William Hazlitt, 1778-1830, was born in Maidstone, England. His father was
a Unitarian clergyman, and he was sent to a college of that denomination
to be educated for the ministry; but having a greater taste for art than
theology, he resolved, on leaving school, to devote himself to painting.
He succeeded so well in his efforts as to meet the warmest commendation of
his friends, but did not succeed in satisfying his own fastidious taste.
On this account he threw away his pencil and took up his pen. His works,
though numerous, are, with the exception of a life of Napoleon, chiefly
criticisms on literature and art.
Hazlitt is thought to have treated his contemporaries with an unjust
severity; but his genial appreciation of the English classics, and the
thorough and loving manner in which he discusses their merits, make his
essays the delight of every lover of those perpetual wellsprings of
intellectual pleasure. His "Table Talk," "Characters of Shakespeare's
Plays," "Lectures on the English Poets," and "Lectures on the Literature
of the Elizabethan Age," are the works that exhibit his style and general
merits in their most favorable light.
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Coming forward and seating himself on the ground, in his white dress and
tightened turban, the chief of the Indian jugglers begins with tossing up
two brass balls, which is what any of us could do, and concludes by
keeping up four at the same time, which is what none of us could do to
save our lives, not if we were to take our whole lives to do it in.
Is it then a trifling power we see at work, or is it not something next to
miraculous? It is the utmost stretch of human ingenuity, which nothing but
the bending the faculties of body and mind to it from the tenderest
infancy with incessant, ever-anxious application up to manhood, can
accomplish or make even a slight approach to. Man, thou art a wonderful
animal, and thy ways past finding out! Thou canst do strange things, but
thou turnest them to small account!
To conceive of this extraordinary dexterity, distracts the imagination and
makes admiration breathless. Yet it costs nothing to the performer, any
more than if it were a mere mechanical deception with which he had nothing
to do, but to watch and laugh at the astonishment of the spectators. A
single error of a hair's breadth, of the smallest conceivable portion of
time, would be fatal; the precision of the movements must be like a
mathematical truth; their rapidity is like lightning.
To catch four balls in succession, in less than a second of time, and
deliver them back so as to return with seeming consciousness to the hand
again; to make them revolve around him at certain intervals, like the
planets in their spheres; to make them chase each other 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 with 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 seems as if the difficulty, once mastered,
naturally resolved itself into ease and grace, and as if, to be overcome
at all, it must be overcome without an effort. The smallest awkwardness or
want of pliancy or self-possession would stop the whole process. It is the
work of witchcraft, and yet sport for children.
Some of the other feats are quite as curious and wonderful--such as the
balancing the artificial tree, and shooting a bird from each branch
through a quill--though none of them have the elegance or facility of the
keeping up of the brass balls. You are in pain for the result, and glad
when the experiment is over; they are not accompanied with the same
unmixed, unchecked delight as the former; and I would not give much to be
merely astonished without being pleased at the same time. As to the
swallowing of the sword, the police ought to interfere to prevent it.
When I saw the Indian juggler do the same things before, his feet were
bare, and he had large rings on his toes, which he kept turning round all
the time of the performance, as if they moved of themselves.
The hearing a speech in Parliament drawled or stammered out by the
honorable member or the noble lord, the ringing the changes on their
commonplaces, which anyone could repeat after them as well as they, stirs
me not a jot,--shakes not my good opinion of myself. I ask what there is
that I can do as well as this. Nothing. What have I been doing all my
life? Have I been idle, or have I nothing to show for all my labor and
pains? Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty
sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an
argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and
not finding them? Is there no one thing in which I can challenge
competition, that I can bring as an instance of exact perfection, in which
others can not find a flaw?
The utmost I can pretend to is to write a description of what this fellow
can do. I can write a book: so can many others who have not even learned
to spell. What abortions are these essays! What errors, what ill-pieced
transitions, what crooked reasons, what lame conclusions! How little is
made out, and that little how ill! Yet they are the best I can do.
I endeavor to recollect all I have ever heard or thought upon a subject,
and to express it as neatly as I can. Instead of writing on four subjects
at a time, it is as much as I can manage, to keep the thread of one
discourse clear and unentangled. I have also time on my hands to correct
my opinions and polish my periods; but the one I can not, and the other I
will not, do. I am fond of arguing; yet, with a good deal of pains and
practice, it is often much as I can do to beat my man, though he may be a
very indifferent hand. A common fencer would disarm his adversary in the
twinkling of an eye, unless he were a professor like himself. A stroke of
wit will sometimes produce this effect, but there is no such power or
superiority in sense or reasoning. There is no complete mastery of
execution to be shown there; and you hardly know the professor from the
impudent pretender or the mere clown.