"The child is a poet, in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek,
or repeats the story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd boy is a
poet when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the
countryman when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city apprentice
when he gazes after the Lord Mayor's show; the miser when he hugs his
gold; the courtier who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage who
paints his idol with blood; the slave who worships a tyrant, or the
tyrant who fancies himself a god; the vain, the ambitious, the proud,
the choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king,
the rich and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of
their own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all
the others think and act."
"Poetry is not a branch of authorship; it is the stuff of which our
life is made."
The artist is speaking in Hazlitt, but beneath the full, rich exuberance
of the artist, you can detect an under-note of austerity.
Then again, his memorable utterance about the Dissenting minister from
one of his essays on "Court Influence."
"A Dissenting minister is a character not so easily to be dispensed
with, and whose place cannot be well supplied. It is a pity that
this character has worn itself out; that that pulse of thought and
feeling has ceased almost to beat in the heart of a nation, who, if
not remarkable for sincerity and plain downright well-meaning, are
remarkable for nothing. But we have known some such, in happier
days, who had been brought up and lived from youth to age in the one
constant belief in God and of His Christ, and who thought all other
things but dross compared with the glory hereafter to be revealed.
Their youthful hopes and vanity had been mortified in them, even in
their boyish days, by the neglect and supercilious regards of the
world; and they turned to look into their own minds for something
else to build their hopes and confidence upon. They were true
priests. They set up an image in their own minds--it was truth; they
worshipped an idol there--it was justice. They looked on man as
their brother, and only bowed the knee to the Highest. Separate from
the world, they walked humbly with their God, and lived in thought
with those who had borne testimony of a good conscience, with the
spirits of just men in all ages. . . . Their sympathy was not with
the oppressors, but the oppressed. They cherished in their
thoughts--and wished to transmit to their posterity--those rights and
privileges for asserting which their ancestors had bled on scaffolds,
or had pined in dungeons, or in foreign climes. Their creed, too,
was 'Glory to God, peace on earth, goodwill to man.' This creed,
since profaned and rendered vile, they kept fast through good report
and evil report. This belief they had, that looks at something out
of itself, fixed as the stars, deep as the firmament; that makes of
its own heart an altar to truth, a place of worship for what is
right, at which it does reverence with praise and prayer like a holy
thing, apart and content; that feels that the greatest Being in the
universe is always near it; and that all things work together for the
good of His creatures, under His guiding hand. This covenant they
kept, as the stars keep their courses; this principle they stuck by,
for want of knowing better, as it sticks by them to the last. It
grows with their growth, it does not wither in their decay. It lives
when the almond-tree flourishes, and is not bowed down with the
tottering knees. It glimmers with the last feeble eyesight, smiles
in the faded cheek like infancy, and lights a path before them to the
grave!"
Here is a man of Puritan lineage speaking; but is it the voice of
Puritanism only? Surely it is a Puritanism softened and refined, a
Puritanism which is free of those harsh and unpleasing elements that have
too often obscured its finer aspects. I know of no passage in his
writings which for spacious eloquence, nobleness of thought, beauty of
expression, can rival this. It was written in 1818, when Hazlitt was
forty years old, and in the plenitude of his powers.