, and much that was thought ill-temper was often no more than anger
with himself for his own lack of social ease and smoothness. Moreover, there
would sometimes arise in discussion, as we shall see, questions of principle
about which he could make no compromise. Extremes meet. During the great
eruption, both Burke and Hazlitt became socially explosive and impossible, the
one with detestation for the Revolution, the other with admiration for it.
Farewell to
Painting
The business of portrait
painting cannot be said to have prospered. What Hazlitt could do in this line
familiar portrait of Lamb attired as a Venetian senator, now in the National Portrait
Gallery and frequently reproduced as a frontispiece. Hazlitt was probably as
anxious to make it like a Titian as like Lamb. The mouth and chin resemble the
strong profile of Hancock’s drawing, but the whole picture is rather
inexpressive and might be anyone but Elia. With Wordsworth and Coleridge he was
even less successful. Of the Coleridge Southey writes, “you look as if you were
on your trial, and had certainly stolen the horse; but then you did it
cleverly.” The Wordsworth was described as “at the gallows, deeply affected by
his deserved fate, yet determined to die like a man.” The portrait of his
father, into the painting of which went so many happy hours – hours of
reconciliation, no doubt – gained the distinction of a place in the Royal
Academy Exhibition of 1806. It is pleasantly mentioned in the first essay on The Pleasure of Painting, and in a later
piece, On Sitting for One's Picture (Plain Speaker). The Museum at Maidstone has four of his portraits
and copies. The horrible medium he used for his colour has so blackened with
age that the pictures are almost buried and might as well not exist. As time
went on, Hazlitt began reluctantly to realise that painting was not his real
work. Titian or Rembrandt he could not be, and less he disdained to be. But his
labour had not been wasted. Painting cultivated in him the seeing eye, and made
him one of the soundest among our early writers on art. Sir Joshua taught in
his Discourses the principles that he
happily forgot in his studio. Hazlitt did not write like a painter; he painted
like a critic. He enjoyed certain pictures immensely, and his enjoyment was the
begetter both of his copies and his criticisms. There are no sublimities of
rapture or flights of virtuosity in his writings on art. To him a portrait by
Titian was neither a moral tract nor a study in values; it was something to be
relished, like a novel by Scott or a comedy by Vanbrugh or a good meal at an inn
after a long day’s march. He liked pictures in a hearty cheerful fashion and
his readers catch the wholesome infection. As for himself, his painting gave
him, if not a livelihood, at least a lively joy which he never forgot. It was
twenty years after his early painting days that he wrote this passage:
Yet I dream sometime; I
dream of the Louvre – Intus et in cute.
I dreamt I was there a few weeks ago, and that the old scene returned – that I
looked for my favourite pictures, and found them gone or erased. The dream of
my youth came upon me ; a glory and a vision unutterable, that comes no more
but in darkness and in sleep : my heart rose up, and I fell on my knees, and
lifted up my voice and wept, and I awoke. (Plain
Speaker, “On Dreams.”)
Beginnings of
Authorship
The prevailing interest in
the Lamb circle was literature. Moving among authors, Hazlitt naturally became eager
to turn certain written words of his own into print. He managed to persuade
some hopeful bookseller to publish that perennial Essay on the Principles of Human Action in 1805, and he issued next
year, apparently at his own risk, a pamphlet, now very rare, entitled Free Thoughts on Public Affairs. It is
difficult to prove that anyone bought a copy of either; but at least he had
appeared as a real printed author, and went on cheerfully to perform two pieces
of hack work, the first an abridgement into one volume of the original seven
occupied by The Light of Nature Pursued,
a leisurely philosophical miscellany written by Abraham Tucker; the second a compilation
called The Eloquence of the British
Senate, exhibiting the oratory of famous statesmen in specimens and their
lives in brief biographical sketches. With characteristic economy Hazlitt used
certain of these sketches again in later works. One, indeed, the acidulated Character of Pitt, crops up with
unfailing regularity in so many volumes as almost to baffle enumeration. These
two works appeared in 1807, the year that saw also the publication of Hazlitt’s
Reply to Malthus, the clergyman who
had issued in 1798 a gloomy prognostication of human lot, based on the fact,
clear to him, that population was increasing in geometrical progression, while
subsistence was increasing only at the comparatively
beggarly arithmetical rate. The
emphatic style of the preface to Tucker and the bold, penetrating criticism of
the Malthusian theories indicate the coming of the real Hazlitt, whose pen was thereafter
busy for many years in many papers. Nothing came amiss to him, from parliamentary
reporting to operatic criticism. He became, in fact, a professional man of
letters, and was to experience very fully the intermittent joys and the
unfailing chagrins of that precarious calling.
Hazlitt’s
Marriages
Soon after his debut as an author,
Hazlitt married. In his early London days he had made the acquaintance of John
Stoddart, an ardent Revolutionist who, like certain others, lived to abjure his
first principles and to become a stiff champion of Legitimate Monarchy. A knighthood
and a colonial judgeship were his reward. Stoddart’s sister Sarah had a small
property at Winterslow on the road from Andover to Salisbury across the Plain.
At the age of thirty-three she combined a strong inclination for matrimony in
the abstract with an almost complete indifference to any bridegroom in particular.
From the letters of Mary Lamb we hear of several suitors, but in the end
Hazlitt was the lucky (or unlucky) man. Sarah was older than Hazlitt who, with
Shakespeare’s example and precepts before him, should have known better. The
wooing was short, and the ceremony was performed on Mayday in 1808 at St Andrew’s,
Holborn. The rest of the matrimonial story had better be told at once, and then
dismissed. Hazlitt married in haste and repented at leisure. The two were quite
unsuited to each other. The lady found marriage in the concrete with an untidy
and all-pervading man much less agreeable than marriage in the contemplative
with an abstract idea of husband. She had no domestic gifts, and no sense of
her deficiency. Hazlitt’s own eager preoccupation with writing and painting as
things-in-themselves added nothing to the household harmony and very little to
the household economy. There seems to have been no violent disagreement, – nothing
but a steady growth of antipathy. By 1819 they were living apart. There was no
Divorce Court in England till 1857; but in Scotland, dissentient parties could
be separated almost as expeditiously as eloping couples were united. To
Scotland, therefore, came the inharmonious but still friendly pair, and there
in 1823 they were divorced. Hazlitt ventured matrimony a second time. He was
too hasty to be warned in the first case by Shakespeare, and a dozen years too early
to be warned in the second by Mr Weller. He married a widow, Mrs Bridgwater, in
1824, and spent a leisurely honeymoon in travelling through France, Switzerland
and Italy, combining business with pleasure by recording his impressions in
some very readable sketches contributed to The
Morning Chronicle in 1824, and collected as a volume in 1826. This second
marriage was of very doubtful validity in England. Whether this weighed on the
conscience of the second Mrs Hazlitt, or whether the position of being married
to a man whose first wife was still living and quite friendly with him was too
embarrassing for her, we do not know; but in any case the union was brief. The
lady’s first husband had held the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, and she appears,
by the fleeting testimony of Haydon and Leigh Hunt, to have been a woman of
much personal dignity, with whom Hazlitt would have to mend his rather Bohemian
(not to say Boeotian) habits. The usual story of their final separation in
Switzerland at the end of the honeymoon must be received with caution. We do
not really know how, when, or where they parted. The second Mrs Hazlitt
disappears from the story as mysteriously as she enters it.
One other kindred incident
may have its necessary mention in this place. In 1820 Hazlitt went to live
(apart from his first wife) in Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane, where a
certain Mr and Mrs Walker had lodgings to let. Here he became infatuated with
their daughter Sarah, and devoted a disagreeable book, half dialogue, half
correspondence, to the incident.
Winterslow
Now revert. This digression
into the backwaters of matrimony left the main stream of Hazlitt’s story in the
first proud days of authorship. Almost the sole benefit he derived from his
union with Sarah Stoddart was the discovery of Winterslow. Thither he went
after his marriage; and when in later years he wanted a lodge in the
wilderness, it was to Winterslow that he turned – not then, of course, to the “small
property” of Sarah Stoddart, but to the Pheasant Inn or Winterslow Hut as it is
more generally known to us. Here much of his best work was written and many of
his happiest hours were spent. A passage from one essay may be quoted as an
illustration of what may be called his Winterslow frame of mind:
If the reader is not
already apprised of it, he will please to take notice that I write this at
Winterslow. My style there is apt to be redundant and excursive. At other times
it may be cramped, dry, abrupt; but here it flows like a river and overspreads
its banks. I have not to seek for thoughts or hunt for images: they come of
themselves, I inhale them with the breeze, and the silent groves are vocal with
a thousand recollections —
And visions,
as poetic eyes avow.
Hang on each
leaf and cling to every bough.
Here I came fifteen years
ago, a willing exile; and as I trod the lengthened greensward by the low
wood-side, repeated the old line,
My mind to me
a kingdom is!
I found it so then, before,
and since; and shall I faint, now that I have poured out the spirit of that
mind to the world, and treated many subjects with truth, with freedom, and
power, because I have been followed with one cry of abuse ever since for not being a government tool?....
I look out of
my window and see that a shower has just fallen: the fields look green after
it, and a rosy cloud hangs over the brow of the hill; a lily expands its petals
in the moisture, dressed in its lovely green and white; a shepherd boy has just
brought some pieces of turf with daisies and grass for his mistress to make a
bed for her sky-lark, not doomed to dip his wings in the dappled dawn – my
cloudy thoughts draw off, the storm of angry politics has blown over – Mr
Blackwood, I am yours – Mr Croker, my service to you – Mr T. Moore, I am alive
and well – Really, it is wonderful how little the worse I am for fifteen years’
wear and tear, how I come upon my legs again on the ground of truth and nature,
and “look abroad into universality,” forgetting that there is any such person
as myself in the world. (Plain Speaker,
“Whether Genius is conscious of its Powers.”)
Hazlitt and
the French Revolution
The allusions in this
passage lead us naturally to some consideration of Hazlitt’s political
principles and the bitter antagonism in which they involved him. Hazlitt was in
a special sense the child of Revolution. He was cradled in strife, and passed
his earliest years in the new transatlantic Republic. He was eleven when the Bastille
fell, and began his career at Hackney College in the year of the Terror.
Coleridge and Wordsworth, the poetical apostles of Revolution, first taught him
to know himself, and so confirmed him in his liberal faith that he went to the
First Consul’s capital as ardent for France and freedom as any Frenchman of
them all. Even his career of authorship began with a baptism of fire, for upon
his first visible publications shone “the sun of Austerlitz.” The tragedy of
Hazlitt is that in a changing world, a world of honest conversion and of
profitable recantation, he kept his first principles fiercely unaltered. And
really, seen from the angle of the present time, those principles are nothing
terrible. Let us endeavour to view the whole matter as he saw it.
The picturesque reading of
young people seems to create in them an impression that the French Revolution
and the Reign of Terror are the same thing. To such readers the French
Revolution is little more than the continuous decapitation of elegant
aristocrats amid howls of execration from a stage mob of tricoteuses and sansculottes.
In the unhappy history of mankind there have been many reigns of terror with no
compensatory revolutions; if the ten months of Terror could be blotted out from
French history, the great achievements of the Revolution would remain
unaltered. The immediate beginning of that great upheaval was an attempt to
erect a workable constitution in the place of a centralised autocracy that had
hopelessly broken down. That the constitutionalists were able to extort
submission from what had seemed the most impregnable monarchy of Europe was
hailed by all free spirits as a triumph of liberty. The subsequent troubles had
their rise in the secret treachery of the French Court, and especially its collusion
with the armies of Prussia and Austria, which presumed to dictate to France
whether or not she should reform her government. In July 1791 Austria summoned
the princes of Europe to unite against the Revolution. Hostile German troops,
aided both secretly and openly by the Court and nobles, threatened the
frontiers. The September massacres of 1792 were the answer of France to a
German invasion; and henceforward slaughter in the name of War or in the name
of Justice was to be the history of some terrible years. Hazlitt puts the
matter briefly:
It has been usual (as men
remember their prejudices better than the truth) to hold up the Coalition of
the Allied Powers as having for its end and justification the repressing the
horrors of the French Revolution; whereas, on the contrary, those horrors arose
out of the Coalition, which had for its object to root out not the evil, but
the good of the Revolution in France. (Life
of Napoleon, Chapter v.)
To Hazlitt the struggle
from first to last and in every phase was simply the struggle of Freedom
against Tyranny:
Let all the wrongs public
and private produced in France by arbitrary power and exclusive privileges for
a thousand years be collected in a volume, and let this volume be read by all
who have hearts to feel or capacity to understand, and the strong, stifling
sense of oppression and kindling burst of indignation that would follow would
be that impulse of public action that led to the French Revolution. Let all the
victims that have perished under the mild, paternal sway of the ancient régime, in dungeons, and in agony,
without a trial, without an accusation, without witnesses, be assembled
together, and their chains struck off, and the shout of jubilee and exultation
they would make, or that nature would make at the sight, will be the shout that
was heard when the Bastille fell! The dead pause that ensued among the gods of
the earth, the rankling malice, the panic-fear, when they saw law and justice
raised to an equality with their sovereign will, and mankind no longer doomed
to be their sport, was that of fiends robbed of their prey: their struggles,
their arts, their unyielding perseverance, and their final triumph was that of
fiends when it is restored to them. (Life
of Napoleon, Chap. iii.)
England and
the Revolution
That the continental
despots, ruling by Right Divine over millions of subjects bound to the soil in
a state indistinguishable from slavery, should have viewed with alarm the
abatement of royal and noble prerogative in France was entirely explicable; but
there was one country that might have been expected to sympathise with the
Revolution – the country in which serfdom had long ago disappeared, in which
abuse of royal privilege had led to a civil war and the execution of a king,
and in which a drastic revolution had driven one ruler from the throne,
diverted the succession to a foreign line, and bound all kings to come within
the strictest confines of constitutional procedure. That sympathy was not withheld.
The brightest spirits in England rejoiced at the downfall of autocracy in
France. Some, indeed, were more revolutionary than the Revolutionists
themselves. Coleridge and Southey, exalted to the heights of youthful
enthusiasm, proposed to emigrate and found a Pantisocracy or Hyper-Utopia on
the banks of the Susquehanna.
Bliss was it in that dawn
to be alive.
But to be young was very
Heaven!
In all this “pleasant exercise of hope
and joy,” Hazlitt came to share. Younger than the poets he admired, he believed
in them as fervently as in the Revolution. But “universal England” was not with
them. One mighty voice had been lifted from the first against the new regime.
Burke, who had stood for liberty in America and justice in India, now appeared
as the champion of tyranny in France. Prematurely aged by a life of struggle
and ill-success, he had declined to the state of political pedantry that
resists any change if it is made in some other than a prescribed way, and
presently comes to resist all change merely because it is change. Burke in his
latest phase seems to be one of those described by Hazlitt as
a set of men existing at
all times, who never can arrive at a conception beyond the still-life of politics, and in the most critical circumstances and
in the convulsion and agony of states, see only the violation of forms and
etiquette. (Life of Napoleon, Chap.
v.)
Burke found many willing
hearers. It is a sufficient comment upon the tendency of his Reflections that they were admired equally
in the Court of England and the Court of Russia. England had changed. What
France was rejecting, England was accepting. The French Revolution came in the
midst of George Ill’s attempt to re-erect a royal autocracy upon the ruins of
parliamentary government. Thirty years of his personal rule had reduced political
life in England to a degraded level of corruption and incompetence. An England
governed by servile and venal “King’s Friends” could have no sympathy with a
Revolution. A young Englishman, travelling in 1792 with the German forces
gathering to crush France, had formulated a plan for the government of that
country. Its first and chief point was that “the authority of the king should
be perfectly re-established, and that any liberty the people may afterwards
possess should be considered as his indulgence[3].”
It is difficult to understand the frame of mind that could ever have held in
modern times this view of liberty and government; it is still more incredible
that such a proposal should date from the summer of 1792 when the immediate
result of the Duke of Brunswick’s atrocious manifesto against the French had
been the imprisonment of Louis XVI in the Temple. It is worth noting that the
young English gentleman who took this enlightened view of national liberty and
royal indulgence was the person who, as Lord Liverpool, held office here as
Prime Minister from 1812 to 1827.
The
Continental War
Elated by unexpected
success against the German invaders, France became aggressive, and held that
those who were not with her were against her. War with England began in 1793
and lasted with few intermissions for twenty-two years. The continental powers
wavered; sometimes they were leagued against France, sometimes leagued with
her; but England remained steadfastly Anti-Gallican from 1793 to 1815. Her
pretexts for that long animosity changed from time to time, but her undeclared
and unwavering purpose never changed; and that purpose was the suppression of
anything like popular government, and the re-establishment of unlimited
monarchy. She warred not so much to suppress revolutionary principles in France
as to suppress revolutionary principles in England. The events in France had
filled the governing classes of England with panic. The excesses of the
Revolution there were made the excuse for excesses of repression here. Men of
honourable record were transported for advocating the measures of Parliamentary
reform that had shortly before been favoured by Pitt himself; and writers of
liberal tendencies were shadowed by spies and dragged before the courts upon ridiculous
charges of treason. Hazlitt in his impressionable youth had met some of the
sufferers. Hatred of Pitt was inhaled with his every breath. Coleridge, whom he
revered, had written thus of the detested minister:
Yon dark
Scowler view,
Who with
proud words of dear-loved Freedom came –
More blasting
than the mildew from the South!
And kissed
his country with Iscariot mouth
Ah! foul
apostate from his Father’s fame!
Wordsworth’s later confession records
the horror he felt when England joined in the hunt against France:
What, then,
were my emotions, when in arms
Britain put
forth her freeborn strength in league,
Oh, pity and
shame! with those confederate Powers!
Not in my
single self alone I found,
But in the
minds of all ingenuous youth,
Change and
subversion from that hour. No shock
Given to my
moral nature had I known
Down to that
very moment; neither lapse
Nor turn of
sentiment that might be named
A revolution,
save at this one time;
All else was
progress on the self-same path
On which,
with a diversity of pace,
I had been
travelling: this a stride at once
Into another
region. As a light
And pliant
harebell, swinging in the breeze
On some grey
rock – its birthplace – so had I
Wantoned,
fast rooted on the ancient tower
Of my beloved
country, wishing not
A happier
fortune than to wither there:
Now was I
from that pleasant station torn
And tossed
about in whirlwind. I rejoiced,
Yes,
afterwards – truth most painful to record!
Exulted, in
the triumph of my soul,
When
Englishmen by thousands were o’erthrown,
Left without
glory on the field, or driven.
Brave hearts!
to shameful flight.
(Prelude, Bk x.)
Sentiments even remotely resembling
these the Government were determined to suppress. The task was easy, for they
were the sentiments of a rapidly dwindling minority. It is always possible to
scare the “mutable many” by assuring them that they will lose the privileges
they do not possess. That well-tried plan succeeded thoroughly in 1793. The
people of England, who had no Parliamentary representation, and, under Pitt’s
recent statutes, next to no liberties, were assured that the French would rob
them of their rights and liberties; and so they fought tremendously.
Napoleon
When the needs of France
produced the Man of Destiny the purpose of England was strengthened. That
France should make a Revolution was bad enough; that she should make an Emperor
was worse. England became the champion of Legitimacy; and just as France, a
century earlier, had warred half-heartedly to force the Stewarts back upon England,
so England fought with superb and memorable tenacity to force the Bourbons back
upon France. That, really, is the story of the war.
Napoleon was our great
enemy for many years, yet in such a way that we have now almost forgotten the
enmity and remember only the greatness. Seen in contrast to the aims and ideals
of the monarchs who combined to crush him, he was a beneficent influence in
Europe. There was more real personal and political liberty, more good and sane
administration in the France of Napoleon, than in all the rest of Europe put
together. An appalling count can be drawn against him; but like Elizabeth or
Henry VIII or any other great sinner of history, Napoleon is entitled to be
judged by the balance of his career; and no one now disputes that this balance
is on the side of good. In the great and ever-changing world of political
doctrine, it is presumptuous for anyone to say that this is right or that is
wrong; but if we believe that the general course of man for the last hundred
years has been wholesomely progressive, we have to admit that, in opposing France,
we were opposing the ideals we now call right. Hazlitt had no doubt of it.
The rest of the story is
significant. After the triumph of England and the extinction of Napoleon, night
settled down upon Europe. It became evident that the liberty which had triumphed
at Waterloo was not the liberty of peoples but the liberty of absolute
monarchs. For a short time Europe endured the burden of this new-found freedom,
and then began to stir uneasily. The three days’ revolution of 1830 was the
answer of France to the liberty imposed upon it by the infantry of Wellington
and the hussars of Blücher. In England the struggles for the Reform Bill acted
as a safety-valve of popular discontent; but the states of Central Europe, more
used to unenlightened despotism, endured to 1848 before they exploded in
revolt. Italy had to wait for half a century before the unity given it by
Napoleon was again restored.
Napoleon! ‘twas
a high name lifted high;
It met at
last God’s thunder sent to clear
Our
compassing and covering atmosphere,
And open a
clear sight, beyond the sky,
Of supreme
empire: this of earth’s was done –
And kings
crept out again to feel the sun.
The kings crept
out – the peoples sate at home, –
And finding
the long invocated peace
A pall
embroidered with worn images
Of rights
divine, too scant to cover doom
Such as they
suffered, – cursed the corn that grew
Rankly, to
bitter bread, on Waterloo.
A deep gloom
centred in the deep repose –
The nations
stood up mute to count their dead –
And he who
owned the Name which vibrated
Through
silence, – trusting to his noblest foes.
When earth
was all too gray for chivalry –
Died of their
mercies, ‘mid the desert sea.
Hazlitt and
Napoleon
The words are Mrs Browning’s;
the sentiments are Hazlitt’s. He grudged France her hero. He thought that
inferior nation did not deserve so great a man. What he really wanted was an
English Napoleon who should cleanse and purify Britain as the Emperor had cleansed
and purified France. To him Napoleon was not a tyrant, but a liberator, who had
to conquer Europe because Europe’s kings had conspired to conquer France. The
Napoleon whom Hazlitt admired was the Napoleon to whom Beethoven had first
dedicated his Eroica Symphony. He was the symbol of the French Revolution, the
embodiment of a principle that Hazlitt, as an Englishman and the inheritor of
the English Revolution, held as dear as life, the principle that there is no Divine
Right of reigning inherent in any special family, and that peoples, therefore,
may choose their own form of government. Thus he writes:
I have nowhere in anything
I may have written declared myself to be a Republican; nor should I think it
worth while to be a martyr and a confessor to any form or mode of government.
But what I have staked health and wealth, name and fame upon, and am ready to
do so again and to the last gasp, is this, that there is a power in the people
to change its government and its governors. That is, I am a Revolutionist: for
otherwise, I must allow that mankind are but a herd of slaves, the property of
thrones, that no tyranny or insult can lawfully goad them to a resistance to a
particular family. (Life of Napoleon,
Chap. xxxiv.)
A fuller confession of his faith
appears in another place in the same work:
Of my object in writing the
Life here offered to the public, and of the general tone that pervades it, it
may be proper that I should render some account (before proceeding farther) in
order to prevent mistakes and false applications. It is true, I admired the man;
but what chiefly attached me to him, was his being, as he had been long ago
designated, “the child and champion of the Revolution.” Of this character he
could not divest himself, even though he wished it. He was nothing, he could be
nothing, but what he owed to himself and to his triumphs over those who claimed
mankind as their inheritance by a divine right; and as long as he was a thorn in the side of kings and kept
them at bay, his cause rose out of the ruins and defeat of their pride and
hopes of revenge. He stood (and he alone stood) between them and their natural
prey. He kept off that last indignity and wrong offered to a whole people (and
through them to the rest of the world) of being handed over, like a herd of
cattle, to a particular family, and chained to the foot of a legitimate throne.
This was the chief point at issue – this was the great question, compared with
which all others were tame and insignificant – Whether mankind were, from the
beginning to the end of time, born slaves or not? As long as he remained, his
acts, his very existence, gave a proud and full answer to this question. As
long as he interposed a barrier, a gauntlet, and an arm of steel between us and
them who alone could set up the plea of old, indefeasible right over us, no
increase of power could be too great that tended to shatter this claim to
pieces: even his abuse of power and aping the style and title of the imaginary
gods of the earth only laughed their pretensions the more to scorn. He did many
things wrong and foolish; but they were individual acts, and recoiled upon the
head of the doer. They stood upon the ground of their own merits, and could not
urge in their vindication “the right divine of kings to govern wrong”; they
were not precedents; they were not exempt from public censure or opinion; they
were not softened by prescription, nor screened by prejudice, nor sanctioned by
superstition, nor rendered formidable by a principle that imposed them as
sacred obligations on all future generations: either they were state-necessities
extorted by the circumstances of the time, or violent acts of the will, that
carried their own condemnation in their bosom. Whatever fault might be found
with them, they did not proceed upon the avowed principle, that “millions are
made for one,” but one for millions; and as long as this distinction was kept
in view, liberty was saved, and the Revolution was untouched; for it was to
establish it that the Revolution was commenced, and to overturn it that the
enemies of liberty waded through seas of blood and at last succeeded. (Life of Napoleon, Chap. xxxi.)
If Hazlitt seems to protest
too much, let us recall our incipient Prime Minister of 1792 quoted earlier,
and his plan for the government of France: “the first point is that the
authority of the king should be perfectly re-established, and that any liberty
the people may afterwards possess should be considered as his indulgence.” All
these things are as Hazlitt saw them. We may differ from him as we please, but
we must understand his point of view if we are going to read him intelligently.
On the whole, however, his beliefs are just the beliefs of the average Briton
to-day. Hazlitt was the first of our now many Napoleonists. If he could return
to this present world he might exhibit the utmost extreme of his enthusiasm
without the least singularity. He would see Englishmen thronging with reverence
to the shrine at the Invalides and averting their eyes with shame from the
spectacle of St Helena. Hazlitt who set so much store by his “little image” of
Napoleon would find the Emperor’s portrait a popular picture in the most British
of households. He would have to read ravenously to keep abreast of the
Napoleonic literature written, translated and published in these islands.
Hazlitt was cold to French tragedy but he would unbend to L’Aiglon of Edmond Rostand. The enthusiastic lover of Scott might
care little for the Wessex novels of Thomas Hardy, but he would certainly
rejoice in The Dynasts.
Hazlitt
contra Mundum
These are agreeable
speculations. The dull fact is that Hazlitt held his views when they were
highly unpopular and savoured of treason. And he held them the more tenaciously
the more they were challenged. He began to stand alone. The glorious visions of
his youth faded. The Revolution instead of being the beginning of a new life,
seemed no more than the end of an old song. His friends, some revered almost to
adoration, crept over to the popular and profitable side. The time was gone
when
Coleridge and Southey,
Lloyd and Lamb and Co.
All tuned their mystic
harps to praise Lepaux.
Wordsworth and Coleridge, once
apostles, became apostates, and Hazlitt hated them, not only for what they
were, but for what they had been. “Into what pit thou seest from what height fall’n.”
Wordsworth, in his view, had been bought by the Government, and had left the
cause for the handful of silver he received as Distributor of Stamps. Southey,
the Pantisocrat and eulogist of Wat Tyler, had become the Court Laureate, and,
what was even worse, a Quarterly Reviewer. As for Coleridge! – Coleridge, who
had preached in the bright dawn of life that memorable sermon against kings,
had now become a pensioner of George IV[4],
a pillar of Church and State, and dallied with the doctrine of Divine Right.
This was the most unkindest cut of all. That Coleridge should turn traitor was
the crime of crimes. It was the worse, the second, fall of man. It was
sacrilege against those divine and hallowed days of youth when Harmer Hill with
all its pines had stooped to listen to a poet as he passed. Upon these false
friends the hand of Hazlitt was thereafter heavy. He was impatient even with
Lamb, who, thinking much as Hazlitt did, nevertheless thought it more
circumspectly. Hazlitt’s friends certainly had much to bear. He stalked the
world wrathfully, holding his pistol at the heads of all he met, demanding that
they should stand and deliver a hymn to the Revolution and a eulogy of the
Emperor. Certainly it must have been hard to be patient with a furious essayist
who asserted that Trafalgar was a tragedy and Austerlitz a crowning mercy – who,
when Napoleon’s flotilla was gathered at Boulogne, insisted that all his
friends should regard the prospective invader of their country as a universal
benefactor. The course of events was not favourable to him. The side he took
became more and more a lost cause and was at last swallowed up in total defeat.
Hazlitt was not a good loser. If he did not lose his hope, he certainly lost
his temper. Indeed, he confesses as much in a little passage of self-analysis:
I have often been
reproached with extravagance for considering things only in their abstract
principles, and with heat or ill-temper, for getting into a passion about what
no ways concerned me. If any one wishes to see me quite calm, they may cheat me
in a bargain, or tread upon my toes; but a truth repelled, or a sophism
repeated, totally disconcerts me, and I lose all patience. I am not, in the
ordinary acceptation of the term, a good-natured
man; that is, many things annoy me besides what interferes with my own ease
and interest. I hate a lie; a piece of injustice wounds me to the quick, though
nothing but the report of it reach me. Therefore I have made many enemies and few
friends; for the public know nothing of well-wishers, and keep a wary eye on
those that would reform them. Coleridge used to complain of my irascibility in
this respect, and not without reason. Would that he had possessed a little of
my tenaciousness and jealousy of temper; and then, with his eloquence to paint
the wrong, and acuteness to detect it, his country and the cause of liberty
might not have fallen without a struggle! (Plain
Speaker, “On Depth and Superficiality.”)
It was claimed by Coleridge and others
that the first great revulsion of their feelings towards France dated from the
attack of the Directory on the liberty of Switzerland in 1798. That invasion,
morally indefensible, is difficult to justify even on the lower ground of
military or political necessity. But, even here, we should know what we are
condemning. The Swiss Confederacy overthrown by France was in fact nothing like
the later and excellent Swiss Republic. The peasants of Vaud and the Valais,
held in subjection by the petty oligarchs of Berne, knew little of the “mountain
liberty” dear to the poets. When such a man as Gibbon, the last person in the
world to feel benevolent towards political discontent, permits himself the criticism
to be found in that long youthful letter by him describing the Swiss
constitution[5], the ordinary observer is
tempted to believe that real Swiss liberty began rather than ended with the
Helvetic Repubhc instituted by France in 1798. But the great fact remains, that
interference with one independent nation by another is in general utterly
wrong, and specially suspicious when lofty motives are urged in justification.
Still, when we read with admiration that splendid sonnet of Wordsworth, it is
well to ask ourselves whether we ought to weep for the subjugation of the Swiss
Republic in 1798 and have no tears for the attempted subjugation of the French
Republic in 1793.
Hazlitt and
the Reviewers
It was this national
hypocrisy or inconsistency of ours that irritated Hazlitt. He held his
principles without thought of compromise, and he had to suffer for his
tenacity. It is difficult for us to understand the power that was wielded a
century ago by the party Reviews, by such persons as Gifford and Croker in the Quarterly Review and John Wilson (called
Christopher North) in Blackwood’s
Magazine. The public seem really to have been terrorised by the truculence
of these periodicals, and afraid to read or think otherwise than the Reviewers
permitted. Ostensibly critical, these magazines had nothing to do with
literature. They were purely political organs. If a writer was suspected of any
leaning towards liberal views in politics, then the hirelings of Mr Murray in
London and of Mr Blackwood in Edinburgh fell upon him with their bludgeons.
Thus, Keats was friendly with Leigh Hunt; Leigh Hunt had been imprisoned for
criticising the Prince Regent; therefore Keats must be bludgeoned; and bludgeoned
he was in articles that are among the ineffaceable shames of our literary
history. The Edinburgh Review, organ
of the Whigs, must not be exempted from general condemnation, though Jeffrey
and his contributors at their worst were cleanness itself in comparison with
Gifford and Wilson. The Edinburgh cannot
claim, like The Quarterly, to have
killed a poet. Its most famous feat is the condemnation of Wordsworth’s Excursion in an article beginning with
the now historic words, “This will never do!”
The Tory reviewers hailed
Hazlitt with joy as a fitting victim for their sport. Poor Keats had failed
them. He had simply perished without any visible sign of anguish; but Hazlitt,
though tough enough to last, was more easily hurt, and (delightful quality)
shouted when he was hurt. Let us glance for a moment at the literary methods of
that famous time. Perhaps the best of all Hazlitt’s books is Table Talk. This was reviewed in Blackwood for August 1822 by someone who
claimed to be a scholar and gentleman, entitled therefore to read the cockney
Hazlitt a lesson in good style and manners. Here are a few sentences:
The whole surface of these
volumes is one gaping sore of wounded and festering vanity; and in short...our
table-talker “is rather AN ULCER than A MAN.” Now, it is one thing to feel
sore, and a bad thing it is there is no denying; but to tell all the world the
story of one’s soreness, to be continually poking at the bandages, and displaying
all the ugly things they ought to cover, is quite another, and a far worse
affair.
A little of this is quite
enough. Hazlitt was maddened by these attacks. He tried to retaliate in various
periodicals; but he was attempting the impossible. The rowdy blackguardism that
fails may perhaps be corrected, but not the rowdy blackguardism that pays. The
combination of vulgarity with success is irresistible. Wilson and Gifford were “in”;
Hazlitt was “out”; and neither Hazlitt nor anyone else could hurt their very hypothetical
feelings.
Continuation
of Authorship
The actual events of
Hazlitt’s private life are not important, and only a brief recital need be made
of his personal and literary doings. He lived at Winterslow from 1808 to 1812,
when he moved to York Street, Westminster, the house once occupied by Milton,
whose noble spirit, did it haunt this sublunary world, would have consorted rather
with the tenant Hazlitt than with the landlord Jeremy Bentham. In 1812 he
delivered at the Russell Institution ten lectures on philosophy, some of which
survived in manuscript and were printed in the Literary Remains. They indicate that Hazlitt’s interest in
philosophy was after all quite literary. The first wholly characteristic work
of his to appear in book form was The
Round Table (1817) containing matter from his contributions to The Examiner, The Morning Chronicle and The
Champion. Here we have the essential Hazlitt, the Hazlitt of flashing,
contentious sentences, full of matter, intimating intense enjoyment in the
writer and inciting to intense enjoyment in the reader. The scale of the essays
hardly allowed him to wind into his subject as he was to do later, but the
imposed brevity gave his aphoristic genius its chance. The same year (1817) saw
the publication of his Characters of
Shakespear’s Plays, a book which possibly its own generation found more
usefully enlightening than we do. Hazlitt’s enjoyment of Shakespeare had (like
Lamb’s) a singular completeness ensuing from his appreciation of poetry, his
sense of drama, and his love for the theatre. He lived in a fortunate hour. He
beheld the sunset splendour of Siddons and hailed the meridian brightness of
Edmund Kean. The classic dignity of John Kemble and the fervent emotionalism of
Miss O’Neill illustrated for him the extremes of Shakespeare’s dramatic art.
Much that we know of these dead and gone players we learn from Hazlitt. He is,
in a special sense, the historian of Kean, whose first impersonations in London
he praised in The Morning Chronicle. A View of the English Stage (1818) reprints a number of dramatic criticisms from The Chronicle, The Examiner and The Champion.
Two years later Hazlitt wrote a fine series of theatrical essays for The London
Magazine, not fully reprinted until 1903 (Works, Vol. viii).
Hazlitt as Lecturer
The years 1819-1820 were in
a special sense Hazlitt’s “lecture years,” for at the Surrey Institution in the
Blackfriars Road he delivered those three sets of discourses that form the
matter of three excellent and always popular volumes. Lectures on the English Poets (1818), Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819) and Lectures chiefly on the Dramatic Literature
of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth
(1820). Talfourd gives an interesting description of Hazlitt as lecturer:
Mr Hazlitt delivered three
courses of lectures at the Surrey Institution ...before audiences with whom he
had but “an imperfect sympathy.” They consisted chiefly of Dissenters, who
agreed with him in his hatred of Lord Castlereagh, but who “loved no plays”; of
Quakers, who approved him as the opponent of Slavery and Capital Punishment,
but who “heard no music”; of citizens devoted to the main chance, who had a
hankering after “the improvement of the mind,” but to whom his favourite
doctrine of its natural disinterestedness was a riddle; of a few enemies who
came to sneer; and a few friends who were eager to learn and admire. The
comparative insensibility of the bulk of his audience to his finest passages
sometimes provoked him to awaken their attention by points which broke the
train of his discourse, after which he could make himself amends by some abrupt
paradox which might set their prejudices on edge, and make them fancy they were
shocked.... He once had an edifying advantage over them. He was enumerating the
humanities which endeared Dr Johnson to his mind; and at the close of an
agreeable catalogue mentioned, as last and noblest, “his carrying the poor
victim of disease and dissipation on his back through Fleet Street,” at which a
titter rose from some, who were struck by the picture as ludicrous, and a
murmur from others, who deemed the allusion unfit for ears polite. He paused
for an instant and then added in his sturdiest and most impressive manner, “an
act which realises the parable of the Good Samaritan,” at which his moral and
delicate hearers shrank rebuked into deep silence. He was not eloquent in the
true sense of the term; for his thoughts were too weighty to be moved along by
the shallow stream of feeling which an evening’s excitement can rouse. He wrote
all his lectures, and read them as they were written; but his deep voice and
earnest manner suited his matter well. He seemed to dig into his subject – and
not in vain. (Literary Remains.)
But a greater than Talfourd
was listening to Hazlitt. Writing to his brother in February 1818, Keats
observes:
I hear Hazlitt’s lectures
regularly, his last was on Gray, Collins, Young, etc., and he gave a very fine
piece of discriminating criticism on Swift, Voltaire and Rabelais. I was very
disappointed at his treatment of Chatterton.
The poet was then
twenty-two and had but another three years of life before him. His first slim
volume had already appeared. Endymion,
dedicated to the memory of that same Chatterton, was being hastily prepared for
the printer. A few weeks earlier he had noted “Hazlitt’s depth of taste” as
being one of three things to rejoice at in the world of his time. The other two
were The Excursion – and the pictures
of Haydon. Upon the last we may remark that much can be forgiven to friendship.
Hazlitt and
Gifford
Two other important publications
by Hazlitt belong to the year 1819, A
Letter to William Gifford Esq. and Political
Essays. The latter work contains many pieces collected from various
periodicals (together with some “characters” from his early compilation The Eloquence of the British Senate),
and exhibits Hazlitt at his best and worst. Some pieces are little more than
rancorous journalism with no permanent interest; but others are among his very
finest essays. The Letter to Gifford
was a deliberate attempt to get even with that person. The pamphlet has been
highly praised as a piece of tremendous invective, but, really, it is much less
vitriolic than some of Hazlitt’s shorter pieces – the character of Gifford, for
instance, in The Spirit of the Age.
It is far too long. Burke’s Letter to a
Noble Lord, which the admiring Hazlitt probably had in mind as a model of
scale, is so different in scope as to afford the reader an instructive exercise
in the comparison of effective and ineffective polemic. Hazlitt made the
tactical mistake of attempting to argue with his adversary. With an insistence
that is almost pathetic, Hazlitt tries to convince Gifford (and such of the
world as might read the epistle) that he is a metaphysician of parts; and so
the Letter concludes with another attempt to restate his views on the Natural
Disinterestedness of the Human Mind. As befits a now practised writer, Hazlitt
is vastly more lucid than in his efforts of twenty years earlier, but he leaves
us without any conviction that his alleged metaphysical discovery is either
true or useful.
Later Works
In 1821 appeared the first
volume of his Table Talk, the second following
a year later. Among several works of high excellence it is hard to choose one
and call it best. Still, most lovers of Hazlitt, restricted to one, would
probably give their choice to this body of essays, so hard to match for variety
of subject, brilliance of style and valid criticism of life and letters. The Characteristics of 1823 was an attempt
to imitate the Maxims of La
Rochefoucauld. It cannot be called entirely successful. Hazlitt’s best
aphorisms are to be found scattered in profusion up and down his longer essays;
his deliberate attempts at epigram are more like excised paragraphs than the
stamped and coined utterance of genuine aphorism.
Sketches
of the Principal Picture Galleries in England (1824) recalls the adventures of the
early painting days, and confirms the view that Hazlitt was, on the whole, an
excellent critic of pictures. Nowhere does he attempt a purely literary fantasia
upon a theme pictorial such as we find, for instance, in Ruskin’s description
of Tintoretto’s “Last Judgment,” where much of the critic’s ecstasy arises from
imagined beauties that are simply not paintable. With Hazlitt a picture is
never more than a picture, and so we enjoy his writing as he enjoyed the
picture. Sometimes he seems to enjoy certain pictures that later, and
presumably better, taste prefers to neglect, but on the whole his judgment is
quite remarkably in accord with modern preferences.
In 1825 appeared The Spirit of the Age or Contemporary Portraits,
a series of character sketches fuller, rounder and less distorted than his
earlier efforts in this line. Lamb praises it highly in a letter to Bernard
Barton, calling the Home Tooke “a matchless portrait.” It is indeed one of Hazlitt’s
best works. The essence of a whole period is concentrated in its pungent pages.
It was followed in 1826 by The Plain Speaker, a collection of essays matching
the Table Talk, and only slightly
less excellent than its companion. To the same year belongs the Notes of a Journey mentioned earlier.
Life of
Napoleon
During all this busy period
Hazlitt had migrated a good deal. He lived at York Street till 1819. We find
him in Southampton Buildings during 1820-22, and later in such respectable
thoroughfares as Down Street and Half-Moon Street; after which Bouverie Street
seems a decline. All these sojournings must be understood as punctuated by
frequent flights to Winterslow. His last lodging was in Frith Street, Soho,
whither he went in 1830. He was now past his half-century. His health had begun
to fail, and his circumstances, depending as they did upon his immediate
efforts, naturally grew difficult. Since 1826 he had been labouring at his
longest, least read and most unprofitable work, the Life of Napoleon. Upon this child of his growing age he lavished
his tenderest care and his fullest exertions; but it proved a child of sorrow.
Three volumes appeared in 1828, and the fourth in 1830, the year of his death.
It attracted little notice, and, the publishers failing, Hazlitt got nothing.
What interest it still retains centres, of course, in Hazlitt, not in Napoleon.
The life of Napoleon could not be written in 1826. It can hardly be written
even now. Still, we cannot say that Hazlitt made the best use of the material
open to him. He was essentially an essayist, and lost his touch on the large
canvas of a great historical picture. Its chief literary fault is a lack of
sustained narrative power. Few indeed are the Gibbons, Macaulays and Carlyles,
and Hazlitt is not numbered among those who approach the standard of these
giants. He cannot compare even with less exalted historians. His account of
that epic adventure, the Campaign in Italy, is simply tame; and his story of
Brumaire, set by the side of Mr Fisher’s, exhibits the difference between
forced effort and genuine impulse. Hazlitt’s easy and sweeping generalisations
about the French and English national character will not do. He could not
forgive France for deserting the Emperor so basely, and prostrating herself
before the Allied sovereigns so abjectly; and so he rarely loses an opportunity
of pouring out contempt. Even his view of the military operations has a
political bias. Beside that dazzling line of Marshals the English commanders
certainly make very little show; but they were not all fools. Hazlitt’s denial
of talent to Wellington is as stupid as Tolstoy’s denial of genius to Napoleon.
The story of the Emperor’s
glorious rise and tragic fall was, appropriately, Hazlitt’s last work. One
other book, however, belongs to 1830, an odd and attractive volume reprinting
various magazine articles in which Hazlitt had recorded his conversations with
the painter James Northcote. This is not one of the most generally read among
his works; yet it contains more keen and sagacious comments on books, pictures
and life in general than are dreamt of in the philosophy of many graver
authors. How much is Hazlitt and how much is Northcote it is impossible to say;
but all of it is delightful.
Sickness and
Death
In August 1830 Hazlitt
became seriously ill. For a short time, during his early days as a
Parliamentary reporter, he had exceeded in the matter of intoxicants, but he
soon abandoned an evil habit that was due more to his surroundings than to his
desires. As compensation he took to tea, and for the rest of his life drank
that enchanting liquor not wisely, but too strong. The occasional references in
his work to indigestion are significant. It is even possible that excess of tea
may have shortened his life, for his fatal illness arose from internal
inflammation. Alone, and in poverty, he gradually sank for several weeks.
Material help came from his old editor Lord Jeffrey and his old friend Charles
Lamb; but he was then beyond the reach of human aid. He went out with the
Bourbons. Some years before, he had said, “I confess I should like to live to
see the downfall of the Bourbons. That is a vital question with me; and I shall
like it the better the sooner it happens” (Table
Talk, “On the Fear of Death”). He had his wish. The last Bourbon king of
France fled his country after the July Revolution of 1830. The news cheered Hazlitt,
but he could scarcely believe that the change was permanent. The other changes
he was not to see. He died on the 18th of September 1830 at the age
of fifty-two – young for the child of such long-lived parents. Had he reached
the years of his father he would have seen the best days of Napoleon III; had
he reached the years of his mother he would have seen the worst.
Posthuma
Six years after his death
appeared two volumes of Literary Remains containing,
as preliminaries, a short biography by his son, some Thoughts on the Genius of Hazlitt by Lytton, and a valuable
personal sketch by Talfourd. The bulk of the work was occupied by essays and
papers not republished by Hazlitt in any of his books. Included among these
were such masterpieces as The Fight
and My First Acquaintance with Poets. Some of them were reprinted in a still
later volume called Winterslow,
embodying pieces written in that loved retreat. Quite a mass of his work,
including sixteen long essays written for The
Edinburgh Review between 1814 to 1830, remained uncollected until the
appearance of the complete edition of his works a few years ago.
Essays in
Adventure
Hazlitt died, as he had lived,
in an attitude of defiance; for the last recorded utterance of one who had
dealt and suffered many a shrewd blow for the sake of a lost cause was, “Well,
I have had a happy life.” There is no need to doubt it. The man who praised the
English “bruisers” found his joy in combat. Whatever else Hazlitt is, tame he
is never. He enjoyed as strenuously as he fought. For him a book, a picture, or
a walk is an adventure. Adventures are to the adventurous, Disraeli tells us;
and for Hazlitt the age of adventure was never past. According to Cervantes,
adventures should begin at an inn. Hazlitt’s usually ended there. Think of such
essays as The Fight and On Going a Journey.
Think how many passages in his work can be typified by such a sentence as: “It
was on the 10th of April, 1798, that I sat down to a volume of the
New Eloise, at the inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold
chicken.” Consider the spirit of such a passage as the following:
The greatest pleasure in
life is that of reading, while we are young. I have had as much of this
pleasure, perhaps, as anyone. As I grow older, it fades; or else the stronger
stimulus of writing takes off the edge of it. At present, I have neither time
nor inclination for it: yet I should like to devote a year’s entire leisure to
a course of the English Novelists; and perhaps clap on that old sly knave Sir
Walter, to the end of the list. It is astonishing how I used formerly to relish
the style of certain authors, at a time when I myself despaired of ever writing
a single line. Probably this was the reason. It is not in mental as in natural
ascent – intellectual objects seem higher when we survey them from below, than
when we look down from any given elevation above the common level. My three
favourite writers about the time I speak of were Burke, Junius, and Rousseau. I
was never weary of admiring and wondering at the felicities of the style, the
turns of expression, the refinements of thought and sentiment: I laid the book
down to find out the secret of so much strength and beauty, and took it up
again in despair, to read on and admire. So I passed whole days, months, and I
may add, years; and have only this to say now, that as my life began, so I
could wish it may end. The last time I tasted this luxury in full perfection
was one day after a sultry day’s walk in summer between Farnham and Alton. I
was fairly tired out; I walked into an inn-yard (I think at the latter place);
I was shown by the waiter to what looked at first like common out-houses at the
other end of it, but they turned out to be a suite of rooms, probably a hundred
years old – the one I entered opened into an old-fashioned garden, embellished
with beds of larkspur and a leaden Mercury; it was wainscoted, and there was a
grave-looking, dark-coloured portrait of Charles II hanging up over the tiled
chimney-piece. I had Love for Love in
my pocket, and began to read; coffee was brought in a silver coffee-pot; the
cream, the bread and butter, everything was excellent, and the flavour of Congreve’s
style prevailed over all. I prolonged the entertainment till a late hour, and
relished this divine comedy better even than when I used to see it played by
Miss Mellon, as Miss Prue; Bob Palmer, as Tattle; and Bannister, as honest Ben.
This circumstance happened just five years ago, and it seems like yesterday. If
I count my life so by lustres, it will soon glide away; yet I shall not have to
repine, if, while it lasts, it is enriched with a few such recollections! (Plain Speaker, “Whether Genius is
conscious of its Powers.”)
Can we doubt that one in whom the will
to adventure was so strong had a happy life? The sense of thrill and discovery
in Hazlitt gives to his essays a kinship with the great literature of adventure
or wayfaring, the literature that begins for us with The Odyssey and includes in later times such different and
delightful books as The Pilgrim’s Progress, Tom Jones, the writings of Borrow and The Pickwick Papers. A fondness for Hazlitt is a fondness for
health in literature.
Hazlitt’s
Prose
Into any general criticism
of his writing this is not the place to enter. One or two points, however,
should be noticed. Hazlitt’s frequent epigrammatic brilliance is never false
glitter. Some later essayists have been tempted to say brilliant things, not
because they are true, but merely because they are brilliant. Hazlitt is
guiltless of this bid for applause. Whatever virtues he may have lacked, moral
and intellectual honesty he had in unusual fullness. Forcible, and even
furious, he may sometimes be called; but he is no swaggering companion, he is
no Ancient Pistol of prose, merely blusterous and truculent, like some who have
thought to imitate him. Hazlitt wrote from fierce unshakeable convictions, and
his literary rectitude is as unimpeachable as his political consistency. He is
not, like Lamb, a “quaint” writer. Indeed, he says of himself, “I hate my style
to be known, as I hate all idiosyncracy.” Nor is he one of those whom we may
call great architects of prose – like the Burke whose domed and pinnacled
sentences not all the sundering rancour of the Revolution could prevent Hazlitt
from admiring. Much of his work is what we should call journalism – current
criticism, hastily set down for waiting periodicals; and the wonder is that its
average is so high – so high that Stevenson the fastidious feels compelled to
assure us that, though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write
like William Hazlitt. Now and then he cheers our imperfection by giving us a
bad sentence or a breathless paragraph, but not often. His most noticeable
oddity is a trick of separating antecedent and relative too far, at times with
unhappy results, as when he writes, “On the contrary, the celebrated person
just alluded to might be said to grind the sentences between his teeth, which
he afterwards committed to paper” (Plain
Speaker, “Prose Style of Poets”). But these faults are lost in the general
excellence of his work, which combines brilliance with unstudied ease of manner
in a style altogether his own. He never strains after “fine writing,” but he
rises, when he wishes, to heights of noble and moving eloquence.
Hazlitt and
his Contemporaries
Walter Bagehot, who owed
something of his own bright style to Hazlitt, and might have learned from him,
with his advantage, to relax the personal reserve that makes Sparkling
utterance just a little frigid, actually preferred Hazlitt to Lamb, thereby
incurring the wrath of his (and Haziitt's) old acquaintance Crabb Robinson:
He nearly quarrelled with
me... for urging that Hazlitt was a much greater writer than Charles Lamb – a
harmless opinion which I still hold, but which Mr Robinson met with this
outburst: “You, sir, You prefer the works of that scoundrel, that odious, that
malignant writer, to the exquisite essays of that angelic creature!” (Literary Studies, “Henry Crabb Robinson.”)
Bagehot is distinguished
enough to be entitled to a preference which the normal reader need neither make
nor share. The obvious and wholesome thing to do is to avoid invidious distinction
between two essayists of very different excellence and to enjoy each for the
best he has to give.
Both Lamb and Hazlitt were
on the side of the ancients. They are safer guides to us when they write of the
poets and dramatists of older and more flavoured times than on the rare
occasions when they touch on the newer literature. Hazlitt has occasionally
some good references to Byron, but on the whole his attitude is one of
suspicion. Neither Lamb nor Hazlitt had a genuine liking for Keats, and their
misunderstanding of Shelley was simply abject. On the other hand Hazlitt’s
admiration for the Waverley novels was as tremendous as Borrow’s depreciation
of them was ludicrous. Hazlitt’s acquaintance with foreign literature (other
than a few works by Rousseau) was very very small, and his references to the current
music of his day indicate that the higher reaches of that art were quite beyond
him.
Hazlitt the
Man
The portraits of Hazlitt
are many, but so various as to leave us with no such clear and instantly
recognisable image of the man as we have, say, of Scott, or Burns, or
Wordsworth. Talfourd’s pen-portrait is admirable:
In person, Mr Hazlitt was
of the middle size, with a handsome and eager countenance, worn by sickness and
thought, and dark hair, which had curled stiffly over the temples, and was only
of late years sprinkled with grey. His gait was slouching and awkward, and his
dress neglected; but when he began to talk, he could not be mistaken for a
common man. In the company of persons with whom he was not familiar his
bashfulness was painful; but when he became entirely at ease, and entered on a
favourite topic, no one’s conversation was ever more delightful. (Literary Remains.)
So much for the outward man. For the
rest let us summon another witness. Thus writes Lamb in that Letter of Elia to Robert Southey which
gave the self-righteous laureate a trouncing he deserved and preserves for us
many tributes to Elian friends:
What hath soured him
[Hazlitt], and made him to suspect his friends of infidelity towards him, when
there was no such matter, I know not. I stood well with him for fifteen years
(the proudest of my life), and have ever spoke my full mind of him to some, to
whom his panegyric must naturally be least tasteful. I never in thought swerved
from him, I never betrayed him, I never slackened in my admiration of him, I
was the same to him (neither better nor worse) though he could not see it, as
in the days when he thought fit to trust me. At this instant, he may be
preparing for me some compliment, above my deserts, as he has sprinkled many
such among his admirable books, for which I rest his debtor; or, for anything I
know, or can guess to the contrary, he may be about to read a lecture on my
weaknesses. He is welcome to them (as he was to my humble hearth), if they can
divert a spleen, or ventilate a fit of sullenness. I wish he would not quarrel
with the world at the rate he does; but the reconciliation must be effected by
himself, and I despair of living to see that day. But, protesting against much
that he has written, and some things which he chooses to do; judging him by his
conversation which I enjoyed so long, and relished so deeply; or by his books, in
those places where no clouding passion intervenes – I should belie my own
conscience, if I said less, than that I think W. H. to be, in his natural and
healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing. So far from
being ashamed of that intimacy, which was betwixt us, it is my boast that I was
able for so many years to have preserved it entire; and I think I shall go to
my grave without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion.
To this it would be an
offence to add another word.
[1] The authority for details of the
American sojourn is a diary kept by Margaret, the essayist’s sister.
[2] See Table Talk, “Why Distant Objects
Please.”
[3] Lord
Granville Leveson Gower, Private
Correspondence, 1781-1821, Vol. I, p. 49 (1916).
[4] Not, however, till 1824.
[5] Works,
1814, Vol. II, Letter ix.
