1778-1830
THE titles of William Hazlitt’s first books bear witness to the ethic
spirit in which he began life. From his beloved father, an Irish
dissenting minister, he inherited his unworldliness, his obstinacy, his
love of inexpedient truth, and his interest in the emancipation and
well-being of his fellow-creatures. Bred in an air of seriousness and
integrity, the child of twelve announced by post that he had spent “a
very agreeable day” reading one hundred and sixty pages of Priestley,
and hearing two good sermons. A year later he appeared, under a Greek
signature, in _The Shrewsbury Chronicle_, protesting against sectarian
injustice; an infant herald in the great modern movement towards fair
play. The roll of the portentous periods must have made his father
weep for pride and diversion. William’s young head was full of moral
philosophy and jurisprudence, and he had what is the top of luxury
for one of his temperament: perfect license of mental growth. Alone
with his parents (one of whom was always a student and a recluse),
and for the most part without the school-fellows who are likely to
adjust the perilous effects of books, he became choked with theories,
and thought more of the needful repeal of the Test Act than of his
breakfast. He found his way at fourteen into the Unitarian College at
Hackney, but eventually broke from his traces, saving his fatherland
from the spectacle of a unique theologian. During the year 1795 he
saw the pictures at Burleigh House, and began to live. Desultory but
deep study, at home and near home, took up the time before his first
leisurely choice of a profession. His lonely broodings, his early
love for Miss Railton, his four enthusiastic months at the Louvre,
his silent friendship with Wordsworth and with Coleridge; the country
walks, the pages and prints, the glad tears of his youth,—these were
the fantastic tutors which formed him; nor had he ever much respect for
any other kind of training. The lesson he prized most was the lesson
straight from life and nature. He comments, tartly enough, on the
sophism that observation in idleness, or the growth of bodily skill and
social address, or the search for the secret of honorable power over
people, is not in any wise to be accounted as learning. Montaigne, who
was in Hazlitt’s ancestral line, was of this mind: “_Ce qu’on sçait
droictement, on en dispose sans regarder au patron, sans tourner les
yeulx vers son livre._” Hazlitt insists, too, that learned men are
but “the cisterns, not the fountain-heads, of knowledge.” He hated
the schoolmaster, and has said as witty things of him as Mr. Oscar
Wilde. Yet his little portrait-study of the mere book-worm, in _The
Conversation of Authors_, has a never-to-be-forgotten sweetness. His
mental nurture was serviceable; it was of his own choosing; it fitted
him for the work he had to do. Like Marcus Aurelius, he congratulated
himself that he did not squander his youth “chopping logic and scouring
the heavens.” Hazlitt once entered upon an _Inquiry whether the Fine
Arts are promoted by Academies_; the answer, from him, is readily
anticipated.
“If arts and schools reply,”
he might have added,—and it is a wonder that he did not,
“Give arts and schools the lie!”
Mr. Matthew Arnold made a famous essay on the same topic, and some
readers recollect distinctly that his verdict, for England, would be
in the affirmative, whereas it was no such matter. Now, no man can
conceive of Hazlitt presenting both sides of a case so impartially as
to be misunderstood, especially upon so vital a subject. He pastured,
he was not trained; and therefore he would have you and your children’s
children scoff at universities. Indeed, though the boy’s lack of
discipline told on him all through life, his reader regrets nothing
else which a university could have given him, except, perhaps, milder
manners. Hazlitt was perfectly aware that he had too little general
knowledge; but general knowledge he did not consider so good a tool for
his self-set task in life as a persistent, passionate study of one or
two subjects. Again, he is pleased to conjecture, with bluntness, that
if he had learned more he would have thought less. (Perhaps he was the
friend cited by Elia, who gave up reading to improve his originality!
He was certainly useful to Elia in delicate and curious ways: a whole
vein of rich eccentricity ready for that sweet philosopher’s working.)
Hear him pronouncing upon himself at the very end: “I have, then, given
proof of some talent and more honesty; if there is haste and want of
method, there is no common-place, nor a line that licks the dust. If
I do not appear to more advantage, I at least appear such as I am.”
Divorce that remark and the truth of it from Hazlitt, and there is
no Hazlitt left. He stood for individualism. He wrote from what was,
in the highest degree for his purpose, a full mind, and with that
blameless conscious superiority which a full mind must needs feel in
this empty world. His whole intellectual stand is taken on the positive
and concrete side of things. He has a fine barbaric cocksureness; he
dwells not with althoughs and neverthelesses, like Mr. Symonds and Mr.
Saintsbury. “I am not one of those,” he says, concerning Edmund Kean’s
first appearance in London, “who, when they see the sun breaking from
behind a cloud, stop to inquire whether it is the moon.” And he takes
enormous interest in his own promulgation, because it is inevitably
not only what he thinks, but what he has long thought. He delivers an
opinion with the air proper to a host who is master of a vineyard, and
can furnish name and date to every flagon he unseals.
None of Hazlitt’s energies went to waste: he earned his soul early, and
how proud he was of the possession! Retrospection became his forward
horizon. He was all aglow at the thought of that beatific yesterday;
in his every mood “the years that are fled knock at the door, and
enter.” He struggled no more thereafter, having fixed his beliefs and
found his voice. He saw no occasion to change. “As to myself,” he wrote
at fifty, referring to Lamb’s well-known “surfeits of admiration”
concerning some objects once adored, “as to myself, any one knows
where to have me!” He adds: “In matters of taste and feeling, one
proof that my conclusions have not been quite shallow or hasty is the
circumstance of their having been lasting. . . . This continuity of
impression is the only thing on which I pride myself.” A fine saying in
the _Boswell Redivivus_, attributed to Opie, is as clearly expressed
elsewhere by Hazlitt’s self: that a man in his lifetime can do but
one thing; that there is but one effort and one victory, and all the
rest is as machinery in motion. “What I write costs me nothing, but it
cost me a great deal twenty years ago. I have added little to my stock
since then, and taken little from it.” His sensations, latterly, were
“July shoots,” graftings on the old sap. It is his boast in almost his
final essay that his tenacious brain holds fast while the planets are
turning. He can look at a child’s kite in heaven, to the last, with the
eyes of a child: “It pulls at my heart.”
His conservative habit, however, seemed to teach him everything by
inference. In 1821, familiar with none of the elder dramatists save
Shakespeare, he borrowed their folios, and shut himself up for six
weeks at Winterslow Hut on Salisbury Plain. He returned to town steeped
in his theme, and with the beautiful and authoritative _Lectures_
written. Appreciation of the great Elizabethans is common enough now;
seventy years ago, propagated by Lamb’s _Specimens_, 1808, it was the
business only of adventurers and pioneers. Here is a critic indeed who,
without a suspicion of audacity, can arise as a stranger to arraign
the _Arcadia_, and “shake hands with Signor Orlando Friscobaldo as the
oldest acquaintance” he has! The thing, exceptional as it was, proves
that William Hazlitt knew his resources. His devoted friend Patmore
attributes his “unpremeditated art,” terse, profound, original, and
always moving at full speed, to two facts: “first, that he never, by
choice, wrote on any topic or question in which he did not, for some
reason or other, feel a deep personal interest; and, secondly, because
on all questions on which he did so feel, he had thought, meditated,
and pondered, in the silence and solitude of his own heart, for years
and years before he ever contemplated doing more than thinking of
them.” Unlike a distinguished historian, who, according to Horace
Walpole, “never understood anything until he had written of it,”
Hazlitt brought to his every task a mind violently made up, and a
vocation for special pleading which nothing could withstand.
Sure as he is, he means to be nobody’s hired guide: a resolve for
which the general reader cannot be too grateful. In wilful and mellow
study of what chance threw in his way his strength grew, and his
limitations with it. It is small wonder that he hated schoolmasters,
and the public which expected of him schoolmaster platitudes. He had
a pride of intellect not unlike Rousseau’s, and he seems to have had
ever in mind Rousseau’s cardinal declaration that if he were no better
than other men, he was at least different from them. Hazlitt defined
his own functions with proper haughtiness, in the amusing apology of
_Capacity and Genius_. “I was once applied to, in a delicate emergency,
to write an article on a difficult subject for an encyclopædia; and was
advised to take time, and give it a systematic and scientific form;
to avail myself of all the knowledge that was to be obtained upon the
subject, and arrange it with clearness and method. I made answer that,
as to the first, I _had_ taken time to do all that I ever pretended
to do, as I had thought incessantly on different matters for twenty
years of my life; that I had no particular knowledge of the subject
in question, and no head for arrangement; that the utmost I could do,
in such a case, would be, when a systematic and scientific article
was prepared, to write marginal notes upon it, to insert a remark or
illustration of my own (not to be found in former encyclopædias!) or to
suggest a better definition than had been offered in the text.”[58]
Such independence nobly became him, and none the less because it kept
him poor. But in the course of time, he had to work, and keep on
working, under wretched disadvantages. He had spurts of revolt, after
long experience of compulsory composition; his darling wish in 1822
(confided to his wife, of all persons) being that he “could marry some
woman with a good fortune, that he might not be under the necessity of
writing another line!”
There was in him absolutely nothing of the antiquary and the
scholar, as the modern world understands those most serviceable
gentlemen. He was a “surveyor,” as he said, erroneously, of Bacon.
He was continuously drawn into the byway, and ever in search of the
accidental, the occult; he lusted, like Sir Thomas Browne, to find the
great meanings of minor things. The “pompous big-wigs” of his day, as
Thackeray called them, hated his informality, his boldly novel methods,
his vivacity and enthusiasm. He had, within proscribed bounds, an
exquisite and affectionate curiosity, like that of the Renaissance.
“The invention of a fable is to me the most enviable exertion of human
genius: it is the discovery of a truth to which there is no clew, and
which, when once found out, can never be forgotten.” “If the world were
good for nothing else, it would be a fine subject for speculation.” It
is his deliberate dictum that it were “worth a life” to sit down by an
Italian wayside, and work out the reason why the Italian supremacy in
art has always been along the line of color, not along the line of form.
He depended so entirely upon his memory that those who knew him best
say that he never took notes, neither in gallery, library, nor theatre;
yet his inaccuracies are few and slight,[59] and he must have secured
by this habit a prodigious freedom and luxury in the act of writing.
He would rather stumble than walk according to rule; and he was so
pleasantly beguiled with some of his own images (that, for instance,
of immortality the bride of the youthful spirit, and of the procession
of camels seen across the distance of three thousand years) that he
reiterates them upon every fit occasion. He cites, twice and thrice,
the same passages from the Elizabethans. He is a masterly quoter, and
lingers like a suitor upon the borders of old poesy. His infallibility,
like the Pope’s, is of narrow scope and nicely defined. When he steps
beyond his accustomed tracks, which is seldom, his vagaries are
entertaining. You may account for his declaration that Thomas Warton’s
sonnets rank as the very best in the language, by reflecting that he
dealt not in sonnets and knew nothing of them; if he prefer _Hercules
Raging_ to any other Greek tragedy, it is collateral proof that he was
no wide-travelled Grecian, nor even Euripideian; when he gives his
distinguished preference to Shakespeare’s Helena, there is small need
of adding that Mr. Hazlitt, albeit with an affectionate friendship for
Mary Lamb, with a mother, a sister, a dynasty of sweethearts, and two
wives, was notoriously unlearned in women.[60]
The events of his life count for so little that they are hardly worth
recording. He was born into a high-principled and intelligent family,
at Mitre Lane, Maidstone, Kent, on the 10th of April, in the year 1778.
His infancy was passed there and in Ireland, his boyhood in New England
and in Shropshire. Prior to a long visit to Paris, where he made some
noble copies of Titian, he came in 1802 to Bloomsbury, where his
elder brother John, an advanced Liberal in politics and an excellent
miniature-painter, had a studio; and here he worked at art for several
joyous years, finally abandoning it for literature. The portraits he
painted, utterly lacking in grace, are fraught with power and meaning;
few of these are extant, thanks to the fading and cracking pigments
of the modern schools. The old Manchester woman in shadow, done in
1803, and the head of his father, dating from a twelvemonth later (two
things to which Hazlitt makes memorable reference in his essays),
are no longer distinguishable, save to a very patient eye, upon the
blackened canvases in his grandson’s possession. The picture of the
child Hartley Coleridge, begun at the Lakes in 1802, has perished
from the damp; that of Charles Lamb in the Venetian doublet survives
since 1804, in its serious and primitive browns,[61] as the best-known
example of an English artist not in the catalogues. Its historic value,
however, is not superior to that of two portraits of Hazlitt himself:
one a study in strong light and shade, with a wreath upon the head,
now very much time-eaten; and another representing him at about the
age of twenty-five, with a three-quarters front face looking over the
right shoulder, which appeals to the spectator like spoken truth. It
is all but void of the beauty characterizing the striking Bewick head
(especially as retouched and reproduced in Mr. Alexander Ireland’s
valuable book of 1889, which is a sort of Hazlitt anthology), and
characterizing, no less, John Hazlitt’s charming miniatures of William
at five and at thirteen; therefore it can deal in no self-flattery.
Fortunately, we have from the hand which knew him best the lank, odd,
reserved youth in whom great possibilities were brewing; thought and
will predominate in this portrait, and it expresses the sincere soul.
It would be idle to criticise the technique of a work disowned by its
author. Hazlitt had, as we know from much testimony, a most interesting
and perplexing face, with the magnificent brow almost belied by
shifting eyes, and the petulance and distrust of the mouth and chin;
but a face prepossessing on the whole from the clear marble of his
complexion,[62] remarkable in a land of ruddy cheeks. His lonely and
peculiar life lent him its own hue; the eager look of one indeed a
sufferer, but with the light full upon him of visions and of dreams:
“_Chi pallido si fece sotto l’ombra
Sì di Parnaso, o bevve in sua cisterna?_”
In 1798 Hazlitt had his immortal meeting at Wem with Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. He described himself at this period as “dumb, inarticulate,
helpless, like a worm by the wayside,” striving in vain to put on paper
the thoughts which oppressed him, shedding tears of vexation at his
inability, and feeling happy if in eight years he could write as many
pages. The abiding influence of his First Poet he has acknowledged
in an imperishable chapter. For a long while he still kept in “the
o’erdarkened ways” of Malthus and Tucker, or in the shadow, dear to
him, of Hobbes; but in 1817 the floodgates broke, the pure current
gushed out; and in the _Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays_ we have the
primal pledge of Hazlitt as we know him, “such as had never been before
him, such as will never be again.” From a “dumbness” and diffidence
extreme, he developed into the readiest of writers; his sudden pages,
year after year, transcribed in his slant large hand, went to the
printers rapidly and at first draft. The longer he used his dedicated
pen, the freer, the brighter, the serener it grew. In the fourteen or
fifteen of his books which deal with genius and the conduct of life,
there is, throughout, an indescribable unaffected zest, a self-same
and unwavering certitude of handling. Once he learned his trade, he
gave himself a large field and an easy rein. He never warmed towards
a subject chosen for him. His conversation was non-professional. He
considered a discussion as to the likelihood of the weather’s holding
up for to-morrow as “the end and privilege of a life of study.”
In London, as soon as he had abandoned painting, he became a
parliamentary reporter, and began to lecture on the English
philosophers and metaphysicians. He furnished his famous dramatic
criticisms to _The Morning Chronicle_, _The Champion_, _The Examiner_,
and _The Times_, and he acted later as home editor of _The Liberal_.
He married, on May-day of 1808, Miss Sarah Stoddart, who owned the
property near Salisbury where he afterwards spent melancholy years
alone. He fulfilled one human duty perfectly, for he loved and reared
his son. A most singular infatuation for the unlovely daughter of his
landlady; a second inauspicious marriage in 1824 with a Mrs. Isabella
Bridgwater; a prolonged journey on the Continent; the failure of
the publishers of his _Life of Napoleon_, which thus in his needful
days brought him no competence; a long illness heroically borne, and
a burial in the parish churchyard of St. Anne’s, under a headstone
raised, in a romantic remorse after an estrangement, by Charles Wells,
the author of _Joseph and his Brethren_,—these round out the meagre
details of Hazlitt’s life. He died in the arms of his son and of his
old friend Charles Lamb,[63] on the 18th of September, 1830, at 6 Frith
Street, Soho.
His domestic experiences, indeed, had been nearly as extraordinary as
Shelley’s. Sarah Walker, of No. 9 Southampton Buildings, is a sort of
burlesque counterpart of that other “spouse, sister, angel,” Emilia
Viviani. Nothing in literary history is much funnier than Mr. Hazlitt’s
kind assistance to Mrs. Hazlitt in securing her divorce, going to visit
her at Edinburgh, and supplying funds and advice over the teacups,
while the process was pending, unless it be Shelley’s ingenuous
invitation to his deserted young wife to come and dwell forever with
himself and Mary! The silent dramatic withdrawal of the second Mrs.
Hazlitt, the well-to-do relict of a colonel, who is henceforth
swallowed up in complete oblivion, is a feature whose like is missing
in Shelley’s romance. Events in Hazlitt’s path were not many, and his
inner calamities seem somehow subordinated to exterior workings. It is
not too much to say that to the French Revolution and the white heat of
hope it diffused over Europe he owed the renewal of the very impetus
within him: his moral probity, his mental vigor, and his physical
cheer. His measure of men and things was fixed by its standard. Other
enthusiasts wavered and went back to the flesh-pots of Egypt, but not
he. _Et cuncta terrarum subacta præter atrocem animum Catonis._ Towards
the grandest inconsistency this world has seen, he bore himself with a
consistency nothing less than touching. Everywhere, always, as a friend
who understood him well reminds a later generation, “Hazlitt was the
only man of letters in England who dared openly to stand by the French
Revolution, through good and evil report, and who had the magnanimity
never to turn his back upon its child and champion.” The ruin of
Napoleon, and the final news that “the hunter of greatness and of glory
was himself a shade,” meant more to him than the relinquishment of
his early and cherished art, or the fading of the long dream that his
heart “should find a heart to speak to.” On his last autumn afternoon,
he said what no one else would have dared to say for him: “I have had
a happy life.” Such it was, if we are to compute happiness by souls,
and not by the incidents which befall them. What were the things
which atoned to this reformer for the curse of a mind too sentient,
a heart never far from breaking? Over and above all amended and
amending abuses, the memory of the Rembrandts on the walls of Burleigh
House; the waving crest of the Tuderley woods; the sky, the turf, “a
winding road, and a three-hours’ march to dinner”; the impersonator of
Richard III. most to his mind, who lighted the stage, “and fought as
if drunk with wounds”; and the figure (how pastoral and tender!) of
the shepherd-boy bringing a nest for his young mistress’s sky-lark,
“not doomed to dip his wings in the dappled dawn.” What heresy to
the ancients would be this creed of poetic compensation! Montesquieu
adhered to it; but hardly from baffled and impassioned Hazlitt, dying
in his prime, would the avowal have been expected. Yet he had written
almost always, as Jeffrey saw, in “a happy intoxication.” Like the
sundial, in one of the most charming among his miscellaneous essays, he
kept count only of the hours of joy.
Hazlitt’s erratic levees among coffee-house wits and politicians, his
slack dress, his rich and fitful talk, his beautiful fierce head, go to
make up any accurate impression of the man. Mr. P. G. Patmore has drawn
him for us; a strange portrait from a steady hand: in certain moods
“an effigy of silence,” pale, anxious, emaciated, with an awful look
ever and anon, like the thunder-cloud in a clear heaven, sweeping over
his features with still fury.[64] He was so much at the mercy of an
excitable and extra-sensitive organization that an accidental failure
to return his salute upon the street, or, above all, the gaze of a
servant as he entered a house, plunged him into an excess of wrath and
misery. Full, at other times, of scrupulous good faith and generosity,
he would, under the stress of a fancied hurt, say and write malicious
things about those he most honored. He must have been a general thorn
in the flesh, for he had no tact whatever. “I love Henry,” said one
of Thoreau’s friends, “but I cannot like him.” Shy, splenetic, with
Dryden’s “down look,” readier to give than to exchange, Hazlitt was
a riddle to strangers’ eyes. His deep voice seemed at variance with
his gliding step and his glance, bright but sullen; his hand felt
as if it were the limp, cold fin of a fish, and was an unlooked-for
accompaniment to the fiery soul warring everywhere with darkness, and
drenched in altruism. His habit of excessive tea-drinking, like Dr.
Johnson’s, was to keep down sad thoughts. For sixteen years before he
died, from the day on which he formed his resolution, Hazlitt never
touched spirits of any kind. Profuse of money when he had it, he lacked
heart, says Mr. Patmore, to live well. Wherever he dwelt there was
what Carlyle, in Hunt’s case, called “tinkerdom”; his marriage, and
his residence under the august roof which had been Milton’s,[65] did
not mend matters for him. He covered the walls and mantel-pieces of
London landladies, after the fashion of the French bohemian painters,
with samples of his noblest style; and the savor of yesterday’s potions
of strong tea exhaled into their curtains. Never was there, despite
his confessional attitude, so non-communicative a soul. He never
corresponded with anybody; he never would walk arm in arm with anybody;
he never, perhaps from horror of the “patron” bogie, dedicated a book
to anybody. De Quincey knew a man warmly disposed towards Hazlitt
who learned to shudder and dread daggers when poor Hazlitt, with a
gesture habitual to him, thrust his right hand between the buttons
of his waistcoat! And he once cheerfully requested of a cheerful
colleague: “Write a character of me for the next number. I want to
know why everybody has such a dislike to me.” As a social factor he
was something atrocious.[66] The most humane of men, his suspicions
and shyings cut him off completely from humanity. The base war waged
upon him by the great Tory magazines could not have affected him so
deeply that it changed his demeanor towards his fellows; for he had the
mettle of a paladin, which no invective could break. But, alas! he had
“the canker at the heart,” which is no fosterer of “the rose upon the
cheek.”
With all this fever and heaviness in Hazlitt’s blood, he had a hearty
laugh, musical to hear. Haydon, in his exaggerated manner, reports an
uncharitable conversation held with him once on the subject of Leigh
Hunt in Italy, during which the two misconstruing critics, in their
great glee, “made more noise than all the coaches, wagons, and carts
outside in Piccadilly.” His smile was singularly grave and sweet.
Mrs. Shelley wrote, on coming back to England, in her widowhood, and
finding him much changed: “His smile brought tears to my eyes; it
was like melancholy sunlight on a ruin.” A man who sincerely laughs
and smiles is somewhat less than half a cynic. If there be any alive
at this late hour who questions the genuineness of Hazlitt’s high
spirits, he may be referred to the essay _On Going a Journey_, with
the pæan about “the gentleman in the parlor,” in the finest emulation
of Cowley; but chiefly and constantly to _The Fight_, with its
lingering De-Foe-like details, sprinkled, not in the least ironically,
with gold-dust of Chaucer and the later poets: the rich-ringing,
unique _Fight_,[67] predecessor of Borrow’s famous burst about the
“all tremendous bruisers” of _Lavengro_; and not to be matched in our
peaceful literature save with the eulogy and epitaph of Jack Cavanagh,
by the same hand. Divers hints have been circulated, within sixty-odd
years, that Mr. Hazlitt was a timid person, also that he had no turn
for jokes. These ingenious calumnies may be trusted to meet the fate of
the Irish pagan fairies, small enough at the start, whose punishment
it is to dwindle ever and ever away, and point a moral to succeeding
generations. Hazlitt’s paradoxes are not of malice prepense, but are
the ebullitions both of pure fun and of the truest philosophy. “The
only way to be reconciled with old friends is to part with them for
good.” “Goldsmith had the satisfaction of good-naturedly relieving
the necessities of others, and of being harassed to death with his
own.” “Captain Burney had you at an advantage by never understanding
you.” Scattered mention of “people who live on their own estates and
on other people’s ideas”; of Jeremy Bentham, who had been translated
into French, “when it was the greatest pity in the world that he
had not been translated into English”; of the Coleridge of prose,
one of whose prefaces is “a masterpiece of its kind, having neither
beginning, middle, nor end”; and even of the “singular animal,”
John Bull himself, since “being the beast he is has made a man of
him”:—these are no ill shots at the sarcastic. Congreve, with all his
quicksilver wit, could not outgo Hazlitt on Thieves, _videlicet_: “Even
a highwayman, in the way of trade, may blow out your brains; but if he
uses foul language at the same time, I should say he was no gentleman!”
Hazlitt’s sense of humor has quality, if not quantity. How was it this
same sense of humor, this fine-grained reticence, which wrote, nay,
printed, in 1823, the piteous and ludicrous canticle of the goddess
Sarah?
Hazlitt was a great pedestrian from his boyhood on, and, like
Goldsmith, a fair hand at the game of fives, which he played by the
day. Wherever he was, his pocket bulged with a book. It gave him keen
pleasure to set down the hour, the place, the mood, and the weather
of various ecstatic first readings. He became acquainted with _Love
for Love_ in a low wainscoted tavern parlor between Farnham and Alton,
looking out upon a garden of larkspur, with a portrait of Charles
II. crowning the chimney-piece; in his father’s house he fell across
_Tom Jones_, “a child’s Tom Jones, an innocent creature”; he bought
Milton and Burke at Shrewsbury, on the march; he looked up from Mrs.
Inchbald’s _Simple Story_, when its pathos grew too poignant, to
find “a summer shower dropping manna” on his head, and “an old crazy
hand-organ playing _Robin Adair_.” And on April 10, 1798, his twentieth
birthday, he sat down to a volume of the _New Eloïse_, a book which
kept its hold upon him, “at the inn of Llangollen, over a bottle of
sherry and a cold chicken!” The frank epicurean catalogue, as of equal
spiritual and corporeal delight, is worth notice. Do we not know that
Mr. Hazlitt had wood-partridges for supper, in his middle age, at
the Golden Cross, in Rastadt, near Mayence? Yet he failed to record
what book lay by his plate, and distracted his attention from her
who had been a widow, and who was already planning her respectable
exit from his society. Evidence that he was an eater of taste is to
be accumulated eagerly by his partisans, for eating is one of many
engaging human characteristics which establish him as lovable—that is,
posthumously lovable. Barry Cornwall was so jealously tender of his
memory that he would have forbidden any one to write of Hazlitt who
had not known him. As he did not warm miscellaneously to everybody,
it followed that his friends were few. We do not forget which one
of these, during their only difference, thought “to go to his grave
without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion.”[68]
Hazlitt would have set himself down, by choice, as a metaphysician.
Up to the time when his _Life of Napoleon_ was well in hand, he used
to affirm that the anonymous _Principles of Human Action_, which he
completed at twenty, in the literary style of the azoic age, was his
best work. He was rather proud, too, of the _Characteristics in the
Manner of Rochefoucauld’s Maxims_, his one dreary book, which contains
a couple of inductions worthy of Pascal, some sophistries and hollow
cynicisms not native to Hazlitt’s brain, and a vast number of the very
professorisms which he scouted. Maxims, indeed, are sown broadcast
over his pages, which Alison the historian classified as better to
quote than to read; but they gain by being incidental, and embedded in
the body of his fancies. His vein of original thought comes nowhere
so perfectly into play as in its application to affairs. His pen is
anything but abstruse,
“Housed in a dream, at distance from the kind.”
He did not recognize that to display his highest power he needed deeds
and men, and their tangible outcome to be criticised. His preferences
were altogether wed to the past. In his essay on _Envy_ he excuses,
with a wise reflection, his comparative indifference to living writers:
“We try to stifle the sense we have of their merit, not because they
are new or modern, but because we are not sure they will ever be old.”
Or, as Professor Wilson said of him, with tardy but winning kindness:
“In short, if you want Hazlitt’s praise, you must die for it . . .
and it is almost worth dying for.”[69] Yet what an eye he has for the
idiosyncrasy at his elbow, be it in the individual or in the race!
Every contemporary of his, every painter, author, actor, and statesman
of whom he cared to write at all, stands forth under his touch in
delicate and aggressive outlines from which a wind seems to blow
back the mortal draperies, like a figure in a triumphal procession
of Mantegna’s. His manner is essentially pictorial. His sketches of
Cobbett and of Northcote, in _The Spirit of Obligations_; of Johnson,
in _The Periodical Essayists_; of Sir Thomas Browne and Bishop Taylor;
and of Coleridge and Lamb, drawn more than once, with great power,
from the life, will never be excelled. His philippic on _The Spirit
of Monarchy_, or that on _The Regal Character_, is a pure vitriol
flame, to scorch the necks of princes. His comments upon English
and Continental types, if gathered from the necessarily promiscuous
_Notes of a Journey_, would make a most diverting and illuminating
duodecimo; the indictment of the French is especially masterly. _The
Spirit of the Age_, _The Plain Speaker_, the Northcote book, _The
English Comic Writers_, and the noble and little-read _Political
Essays_ are packed with vital personalities. So is _The Characters
of Shakespeare’s Plays_, full of beautiful metaphysical analysis, as
well as of vivifying criticism. This lavish accumulation of material,
never put to use according to modern methods, must appear to some as a
collection of interest awaiting the broom and the hanging committee;
but until the end of time it will be a place of delight for the scholar
and the lover of virtue. Hazlitt’s genius for assortment and sense of
relative values were not developed; he was in no wise a constructive
critic. Mr. R. H. Hutton complained once of Mr. Matthew Arnold that he
ranked his men, but did not portray them. Now Hazlitt, whose search is
all for character, irrespective of the historic position, falls into
the opposite extreme: he portrays his men, but does not rank them. An
attempt to break up into single file the merit which, with him, marches
abreast, he would look upon as a bit of arrogance and rank impiety.
He has nothing to say of the quality which stamps Bavius as the best
elegiac poet between Gray and Tennyson, or of the irony of Mævius,
which would place his dramas, were it not for their loose construction,
next to Molière’s. He does not care a fig for comparisons; or, rather,
he wishes them left to the gods, and to his perceiving reader.
Meanwhile, one face after another shines clear upon the wall, and
breathes enchantment on a passer-by.
It is very difficult to be severe with William Hazlitt, who was
towards himself so outspokenly severe. Every stricture upon him, as
well as every defence to be urged for it, may be taken out of his own
mouth. Even the _Liber Amoris_, as must always have been discerned,
demonstrates not only his weakness, but his essential uprightness
and innocence. His vindication is written large in _Depth and
Superficiality_, in _The Pleasures of Hating_, in _The Disadvantage of
Intellectual Superiority_. His “true Hamlet” is as faithful a sketch
of the author as is Newman’s celebrated definition of a gentleman.
Hazlitt says a tender word for Dr. Johnson’s prejudices which covers
and explains many of his own. Who can call him irritable, recalling
the splendid exposition of merely selfish content, in the opening
paragraphs of the essay on _Good Nature_? Yet, with all his lofty and
endearing qualities, he had a warped and soured mind, a constitutional
disability to find pleasure in persons or in conditions which were
quiescent. He would have every one as mettlesome and gloomily
vigilant as he was himself. His perfectly proper apostrophe to the
lazy Coleridge at Highgate to “start up in his promised likeness,
and shake the pillared rottenness of the world,” is somewhat comic.
Hazlitt’s nerves never lost their tension; to the last hour of his
last sickness he was ready for a bout. Much of his personal grief
arose from his refusal to respect facts as facts, or to recognize in
existing evil, including the calamitous perfumed figure of Turveydrop
gloriously reigning, what Vernon Lee calls “part of the mechanism
for producing good.” He bit at the quietist in a hundred ways, and
with choice venom. “There are persons who are never very far from the
truth, because the slowness of their faculties will not suffer them to
make much progress in error. These are ‘persons of great judgment.’
The scales of the mind are pretty sure to remain even when there is
nothing in them.” He was a natural snarler at sunshiny people with full
pockets and feudal ideas, like Sir Walter, who got along with the ogre
What Is, and even asked him to dine. In fact, William Hazlitt hated
a great many things with the utmost enthusiasm, and he was impolite
enough to say so, in and out of season. The Established Church and all
its tenets and traditions were only less monstrous in his eyes than
legendry, mediævalism, and “the shoal of friars.” He knew, from actual
experience, the loyalty and purity of the early Unitarians, and he
praised these with all his heart and tongue. As far as one can make
out, he had not the remotest conception of the breadth and texture
of Christianity as a whole. His theory, for he practised no creed
except the cheap one of universal dissent, was a faint-colored local
Puritanism; and that, as the Merry Monarch (an excellent judge of what
was not what!) reminds us, is “no religion for a gentleman.” But more
than this, Hazlitt had no apprehension of the supernatural in anything;
he was very unspiritual. It is curious to see how he sidles away from
the finer English creatures whom he had to handle. Sidney almost repels
him, and he dismisses Shelley, on one occasion, with an inadequate but
apt allusion to the “hectic flutter” of his verse. Living in a level
country with no outlook upon eternity, and no deep insight into the
human past, nor fully understanding those who had wider vision and more
instructed utterance than his own, it follows that beside such men as
those just named, then as now, Hazlitt has a crude villageous mien. He
had his refined sophistications; chief among them was a surpassing love
of natural beauty. But he relished, on the whole, the beef and beer of
life. The normal was what he wrote of with “gusto”; a word he never
tired of using, and which one must use in speaking of himself. While he
is an admirable arbiter of what is or is not truly intellectual, he is
all at sea when he has to discuss, for instance, emotional poetry, or,
what is yet more difficult to him, poetry purely poetic; its inevitable
touch of the fantastic, the mystical, puts his wits completely to rout.
The stern, lopsided, and magnificent article on Shelley’s _Posthumous
Poems_ in the _Edinburgh Review_ for July, 1824, and his impatience
with Coleridge at his best, perfectly exemplify this limitation.
Despite his partiality for Rousseau and certain of the early Italian
painters, most of the men whose genius he seizes upon and exalts with
unerring success are the men who display, along with enormous acumen
and power, nothing which betokens the morbid and exquisite thing we
have learned to call modern culture. Hazlitt, fortunately for us,
was not over-civilized, had no cinque-cento instincts, and would
have groaned aloud over such hedonism as Mr. Pater’s. Homespun and
manly as he is, who can help feeling that his was but an imperfect
development? that, as Mr. Arnold said so paternally of Byron, “he
did not know enough”? He lacked both mental discipline and moral
governance. He has the wayward and appealing Celtic utterance; the
manner made of largeness and simpleness, all shot and interwoven with
the hues of romanticism. Prodigal that he is, he cannot stoop to build
up his golden piecemeal, or to clinch his generalizations, thrown down
loosely, side by side. Esoteric thrift is not in him, nor the spirit of
co-operation, nor the sweetest of artistic anxieties, that of marching
in line. He has a knight-errant pen; his glad and chivalrous services
to literature resemble those of an outlaw to the commonwealth. Despite
his personal value, he stands detached; he is episodic, and represents
nothing.
“The earth hath bubbles as the water hath,
And this is of them.”
He misses the white station of a classic; for the classics have
equipoise, and inter-relationship. But it is great cause for
thankfulness that William Hazlitt cannot be made other than he is. Time
can not take away his height and his red-gold garments, bestow on him
the “smoother head of hair” which Lamb prayed for, and shrivel him into
one of several very wise and weary _précieux_. No: he stalks apart in
state, the splendid Pasha of English letters.
Hazlitt boasts, and permissibly, of genuine disinterestedness: “If you
wish to see me perfectly calm,” he remarks somewhere, “cheat me in a
bargain, or tread on my toes.”[70] But he cannot promise the same
behavior for a sophism repeated in his presence, or a truth repelled.
In his sixth year he had been taken, with his brother and sister, to
America, and he says that he never afterwards got out of his mouth the
delicious tang of a frost-bitten New England barberry. It is tolerably
sure that the blowy and sunny atmosphere of the young republic of
1783-7 got into him also. Liberalism was his birthright. He flourishes
his fighting colors; he trembles with eagerness to break a lance with
the arch-enemies; he is a champion, from his cradle, against class
privilege, of slaves who know not what they are, nor how to wish for
liberty. But he cannot do all this in the laughing Horatian way; he
cannot keep cool; he cannot mind his object. If he could, he would be
the white devil of debate. There are times when he speaks, as does
Dr. Johnson, out of all reason, because aware of the obstinacy and the
bad faith of his hearers. Morals are too much in his mind, and, after
their wont, they spoil his manners. Like the Caroline Platonist, Henry
More, he “has to cut his way through a crowd of thoughts as through a
wood.” His temper breaks like a rocket, in little lurid smoking stars,
over every ninth page; he lays about him at random; he raises a dust of
side-issues. Hazlitt sometimes reminds one of Burke himself gone off
at half-cock. He will not step circumspectly from light to light, from
security to security. Some of his very best essays, as has been noted,
have either no particular subject, or fail to follow the one they have.
Nor is he any the less attractive if he be heated, if he be swearing
“By the blood so basely shed
Of the pride of Norfolk’s line,”
or scornfully settling accounts of his own with the asinine public.
When he is not driven about by his moods, Hazlitt is set upon his fact
alone; which he thinks is the sole concern of a prose-writer. Grace and
force are collateral affairs. “In seeking for truth,” he says proudly,
in words fit to be the epitome of his career, “I sometimes found
beauty.”
_The Edinburgh Review_, in an article written while Hazlitt was in the
full of his activity, summed up his shortcomings. “There are no great
leading principles of taste to give singleness to his aims, nor any
central points in his mind around which his feelings may revolve and
his imaginations cluster. There is no sufficient distinction between
his intellectual and his imaginative faculties. He confounds the truths
of imagination with those of fact, the processes of argument with
those of feeling, the immunities of intellect with those of virtue.”
Here is an admirable arraignment, which goes to the heart of the
matter. Hazlitt himself corroborates it in a confession of gallant
directness: “I say what I think; I think what I feel.” It is this fatal
confusion which makes his course now rapid and clear, anon clogged with
vagaries, as if his rudder had run into a mesh of sea-weed; it is
this which deflects his judgments, and leads him, in the shrewd phrase
of a modern critic, to praise the right things for the wrong reasons.
Hazlitt’s prejudices are very instructive, even while he bewails
Landor’s or Cobbett’s, and tells you, as it were, with a tear in his
eye, when he has done berating the French, that, after all, they are
Catholics; and as for manners, “Catholics must be allowed to carry it,
all over the world!” His exquisite treatment of Northcote, a winning
old sharper for whom he cared nothing, is all due to his looking like
a Titian portrait. So with the great Duke: Hazlitt hated the sight
of him, “as much for his pasteboard visor of a face as for anything
else.” One of his justifications for adoring Napoleon was, that at a
levee a young English officer named Lovelace drew from him an endearing
recognition: “I perceive, sir, that you bear the name of the hero of
Richardson’s romance.” If you look like a Titian portrait, if you read
and remember Richardson, you may trust a certain author, who knows a
distinction when he sees it, to set you up for the idol of posterity.
Hazlitt thought Mr. Wordsworth’s long and immobile countenance
resembled that of a horse; and it is not impossible that this
conviction, twin-born with that other that Mr. Wordsworth was a mighty
poet, is responsible for various gibes at the august contemporary whose
memory owes so much to his pen in other moods.
He is the most ingenuous and agreeable egoist we have had since the
seventeenth-century men. It must be remembered how little he was in
touch outwardly with social and civic affairs; how he was content to
be the always young looker-on. There was nothing for him to do but
fall back, under given conditions, upon his own capacious entity. The
automaton called William Hazlitt is to him a toy made to his hand,
to be reached without effort; the digest of all his study and the
applicable test of all his assumptions. He knew himself; he could, and
did, with decorum, approve or chastise himself in open court. “His
life was of humanity the sphere.” His “I” has a strong constituency
in the other twenty-five initials. In this sense, and in our current
cant, Hazlitt is nothing if not subjective, super-personal. His sort of
sentimentalism is an anomaly in Northern literature, even in the age
when nearly every literary Englishman of note was variously engaged
in baring his breast. Whether he would carp or sigh, he will still
hold you by the button, as he held host and guest, master and valet,
to pour into their adjacent ears the mad extravagances of the _Liber
Amoris_. He gets a little tired at his desk, after battling for hours
with the slow and stupid in behalf of the beauty ever-living; he wants
fresh air and a reverie; he must digress or die. And from abstractions
bardic as Carlyle’s, he runs gladly to his own approved self. This very
circumstance, which lends Hazlitt’s pages their curious blur and stain,
is the same which stamps his individuality, and gives those who are
drawn towards him at all an unspeakably hearty relish for his company.
What shall we call it?—the habit, not maudlin in him, of speaking out,
of draining his well of emotion for the benefit of the elect; nay, even
of delicate lyric whimperings, beside which
“Poore Petrarch’s long-deceasèd woes”
take on a tinsel glamour. As the dancing-girl carries her jewels,
every one in sight as she moves, so our “Faustus, that was wont to
make the schools ring with _Sic probo_,” steps into the forum jingling
and twinkling with personalia. He is quite aware of the figure he
may cut: he does not stumble into an intimacy with you because he is
absent-minded, or because he is liable to an attack of affectation. He
is as conscious as Poussin’s giants, whom he once described as “seated
on the tops of craggy mountains, playing idly on their Pan’s pipes, and
knowing the beginning and the end of their own story.” Many sentences
of his, from their structure, might be attributed to Coleridge, the
single person from whom Hazlitt admits to have learned anything;[71]
but there is no mistaking his _note émue_: that is as obvious as the
syncopations in a Scotch tune, or the long eyes of Orcagna’s saints.
He wishes you to know, at every breathing-space, “how ill’s all here
about my heart; but ’tis no matter.” Laying by or taking up an old
print or folio, he loosens some fond confidence to that surprised
novice, the common reader. Like Shelley here, as in a few other
affectionate absurdities, the prince of prose, turning from his proper
affairs, assures you that he, too, is human, hoping, unhappy; he also
has lived in Arcadia. It is in such irrelevancies that he is fully
himself, Hazlitt freed, Hazlitt autobiographic, “his chariot-wheels
hot by driving fast.”[72] Who can forget the parentheses in his advices
to his little son, about the scholar having neither mate nor fellow,
and the god of love clapping his wings upon the river-bank to mock him
as he passes by? Or the noble and moving passage in _The Pleasures of
Painting_, beginning with “My father was willing to sit as long as I
pleased,” and ending with the longing for the revolution of the great
Platonic year, that those times might come over again! He freshens with
his own childhood the garden of larkspur and mignonette at Walworth,
and “the rich notes of the thrush that startle the ear of winter . . .
dear in themselves, and dearer for the sake of what is departed.” You
care not so much for the placid stream by Peterborough as for his own
wistful pilgrimage to the nigh farmhouse gate, where the ten-year-old
Grace Loftus (his much-beloved mother, who survived him) used to gaze
upon the setting sun. And in a choric outburst of praise for Mrs.
Siddons, the splendor seems to culminate less in “her majestic form
rising up against misfortune, an antagonist power to it” (what a truly
Shakespearean breadth is in that description!); less in the sight of
her name on the play-bill, “drawing after it a long trail of Eastern
glory, a joy and felicity unutterable,” than in the widening dream of
the happy lad in the pit, in his sovereign vision “of waning time, of
Persian thrones and them that sat on them”; in the human life which
appeared to him, of a sudden, “far from indifferent,” and in his
“overwhelming and drowning flood of tears.” He can beautify the evening
star itself, this innovator, who records that after a tranced and
busy day at the easel, the day of Austerlitz, he watched it set over
a poor man’s cottage with other thoughts and feelings than he shall
ever have again. There is nothing of _le moi haïssable_ in all this. It
is deliberate naturalism; the rebellion against didactics and “tall
talk,” the milestone of a return, parallel with that of Wordsworth,
to the fearless contemplation of plain and near things. But in a
professing logician, is it not somewhat peculiar? When has even a poet
so centred the universe in his own heart, without offence?
Hazlitt threw away his brush, as a heroic measure, because he foresaw
but a middling success. Many canvases he cut into shreds, in a fury
of dissatisfaction with himself. Northcote, however, thought his lack
of patience had spoiled a great painter. He was too full of worship
of the masters to make an attentive artisan. The sacrifice, like all
his sacrifices, great or small, left nothing behind but sweetness,
the unclouded love of excellence, and the capacity of rejoicing at
another’s attaining whatever he had missed. But the sense of disparity
between supreme intellectual achievement and that which is only
partial and relative, albeit of equal purity, followed him like a
frenzy. Comparison is yet more difficult in literature than in art,
and Hazlitt could take some satisfaction in the results of his second
ardor. He felt his power most, perhaps, as a critic of the theatre.
English actors owe him an incalculable debt, and their best spirits
are not unmindful of it. He was reasonably assured of the duration and
increase of his fame. Has he not, in one of his headstrong digressions,
called the thoughts in his _Table-Talk_ “founded as rock, free as
air, the tone like an Italian picture?” Even there, however, the
faint-heartedness natural to every true artist troubled him. He went
home in despair from the spectacle of the Indian juggler, “in his
white dress and tightened turban,” tossing the four brass balls. “To
make them revolve round him at certain intervals, like the planets in
their spheres, to make them chase one another like sparkles of fire, or
shoot up like flowers or meteors, to throw them behind his back, and
twine them round his neck like ribbons or like serpents; to do what
appears an impossibility, and to do it with all the ease, the grace,
the carelessness imaginable; to laugh at, to play with the glittering
mockeries, to follow them with his eye as if he could fascinate them
with its lambent fire, or as if he had only to see that they kept time
to the music on the stage—there is something in all this which he who
does not admire may be quite sure he never really admired anything in
the whole course of his life. It is skill surmounting difficulty, and
beauty triumphing over skill. . . . It makes me ashamed of myself. I
ask what there is that I can do as well as this? Nothing.” A third
person must give another answer. The whole passage offers a very
exquisite parallel; for in just such a daring, varied, and magical
way can William Hazlitt write. The astounding result, “which costs
nothing,” is founded, in each case, upon the toil of a lifetime.
Hazlitt’s style is an incredible thing. It is not, like Lamb’s, of one
warp and woof. It soars to the rhetorical sublime, and drops to hard
Saxon slang. It is for all the world, and not only for specialists. Its
range and change incorporate the utmost of many men. The trenchant
sweep, the simplicity and point of Newman at his best, are matched
by the pages on _Cobbett_, on _Fox_, and _On the Regal Character_;
and there is, to choose but one opposite instance, in the paper _On
the Unconsciousness of Genius_, touching Correggio, a fragment of
pure eloquence of a very ornate sort, whose onward bound, glow, and
volley can give Mr. Swinburne’s _Essays and Studies_ a look as of
sails waiting for the wind. The same hand which fills a brief with
epic cadences and invocations overwrought, throws down, often without
an adjective, sentence after sentence of ringing steel: “Fashion is
gentility running away from vulgarity, and afraid of being overtaken
by it.” “It is not the omission of individual circumstance, but the
omission of general truth, which constitutes the little, the deformed,
and the short-lived in art.” The man’s large voice in these aphorisms
is Hazlitt’s unmistakably. If it be not as novel to this generation as
if he were but just entering the lists of authorship, it is because his
fecundating mind has been long enriching at second-hand the libraries
of the English world. He comes forth, like another outrider, Rossetti,
so far behind his heralds and disciples, that his mannered utterance
seems familiar, and an echo of theirs. For it may be said at last,
thanks to the numerous reprints of the last seven years, and thanks
to a few competent critics, whom Mr. Stevenson leads, that Hazlitt’s
robust work is in a fair way to be known and appraised, by a public
which is a little less unworthy of him than his own. His method is
entirely unscientific, and therefore archaic. If we can profit no
longer by him, we can get out of him cheer and delight: and these
profit unto immortality. Meanwhile, what mere “maker of beautiful
English” shall be pitted against him there where he sits, the despair
of a generation of experts, continually tossing the four brass balls?
It has been said often by shallow reviewers, and is said sometimes
still, that Hazlitt’s style aims at effect; as if an effect must not
be won, without aiming, by a “born man of letters,” as Mr. Saintsbury
described him, “who could not help turning into literature everything
he touched.”[73] The “effect,” under given conditions, is manifest,
unavoidable. Once let Hazlitt speak, as he speaks ever, in the warmth
of conviction, and what an intoxicating music begins!—wild as that of
the gypsies, and with the same magnet-touch on the sober senses: enough
to subvert all “criticism and idle distinction,” and to bring back
those Theban times when the force of a sound, rather than masons and
surveyors, sent the very walls waltzing into their places.
In the face of diction so joyously clear as his, so sumptuous and
splendid, it is well to endorse Mr. Ruskin, that “no right style
was ever founded save out of a sincere heart.” It can never be
said of William Hazlitt, as Dean Trench well said of those other
“great stylists,” Landor and De Quincey, that he had a lack of moral
earnestness. What he was determined to impress upon his reader, during
the quarter-century while he held a pen, was not that he was knowing,
not that he was worthy of the renown and fortune which passed him by,
but only that he had rectitude and a consuming passion for good. He
declares aloud that his escutcheon has no bar-sinister: he has not
sold himself; he has spoken truth in and out of season; he has honored
the excellent at his own risk and cost; he has fought for a principle
and been slain for it, from his youth up. His sole boast is proven.
In a far deeper sense than Leigh Hunt, for whom he forged the lovely
compliment, he was “the visionary in humanity, the fool of virtue,” and
the captain of those who stood fast, in a hostile day, for ignored and
eternal ideals. The best thing to be said of him, the thing for which,
in Haydon’s phrase, “everybody must love him,” is that he himself loved
justice and hated iniquity. He shared the groaning of the spirit
after mortal welfare with Swift and Fielding, with Shelley and Matthew
Arnold, with Carlyle and Ruskin; he was corroded with cares and desires
not his own. Beside this intense devotedness, what personal flaw will
ultimately show? The host who figure in the Roman martyrology hang all
their claim upon the fact of martyrdom, and, according to canon law,
need not have been saints in their lifetime at all. So with such souls
as his: in the teeth of a thousand acknowledged imperfections in life
or in art, they remain our exemplars. Let them do what they will, at
some one stroke they dignify this earth. It is not Hazlitt, “the born
man of letters” alone, but Hazlitt the born humanist, who bequeaths us,
from his England of coarse misconception and abuse, a memory like a
loadstar, and a name which is a toast to be drunk standing.