I
Hazlitt characterized the age he lived in as "critical, didactic,
paradoxical, romantic."[1] It was the age of the Edinburgh Review, of the
Utilitarians, of Godwin and Shelley, of Wordsworth and Byron--in a word of
the French Revolution and all that it brought in its train. Poetry in this
age was impregnated with politics; ideas for social reform sprang from the
ground of personal sentiment. Hazlitt was born early enough to partake of
the ardent hopes which the last decade of the eighteenth century held out,
but his spirit came to ripeness in years of reaction in which the battle
for reform seemed a lost hope. While the changing events were bringing
about corresponding changes in the ideals of such early votaries to
liberty as Coleridge and Wordsworth, Hazlitt continued to cling to his
enthusiastic faith, but at the same time the spectacle of a world which
turned away from its brightest dreams made of him a sharp critic of human
nature, and his sense of personal disappointment turned into a bitterness
hardly to be distinguished from cynicism. In a passionate longing for a
better order of things, in the merciless denunciation of the cant and
bigotry which was enlisted in the cause of the existing order, he
resembled Byron. The rare union in his nature of the analytic and the
emotional gave to his writings the very qualities which he enumerated as
characteristic of the age, and his consistent sincerity made his voice
distinct above many others of his generation.
Hazlitt's earlier years reveal a restless conflict of the sensitive and
the intellectual. His father, a friend of Priestley's, was a Unitarian
preacher, who, in his vain search for liberty of conscience, had spent
three years in America with his family. Under him the boy was accustomed
to the reading of sermons and political tracts, and on this dry
nourishment he seemed to thrive till he was sent to the Hackney
Theological College to begin his preparation for the ministry. His
dissatisfaction there was not such as could be put into words--perhaps a
hunger for keener sensations and an appetite for freer inquiry than was
open to a theological student even of a dissenting church. After a year at
Hackney he withdrew to his father's home, where he found nothing more
definite to do than to "solve some knotty point, or dip in some abstruse
author, or look at the sky, or wander by the pebbled sea-side."[2] This
was probably the period of his most extensive reading. He absorbed the
English novelists and essayists; he saturated himself with the sentiment
of Rousseau; he studied Bacon and Hobbes and Berkeley and Hume; he became
fascinated, in Burke, by the union of a wide intellect with a brilliant
fancy and consummate rhetorical skill.[3] Though he called himself at this
time dumb and inarticulate, and the idea of ever making literature his
profession had not suggested itself to him, he was eager to talk about the
things he read, and in Joseph Fawcett, a retired minister, he found an
agreeable companion. "A heartier friend or honester critic I never coped
withal."[4] "The writings of Sterne, Fielding, Cervantes, Richardson,
Rousseau, Godwin, Goethe, etc. were the usual subjects of our discourse,
and the pleasure I had had, in reading these authors, was more than
doubled."[5] How acutely sensitive he was to all impressions at this time
is indicated by the effect upon him of the meeting with Coleridge and
Wordsworth of which he has left a record in one of his most eloquent
essays, "My First Acquaintance with Poets." But his active energies were
concentrated on the solution of a metaphysical problem which was destined
to possess his brain for many years: in his youthful enthusiasm he was
grappling with a theory concerning the natural disinterestedness of the
human mind, apparently adhering to the bias which he had received from his
early training.
But being come of age and finding it necessary to turn his mind to
something more marketable than abstract speculation, he determined, though
apparently without any natural inclination toward the art, to become a
painter. He apprenticed himself to his brother John Hazlitt, who had
gained some reputation in London for his miniatures. During the peace of
Amiens in 1802, he travelled to the Louvre to study and copy the
masterpieces which Napoleon had brought over from Italy as trophies of
war. Here, as he "marched delighted through a quarter of a mile of the
proudest efforts of the mind of man, a whole creation of genius, a
universe of art,"[6] he imbibed a love of perfection which may have been
fatal to his hopes of a career. At any rate it was soon after, while he
was following the profession of itinerant painter through England, that he
wrote to his father of "much dissatisfaction and much sorrow," of "that
repeated disappointment and that long dejection which have served to
overcast and to throw into deep obscurity some of the best years of my
life."[7]
When Hazlitt abandoned painting, he fell back upon his analytic gift as a
means of earning a living. Not counting his first published work, the
Essay on the Principles of Human Action, which was purely a labor of love
and fell still-born from the press, the tasks to which he now devoted his
time were chiefly of the kind ordinarily rated as job work. He prepared an
abridgement of Abraham Tucker's Light of Nature, compiled the Eloquence of
the British Senate, wrote a reply to Malthus's Essay on Population, and
even composed an elementary English Grammar. It would be a mistake to
suppose that these labors were performed according to a system of
mechanical routine. Hazlitt impressed something of his personality on
whatever he touched. His violent attack on the inhuman tendencies of
Malthus's doctrines is pervaded by a glow of humanitarian indignation. For
the Eloquence of the British Senate he wrote a sketch of Burke, which for
fervor of appreciation and judicious analysis ranks with his best things
of this class. Even the Grammar bears evidence of his enthusiasm for an
idea. Whenever he has occasion to express his feelings on a subject of
popular interest, his manner begins to grow animated and his language to
gain in force and suppleness.
But Hazlitt continued firmly in the faith that it was his destiny to be a
metaphysician. In 1812 he undertook to deliver a course of lectures on
philosophy at the Russell Institution with the ambitious purpose of
founding a system of philosophy "more conformable to reason and
experience" than that of the modern material school which resolved "all
thought into sensation, all morality into the love of pleasure, and all
action into mechanical impulse."[8] Though he did not succeed in founding
a system, he probably interested his audience by a stimulating review of
the main tendencies of English thought from Bacon and Hobbes to Priestley
and Godwin.
At the conclusion of his last lecture, Hazlitt told the story of a Brahmin
who, on being transformed into a monkey, "had no other delight than that
of eating cocoanuts and studying metaphysics." "I too," he added, "should
be very well contented to pass my life like this monkey, did I but know
how to provide myself with a substitute for cocoanuts." But it must have
become apparent to Hazlitt and his friends that he possessed a talent more
profitable than that of abstract speculation. The vigor and vitality of
the prose in these lectures, compared with the heavy, inert style of his
first metaphysical writing, the freedom of illustration and poetic
allusion, suggested the possibility of success in more popular forms of
literature. He tried to work for the newspapers as theatrical and
parliamentary reporter, but his temper and his habits were not adaptable
to the requirements of daily journalism, and editors did not long remain
complacent toward him. He did however, in the course of a few years,
succeed in gaining admission to the pages of the Edinburgh Review and in
establishing an enviable reputation as a writer, of critical and
miscellaneous essays. Even in that anonymous generation he could not long
contribute to any periodical without attracting attention. Readers were
aroused by his bold paradox and by the tonic quality of his style. Editors
appealed to him for "dashing articles," for something "brilliant or
striking" on any subject. Authors looked forward to a favorable notice
from Hazlitt, and Keats even declared that it would be a compensation for
being damned if Hazlitt were to do the damning.
In his essays the features of Hazlitt's personality may be plainly
recognized, and these reveal a triple ancestry. He claims descent from
Montaigne by virtue of his original observation of humanity with its
entire accumulation of custom and prejudice; he is akin to Rousseau in a
high-strung susceptibility to emotions, sentiments, and ideas; and he is
tinged with a cynicism to which there is no closer parallel than in the
maxims of La Rochefoucauld. The union of the philosopher, the enthusiast,
and the man of the world is fairly unusual in literature, but in Hazlitt's
case the union was not productive of any sharp contradictions. His common
sense served as a ballast to his buoyant emotions; the natural strength of
his feelings loosened the bonds which attached him to his favorite
theories; his cynicism, by sharpening his perception of the frailty of
human nature, prevented his philanthropic dreams from imposing themselves
on him for reality.
The analytical gift manifested itself in Hazlitt precociously in the study
of human nature. He characterized some of his schoolmates disdainfully as
"fit only for fighting like stupid dogs and cats," and at the age of
twelve, while on a visit, he communicated to his father a caustic sketch
of some English ladies who "require an Horace or a Shakespeare to describe
them," and whose "ceremonial unsociality" made him wish he were back in
America. His metaphysical studies determined the direction which his
observation of life should take. He became a remarkable anatomist of the
constitution of human nature in the abstract, viewing the motives of men's
actions from a speculative plane. He excels in sharp etchings which bring
the outline of a character into bold prominence. He is happy in defining
isolated traits and in throwing a new light on much used words.
"Cleverness," he writes, "is a certain _knack_ or aptitude at doing
certain things, which depend more on a particular adroitness and off-hand
readiness than on force or perseverance, such as making puns, making
epigrams, making extempore verses, mimicking the company, mimicking a
style, etc.... Accomplishments are certain external graces, which are to
be learnt from others, and which are easily displayed to the admiration of
the beholder, _viz._ dancing, riding, fencing, music, and so on.... Talent
is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and
industry, such as writing a criticism, making a speech, studying the
law."[9] These innocent looking definitions are probably not without an
ironic sting. It requires no great stretch of the imagination, for
example, to catch in Hazlitt's eye a sly wink at Lamb or a disdainful
glance toward Leigh Hunt as he gives the reader his idea of cleverness or
accomplishment.
Hazlitt's definitions often startle and give a vigorous buffet to our
preconceptions. He is likely to open an essay on "Good-Nature" by
declaring that a good-natured man is "one who does not like to be put out
of his way.... Good-nature is humanity that costs nothing;"[10] and he may
describe a respectable man as "a person whom there is no reason for
respecting, or none that we choose to name."[11] Against the imputation of
paradox, which such expressions expose him to, he has written his own
defence, applying his usual analytical acuteness to distinguish between
originality and singularity.[12] The contradiction of a common prejudice,
which always passes for paradox, is often such only in appearance. It is
true that an ingenious person may take advantage of the elusive nature of
language to play tricks with the ordinary understanding, but it is equally
true that words of themselves have a way of imposing on the uninquiring
mind and passing themselves off at an inflated value. No process is more
familiar than that by which words in the course of a long life lose all
their original power, and yet they will sometimes continue to exercise a
disproportionate authority. Then comes the original mind, which, looking
straight at the thing instead of accepting the specious title, discovers
the incongruity between the pretence and the reality, and in the first
shock of the disclosure annoyingly overturns our settled ideas. This is
the spirit in which Carlyle seeks to strip off the clothes in which
humanity has irrecognizably disguised itself, and it is the spirit in
which Robert Louis Stevenson tries to free his old-world conscience from
the old-world forms. To take a more recent parallel, it is the manner,
somewhat exaggerated, in which Mr. G. K. Chesterton examines the upstart
heresies of our own agitated day. There would be nothing fanciful in
suggesting that all these men owed a direct debt to Hazlitt--Stevenson on
many occasions acknowledged it.[13] Hazlitt was as honest and sincere as
any of them. Though the opening of an essay may appear perverse, he is
sure to enforce his point before proceeding very far. He accumulates
familiar instances in such abundance as to render obvious what at first
seemed paradoxical. He writes "On the Ignorance of the Learned" and makes
it perfectly clear that no person knows less of the actual life of the
world than he whose experience is confined to books. On the other hand he
has a whole-hearted appreciation of pedantry: "The power of attaching an
interest to the most trifling or painful pursuits, in which our whole
attention and faculties are engaged, is one of the greatest happinesses of
our nature.... He who is not in some measure a pedant, though he may be a
wise, cannot be a very happy man."[14] These two examples illustrate
Hazlitt's manner of presenting both views of a subject by concentrating
his attention on each separately and examining it without regard to the
other. On one occasion he anatomizes the faults of the dissenters, and on
another he extols their virtues, "I have inveighed all my life against
the insolence of the Tories, and for this I have the authority both of
Whigs and Reformers; but then I have occasionally spoken against the
imbecility of the Whigs, and the extravagance of the Reformers, and thus
have brought all three on my back, though two out of the three regularly
agree with all I say of the third party."[15] The strange thing is not
that he should have incurred the wrath of all parties, but that he should
show surprise at the result.
Very often Hazlitt's reflections are the generalization of his personal
experience. The essay "On the Disadvantages of Intellectual Superiority"
is but a record of the trials to which he was exposed by his morbid
sensitiveness and want of social tact, and amid much excellent advice "On
the Conduct of Life," there are passages which merely reflect his own
marital misfortunes. It is not so much that he is a dupe of his emotions,
but in his view of life he attaches a higher importance to feeling than to
reason, and so provides a philosophic basis for his strongest prejudices.
"Custom, passion, imagination," he declares, "insinuate themselves into
and influence almost every judgment we pass or sentiment we indulge, and
are a necessary help (as well as hindrance) to the human understanding; to
attempt to refer every question to abstract truth and precise definition,
without allowing for the frailty of prejudice, which is the unavoidable
consequence of the frailty and imperfection of reason, would be to unravel
the whole web and texture of human understanding and society."[16]
It is this infusion of passion and sentiment, the addition of the warm
breath of his personal experience, that gives the motion of life to his
analytic essays, and a deep and solemn humanity to his abstract
speculations. Hazlitt felt life with an intensity which reminds us of a
more spacious age. "What a huge heap, a 'huge, dumb heap,' of wishes,
thoughts, feelings, anxious cares, soothing hopes, loves, joys,
friendships, it is composed of! How many ideas and trains of sentiment,
long and deep and intense, often pass through the mind in only one day's
thinking or reading, for instance! How many such days are there in a year,
how many years in a long life, still occupied with something interesting,
still recalling some old impression, still recurring to some difficult
question and making progress in it, every step accompanied with a sense of
power, and every moment conscious of the 'high endeavour and the glad
success!'"[17] What an exultant sense of power over the resources of life!
What an earnest delight in the tasting of every pleasure which the senses
and the intelligence afford! His enjoyments comprehended the widest range
of sensations and activities. He loved nature, he loved books, he loved
pictures, he loved the theatre, he loved music and dancing. He loved good
talk and good fellowship; he loved an idea and anyone who was susceptible
to an idea. He also loved a spirited game of rackets, and though he hated
brutality, he has left us a very vivid and sympathetic account of a
prize-fight. Above all he loved the words truth and justice and humanity.
With such sensibilities, it is no wonder that his last words should have
been "I have had a happy life."
As the phrase is ordinarily understood, Hazlitt's dying expression might
seem unaccountable. Outwardly few authors have been more miserable. Like
the great French sentimentalist with whom we have compared him, a
suspicious distrust of all who came near him converted his social
existence into a restless fever. He had the gift of interpreting every
contradiction to one of his favorite principles as a personal injury to
himself, and in the tense state of party feeling then prevailing, the
opportunities for taking offence were not limited. Hazlitt was one of the
chief marks singled out for abuse by the critics of Government. To
constant self-tormentings from within and persecution from without, there
was added the misfortune of an unhappy marriage and of a still more
unhappy love affair which lowered him in his own eyes as well as in the
eyes of the world. From the point of view of the practical man, Hazlitt's
life would be declared a failure.
The result of Hazlitt's hard experiences with the realities of life was to
confirm him in a devoted attachment to the past. All his high enthusiasms,
his sanguine dreams, his purest feelings continued to live for him in the
past, and it was only by recurring to their memory in the dim distance
that he could find assurance to sustain his faith. In the past all his
experiences were refined, subtilized, transfigured. A sunny afternoon on
Salisbury Plain, a walk with Charles and Mary Lamb under a Claude Lorraine
sky, a visit to the Montpelier Gardens where in his childhood he drank tea
with his father--occurrences as common as these were enveloped in a haze
of glory. And rarer events, such as a visit to the pictures at Burleigh
House, or to the galleries in the Louvre, tender visions of feminine grace
and sweetness, were touched in the recollection with a depth and pathos
which subdued even the most joyous impressions to a refined melancholy. In
no other English writer is this rich sentiment of the past so eloquent,
and no one was better qualified to describe its sources. "Time takes out
the sting of pain; our sorrows after a certain period have been so often
steeped in a medium of thought and passion, that they 'unmould their
essence'; and all that remains of our original impressions is what we
would wish them to have been.... Seen in the distance, in the long
perspective of waning years, the meanest incidents, enlarged and enriched
by countless recollections, become interesting; the most painful, broken
and softened by time, soothe."[18] The "Farewell to Essay Writing" is
perfumed with the odor of grateful memories from which the writer draws
his "best consolation for the future." He almost erects his feeling for
the past into a religion. "Happy are they," he exclaims, "who live in the
dream of their own existence, and see all things in the light of their own
minds; who walk by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth
still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world has not
entered!... The world has no hold on them. They are in it, not of it; and
a dream and a glory is ever around them!"[19]
But this impassioned sentiment for the past was only a refuge such as
Byron might seek among the glories of by-gone ages or amid the solitary
Alpine peaks, where it was possible to regain the strength spent in
grappling with the forces of the actual world and return newly nerved to
the battle. For fighting was Hazlitt's more proper element. He could hate
with the same intensity that he loved, and his hatred was aroused most by
those whom he regarded as responsible for the overturning of his political
hopes. Politics had played the most important part in his early education.
In his father's house he had absorbed the spirit of protest, accustomed
himself to arguing for the repeal of the Test Act, and to declaiming
against religious and political persecution. At the age of twelve he had
written an indignant letter to the Shrewsbury Chronicle against the mob of
incendiaries which had destroyed the house of Priestley, and as a student
at Hackney he showed sufficient self-reliance to develop an original
"Essay on Laws." The defence of the popular cause was with him not an
academic exercise, but a religious principle. "Since a little child, I
knelt and lifted up my hands in prayer for it."[20] The emotional warmth
of his creed was heightened by the reading of Rousseau, and in Napoleon it
found a living hero on whom it could expend itself.
An uncompromising attachment to certain fundamental principles of
democracy and an unceasing devotion to Napoleon constitute the chief
elements of Hazlitt's political character. He sets forth his idea of
representative government exactly in the manner of Rousseau when he
proclaims that "in matters of feeling and common sense, of which each
individual is the best judge, the majority are in the right.... It is an
absurdity to suppose that there can be any better criterion of national
grievances, or the proper remedies for them, than the aggregate amount of
the actual, dear-bought experience, the honest feelings, and heart-felt
wishes of a whole people, informed and directed by the greatest power of
understanding in the community, unbiassed by any sinister motive."[21]
Hazlitt was not a republican, and he disapproved of the Utopian rhapsodies
of Shelley, woven as they seemed of mere moonshine, without applicability
to the evils that demanded immediate reform. But he did insist that there
was a power in the people to change its government and its governors, and
hence grew his idolatry of Napoleon, who, through all vicissitudes,
remained the "Child and Champion of the Revolution," the hero who had
shown Europe how its established despots could be overthrown.
The news of Waterloo plunged Hazlitt into deep distress, as if it had been
the shock of a personal calamity. According to Haydon, "he walked about
unwashed, unshaven, hardly sober by day, always intoxicated by night,
literally for weeks." But his disappointment only strengthened his
attachment to his principles. These remained enshrined with the brightest
dreams of his youth, and in proportion as the vision faded and men were
beginning to scoff at it as a shadow, Hazlitt bent his energies to fix its
outline and prove its reality. "I am attached to my conclusions," he says,
"in consequence of the pain, the anxiety, and the waste of time they have
cost me."[22] His doctrines contained nothing that was subversive of
social order, and their ultimate triumph lends the color of heroism to a
consistency which people have often interpreted as proof of a limited
horizon. It is at least certain that he did not put his conscience out to
market, and that his reward came in the form of the vilest calumny ever
visited upon a man of letters.
These were the most infamous years of the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's
Magazine, both of which had been founded as avowed champions of reaction.
Their purpose was to discredit all writers whose politics or the politics
of whose friends differed from the Government. Everybody knows of the fate
which Keats and Shelley suffered at their hands, chiefly because they
were friends of Leigh Hunt, who was the editor of a Liberal newspaper
which had displeased George IV. Even the unoffending Lamb did not escape
their brutality, perhaps because he was guilty of admitting Hazlitt to his
house. The weapons were misrepresentation and unconfined abuse, wielded
with an utter disregard of where the blows might fall, in the spirit of a
gang of young ruffians who knew that they were protected in their
wantonness by a higher authority. In the chastened sadness of his later
years Lockhart, who was one of the offenders, confessed that he had no
personal grudge against any of Blackwood's victims, in fact that he knew
nothing about any of them, but that at the request of John Wilson, his
fellow-editor, he had composed "some squibberies ... with as little malice
as if the assigned subject had been the court of Pekin." The sincere
regret he expressed for the pain which his "jokes" had inflicted ought
perhaps to be counted in extenuation of his errors. It may be true, as his
generous biographer suggests, that "his politics and his feud with many of
these men was an affair of ignorance and accidental associations in
Edinburgh," that under different circumstances "he might have been found
inditing sonnets to Leigh Hunt, and supping with Lamb, Haydon, and
Hazlitt."[23] But meanwhile irreparable mischief had been done to many
reputations, and the life of one man had been sacrificed to his
sportiveness.[24]
The signal for the attack on Hazlitt was given by the Quarterly in
connection with a review of The Round Table, Hazlitt's first book. The
contents of this volume were characterized as "vulgar descriptions, silly
paradox, flat truisms, misty sophistry, broken English, ill humour and
rancorous abuse."[25] A little later, when the Characters of Shakespeare's
Plays seemed to be finding such favor with the public that one edition was
quickly exhausted, the Quarterly extinguished its sale by "proving that
Mr. Hazlitt's knowledge of Shakespeare and the English language is on a
par with the purity of his morals and the depth of his understanding."[26]
The cry was soon taken up by the Blackwood's people in a series on the
Cockney School of Prose. Lockhart invented the expression "pimpled
Hazlitt." It so happened that Hazlitt's complexion was unusually clear,
but the epithet clung to him with a cruel tenacity. When an ill-natured
reviewer could find nothing else to say, he had recourse to "pimpled
essays" or "pimpled criticism."[27] The climax of abuse was reached in an
article entitled "Hazlitt Cross-Questioned," which a sense of decency
makes it impossible to reproduce, and which resulted in the payment of
damages to the victim. Even the publisher Blackwood speaks of it, with
what sincerity it is not safe to say, as disgusting in tone, and Murray,
who was the London agent for the Magazine, refused to have any further
dealings with it. But the harm was done. Hazlitt could not walk out
without feeling that every passer-by had read the atrocious article and
saw the brand of the social outcast on his features.
In an atmosphere like this, it is scarcely to be wondered at if Hazlitt's
temper, never of the amiable sort, should have become embittered, nor is
it strange that he should sometimes, through ignorance, have committed the
fault of which his enemies had been guilty in wantonness. Not content with
retaliating the full measure of malice upon the heads of his immediate
assailants, he turned the stream of his abuse upon Sir Walter Scott, whom
he singled out deliberately as the towering head of a supposed literary
conspiracy. He is credited with remarking; "To pay these fellows in their
own coin, the way would be to begin with Walter Scott, and have at his
clump foot."[28] Very mean-spirited this sounds to us, who are acquainted
with the nobility of Scott's character and who know with what magnanimous
wisdom he kept himself above the petty altercations of the day. But for
Hazlitt, Sir Walter was the father-in-law and friendly patron of John
Lockhart, he was the person who had thrown the weight of his powerful
influence to make John Wilson Professor of Moral Philosophy at the
University of Edinburgh! He did not carry his prejudice against the Author
of Waverley.
In some instances Hazlitt was consciously the aggressor, but his attacks
were never wanton. He denounced Wordsworth and Coleridge and Southey
because they were renegades from the cause which lay nearest to his heart.
Their apostasy was an unforgivable offence in his eyes, and his wrath was
proportioned to the admiration which he otherwise entertained for them. It
is true that he treated their motives hastily and unjustly, but none of
his opponents set him the example of charity. In the earlier years of
their acquaintance Coleridge had spoken of Hazlitt as a "thinking,
observant, original man." one who "says things that are his own in a way
of his own,"[29] whereas after their estrangement he discovered that
Hazlitt was completely lacking in originality. Wordsworth, being offended
at Hazlitt's review of the "Excursion," peevishly raked up an old scandal
and wrote to Haydon that he was "not a proper person to be admitted into
respectable society."[30] Perhaps Hazlitt was not as "respectable" as his
poet-friends, but he had a better sense of fair play. At any rate, in a
complete balancing of the accounts, Hazlitt's frequent displays of
ill-temper are offset by the insidious, often unscrupulous baitings which
he suffered from his opponents.
Naturally his bitterness was extended to his reflections on mankind in
general. He felt as if the human race had wilfully deceived his sanguine
expectations, and he poured out his grievances against its refractoriness,
taking revenge for his public and his private wrongs, in a passage in
which high idealism is joined with personal spite, in which he has
revealed himself in all his strength and weakness, and involved his
enemies in a common ruin with himself. It concludes the essay "On the
Pleasure of Hating":
"Instead of patriots and friends of freedom, I see nothing but the tyrant
and the slave, the people linked with kings to rivet on the chains of
despotism and superstition. I see folly join with knavery, and together
make up public spirit and public opinions. I see the insolent Tory, the
blind Reformer, the coward Whig! If mankind had wished for what is right,
they might have had it long ago. The theory is plain enough; but they are
prone to mischief, 'to every good work reprobate.' I have seen all that
had been done by the mighty yearnings of the spirit and intellect of men,
'of whom the world was not worthy,' and that promised a proud opening to
truth and good through the vista of future years, undone by one man, with
just glimmering of understanding enough to feel that he was a king, but
not to comprehend how he could be king of a free people! I have seen this
triumph celebrated by poets, the friends of my youth and the friends of
man, but who were carried away by the infuriate tide that, setting in from
a throne, bore down every distinction of right reason before it; and I
have seen all those who did not join in applauding this insult and outrage
on humanity proscribed, hunted down (they and their friends made a
bye-word of), so that it has become an understood thing that no one can
live by his talents or knowledge who is not ready to prostitute those
talents and that knowledge to betray his species, and prey upon his
fellow-man.... In private life do we not see hypocrisy, servility,
selfishness, folly, and impudence succeed, while modesty shrinks from the
encounter, and merit is trodden under foot? How often is 'the rose plucked
from the forehead of a virtuous love to plant a blister there!' What
chance is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its
continuance? Seeing all this as I do, and unravelling the web of human
life into its various threads of meanness, spite, cowardice, want of
feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others and
ignorance of ourselves--seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself
giving way to infamy--mistaken as I have been in my public and private
hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong; always
disappointed where I placed most reliance; the dupe of friendship, and the
fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I
do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world
enough."[31]--This is not exactly downright cynicism; it is more like
disappointment, beating its head frantically against the wall of
circumstance. Yet through his bitterest utterances there is felt the warm
sentiment that, "let people rail at virtue, at genius and friendship as
long as they will--the very _names_ of these disputed qualities are better
than anything else that could be substituted for them, and embalm even the
most angry abuse of them."[32]
It is no wonder that Hazlitt has never been a popular favorite. With a
stronger attachment to principles than to persons, lavishing upon ideas or
the fanciful creations of art a passionate affection which he grudgingly
withheld from human beings, stubbornly tenacious of a set of political
dogmas to which he was ready to sacrifice his dearest friends, morbidly
sensitive to the faintest suggestion of a personal slight, and prompter
than the serpent to vent against the aggressor the bitterness of his
poison, he plays the role of Ishmael among the men of letters in his day.
The violence of his retorts when he felt himself injured and his capacity
for giving offence even when he was not directly provoked, begot a
resentment in his adversaries which blinded them to an appreciation of his
genuine worth. At best they might have assented, after his death, to the
sublime pity with which Carlyle, from his spiritual altitudes, moralized
upon his struggles. "How many a poor Hazlitt must wander on God's verdant
earth, like the Unblest on burning deserts; passionately dig wells, and
draw up only the dry quicksand; believe that he is seeking Truth, yet only
wrestle among endless Sophisms, doing desperate battle as with
spectre-hosts; and die and make no sign!"[33] We must appeal to the issue
to determine whether Hazlitt's battle was altogether against
spectre-hosts, and whether in his quest for truth and beauty he has drawn
up nothing but quicksand. But at least Carlyle's expression recognizes
the earnestness of his purpose and the bravery with which he maintained
the conflict.
Hazlitt gave himself freely and without reserve to his reader. By his side
Leigh Hunt appears affected, De Quincey theatrical, Lamb--let us say
discreet. Affectation and discretion were equally alien to Hazlitt's
nature, as they concerned either his personal conduct or his literary
exercises. In regard to every impression, every prejudice, every stray
thought that struggled into consciousness, his practice was, to use his
own favorite quotation,
"To pour out all as plain
As downright Shippen or as old Montaigne."
He has drifted far from the tradition of Addison and Steele with which his
contemporaries sought to associate him. There was nothing in him of the
courtier-like grace employed in the good-humored reproof of unimportant
vices, of the indulgent, condescending admonition to the "gentle reader,"
particularly of the fair sex. In Hazlitt's hands the essay was an
instrument for the expression of serious thought and virile passion. He
lacked indeed the temperamental balance of Lamb. His insight into human
nature was intellectual rather than sympathetic. Though as a philosopher
he understood that the web of life is of a mingled yarn, he has given us
none of those rare glimpses of laughter ending in tears or of tears
subsiding in a tender smile which are the sources of Lamb's depth and his
charm. The same thing is true of his humor. He relished heartily its
appearance in others and had a most wholesome laugh; but in himself there
is no real merriment, only an ironic realization of the contrasts of life.
When he writes, the smile which sometimes seeks to overpower the grim
fixity of his features, is frozen before it can emerge to the surface. He
lacks all the ingratiating arts which make a writer beloved. But if one
enjoys a keen student of the intricacies of character, a bold and candid
critic of human imperfections, a stimulating companion full of original
ideas and deep feelings, he will find in Hazlitt an inexhaustible source
of instruction and delight. Hazlitt has long appealed to men of vigorous
character and acute intellect, men like Landor, Froude, Walter Bagehot,
Robert Louis Stevenson, and Ernest Henley, who have either proclaimed his
praise or flattered him with imitation. By the friend who knew him longest
and was better qualified than any other to speak of him, he has been
pronounced as "in his natural and healthy state, one of the wisest and
finest spirits breathing."[34]