The book here included among The World's Classics made its first
appearance as an octavo volume of xxiv + 352 pages, with the title-page:
Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, By William Hazlitt. London:
Printed by C. H. Reynell, 21 Piccadilly, 1817.
William Hazlitt (1778-1830) came of an Irish Protestant stock, and of a
branch of it transplanted in the reign of George I from the county of
Antrim to Tipperary. His father migrated, at nineteen, to the University
of Glasgow (where he was contemporary with Adam Smith), graduated in
1761 or thereabouts, embraced the principles of the Unitarians, joined
their ministry, and crossed over to England; being successively pastor
at Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, at Marshfield in Gloucestershire, and at
Maidstone. At Wisbech he married Grace Loftus, the daughter of a
neighbouring farmer. Of the many children granted to them but three
survived infancy. William, the youngest of these, was born in Mitre
Lane, Maidstone, on April 10, 1778. From Maidstone the family moved in
1780 to Bandon, Co. Cork; and from Bandon in 1783 to America, where Mr.
Hazlitt preached before the new Assembly of the States-General of New
Jersey, lectured at Philadelphia on the Evidences of Christianity,
founded the First Unitarian Church at Boston, and declined a proffered
diploma of D.D. In 1786-7 he returned to England and took up his abode
at Wem, in Shropshire. His elder son, John, was now old enough to choose
a vocation, and chose that of a miniature-painter. The second child,
Peggy, had begun to paint also, amateurishly in oils. William, aged
eight--a child out of whose recollection all memories of Bandon and of
America (save the taste of barberries) soon faded--took his education at
home and at a local school. His father designed him for the Unitarian
ministry.
The above dry recital contains a number of facts not to be overlooked as
predisposing causes in young Hazlitt's later career; as that he was
Irish by blood, intellectual by geniture, born into dissent, and a
minority of dissent, taught at home to value the things of the mind, in
early childhood a nomad, in later childhood 'privately educated'--a
process which (whatever its merits) is apt to develop the freak as
against the citizen, the eccentric and lop-sided as against what is
proportionate and disciplined. Young Hazlitt's cleverness and his
passion for individual liberty were alike precocious. In 1791, at the
age of thirteen, he composed and published in The Shrewsbury Chronicle a
letter of protest against the calumniators of Dr. Priestley: a
performance which, for the gravity of its thought as for the balance of
its expression, would do credit to ninety-nine grown men in a hundred.
At fifteen, his father designing that he should enter the ministry, he
proceeded to the Unitarian College, Hackney; where his master, a Mr.
Corrie, found him 'rather backward in many of the ordinary points of
learning and, in general, of a dry, intractable understanding', the
truth being that the lad had set his heart against the ministry,
aspiring rather to be a philosopher--in particular a political
philosopher. At fourteen he had conceived ('in consequence of a dispute
one day, after coming out of Meeting, between my father and an old lady
of the congregation, respecting the repeal of the Corporation and Test
Acts and the limits of religious toleration') the germ of his Project
for a New Theory of Civil and Criminal Legislation, published in his
maturer years (1828), but drafted and scribbled upon constantly in these
days, to the neglect of his theological studies. His father, hearing of
the project, forbade him to pursue it.
Thus four or five years at the Unitarian College were wasted, or, at
least, had been spent without apparent profit; and in 1798 young
Hazlitt, aged close upon twenty, unsettled in his plans as in his
prospects, was at home again and (as the saying is) at a loose end;
when of a sudden his life found its spiritual apocalypse. It came
with the descent of Samuel Taylor Coleridge upon Shrewsbury, to take
over the charge of a Unitarian Congregation there.
He did not come till late on the Saturday afternoon before he was to
preach; and Mr. Rowe [the abdicating minister], who himself went
down to the coach in a state of anxiety and expectation to look for
the arrival of his successor, could find no one at all answering the
description, but a round-faced man, in a short black coat (like a
shooting-jacket) which hardly seemed to have been made for him, but
who seemed to be talking at a great rate to his fellow-passengers.
Mr. Rowe had scarce returned to give an account of his
disappointment when the round-faced man in black entered, and
dissipated all doubts on the subject by beginning to talk. He did
not cease while he stayed; nor has he since.
Of his meeting with Coleridge, and of the soul's awakening that
followed, Hazlitt has left an account (My First Acquaintance with
Poets) that will fascinate so long as English prose is read.
'Somehow that period [the time just after the French Revolution] was
not a time when NOTHING WAS GIVEN FOR NOTHING. The mind opened, and
a softness might be perceived coming over the heart of individuals
beneath "the scales that fence" our self-interest.' As Wordsworth
wrote:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven.
It was in January, 1798, that I was one morning before daylight, to walk
ten miles in the mud, to hear this celebrated person preach. Never, the
longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk as this cold,
raw, comfortless one in the winter of 1798. Il-y-a des impressions que
ni le tems ni les circonstances peuvent effacer. Dusse-je vivre des
siecles entiers, le doux tems de ma jeunesse ne peut renaitre pour moi,
ni s'effacer jamais dans ma memoire. When I got there the organ was
playing the 100th Psalm, and when it was done Mr. Coleridge rose and
gave out his text, 'And he went up into the mountain to pray, HIMSELF,
ALONE.' As he gave out this text, his voice 'rose like a stream of
distilled perfumes', and when he came to the two last words, which he
pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then
young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart,
and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the
universe.... The preacher then launched into his subject, like an eagle
dallying with the wind.
Coleridge visited Wem, walked and talked with young Hazlitt, and
wound up by inviting the disciple to visit him at Nether Stowey in
the Quantocks. Hazlitt went, made acquaintance with William and
Dorothy Wordsworth, and was drawn more deeply under the spell. In
later years as the younger man grew cantankerous and the elder
declined, through opium, into a 'battered seraph', there was an
estrangement. But Hazlitt never forgot his obligation.
My soul has indeed remained in its original bondage, dark, obscure,
with longings infinite and unsatisfed; my heart, shut up in the
prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever
find, a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not
remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language that
expresses itself, I owe to Coleridge.
Coleridge, sympathizing with the young man's taste for philosophy
and abetting it, encouraged him to work upon a treatise which saw
the light in 1805, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action: Being
an Argu-ment in favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human
Mind. Meantime, however,--the ministry having been renounced--the
question of a vocation became more and more urgent, and after long
indecision Hazlitt packed his portmanteau for London, resolved to
learn painting under his brother John, who had begun to do
prosperously. John taught him some rudiments, and packed him off to
Paris, where he studied for some four months in the Louvre and
learned to idolize Bonaparte. This sojourn in Paris--writes his
grandson and biographer--'was one long beau jour to him'. His
allusions to it are constant. He returned to England in 1803, with
formed tastes and predilections, very few of which he afterwards
modified, much less forsook.
We next find him making a tour as a portrait-painter through the
north of England, where (as was to be expected) he attempted a
portrait of Wordsworth, among others. 'At his desire', says
Wordsworth, 'I sat to him, but as he did not satisfy himself or my
friends, the unfinished work was destroyed.' He was more successful
with Charles Lamb, whom he painted (for a whim) in the dress of a
Venetian Senator. As a friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth he had
inevitably made acquaintance with the Lambs. He first met Lamb at
one of the Godwins' strange evening parties and the two became
intimate friends and fellow theatre-goers.
Hazlitt's touchy and difficult temper suspended this inintimacy in
later years, though to the last Lamb regarded him as 'one of the
finest and wisest spirits breathing'; but for a while it was
unclouded. At the Lambs', moreover, Hazlitt made acquaintance with a
Dr. Stoddart, owner of some property at Winterslow near Salisbury,
and his sister Sarah, a lady wearing past her first youth but yet
addicted to keeping a number of beaux to her string. Hazlitt,
attracted to her from the first,--he made a gloomy lover and his
subsequent performances in that part were unedifying--for some years
played walking gentleman behind the leading suitors with whom Miss
Stoddart from time to time diversified her comedy. But Mary Lamb was
on his side; the rivals on one excuse or another went their ways or
were dismissed; and on May 1, 1808, the marriage took place at St.
Andrew's Church, Holborn. Lamb attended, foreboding little happiness
to the couple from his knowledge of their temperaments. Seven years
after (August 9, 1815), he wrote to Southey. 'I was at Hazlitt's
marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during
the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh.' The marriage was not a
happy one.
Portrait-painting had been abandoned long before this. The Essay on the
Principles of Human Action (1805) had fallen, as the saying is,
stillborn from the press: Free Thoughts on Public Affairs (1806) had
earned for the author many enemies but few readers: and a treatise
attacking Malthus's theory of population (1807) had allured the public
as little. A piece of hack-work, The Eloquence of the British Senate,
also belongs to 1807: A New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue
for the use of Schools to 1810. The nutriment to be derived from these
works, again, was not of the sort that replenishes the family table, and
in 1812 Hazlitt left Winterslow (where he had been quarrelling with his
brother-in-law), settled in London in 19 York Street, Westminster--once
the home of John Milton--and applied himself strenuously to lecturing
and journalism. His lectures, on the English Philosophers, were
delivered at the Russell Institution: his most notable journalistic
work, on politics and the drama, was done for The Morning Chronicle,
then edited by Mr. Perry. From an obituary notice of Hazlitt contributed
many years later (October 1830) to an old magazine I cull the following:
He obtained an introduction, about 1809 or 1810, to the late Mr.
Perry, of The Morning Chronicle, by whom he was engaged to report
Parliamentary debates, write original articles, etc. He also
furnished a number of theatrical articles on the acting of Kean. As
a political writer he was apt to be too violent; though in general
he was not a man of violent temper. He was also apt to conceive
strong and rooted prejudices against individuals on very slight
grounds. But he was a good-hearted man.... Private circumstances, it
is said, contributed to sour his temper and to produce a peculiar
excitement which too frequently held its sway over him. Mr. Hazlitt
and Mr. Perry did not agree. Upon one occasion, to the great
annoyance of some of his colleagues, he preferred his wine with a
few friends to taking his share in reporting an important discussion
in the House of Commons. Added to this, he either did not understand
the art of reporting, or would not take the trouble to master it....
His original articles required to be carefully looked after, to weed
them of strong expressions.
Hazlitt's reputation grew, notwithstanding. In 1814 Jeffrey enlisted
him to write for The Edinburgh Review, and in 1815 he began to
contribute to Leigh Hunt's paper The Examiner. In February 1816 he
reviewed Schlegel's 'Lectures on Dramatic Literature' for the
Edinburgh, and this would seem to have started him on his Characters
of Shakespeare's Plays. Throughout 1816 he wrote at it sedulously.
The MS., when completed, was accepted by Mr. C. H. Reynell, of 21,
Piccadilly, the head of a printing establishment of old and high
standing; and it was agreed that 100 pounds should be paid to the author
for the entire copyright.... The volume was published by Mr. Hunter of
St. Paul's Churchyard; and the author was gratified by the prompt
insertion of a complimentary notice in the Edinburgh Review. The whole
edition went off in six weeks; and yet it was a half-guinea book.'
[Footnote: Memoirs of William Hazlitt, by W. Carew Hazlitt, 1887. Vol.
i, p. 228.]
The reader, who comes to it through this Introduction, will note two
points to qualify his appreciation of the book as a specimen of
Hazlitt's critical writing, and a third that helps to account for
its fortune in 1817. It was the work of a man in his thirty-eighth
year, and to that extent has maturity. But it was also his first
serious essay, after many false starts, in an art and in a style
which, later on, he brilliantly mastered. The subject is most
pleasantly handled, and with an infectious enthusiasm: the reader
feels all the while that his sympathy with Shakespeare is being
stimulated and his understanding promoted: but it scarcely yields
either the light or the music which Hazlitt communicates in his
later and more famous essays.
For the third point, Hazlitt had made enemies nor had ever been cautious
of making them: and these enemies were now the 'upper dog'. Indeed, they
always had been: but the fall of Napoleon, which almost broke his heart,
had set them in full cry, and they were not clement in their triumph. It
is not easy, even on the evidence before us, to realize that a number of
the finest spirits in this country, nursed in the hopes of the French
Revolution, kept their admiration of Napoleon, the hammer of old bad
monarchies, down to the end and beyond it: that Napier, for example,
historian of the war in the Peninsula and as gallant a soldier as ever
fought under Wellington, when--late in life, as he lay on his sofa
tortured by an old wound--news was brought him of Napoleon's death,
burst into a storm of weeping that would not be controlled. On Hazlitt,
bound up heart and soul in what he regarded as the cause of French and
European liberty and enlightenment, Waterloo, the fall of the Emperor,
the restoration of the Bourbons, fell as blows almost stupefying, and
his indignant temper charged Heaven with them as wrongs not only public
but personal to himself.
In the writing of the Characters he had found a partial drug for
despair. But his enemies, as soon as might be, took hold of the
anodyne. Like the Bourbons, they had learnt nothing and forgotten
nothing.
The Quarterly Review moved--for a quarterly--with something like
agility. A second edition of the book had been prepared, and was
selling briskly, when this Review launched one of its diatribes
against the work and its author.
Taylor and Hessey [the booksellers] told him subsequently that they
had sold nearly two editions in about three months, but after the
Quarterly review of them came out they never sold another copy. 'My
book,' he said, 'sold well--the first edition had gone off in six
weeks--till that review came out. I had just prepared a second
edition--such was called for--but then the Quarterly told the public
that I was a fool and a dunce, and more, that I was an evil disposed
person: and the public, supposing Gifford to know best, confessed
that it had been a great ass to be pleased where it ought not to be,
and the sale completely stopped.
The review, when examined, is seen to be a smart essay in detraction
with its arguments ad invidiam very deftly inserted. But as a piece
of criticism it misses even such points as might fairly have been
made against the book; as, for example, that it harps too
monotonously upon the tense string of enthusiasm. Hazlitt could not
have applied to this work the motto--'For I am nothing if not
critical'--which he chose for his View of the English Stage in 1818;
the Characters being anything but 'critical' in the sense there
connoted. Jeffrey noted this in the forefront of a sympathetic
article in the Edinburgh.
It is, in truth, rather an encomium on Shakespeare than a commentary
or a critique on him--and it is written more to show extraordinary
love than extraordinary knowledge of his productions.... The author
is not merely an admirer of our great dramatist, but an Idolater of
him; and openly professes his idolatry. We have ourselves too great
a leaning to the same superstition to blame him very much for his
error: and though we think, of course, that our own admiration is,
on the whole, more discriminating and judicious, there are not many
points on which, especially after reading his eloquent exposition of
them, we should be much inclined to disagree with him.
The book, as we have already intimated, is written less to tell the
reader what Mr. H. KNOWS about Shakespeare or his writings than what
he FEELS about them--and WHY he feels so--and thinks that all who
profess to love poetry should feel so likewise.... He seems pretty
generally, indeed, in a state of happy intoxication--and has
borrowed from his great original, not indeed the force or brilliancy
of his fancy, but something of its playfulness, and a large share of
his apparent joyousness and self-indulgence in its exercise. It is
evidently a great pleasure to him to be fully possessed with the
beauties of his author, and to follow the impulse of his
unrestrained eagerness to impress them upon his readers.
Upon this, Hazlitt, no doubt, would have commented, 'Well, and why
not? I choose to understand drama through my FEELINGS.' To surrender
to great art was, for him, and defnitely, a part of the critic's
function--' A genuine criticism should, as I take it, repeat the
colours, the light and shade, the soul and body of a work.' This
contention, for which Hazlitt fought all his life and fought
brilliantly, is familiar to us by this time as the gage flung to
didactic criticism by the 'impressionist', and in our day, in the
generation just closed or closing, with a Walter Pater or a Jules
Lemaitre for challenger, the betting has run on the impressionist.
But in 1817 Hazlitt had all the odds against him when he stood up
and accused the great Dr. Johnson of having made criticism 'a kind
of Procrustes' bed of genius, where he might cut down imagination to
matter-of-fact, regulate the passions according to reason, and
translate the whole into logical diagrams and rhetorical
declamation'.
Thus he says of Shakespeare's characters, in contradiction to what
Pope had observed, and to what every one else feels, that each
character is a species, instead of being an individual. He in fact
found the general species or DIDACTIC form in Shakespeare's
characters, which was all he sought or cared for; he did not find
the individual traits, or the DRAMATIC distinctions which
Shakespeare has engrafted on this general nature, because he felt no
interest in them.
Nothing is easier to prove than that in this world nobody ever
invented anything. So it may be proved that, Johnson having written
'Great thoughts are always general', Blake had countered him by
affirming (long before Hazlitt) that 'To generalize is to be an
idiot. To particularize is the great distinction of merit': even as
it may be demonstrable that Charles Lamb, in his charming personal
chat about the Elizabethan dramatists and his predilections among
them, was already putting into practice what he did not trouble to
theorize. But when it comes to setting out the theory, grasping the
worth of the principle, stating it and fighting for it, I think
Hazlitt may fairly claim first share in the credit.
He did not, when he wrote the following pages, know very much, even
about his subject. As his biographer says:
My grandfather came to town with very little book-knowledge.... He
had a fair stock of ideas.... But of the volumes which form the
furniture of a gentleman's library he was egregiously ignorant ...
Mr. Hazlitt's resources were emphatically internal; from his own
mind he drew sufficient for himself.
Now while it may be argued with plausibility, and even with truth,
that the first qualification of a critic--at any rate of a critic of
poetry--is, as Jeffrey puts the antithesis, to FEEL rather than to
KNOW; while to be delicately sensitive and sympathetic counts more
than to be well-informed; nevertheless learning remains respectable.
He who can assimilate it without pedantry (which is another word for
intellectual indigestion) actually improves and refines his feelings
while enlarging their scope and at the same time enlarging his
resources of comparison and illustration. Hazlitt, who had something
like a genius for felicitous, apposite quotation, and steadily
bettered it as he grew older, would certainly have said 'Yes' to
this. At all events learning impresses; it carries weight: and
therefore it has always seemed to me that he showed small tact, if
some modesty, by heaping whole pages of Schlegel into his own
preface.
For Schlegel [Footnote: Whose work, by the way, cries aloud for a
new and better English translation.] was not only a learned critic
but a great one: and this mass of him--cast with seeming
carelessness, just here, into the scales--does give the reader, as
with a jerk, the sensation that Hazlitt has, of his rashness,
invited that which suddenly throws him up in the air to kick the
beam: that he has provoked a comparison which exhibits his own
performance as clever but flimsy.
Nor is this impression removed by his admirer the late Mr. Ireland,
who claims for the Characters that, 'although it professes to be
dramatic criticism, it is in reality a discourse on the philosophy
of life and human nature, more suggestive than many approved
treatises expressly devoted to that subject'. Well, for the second
half of this pronouncement--constat. 'You see, my friend,' writes
Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, 'there is nothing so ridiculous
that it has not at some time been said by some philosopher.' But for
the first part, while a priori Mr. Ireland ought to be right--since
Hazlitt, as we have seen, came to literary criticism by the road of
philosophical writing--I confess to finding very little philosophy
in this book.
Over and above the gusto of the writing, which is infectious enough,
and the music of certain passages in which we foretaste the masterly
prose of Hazlitt's later Essays, I find in the book three merits
which, as I study it, more and more efface that first impression of
flimsiness.
(1) To begin with, Hazlitt had hold of the right end of the stick.
He really understood that Shakespeare was a dramatic craftsman,
studied him as such, worshipped him for his incomparable skill in
doing what he tried, all his life and all the time, to do. In these
days much merit must be allowed to a Shakespearian critic who takes
his author steadily as a dramatist and not as a philosopher, or a
propagandist, or a lawyer's clerk, or a disappointed lover, or for
his acquaintance with botany, politics, cyphers, Christian Science,
any of the thousand and one things that with their rival degrees of
intrinsic importance agree in being, for Shakespeare, nihil ad rem.
(2) Secondly, Hazlitt always treats Shakespeare as, in my opinion,
he deserves to be treated; that is, absolutely and as 'patrone and
not compare' among the Elizabethans. I harbour an ungracious doubt
that he may have done so in 1816-17 for the simple and sufficient
reason that he had less than a bowing acquaintance with the other
Elizabethan dramatists. But he made their acquaintance in due
course, and discussed them, yet never (so far as I recall) committed
the error of ranking them alongside Shakespeare. With all love for
the memory of Lamb, and with all respect for the memory of
Swinburne, I hold that these two in their generations, both soaked
in enjoyment of the Elizabethan style--an enjoyment derivative from
Shakespeare--did some disservice to criticism by classing them with
him in the light they borrow; whenas truly he differs from them in
kind and beyond any reach of degrees. One can no more estimate
Shakespeare's genius in comparison with this, that, or the other
man's of the sixteenth century, than Milton's in comparison with any
one's of the seventeenth. Some few men are absolute and can only be
judged absolutely.
(3) For the third merit--if the Characters be considered
historically--what seems flimsy in them is often a promise of what
has since been substantiated; what seems light and almost juvenile
in the composition of this man, aged thirty-nine, gives the scent on
which nowadays the main pack of students is pursuing. No one not a
fool can read Johnson's notes on Shakespeare without respect or fail
to turn to them again with an increased trust in his common-sense,
as no one not a fool can read Hazlitt without an equal sense that he
has the root of the matter, or of the spirit which is the matter.