The discovery in the seventeenth century of the Greek treatise "On the
Sublime," attributed to Longinus, with its inspired appreciation of the
great passages in Greek literature so different from the analytic manner
of Aristotle, gave a decided impulse to English criticism. It was at the
same time that English prose, under the influence of French models, was
developing a more familiar tone than it had hitherto been acquainted with.
The union of the enthusiasm of Longinus with this moderated French prose
resulted in the graceful prefaces of Dryden, which remained unmatched for
more than a century. The Longinian fire, breathed upon too by the genius
of Shakespeare, preserved the eighteenth century from congealing into the
utter formalism of pseudo-Aristotelian authority. Though they did not
produce an even warmth over the whole surface, the flames are observed
darting through the crust even where the crust seems thickest. It is
significant that Dr. Johnson should exclaim with admiration at the
criticism of Dryden, not because Dryden judged according to rules but
because his was the criticism of a poet. And he singles out as the best
example of such criticism the well-known appreciation of Shakespeare, the
very passage which Hazlitt later quoted as "the best character of
Shakespeare that has ever been written."[35] The high-priest of classicism
wavered frequently in his allegiance to some of the sacred fetishes of his
cult, and had enough grace, once at least, to speak with scorn of the
"cant of those who judged by principles rather than by perception."[36]
But to judge by perception is a comparatively rare accomplishment, and so
most critics continued to employ the foot-rule as if they were measuring
flat surfaces, while occasionally going so far as to recognize the
existence of certain mountain-peaks as "irregular beauties." In a more or
less conscious distinction from the criticism of external rules there
developed also during the eighteenth century what its representatives were
pleased to call metaphysical criticism, to which we should now probably
apply the term psychological. This consisted in explaining poetic effects
by reference to strictly mental processes in a tone of calm analysis
eminently suited to the rationalistic temper of the age. It methodically
traced the sources of grandeur or of pathos or of humor, and then
illustrated its generalization by the practice of the poets. It could
thereby pride itself on going back of the rules to the fundamental laws of
human nature. Kames's Elements of Criticism, written in 1761, became a
work of standard reference, though it did not impose on the great critics.
In commending it Dr. Johnson was careful to remark, "I do not mean that he
has taught us anything; but he has told us old things in a new way."[37]
But in general Kames was considered a safer guide than the enthusiastic
Longinus, who throughout the century was looked upon with distrust.
"Instead of shewing for what reason a sentiment or image is sublime, and
discovering the secret power by which they affect a reader with pleasure,
he is ever intent on producing something sublime _himself_, and strokes of
his own eloquence." So runs the complaint of Joseph Warton.[38] The
distrust was not without ground. The danger that the method of Longinus in
the hands of ungifted writers would become a cloak for critical ignorance
and degenerate into empty bluster was already apparent.[39] Only rarely
was there a reader who could distinguish between the false and the true
application of the method. Gibbon did it in a passage which impressed
itself upon the younger critics of Hazlitt's generation. "I was acquainted
only with two ways of criticising a beautiful passage: the one, to shew,
by an exact anatomy of it, the distinct beauties of it, and whence they
sprung; the other, an idle exclamation, or a general encomium, which
leaves nothing behind it. Longinus has shewn me that there is a third. He
tells me his own feelings upon reading it; and tells them with such
energy, that he communicates them."[40] That vital element, the
commentator's power of communicating his own feelings, constituting as it
does the difference between phrase-making and valuable criticism, did not
become prominent in English literature before the nineteenth century.
The official criticism of the early nineteenth century as represented by
the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, derives its descent directly from
the eighteenth. Whatever the Government might have thought of the politics
of the Edinburgh, its literary outlook remained unexceptionably orthodox.
Jeffrey's "Essay on Beauty" is a direct copy of Alison's "Essay on Taste."
Much as Dr. Johnson in the preceding age, Jeffrey prided himself on the
moral tendency of his criticism--a morality which consisted in censuring
the life of Burns and in exalting the virtuous insipidities of Maria
Edgeworth's tales as it might have been done by any faithful minister of
the gospel. To be sure he cannot be said to have held tenaciously to the
old set of canons. Though he stanchly withstood the new-fangled poetic
practices of Wordsworth and of Southey, he bowed before the great
popularity of Scott and Byron, even at the cost of some of his favorite
maxims. In his writings the solvents of the older criticism are best seen
at work. Jeffrey both by instinct and training was a lawyer, and his
position at the head of the most respected periodical formed a natural
temptation to a dictatorial manner. He was a judge who tried to uphold the
literary constitution but wavered in the face of a strong popular
opposition. When the support of precedent failed him, he remained without
any firm conviction of his own. While his poetic taste was quite adequate
to the appreciation of a Samuel Rogers or a Barry Cornwall, it was
incomparably futile in the perception of a Wordsworth or a Shelley. In a
passage composed at the end of his long editorial career in 1829, he
unconsciously announced his own extinction as a critic:
"Since the beginning of our critical career, we have seen a vast deal of
beautiful poetry pass into oblivion, in spite of our feeble efforts to
recall or retain it in remembrance. The tuneful quartos of Southey are
already little better than lumber:--and the rich melodies of Keats and
Shelley,--and the fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth,--and the plebeian
pathos of Crabbe, are melting fast from the field of our vision. The
novels of Scott have put out his poetry. Even the splendid strains of
Moore are fading into distance and dimness, except where they have been
married to immortal music; and the blazing star of Byron himself is
receding from its place of pride. We need say nothing of Milman, and
Croly, and Atherstone, and Hood, and a legion of others, who, with no
ordinary gifts of taste and fancy, have not so properly survived their
fame, as been excluded by some hard fatality, from what seemed their just
inheritance. The two who have the longest withstood this rapid withering
of the laurel, and with the least marks of decay on their branches, are
Rogers and Campbell; neither of them, it may be remarked, voluminous
writers, and both distinguished rather for the fine taste and consummate
elegance of their writings, than for that fiery passion, and disdainful
vehemence, which seemed for a time to be so much more in favour with the
public."[41]
But the authority of Jeffrey did not long remain unchallenged. His
unfortunate "This will never do" became a by-word among the younger
writers who were gradually awaking to the realization of a new spirit in
criticism. The protest against the methods of the dictatorial quarterlies
found expression in the two brilliant monthly periodicals, Blackwood's and
the London Magazine, founded respectively in 1817 and 1820. In these no
opportunity was neglected to thrust at the inflated pretensions of the
established reviews, and, though the animus of rivalry might be suspected
of playing its part, the blows usually struck home. There is an air of
absolute finality about Lockhart's "Remarks on the Periodical Criticism of
England," and his characterization of Jeffrey in this article is a bold
anticipation of the judgment of posterity.[42] The editor of the London
Magazine[43] writes with equal assurance, "We must protest against
considering the present taste as the standard of excellence, or the
criticisms on poetry in the Edinburgh Review as the voice even of the
present taste." The test of critical eligibility in this age is an
appreciation of Wordsworth and a proper understanding of Coleridge his
prophet, and it is by virtue of what inspiration they drew from these
oracles that John Lockhart and John Scott became better qualified than
Jeffrey or Gifford to form the literary opinions of the public.
Coleridge more than any other person was responsible for bringing about a
change in the attitude of literature toward criticism. As Hazlitt puts it
with his inimitable vividness, he "threw a great stone into the standing
pool of criticism, which splashed some persons with the mud, but which
gave a motion to the surface and a reverberation to the neighbouring
echoes, which has not since subsided."[44] Whether his ideas were borrowed
from the Germans or evolved in his own brain, their importance for English
literature remains the same. Coleridge's service lay in asserting and
reasserting such fundamental principles as that a critical standard is
something quite distinct from a set of external rules; that the
traditional opposition between genius and laws was based on a
misconception as to the function of the critic; that all great genius
necessarily worked in accordance with certain laws which it was the
function of the critic to determine by a study of each particular work of
art; that art, being vital and organic, assumed different shapes at
different epochs of human culture; that only the spirit of poetry
remained constant, while its form was molded anew by each age in
accordance with the demands of its own life; that it was no more
reasonable to judge Shakespeare's plays by the practice of Sophocles than
to judge sculpture by the rules of painting. "O! few have there been among
critics, who have followed with the eye of their imagination the
imperishable yet ever wandering spirit of poetry through its various
metempsychoses; or who have rejoiced with the light of clear perception at
beholding with each new birth, with each rare _avatar_, the human race
frame to itself a new body, by assimilating materials of nourishment out
of its new circumstances, and work for itself new organs of power
appropriate to the new sphere of its motion and activity."[45] This rare
grasp of general principles was combined in Coleridge with poetic vision
and a declamatory eloquence which enabled him to seize on the more ardent
and open-minded men of letters and to determine their critical viewpoint.
William Hazlitt was among the earliest to fall under Coleridge's spell.
Just how much he owed to Coleridge beyond the initial impulse it is
impossible to prove, because so much of the latter's criticism was
expressed during improvised monologues at the informal meetings of
friends, or in lectures of which only fragmentary notes remain. At any
rate, while Coleridge's chief distinction lay in the enunciation of
general principles, Hazlitt's practice, in so far as it took account of
these general principles at all, assumed their existence, and displayed
its strength in concrete judgments of individual literary works. His
criticism may be said to imply at every step the existence of Coleridge's,
or to rise like an elegant superstructure on the solid foundation which
the other had laid. Hazlitt communicated to the general public that love
and appreciation of great literature which Coleridge inspired only in the
few elect. The latter, even more distinctly than a poet for poets, was a
_critic for critics_,[46] and three generations have not succeeded in
absorbing all his doctrines. But Hazlitt, with a delicate sensitiveness to
the impressions of genius, with a boundless zest of poetic enjoyment, with
a firm common sense to control his taste, and with a gift of original
expression unequalled in his day, arrested the attention of the ordinary
reader and made effective the principles which Coleridge with some
vagueness had projected. To analyze in cold blood such living criticism as
Hazlitt's may expose one to unflattering imputations, but the attempt may
serve to bring to light what is so often overlooked, that Hazlitt's
criticism is no random, irresponsible discharge of his sensibilities, but
has an implicit basis of sound theory.
In his History of Criticism, Mr. Saintsbury takes as his motto for the
section on the early nineteenth century a sentence from Sainte-Beuve to
the effect that nearly the whole art of the critic consists in knowing how
to read a book with judgment and without ceasing to relish it.[47] We are
almost ready to believe that the French critic, in the significant choice
of the words judgment and relish, is consciously summarizing the method of
Hazlitt, the more so as he elsewhere explicitly confesses a sympathy with
the English critic.[48] Hazlitt has indeed himself characterized his art
in some such terms. In one of his lectures he modestly describes his
undertaking "merely to read over a set of authors with the audience, as I
would do with a friend, to point out a favorite passage, to explain an
objection; or if a remark or a theory occurs, to state it in illustration
of the subject, but neither to tire him nor puzzle myself with pedantical
rules and pragmatical _formulas_ of criticism that can do no good to
anybody."[49] This sounds dangerously like dilettantism. It suggests the
method of what in our day is called impressionism, one of the most
delightful forms of literary entertainment when practiced by a master of
literature. The impressionist's aim is to record whatever impinges on his
brain, and though with a writer of fine discernment it is sure to be
productive of exquisite results, as criticism it is undermined by the
impressionist's assumption that every appreciation is made valid by the
very fact of its existence. But this was scarcely Hazlitt's idea of
criticism. Against universal suffrage in matters literary he would have
been among the first to protest. We might almost imagine we were listening
to some orthodox theorist of the eighteenth century when we hear him
declaring that the object of taste "must be that, not which _does_, but
which _would_ please universally, supposing all men to have paid an equal
attention to any subject and to have an equal relish for it, which can
only be guessed at by the imperfect and yet more than casual agreement
among those who have done so from choice and feeling."[50] Though not the
surest kind of clue, this indicates at least that Hazlitt's rejection of
"pedantical rules and pragmatical formulas" was not equivalent to a
declaration of anarchy.
For Hazlitt the assertion of individual taste meant emancipation from
arbitrary codes and an opportunity to embrace a compass as wide as the
range of literary excellence. Realizing that every reader, even the
professed critic, is hemmed in by certain prejudices arising from his
temperament, his education, his environment, he was unwilling to pledge
his trust to any school or fashion of criticism. The favorite oppositions
of his generation--Shakespeare and Pope, Fielding and Richardson, English
poetry and French--had no meaning for him. He was glad to enjoy each in
its kind. "The language of taste and moderation is, _I prefer this,
because it is best to me_; the language of dogmatism and intolerance is,
_Because I prefer it, it is best in itself, and I will allow no one else
to be of a different opinion_."[51] This passage, in connection with the
one last quoted, may be considered as fixing the limits within which
Hazlitt gave scope to personal preference. The sum of his literary
judgments reveals a taste for a greater variety of the works of genius
than is displayed by any contemporary, and the absence of "a catholic and
many-sided sympathy"[52] is one of the last imputations that should have
been brought against him. His criticism has limitations, but not such as
are due to a narrowness of literary perception.
Even Hazlitt's shortcomings may frequently be turned to his glory as a
critic. The most remarkable thing about his violent political prejudices
is the success with which he dissociated his literary estimates from them.
Such a serious limitation in a critic as deficiency of reading in his case
only raises our astonishment at the sureness of instinct which enabled him
to pronounce unerringly on the scantest information. Never was there a
critic of nearly equal pretensions who had as little of the scholar's
equipment. If, as he tells us, he applied himself too closely to his
studies at a certain period in his youth,[53] he atoned for it by his
neglect of books in later life.[54] A desultory education had left him
without that intimacy with the classics which belonged of right to every
cultivated Englishman. His allusions to the Greek and Latin writers are in
the most general terms, but with a note of reverence which did not enter
into his speech concerning even Shakespeare. "I would have you learn Latin
(he is writing to his son) because there is an atmosphere round this sort
of classical ground, to which that of actual life is gross and
vulgar."[55] His knowledge of Italian was no more thorough, though here he
was more nearly on a level with his contemporaries. For Boccaccio indeed
he showed an intense affection, and he could write intelligently, if not
deeply, concerning Dante and Ariosto and Tasso.[56] With French he
naturally had a wider acquaintance, but still nothing beyond the reach of
the very general reader. The notable point is that he refrains from
passing judgment on the entire body of French poetry because it is unlike
English poetry. He is not infected with the wilful provincialism of Lamb
nor with the spirit of John Bullishness which seriously proclaims in its
rivals "equally a want of books and men."[57] "We may be sure of this,"
says Hazlitt, "that when we see nothing but grossness and barbarism, or
insipidity and verbiage in a writer that is the God of a nation's
idolatry, it is we and not they who want true taste and feeling."[58]
Having this wholesome counsel ever before him, he can be more generously
appreciative of the genius of Moliere, more justly discerning in his
analysis of the spirit of Rousseau,[59] and more free of the puritanical
clatter against Voltaire than any of his fellow-critics. With German
literature his familiarity was bounded on the one hand by Schiller's
"Robbers," on the other by the first part of "Faust," the entire gap
between these being filled by the popular versions of Kotzebue's plays and
Mme. de Stael's book on Germany. Yet he dared to write a character of the
German people which is almost worth quoting.[60]
In English his range of reading was correspondingly narrow. Such a piece
of waywardness as his enthusiasm for John Buncle,[61] derived no doubt
from Lamb, is unique. Broadly speaking, he prefers to accept the
established canon and approaches new discoveries with a deep distrust. He
is very little concerned with writers of the second order, and in his
Lecture on the Living Poets he shocked his audience unspeakably, when he
came to the name of Hannah More, by merely remarking, "She has written a
great deal which I have never read." He looked upon most living writers
through the eyes of the somewhat jaded reviewer, who, though susceptible
to a romantic thrill from one or the other, is usually on his guard
against spurious blandishments and reluctant to admit the claims of new
pretenders. Even in poets of the first rank he slurred over a great deal;
but what he loved he dwelt on with a kind of rapt inspiration until it
became his second nature, its spirit and its language fused intimately
with his own. This revolutionist in politics was a jealous aristocrat in
the domains of art, and this admission does not impair our earlier
assertion of his openness to a greater variety of impressions than any of
his contemporaries in criticism.
Hazlitt's professed indifference to system is probably due as much to lack
of deep reading as to romantic impatience of restraint. When he declared
that it was beyond his powers "to condense and combine all the facts
relating to a subject"[62] or that "he had no head for arrangement,"[63]
it was only because he did not happen to be a master of the facts which
required combination or arrangement. For he did have an unusual gift for
penetrating to the core of a subject and tearing out the heart of its
mystery; in fact, his power of concrete literary generalization was in his
age unmatched. To reveal the distinctive virtue of a literary form, to
characterize the sources of weakness or of strength in a new or a by-gone
fashion of poetry, to analyze accurately the forces impelling a whole
mighty age--these things, requiring a deep and steady concentration of
mind, are among his most solid achievements. In a paragraph he distils for
us the essence of what is picturesque and worth dwelling on in the comedy
of the Restoration. In a page he triumphantly establishes the
boundary-line between the poetry of art and nature--Pope and
Shakespeare--which to the present day remains as a clear guide, while at
the same time Campbell and Byron and Bowles are filling the periodicals
with protracted and often irrelevant arguments on one side or the other
which only the critically curious now venture to look into. In the space
of a single lecture he takes a sweeping view of all the great movements
which gave vitality and grandeur to the Elizabethan spirit and found a
voice in its literature, so that in spite of his little learning he seems
to have left nothing for his followers but to fill in his outline. The
same keenness of discernment he applied casually in dissecting the genius
of his own time. He associated the absence of drama with the French
Revolution, its tendency to deal in abstractions and to regard everything
in relation to _man_ and not men--a tendency irreconcilable with dramatic
literature, which is essentially individual and concrete.[64] To be sure
the eighteenth century before the Revolution was as void of drama as
Hazlitt's generation, but what is true of the period which produced
Political Justice and the Edinburgh Review would hold equally of the time
which produced the "Essay on Man" and the deistic controversy. He
sometimes harshly exposes the weaker side of contemporary lyricism as a
"mere effusion of natural sensibility," and he regrets the absence of
"imaginary splendor and human passion" as of a glory departed.[65] But
with all this he had the true historical sense. It breaks out most
unmistakably when he says, "If literature in our day has taken this
decided turn into a critical channel, is it not a presumptive proof that
it ought to do so?"[66] Of the actual application of historical principles,
which were just beginning to be realized in the study of literature, we
find only a few faint traces in Hazlitt. Some remarks on the influence of
climate and of religious and political institutions occur in his
contributions to the Edinburgh, but occasionally their perfunctory manner
suggests the editorial pen of Jeffrey. Doubtless Hazlitt's discriminating
judgment would have enabled him to excel in this field, had he been
equipped with the necessary learning.
It may also be a serious limitation of Hazlitt's that he neglects
questions of structure and design. Doubtless he was reacting against the
jargon of the older criticism with its lifeless and monotonous repetitions
about invention and fable and unity, giving nothing but the "superficial
plan and elevation, as if a poem were a piece of formal architecture."[67]
In avoiding the study of the design of "Paradise Lost" or of the "Faerie
Queene" he may have brought his criticism nearer to the popular taste; but
he deliberately shut himself off from a vision of some of the higher
reaches of poetic art, perhaps betraying thereby that lack of
"imagination" with which he has sometimes been charged.[68] His
interpretation of an author is therefore occasionally in danger of
becoming an appreciation of isolated characters, or scenes, or passages,
as if he were actually reading him over with his audience. But this is a
limitation which Hazlitt shares with all the finer critics of his day.
After all these shortcomings have been acknowledged, the permanence of
Hazlitt's achievement appears only the more remarkable. It is clear that
the gods made him critical. The two essential qualities of judgment and
taste he seems to have possessed from the very beginning. It is impossible
to trace in him any development of taste; his growth is but the succession
of his literary experiences. One looks in vain for any of those errors of
youth such as are met even in a Coleridge enamored of Bowles. What
extravagance of tone Hazlitt displayed in his early criticism he carried
with him to his last day. If any change is to be noted, it is in the
growing keenness of his appreciation. The early maturity of his judicial
powers is attested by the political and metaphysical tendency of his
youthful studies. His birth as a full-fledged critic awaited only the
stirring of the springs of his eloquence, as is evident from the
excellence of what is practically his first literary essay, the "Character
of Burke."
No critic has approached books with so intense a passion as Hazlitt. That
sentimental fondness for the volumes themselves, especially when enriched
by the fragrance of antiquity, which gives so delicious a savor to the
bookishness of Lamb, was in him conspicuously absent. For him books were
only a more vivid aspect of life itself. "Tom Jones," he tells us, was the
novel that first broke the spell of his daily tasks and made of the world
"a dance through life, a perpetual gala-day."[69] Keats could not have
romped through the "Faerie Queene" with more spirit than did Hazlitt
through the length and breadth of eighteenth century romance, and the
young poet's awe before the majesty of Homer was hardly greater than that
of the future critic when a Milton or a Wordsworth swam into his ken. This
hot and eager interest, deprived of its outlet in the form of direct
emulation, sought a vent in communicating itself to others and in making
converts to its faith. So intimately did Hazlitt feel the spell of a work
of genius, that its life-blood was transfused into his own almost against
his will. "I wish," he exclaims, "I had never read the Emilius ... I had
better have formed myself on the model of Sir Fopling Flutter."[70] He
entered into the poet's creation with a sympathy amounting almost to
poetic vision, and the ever-present sense of the reality of the artist's
world led him to interpret literature primarily in relation to life. The
poetry of character and passion is what he regards of most essential
interest.[71] This point of view unintentionally converts his familiar
essays on life into a literary discourse, and gives to his formal
criticism the tone of a study of life at its sources, raising it at once
to the same level with creative literature. Though he nowhere employs the
now familiar formula of "literature and life," the lecture "On Poetry in
General" is largely an exposition of this outlook.
Life in its entire compass is regarded as the rough material of
literature, but it does not become literature until the artist's
imagination, as with a divine ray, has penetrated the mass and inspired it
with an ideal existence. Among the numerous attempts of his contemporaries
to define the creative faculty of the poet, this comparatively simple one
of Hazlitt's is worth noting. "This intuitive perception of the hidden
analogies of things, or, as it may be called, this _instinct of
imagination_, is perhaps what stamps the character of genius on the
productions of art more than any other circumstance: for it works
unconsciously, like nature, and receives its impressions from a kind of
inspiration."[72] It is this power that he has in mind when he says
"Poetry is infusing the same spirit in a number of things, or bathing them
all as it were, in the same overflowing sense of delight."[73] It shows
Hazlitt to have fully apprehended the guiding principle of the new ideal
of criticism which, looking upon the work of art as an act of original
creation and not of mechanical composition, based its judgment on a direct
sympathy with the artist's mind instead of resorting to a general rule. In
the light of this principle he is enabled to avoid the pitfalls of a
moralistic interpretation of literature and to decide the question as to
the relative importance of substance and treatment with a certainty which
seems to preclude the possibility of any other answer.
It is not the dignity of the theme which constitutes the great work of
art, for in that case a prose summary of the "Divine Comedy" would be as
exalted as the original, and it would be necessary merely to know the
subject of a poem in order to pass judgment upon it. A low or a trivial
subject may be raised by the imagination of the artist who recognizes in
it the elements of beauty or power. No definition of poetry can be worth
anything which would exclude "The Rape of the Lock"; and Murillo's
painting of "The Two Beggar Boys" is as much worth having "as almost any
picture in the world."[74] "Yet it is not true that execution is
everything, and the class or subject nothing. The highest subjects,
equally well-executed (which, however, rarely happens), are the best."[75]
Though each is perfect in its kind, there can be no difficulty in deciding
the question of greatness between "King Lear" and "The Comedy of Errors."
"The greatest strength of genius is shewn in describing the strongest
passions: for the power of imagination, in works of invention, must be in
proportion to the force of the natural impressions, which are the subject
of them."[76] One also finds a test of relative values in the measure of
fulness with which the work of art reflects the complex elements of life.
If we estimate a tragedy of Shakespeare above one of Lillo or Moore, it is
because "impassioned poetry is an emanation of the moral and intellectual
part of our nature, as well as of the sensitive--of the desire to know,
the will to act, and the power to feel; and ought to appeal to these
different parts of the constitution, in order to be perfect."[77]
In treating of the specific distinction of poetry Hazlitt does not escape
the usual difficulties. Taking his point of departure from Milton's
"thoughts that voluntary move harmonious numbers," he defines poetry in a
passage that satisfactorily anticipates the familiar one of Carlyle, as
"the music of language answering to the music of the mind.... Wherever any
object takes such a hold of the mind as to make us dwell upon it, and
brood over it, melting the heart in tenderness, or kindling it to a
sentiment of enthusiasm;--wherever a movement of imagination or passion is
impressed on the mind, by which it seeks to prolong or repeat the emotion,
to bring all other objects into accord with it, and to give the same
movement of harmony, sustained and continuous, or gradually varied
according to the occasion, to the sounds that express it--this is poetry.
The musical in sound is the sustained and continuous; the musical in
thought is the sustained and continuous also. There is a near connection
between music and deep-rooted passion."[78] In this mystical direction a
definition could go no further, but like nearly all writers and speakers
Hazlitt is inclined to use the word poetry in a variety of more or less
connected meanings,[79] ordinarily legitimate enough, but somewhat
embarrassing when it is a question of definition. "That which lifts the
spirit above the earth, which draws the soul out of itself with
indescribable longings, is," he says, "poetry in kind, and generally fit
to become so in name, by 'being married to immortal verse.'"[80] If it is
true that Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe possess the "essence and
the power of poetry" and require only the addition of verse to become
absolutely so,[81] then the musical expression is only a factitious
ornament, to be added or removed at the caprice of the writer. But Hazlitt
is careful to declare that verse does not make the whole difference
between poetry and prose, leaving the whole question as vaguely suspended
as ever.[82]
Bare theorizing, according to his own confession, was no favorite pursuit
with Hazlitt. He enjoyed himself much more in the analysis of an
individual author or his work. His aversion to literary cant, his love of
"saying things that are his own in a way of his own," were here most in
evidence. What he says of Milton might appropriately be applied to
himself, that he formed the most intense conception of things and then
embodied them by a single stroke of his pen. In a phrase or in a sentence
he stamped the character of an author indelibly, and, enemy to commonplace
though he was, became a cause of commonplace in others. No matter how much
might already have been written on a subject (and Hazlitt did not make a
practice of celebrating neglected obscurity) his own view stood out fresh
and clear, and yet his judgments were never eccentric. He wrestled with a
writer's thoughts, absorbed his most passionate feelings, and mirrored
back his most exquisite perceptions with "all the color, the light and the
shade." His fertility is more amazing than his intensity, for no critic of
nearly equal rank has enriched English literature with so many valuable
and enduring judgments on so great a variety of subjects. Dr. Johnson is
by common consent the spokesman of the eighteenth century, or of its
dominant class; Coleridge and Lamb are entitled to the glory of revealing
the literature between Spenser and Milton to English readers, and the
former rendered the additional service of acting as the interpreter of
Wordsworth. But to give an idea of Hazlitt's scope would require a summary
of opinions embracing poetry from Chaucer and Spenser to Wordsworth and
Byron, prose sacred and profane from Bacon and Jeremy Taylor to Burke and
Edward Irving, the drama in its two flourishing periods, the familiar
essay from Steele and Addison to Lamb and Leigh Hunt, the novel from Defoe
to Sir Walter Scott. This does not begin to suggest Hazlitt's versatility.
His own modest though somewhat over-alliterative words are that he has "at
least glanced over a number of subjects--painting, poetry, prose, plays,
politics, parliamentary speakers, metaphysical lore, books, men, and
things."[83]
The importance of Hazlitt's Shakespearian criticism is no longer open to
question. Though Coleridge alluded to them slightingly as out-and-out
imitations of Lamb,[84] Hazlitt's dicta on the greatest English genius are
equal in depth to Lamb's and far more numerous; and while in profoundness
and subtlety they fall short of the remarks of Coleridge himself, they
surpass them in intensity and carrying power. To both of these men Hazlitt
owed a great deal in his appreciation of Shakespeare, and perhaps even
more to August Wilhelm Schlegel, whose Lectures on Dramatic Literature he
reviewed in 1815.[85] His allusions to Schlegel border on enthusiasm and
he makes it a proud claim that he has done "more than any one except
Schlegel to vindicate the Characters of Shakespeare's Plays from the
stigma of French criticism."[86] But however great his obligation, there
was some point in the compliment of the German critic when he declared
that Hazlitt had gone beyond him (l'avoit depasse) in his Shakespearian
opinions.[87] A few years later Heine maintained that the only significant
commentator of Shakespeare produced by England was William Hazlitt.[88]
Coleridge's notes, it is to be remembered, were not at that time generally
accessible.
Hazlitt's attitude toward Shakespeare was wholesomely on this side of
idolatry. He did not make it an article of faith to admire everything that
Shakespeare had written, and refused his praise to the poems and most of
the sonnets. Even Schlegel and Coleridge could not persuade him to see
beauties in what appeared to be blemishes, but in a general estimate of
Shakespeare's all-embracing genius he conceived his faults to be "of just
as much consequence as his bad spelling."[89] He saw in him a genius who
comprehended all humanity, who represented it poetically in all its shades
and varieties. He examined all the fine distinctions of character, he
studied Shakespeare's manner of combining and contrasting them so as to
produce a unity of tone above even the art of the classic unities. From
the irresponsible comedy of Falstaff to the deepest tragic notes of Lear,
the whole gamut of human emotions encounters responsive chords in the
critic's mind--the young love of Romeo and Juliet or the voluptuous
abandonment of Antony and Cleopatra, the intellect of Iago irresistibly
impelled to malignant activity or Hamlet entangled in the coils of a fatal
introspection. To the sheer poetry of Shakespeare he is also acutely
sensitive, to the soft moonlit atmosphere of the "Midsummernight's Dream,"
to the tender gloom of "Cymbeline," to the "philosophic poetry" of "As You
Like It." Some of his interpretations of isolated passages are hardly to
be surpassed. He comments minutely and exquisitely on what he considers to
be a touchstone of poetic feeling,
"Daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty."[90]
And with what complete insight he translates a speech of Antony's:
"This precarious state and the approaching dissolution of his greatness
are strikingly displayed in the dialogue of Antony with Eros:
'_Antony._ Eros, thou yet behold'st me?
_Eros._ Ay, noble lord.
_Antony._ Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish;
A vapour sometime, like a bear or lion,
A towered citadel, a pendant rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon't, that nod unto the world
And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs,
They are black vesper's pageants.
_Eros._ Ay, my lord.
_Antony._ That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water.
_Eros._ It does, my lord.
_Antony._ My good knave, Eros, now thy captain is
Even such a body,' etc.
"This is, without doubt, one of the finest pieces of poetry in Shakspeare.
The splendour of the imagery, the semblance of reality, the lofty range of
picturesque objects hanging over the world, their evanescent nature, the
total uncertainty of what is left behind, are just like the mouldering
schemes of human greatness. It is finer than Cleopatra's passionate
lamentation over his fallen grandeur, because it is more dim, unstable,
unsubstantial."[91]
If an understanding of Shakespeare in Hazlitt's day may be taken as a
measure of a critic's depth of insight, his attitude toward Shakespeare's
fellow-dramatists will just as surely reveal his powers of discrimination.
Lamb was often carried away by a pioneer's fervor and misled persons like
Lowell, who, returning to Ford late in life, found "that the greater part
of what [he] once took on trust as precious was really paste and
pinchbeck," and that as far as the celebrated closing scene in "The Broken
Heart" was concerned, Charles Lamb's comment on it was "worth more than
all Ford ever wrote."[92] Hazlitt's dispassionate sanity in this instance
forms an instructive contrast: "Except the last scene of the Broken Heart
(which I think extravagant--others may think it sublime, and be right)
they [Ford's plays] are merely exercises of style and effusion of
wire-drawn sentiment."[93] The same strength of judgment rendered Hazlitt
proof against the excessive sentimentality in Beaumont and Fletcher and
gave a distinct value to his opinions even when they seemed to be wrong,
which was not often. But in writing of Marlowe, of Dekker and of Webster,
he spreads out all his sail to make a joyous run among the beauties in his
course.
And it is so with the rest of his criticism--throughout the same
susceptibility to all that is true, or lofty, or refined, vigilantly
controlled by a firm common sense, the same stamp of originality
unmistakably impressed on all. "I like old opinions with new reasons," he
once said to Northcote, "not new opinions without any."[94] But he did not
hesitate to express a new opinion where the old one appeared to be unjust.
His heretical preference of Steele over Addison has found more than one
convert in later days. On Spenser or Pope, on Fielding or Richardson, he
is equally happy and unimprovable. In the opinion of Mr. Saintsbury,
Hazlitt's general lecture on Elizabethan literature, his treatment of the
dramatists of the Restoration, of Pope, of the English Novelists, and of
Cobbett have never been excelled; and who is better qualified than Mr.
Saintsbury by width of reading to express such an opinion?[95]
Of Hazlitt's treatment of his own contemporaries an additional word needs
to be said. No charge has been repeated more often than that of the
inconsistency, perversity, and utter unreliableness of his judgments on
the writers of his day. To distinguish between the claims of living poets,
particularly in an age of new ideas and changing forms, is a task which
might test the powers of the most discerning critics, and in which
perfection is hardly to be attained. Yet one may ask whether in the entire
extent of Hazlitt's writing a great living genius has been turned into a
mockery or a figurehead been set up for the admiration of posterity. Of
his personal and political antipathies enough has been said, but against
literary orthodoxy his only great sin is a harsh review of
"Christabel."[96] If in general we look at the age through Hazlitt's eyes,
we shall see its literature dominated by the figures of Wordsworth and
Scott, the one regarded as the restorer of life to poetry, the other as
the creator or transcriber of a whole world of romance and humanity.
Coleridge stands out prominently as the widest intellect of his age.
Byron's poetry bulks very large, though it is not estimated as
superlatively as in the criticism of our own day. It is a pity that
Hazlitt never wrote formally of Keats, for his casual allusions indicate a
deep enjoyment of the "rich beauties and the dim obscurities" of the "Eve
of St. Agnes"[97] and an appreciation of the perfection of the great
odes.[98] If he failed to give Shelley his full dues, he did not overlook
his exquisite lyrical inspiration. He spoke of Shelley as a man of genius,
but "'all air,' disdaining the bars and ties of mortal mould;" he praised
him for "single thoughts of great depth and force, single images of rare
beauty, detached passages of extreme tenderness," and he rose to
enthusiasm in commending his translations, especially the scenes from
Faust.[99] He has been accused of writing a Spirit of the Age which
omitted to give an account of Shelley and Keats, but in the title of the
book consists his excuse. As it was not his idea to anticipate the
decision of posterity but only to sketch the personalities who were in
control of the public attention, he passed over the finer poets who were
still neglected, and wrote instead about Campbell and Moore and Crabbe. It
is sufficient praise for the critic that those of whom he has undertaken
to treat stand irreversibly judged in his pages. He is generous toward
Campbell and Moore, who were both personally hostile to him; he is
scrupulously honest toward Bentham, with whose system he had no sympathy.
The concluding pages of his sketch of Southey, in view of that poet's
rancor against him, are almost defiant in their magnanimity. His adverse
judgments, moreover, are as permanent as his favorable ones. He pronounced
the verdict against the naked realism of Crabbe's poetry, which persons
like Jeffrey thought superior to Wordsworth's, and he pricked the bubble
of Edward Irving's popularity while it was at its pitch of highest glory.
If he was often bitter toward men whom he at other times eulogized, it was
in the heat and hurry of journalistic publication in a period when blows
were freely dealt and freely taken. If he sometimes censured even
Wordsworth and Scott and grew impatient with Byron and Coleridge, it must
be remembered that these men of genius had imperfections, and that the
imperfections of men of genius are of far greater concern to their
contemporaries than to posterity. Time dispels the mists and allows the
gross matter to settle to the bottom. We now have Wordsworth in the
selections of Matthew Arnold, we read the Waverley Novels with Lockhart's
Life of Scott before us, and we render praise to Coleridge for what he has
accomplished since his death. With none of these advantages, Hazlitt's
performance seems remarkable enough. No contemporary with the exception of
Leigh Hunt displayed as wide a sympathy with the writers of that time, and
Hazlitt so far surpasses Hunt in discrimination and strength, that he
deserves to be called, strange as it may sound, the best contemporary
judge of the literature of his age.
It has already been suggested that much of Hazlitt's appeal as a critic
rests on the force of his popular eloquence, so that a brief consideration
of his prose is not in this connection out of place. "We may all be fine
fellows," said Stevenson, "but none of us can write like Hazlitt." To
write a style that is easy yet incisive, lively and at the same time
substantial, buoyant without being frothy, glittering but with no tinsel
frippery, a style combining the virtues of homeliness and picturesqueness,
has been given to few mortals. Writing in a generation in which the
standards of prose were conspicuously unsettled, when the most ambitious
writers were seeking an escape from the frozen patterns of the eighteenth
century in a restoration of the elaborate artifices of the seventeenth,
when quaintness and ornateness were the evidence of a distinguished style,
Hazlitt succeeded in preserving the note of familiarity without fading
into colorlessness or in any degree effacing his individuality. He cannot
be counted among the masters of finished prose, he is as a matter of fact
often very negligent,[100] but he developed the best model of an
undiluted, sturdy, popular style that is to be found in the English
language.
Perhaps an adherence to the eighteenth century tradition of plainness is
the most prominent characteristic of Hazlitt's prose. But his plainness is
not precisely of the blunt type associated with Swift and Arbuthnot. It is
modified by the Gallic tone of easy familiarity, by the ideal deemed
appropriate for dignified converse among educated people of the world. His
periods are of the simplest construction and they are not methodically
combined in the artificial patterns beloved of the eighteenth century
followers of the plain style. Not that he altogether neglects the devices
of parallelism and antithesis when he wishes to give epigrammatic point to
his remarks, but he more generally develops his ideas in a series of
easily flowing sentences which are as near as writing can be to "the tone
of lively and sensible conversation." It is impossible to match in the
English essay such talk as Hazlitt reproduces in his accounts of the
evenings at Lamb's room or of his meeting with Coleridge, in which high
themes and spirited eloquence find spontaneous and unaffected expression
through the same medium as might be employed in a deliberate definition of
the nature of poetry. The various sets of lectures are pitched in the same
conversational key and are found adequate to conveying a notion of the
grandeur of Milton as well as of the familiarity of Lamb.
Those who have praised Hazlitt's simplicity have often given the
impression that his prose is a single-stringed instrument, and have failed
to suggest the range comprised between the simple hammer-strokes of the
essay on Cobbett and the magnificent diapason in which he unrolls the
panorama of Coleridge's mind. In both passages there is the same
sentence-norm. In the first, the periods, not bound by any connecting
words, strike distinctly, sharply, with staccato abruptness. The movement
is that of a clean-limbed wrestler struggling with confident energy to pin
down a difficult opponent:
"His principle is repulsion, his nature contradiction: he is made up of
mere antipathies; an Ishmaelite indeed, without a fellow. He is always
playing at _hunt-the-slipper_ in politics. He turns round upon whoever is
next to him. The way to wean him from any opinion, and make him conceive
an intolerable hatred against it, would be to place somebody near him who
was perpetually dinning it in his ears. When he is in England, he does
nothing but abuse the Boroughmongers, and laugh at the whole system: when
he is in America, he grows impatient of freedom and a republic. If he had
staid there a little longer, he would have become a loyal and a loving
subject of his Majesty King George IV. He lampooned the French Revolution
when it was hailed as the dawn of liberty by millions: by the time it was
brought into almost universal ill-odour by some means or other (partly no
doubt by himself) he had turned, with one or two or three others, staunch
Bonapartist. He is always of the militant, not of the triumphant party: so
far he bears a gallant show of magnanimity; but his gallantry is hardly of
the right stamp: it wants principle. For though he is not servile or
mercenary, he is the victim of self-will. He must pull down and pull in
pieces: it is not in his disposition to do otherwise. It is a pity; for
with his great talents he might do great things, if he would go right
forward to any useful object, make thorough-stitch work of any question,
or join hand and heart with any principle. He changes his opinions as he
does his friends, and much on the same account. He has no comfort in fixed
principles: as soon as anything is settled in his own mind, he quarrels
with it. He has no satisfaction but in the chase after truth, runs a
question down, worries and kills it, then quits it like vermin, and starts
some new game, to lead him a new dance, and give him a fresh breathing
through bog and brake, with the rabble yelping at his heels and the
leaders perpetually at fault."[101]
In the other passage the clauses and phrases follow in their natural
order, but they are united by the simplest kind of connective device in an
undistinguishable stream over which the reader is driven with a steady
swell and fall, sometimes made breathlessly rapid by the succession of its
uniformly measured word-groups, but delicately modulated here and there to
provide restful pauses in the long onward career:
"Next, he was engaged with Hartley's tribes of mind, 'etherial braid,
thought-woven,'--and he busied himself for a year or two with vibrations
and vibratiuncles and the great law of association that binds all things
in its mystic chain, and the doctrine of Necessity (the mild teacher of
Charity) and the Millennium, anticipative of a life to come--and he
plunged deep into the controversy on Matter and Spirit, and, as an escape
from Dr. Priestley's Materialism, where he felt himself imprisoned by the
logician's spell, like Ariel in the cloven pine-tree, he became suddenly
enamoured of Bishop Berkeley's fairy-world, and used in all companies to
build the universe, like a brave poetical fiction, of fine words--and he
was deep-read in Malebranche, and in Cudworth's Intellectual System (a
huge pile of learning, unwieldly, enormous) and in Lord Brook's
hieroglyphic theories, and in Bishop Butler's Sermons, and in the Duchess
of Newcastle's fantastic folios, and in Clarke and South and Tillotson,
and all the fine thinkers and masculine reasoners of that age--and
Leibnitz's _Pre-established Harmony_ reared its arch above his head, like
the rainbow in the cloud, covenanting with the hopes of man--and then he
fell plump, ten thousand fathoms down (but his wings saved him harmless)
into the _hortus siccus_ of Dissent" etc.[102]
The same style which glistens and sparkles in describing the fancy of Pope
rises to an inspired chant with a clearly defined cadence at the
recollection of the past glory of Coleridge:
"He was the first poet I ever knew. His genius at that time had angelic
wings, and fed on manna. He talked on for ever; and you wished him to talk
on for ever. His thoughts did not seem to come with labour and effort; but
as if borne on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination
lifted him from off his feet. His voice rolled on the ear like the pealing
organ, and its sound alone was the music of thought. His mind was clothed
with wings; and raised on them, he lifted philosophy to heaven. In his
descriptions, you then saw the progress of human happiness and liberty in
bright and never-ending succession, like the steps of Jacob's ladder, with
airy shapes ascending and descending, and with the voice of God at the top
of the ladder. And shall I, who heard him then, listen to him now? Not I!
That spell is broke; that time is gone for ever; that voice is heard no
more: but still the recollection comes rushing by with thoughts of
long-past years, and rings in my ears with never-dying sound."[103]
It would take much space to illustrate all the notes to which Hazlitt's
voice responds--the pithy epigram of the Characteristics, the
Chesterfieldian grace in his advice "On the Conduct of Life," the
palpitating movement with which he gives expression to his keen enjoyment
of his sensual or intellectual existence, and the subdued solemnity of his
reveries which sometimes remind us that he was writing in an age which had
rediscovered Sir Thomas Browne. The following sentence proves how
accurately he could catch the rhythm of the seventeenth century. "That we
should wear out by slow stages, and dwindle at last into nothing, is not
wonderful, when even in our prime our strongest impressions leave little
trace but for the moment, and we are the creatures of petty
circumstance."[104] Other passages in the same essay echo this manner only
less strikingly:
"Life is indeed a strange gift, and its privileges are most mysterious. No
wonder when it is first granted to us, that our gratitude, our admiration,
and our delight, should prevent us from reflecting on our own nothingness,
or from thinking it will ever be recalled. Our first and strongest
impressions are borrowed from the mighty scene that is opened to us, and
we unconsciously transfer its durability as well as its splendour to
ourselves. So newly found we cannot think of parting with it yet, or at
least put off that consideration _sine die_. Like a rustic at a fair, we
are full of amazement and rapture, and have no thought of going home, or
that it will soon be night. We know our existence only by ourselves, and
confound our knowledge with the objects of it. We and nature are therefore
one. Otherwise the illusion, the 'feast of reason and the flow of soul,'
to which we are invited, is a mockery and a cruel insult. We do not go
from a play till the last act is ended, and the lights are about to be
extinguished. But the fairy face of nature still shines on: shall we be
called away before the curtain falls, or ere we have scarce had a glimpse
of what is going on? Like children, our step-mother nature holds us up to
see the raree-show of the universe, and then, as if we were a burden to
her to support, lets us fall down again. Yet what brave sublunary things
does not this pageant present, like a ball or _fete_ of the
universe!"[105]
In Hazlitt's vocabulary there is nothing striking unless it be the
scrupulousness with which he avoids the danger of commonplaceness and of
pedantry. It is easy to forget that the transparent obviousness of his
style was attained only after many years of groping. We may well believe
that "there is a research in the choice of a plain, as well as of an
ornamental or learned style; and, in fact, a great deal more."[106] Though
he did not go in pursuit of the word to the extent of some later refiners
of style, he had a clear realization that the appropriate word was what
chiefly gave vitality to writing.[107] For this reason he constantly
denounced Johnsonese with its polysyllabic Latin words which reduced
language to abstract generalization. His own vocabulary is concrete and
vivid, and of a purity which makes one wonder how even the Quarterly
Review could have ventured to apply to him the epithet "slang-whanger."
In spite of all that may be said in honor of the unadorned style of
composition, writers have ever found that even in prose ideas are most
forcibly conveyed by means of imagery. Hazlitt, it should be remembered,
was an ardent admirer of the picturesque qualities in the prose of Burke,
the most brilliant of the eighteenth century. In recalling his first
reading of Burke, he tells how he despaired of emulating his felicities.
But whether by dint of meditating over Burke or by the native vigor of his
fancy, Hazlitt learned to write as boldly and as brilliantly as the great
orator. As a rule his rhetorical passages are not deliberately contrived,
in the manner for example of his esteemed contemporary De Quincey. His
tropes and images rise directly out of his subject or his feelings.
Instead of dissecting the qualities of a character or a work of art, he
translates its tone and its spirit as closely as language will permit.
That is why his criticism, like Lamb's or that of the master of this form,
Longinus, is itself first-rate literature, recreating the impression of a
masterpiece and sometimes even going beyond it.
Of his picturesque quality examples enough may be found in the present
volume, yet one cannot forbear to add a few illustrations at this point.
There is his irresistible comparison of Cobbett in his political
inconsistency to "a young and lusty bridegroom, that divorces a favorite
speculation every morning, and marries a new one every night. He is not
wedded to his notions, not he. He has not one Mrs. Cobbett among all his
opinions."[108] There is a good deal more than mere wit in the analogy
between Godwin's mechanical laboriousness and "an eight-day clock that
must be wound up long before it can strike."[109] And there is real
grandeur in his description of Fame: "Fame is the sound which the stream
of high thoughts, carried down to future ages, makes as it flows--deep,
distant, murmuring evermore like the waters of the mighty ocean. He who
has ears truly touched to this music, is in a manner deaf to the voice of
popularity."[110] In representing the brilliant hues of Restoration
comedy, he allows an even freer play to his fancy:
"In turning over the pages of the best comedies, we are almost transported
to another world, and escape from this dull age to one that was all life,
and whim, and mirth, and humour. The curtain rises, and a gayer scene
presents itself, as on the canvas of Watteau. We are admitted behind the
scenes like spectators at court, on a levee or birthday; but it is the
court, the gala-day of wit and pleasure, of gallantry and Charles II.!
What an air breathes from the name! what a rustling of silks and waving of
plumes! what a sparkling of diamond ear-rings and shoe-buckles! What
bright eyes, (Ah, those were Waller's Sacharissa's as she passed!) what
killing looks and graceful motions! How the faces of the whole ring are
dressed in smiles! how the repartee goes round! how wit and folly,
elegance and awkward imitation of it, set one another off! Happy,
thoughtless age, when kings and nobles led purely ornamental lives; when
the utmost stretch of a morning's study went no farther than the choice of
a sword-knot, or the adjustment of a side-curl; when the soul spoke out in
all the pleasing eloquence of dress; and beaux and belles, enamoured of
themselves in one another's follies, fluttered like gilded butterflies, in
giddy mazes, through the walks of St. James's Park!"[111]
Sometimes, it is true, he allows his spirits to run away with his
judgment, although in such instances the manner is so obviously
exaggerated as to suggest deliberate mimicry. His account of the tawdry
sentimentality of Moore's poetry sounds like pure travesty:
"His verse is like a shower of beauty; a dance of images; a stream of
music; or like the spray of the water-fall, tinged by the morning-beam
with rosy light. The characteristic distinction of our author's style is
this continuous and incessant flow of voluptuous thoughts and shining
allusions. He ought to write with a crystal pen on silver paper. His
subject is set off by a dazzling veil of poetic diction, like a wreath of
flowers gemmed with innumerous dew-drops, that weep, tremble, and glitter
in liquid softness and pearly light, while the song of birds ravishes the
ear, and languid odours breathe around, and Aurora opens Heaven's smiling
portals, Peris and nymphs peep through the golden glades, and an Angel's
wing glances over the glossy scene."[112]
One feature of Hazlitt's style concerning which much has been said both in
praise and in blame is his inveterate use of quotations. His pages,
particularly when he is in a contemplative mood, are sown with snatches
from the great poets, and the effect generally is of the happiest. A line
of Shakespeare's or of Wordsworth's, blending with a vein of high feeling
or deep reflection, transfigures the entire passage as if by magic.
Sometimes the phrase is merely woven into the general texture of the prose
without in any way raising its tone, and on occasion some fine poetic
expression is vulgarized by being thrown into very common company. It is
vandalism to muster a sonnet of Shakespeare's into such a service and it
in no way enhances the expressiveness of the passage to say, "A flashy
pamphlet has been run to a five-and-thirtieth edition, and thus ensured
the writer a 'deathless date' among political charlatans."[113] The fact
is that quotations were a part of Hazlitt's vocabulary, which he used with
the same freedom as common locutions and with less scrupulous regard for
the associations which were gathered about them. He negligently misquoted
or wantonly adapted to his purpose, but the reader is willing to pardon
the moments of irritation for the numerous delightful thrills which he has
provoked by some happy poetic memory "stealing and giving odor" to a
sentiment in itself dignified or elevated.
Hazlitt's influence as a critic may be inferred from a summary of his
opinions. It was not so much through the infusion of a new spirit in
literature that he acted on other minds. Though his criticism owes much of
its value to the freshness and boldness of his approach, this
temperamental virtue was not something which could be imitated by a less
gifted writer. Sainte-Beuve indeed seems to recognize Hazlitt as the
exponent of the impetuous and inspired vein in criticism--"the kind of
inspiration which accompanies and follows those frequent articles
dashingly improvised and launched under full steam. One puts himself
completely into it: its value is exaggerated for the time being, its
importance is measured by its fury, and if this leads to better results,
there is no great harm after all."[114] But though he professed these to
be his own feelings as a critic, they were in him so modified by the
traditional French moderation and suavity of tone, as well as by a greater
precision of method, as to make the resemblance to Hazlitt inconspicuous.
It is hard to determine to what extent Hazlitt's individualism is
responsible for the lawless impressionism of some later critics,[115] but
it is not to be imputed to him as a sin if, in the course of a century,
one of his virtues has become exaggerated into a fault. He has but
suffered human destiny.
Hazlitt's influence has been wide in guiding the taste of readers and in
creating or giving currency to a body of opinions on literature which has
found acceptance among critics. If the tributes of Schlegel and Heine to
Hazlitt's Shakespearian criticism were insufficient, we have the word of
his own countrymen for it that numberless readers were initiated into a
proper understanding of Shakespeare by means of his writings.[116] In our
own days Mr. Howells has told us that Hazlitt "helped him to clarify and
formulate his opinions of Shakespeare as no one else has yet done."[117]
Critics no less than readers owe him a large debt. Hazlitt had not been
writing many years before his fellow-laborers in literature began to
recognize and pay homage to his superior insight. His opinions were quoted
as having the weight of authority by those who were friendly to him, the
writers in the London Magazine or in the Edinburgh Review; they were
appropriated without acknowledgement by the hostile contributors to
Blackwood's. Many writers deferred to him as respectfully as he himself
deferred to Coleridge and Lamb, even though Byron's respectable friends
adjured the noble poet not to dignify Hazlitt in open controversy except
by mentioning him as "a certain lecturer." Leigh Hunt was frequently
indebted to him, but generally paid the tribute due. Macaulay sometimes
assimilated a passage of Hazlitt's to the needs of his own earlier essays.
In the essay on Milton his balancing of Charles's political vices against
his domestic virtues is strikingly reminiscent of a similar treatment of
Southey by the older critic. Personal dislike of Hazlitt, persisting after
his death, for a long time prevented a proper respect being paid to his
memory without much diminishing the weight of his influence. The attitude
toward him is summed up by a writer whose treatment in general does not
err on the side of enthusiasm. Hazlitt, he tells us, is "a writer with
whose reputation fashion has hitherto had very little to do--who is even
now more read than praised, more imitated than extolled, and whose various
productions still interest many who care and know very little about the
author."[118] But this very utterance was on the occasion of the turning
of the tide. It was in a review of Hazlitt's Literary Remains which had
been introduced by appreciative essays from the pens of Bulwer-Lytton and
Thomas Noon Talfourd, the former not a little patronizing, but Talfourd's
excellent in its discrimination of the strength and weakness of Hazlitt. A
few years later came the implied compliment of Horne's New Spirit of the
Age, which would hardly be worth mentioning were it not that Thackeray in
reviewing it took occasion to pay an exquisite tribute to Hazlitt.[119]
From this time forth he was not wanting in stout champions, though most
people still maintained a cautious reserve in their judgments of him. So
sound and penetrating a critic as Walter Bagehot became an earnest
convert, and in Bagehot's writings Mr. Birrell has pointed out more than
one resemblance to Hazlitt. James Russell Lowell has not been profuse in
his expressions of admiration, but he has probably followed Hazlitt's
track more closely than any other important critic. Many of his essays
seem to have been composed with a volume of Hazlitt on the desk before
him. There is the essay on Pope with its general correspondence of points
and occasional startling parallel of phrase. Hazlitt at the end of his
lecture on Pope and Dryden remarks that poetry had "declined by successive
gradations from the poetry of imagination in the age of Elizabeth to the
poetry of fancy in the time of Charles I," and Lowell repeats this with
some amplification. In the same connection he characterizes Shakespeare,
Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton in the sharp epigrammatic manner reminding
one of Hazlitt. In the concluding pages of the essay on Spenser we are
also kept in a reminiscent mood, till Lowell tells us that "to read him is
like dreaming awake," and at once there flashes upon us Hazlitt's
expression that "Spenser is the poet of our waking dreams." It is through
missionary work like this, not altogether conscious and therefore all the
more genuine, that his opinions have been diffused through the length and
breadth of English and been incorporated into the common stock. "Gracious
rills from the Hazlitt watershed have flowed in all directions,
fertilizing a dry and thirsty land"--is the happily turned phrase of Mr.
Birrell. If in our own day there are still persons who, looking upon
criticism as a severe science, occasionally sneer at him as a "facile
eulogist,"[120] those who regard it rather as a gift have seen in him "the
greatest critic that England has yet produced."[121] Wherever the golden
mean between these two extremes of opinion may lie, there is no doubt that
for introducing readers to an appreciation of the great things in English
literature, Hazlitt still remains without an equal.
I