[58] The article on _The Fine Arts_ in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ is
signed “W. H.”
[59] Mrs. Hazlitt the first, it would appear, undertook to verify
her husband’s quotations for him. His favorite metaphor, “Like the
tide which flows on to the Propontic, and knows no ebb,” must have
passed many times under her eye. Any reference to Othello himself, in
the great scene of Act III., would have shown four lines for William
Hazlitt’s explicit one.
[60] Some of Hazlitt’s comments on women are full of unconscious humor.
In _Great and Little Things_ he admits being snubbed by the fair, and
adds with grandiloquence: “I took a pride in my disgrace, and concluded
that I had elsewhere my inheritance!”
[61] In the National Portrait Gallery, London.
[62] _Blackwood’s_, in the charming fashion of the time, repeatedly
refers to Hazlitt’s “pimples”; and Byron credited and supplemented the
allegation. Hazlitt himself says somewhere “that to lay a thing to
a person’s charge from which he is perfectly free, shows spirit and
invention!” The calumny is not worth mention, except as a fair specimen
of the journalistic methods against which literary men had to contend
some eighty years ago.
[63] Lamb had been his groomsman twenty-two years before, at the Church
of St. Andrew, Holborn, “and like to have been turned out several times
during the ceremony; anything awful makes me laugh!” as he confessed in
a letter to Southey in 1815.
[64] Orrery had seen this same bitter indignation overwhelm Swift at
times, “so that it is scarcely possible for human features to carry in
them more terror and austerity.”
[65] At 19 York Street, Westminster. The house, with its tablet “To the
Prince of Poets” set by Hazlitt himself, was destroyed in 1877.
[66] A snappy unpublished letter to Hunt, sold among the Hazlitt
papers at Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge’s, in the late autumn of 1893,
complains bitterly of kind Basil Montagu, who had once put off a
proffered visit from Hazlitt, on the ground that a party of other
guests was expected. The deterred one was naturally wroth. “Yet after
this, I am not to look at him a little _in abstracto_! This is what has
soured me and made me sick of friendship and acquaintanceship.” Hazlitt
confounded cause and effect. He was unwelcome in general gatherings
where his genius was unappreciated; and we may be sure Montagu
was sorry for it when, in the interests of concord, he held up so
deprecating and inhospitable a hand. But among those who nursed Hazlitt
in his last illness, Basil Montagu was not the least loyal.
[67] _The Fight_ appeared in the _New Monthly Magazine_ in 1822. It
was itself antedated by _The Fancy_ of John Hamilton Reynolds, Keats’s
friend and Hood’s brother-in-law, which was printed in 1820. The jolly
iambics are as inspired as the essay. “P. C.” is, of course, Pugilistic
Club.
“Oh, it is life! to see a proud And dauntless man step, full of hopes,
Up to the P. C. stakes and ropes, Throw in his hat, and with a spring
Get gallantly within the ring; Eye the wide crown, and walk awhile
Taking all cheerings with a smile; To see him strip; his well-trained
form, White, glowing, muscular, and warm, All beautiful in conscious
power, Relaxed and quiet, till the hour; His glossy and transparent
frame, In radiant plight to strive for fame! To look upon the clean
shap’d limb In silk and flannel clothèd trim; While round the waist
the kerchief tied Makes the flesh glow in richer pride. ’Tis more than
life to watch him hold His hand forth, tremulous yet bold, Over his
second’s, and to clasp His rival’s in a quiet grasp; To watch the noble
attitude He takes, the crowd in breathless mood; And then to see, with
adamant start, The muscles set, and the great heart Hurl a courageous
splendid light Into the eye, and then—the FIGHT!”
But this is general: Hazlitt is specific. His particular Fight was the
great one between Neate of Bristol and Tom Hickman the Gasman, Neate
being the victor. On May 20, 1823, Neate met Spring of Hertfordshire
(so translated out of his natural patronymic of Winter), in a contest
for the championship, and Neate himself went under. This latter battle
was mock-heroically celebrated by Maginn in _Blackwood’s_, and Hood’s
casual meteorological simile heaped up honors on the winner:
“The Spring! I shrink and shudder at her name. For why? I find her
breath a bitter blighter, And suffer from her blows as if they came
From Spring the fighter!”
So that literature may be said to have set close to the ropes in those
days, from first to last.
[68] Lamb, in “_A Letter to R. Southey, Esq._”
[69] The man of Martial’s epigram had other “views.” The capital
translation is Dr. Goldwin Smith’s:
“Vacerra lauds no living poet’s lays, But for departed genius keeps his
praise. I, alas, live; nor deem it worth my while To die, that I may
win Vacerra’s smile.”
[70] This was the spirit of Henry Fielding on his last voyage, hoisted
aboard among the watermen at Redcliffe, and hearing his emaciated body
made the subject of jeers and laughter. “No man who knew me,” he writes
in his journal, “will think I conceived any personal resentment at this
behavior; but it was a lively picture of that cruelty and inhumanity
in the nature of man which I have often contemplated with concern, and
which leads the mind into a train of very uncomfortable and melancholy
thoughts.” It is a fine passage, and a strong heart, not given to
boasting, penned it. Poor Hazlitt could not bear even an unintentional
slight without imputing diabolical malice to the offender. Yet it was
certainly true that, in his saner hours, he could suffer personal
discomfort in public without flinching, and deplore the habit which
imposed it, rather than the act.
[71] If Hazlitt conveyed some of his best mannerisms from Coleridge,
not always transmuting them, surely the balance may be said to be
even when one discovers later in Hartley Coleridge such an easy
inherited use of Hazlitt’s “flail of gold” as is exemplified in this
summary of Roger Ascham’s career. “There was a primitive honesty, a
kindly innocence about this good old scholar, which gave a personal
interest to the homeliest details of his life. He had the rare
felicity of passing through the worst of times without persecution and
without dishonor. He lived with princes and princesses, prelates and
diplomatists, without offence as without ambition. Though he enjoyed
the smiles of royalty, his heart was none the worse, and his fortunes
little the better.”
[72] The quotation is from Coleridge, and it was applied by him to
Dryden. Hazlitt himself unconsciously expanded and spoiled it in his
essay on _Burke_. “The wheels of his imagination did not catch fire
from the rottenness of the material, but from the rapidity of their
motion.”
[73] The Rev. H. R. Haweis has another characterization of these
breathing and burning pages: “long and tiresome essays by Hazlitt.”
So they are, sure enough, if only you be endowed to think so! Hazlitt
himself gives the diverting fact for what it is worth, that “three
chimney-sweeps meeting three Chinese in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, they
laughed at one another till they were ready to drop down.”