singular composition. Like some others of his revolutionary friends,
Godwin, for example, Leigh Hunt, and Tom Paine, he represents the old
dissenting spirit in a new incarnation. The grandfather a stern
Calvinist, the father a Unitarian, the son a freethinker; those were the
gradations through which more than one family passed during the closing
years of the last century and the opening of this. One generation still
clung to the old Puritan traditions and Jonathan Edwards; the next
followed Priestley; and the third joined the little band of radicals who
read Cobbett, scorned Southey as a deserter, and refused to be
frightened by the French Revolution. The outside crust of opinion may be
shed with little change to the inner man. Hazlitt was a dissenter to his
backbone. He was born to be in a minority; to be a living protest
against the dominant creed and constitution. He recognised and
denounced, but he never shook off, the faults characteristic of small
sects. A want of wide intellectual culture, and a certain sourness of
temper, cramped his powers and sometimes marred his writing. But from
his dissenting forefathers Hazlitt inherited something better. Beside
the huge tomes of controversial divinity on his father's shelves, the
'Patres Poloni,' Pripscovius, Crellius and Cracovius, Lardner and
Doddridge, and Baxter and Bates, and Howe, were the legends of the
Puritan hagiology. The old dissenters, he tells us, had Neale's 'History
of the Puritans' by heart, and made their children read Calamy's account
of the 2,000 ejected ministers along with the stories of Daniel in the
Lion's Den and Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego. Sympathy for the
persecuted, unbending resistance to the oppressor, was the creed which
had passed into their blood. 'This covenant they kept as the stars keep
their courses; this principle they stuck by, for want of knowing better,
as it sticks by them to the last. It grew with their growth, it does not
wither in their decay.... It glimmers with the last feeble eyesight,
smiles in the faded cheek like infancy, and lights a path before them to
the grave. This'--for in Hazlitt lies a personal application in all his
moralising--'This is better than the whirligig life of a court
poet'--such, for example, as Robert Southey.
But Hazlitt's descent was not pure. If we could trace back the line of
his ancestry we should expect to find that by some freak of fortune, one
of the rigid old Puritans had married a descendant of some great Flemish
or Italian painter. Love of graceful forms and bright colouring and
voluptuous sensations had been transmitted to their descendants, though
hitherto repressed by the stern discipline of British nonconformity. As
the discipline relaxed, the Hazlitts reverted to the ancestral type.
Hazlitt himself, his brother and his sister, were painters by instinct.
The brother became a painter of miniatures by profession; and Hazlitt to
the end of his days revered Titian almost as much as he revered his
great idol Napoleon. An odd pair of idols, one thinks, for a youth
brought up upon Pripscovius and his brethren! A keen delight in all
artistic and natural beauty was an awkward endowment for a youth
intended for the ministry. Keats was scarcely more out of place in a
surgery than Hazlitt would have been in a Unitarian pulpit of those
days, and yet from that pulpit, oddly enough, came the greatest impulse
to Hazlitt. It came from a man who, like Hazlitt himself, though in a
higher degree than Hazlitt, combined the artistic and the philosophic
temperament. Coleridge, as Hazlitt somewhere says, threw a great stone
into the standing pool of contemporary thought; and it was in January
1798--one of the many dates in his personal history to which he recurs
with unceasing fondness--that Hazlitt rose before daylight and walked
ten miles in the mud to hear Coleridge preach. He has told, in his
graphic manner, how the voice of the preacher 'rose like a stream of
rich distilled perfumes;' how he launched into his subject, after giving
out the text, 'like an eagle dallying with the wind;' and how his young
hearer seemed to be listening to the music of the spheres, to see the
union of poetry and philosophy; and behold truth and genius embracing
under the eye of religion. His description of the youthful Coleridge has
a fit pendant in the wonderful description of the full-blown philosopher
in Carlyle's 'Life of Sterling;' where, indeed, one or two touches are
taken from Hazlitt's Essays. It is Hazlitt who remarked, even at this
early meeting, that the dreamy poet philosopher could never decide on
which side of the footpath he should walk; and Hazlitt, who struck out
the epigram that Coleridge was an excellent talker if allowed to start
from no premisses and come to no conclusion. The glamour of Coleridge's
theosophy never seems to have fascinated Hazlitt's stubborn intellect.
At this time, indeed, Coleridge had not yet been inoculated with German
mysticism. In after years, the disciple, according to his custom,
renounced his master and assailed him with half-regretful anger. But the
intercourse and kindly encouragement of so eminent a man seem to have
roused Hazlitt's ambition. His poetical and his speculative intellect
were equally stirred. The youth was already longing to write a
philosophical treatise. The two elements of his nature thus roused to
action led him along a 'strange diagonal.' He would be at once a painter
and a metaphysician. Some eight years of artistic labour convinced him
that he could not be a Titian or a Raphael, and he declined to be a mere
Hazlitt junior. His metaphysical studies, on the contrary, convinced him
that he might be a Hume or a Berkeley; but unluckily they convinced
himself alone. The tiny volume which contained their results was
neglected by everybody but the author, who, to the end of his days,
loved it with the love of a mother for a deformed child. It is written,
to say the truth, in a painful and obscure style; it is the work of a
man who has brooded over his own thoughts in solitude till he cannot
appreciate the need of a clear exposition. The narrowness of his reading
had left him in ignorance of the new aspects under which the eternal
problems were presenting themselves to the new generation; and a
metaphysical discussion in antiquated phraseology is as useless as a
lady's dress in the last year's fashion. Hazlitt, in spite of this
double failure, does not seem to have been much disturbed by
impecuniosity; but the most determined Bohemian has to live. For some
years he strayed about the purlieus of literature, drudging,
translating, and doing other cobbler's work. Two of his performances,
however, were characteristic; he wrote an attack upon Malthus, and he
made an imprudent marriage. Even Malthusians must admit that imprudent
marriages may have some accidental good consequences. When a man has
fairly got his back to the wall, he is forced to fight; and Hazlitt, at
the age of thirty-four, with a wife and a son, at last discovered the
great secret of the literary profession, that a clever man can write
when he has to write or starve. To compose had been labour and grief to
him, so long as he could potter round a thought indefinitely; but with
the printer's devil on one side and the demands of a family on the
other, his ink began to flow freely, and during the last fifteen or
seventeen years of his life he became a voluminous though fragmentary
author. Several volumes of essays, lectures, and criticisms, besides his
more ambitious 'Life of Napoleon,' and a great deal of anonymous
writing, attest his industry. He died in 1830, at the age of fifty-two;
leaving enough to show that he could have done more and a good deal of a
rare, if not of the highest kind of excellence.
Hazlitt, as I have said, is everywhere autobiographical. Besides that
secret, that a man can write if he must, he had discovered the further
secret that the easiest of all topics is his own feelings. It is an
apparent paradox, though the explanation is not far to seek, that
Hazlitt, though shy with his friends, was the most unreserved of
writers. Indeed he takes the public into his confidence with a facility
which we cannot easily forgive. Biographers of late have been guilty of
flagrant violations of the unwritten code which should protect the
privacies of social life from the intrusions of public curiosity. But
the most unscrupulous of biographers would hardly have dared to tear
aside the veil so audaciously as Hazlitt, in one conspicuous instance at
least, chose to do for himself. His idol Rousseau had indeed gone
further; but when Rousseau told the story of his youth, it was at least
seen through a long perspective of years, and his own personality might
seem to be scarcely interested. Hazlitt chose, in the strange book
called the 'New Pygmalion,' or 'Liber Amoris,' to invite the British
public at large to look on at a strange tragi-comedy, of which the last
scene was scarcely finished. Hazlitt had long been unhappy in his family
life. His wife appears to have been a masculine woman, with no talent
for domesticity; completely indifferent to her husband's pursuits, and
inclined to despise him for so fruitless an employment of his energies.
They had already separated, it seems, when Hazlitt fell desperately in
love with Miss Sarah Walker, the daughter of his lodging-house keeper.
The husband and wife agreed to obtain a divorce under the Scotch law,
after which they might follow their own paths, and Sarah Walker become
the second Mrs. Hazlitt. Some months had to be spent by Mr. and Mrs.
Hazlitt in Edinburgh, with a view to this arrangement. The lady's
journal records her impressions; which, it would seem, strongly
resembled those of a tradesman getting rid of a rather flighty and
imprudent partner in business. She is extremely precise as to all
pecuniary and legal details; she calls upon her husband now and then,
takes tea with him, makes an off-hand remark or two about some
picture-gallery which he had been visiting, and tells him that he has
made a fool of himself, with the calmness of a lady dismissing a
troublesome servant, or a schoolmaster parting from an ill-behaved
pupil. And meanwhile, in queer contrast, Hazlitt was pouring out to his
friends letters which seem to be throbbing with unrestrainable passion.
He is raving as Romeo at Mantua might have raved about Juliet. To hear
Miss Walker called his wife will be music to his ears, such as they
never heard. But it seems doubtful whether, after all, his Juliet will
have him. He shrieks mere despair and suicide. Nothing is left in the
world to give him a drop of comfort. The breeze does not cool him nor
the blue sky delight him. He will never lie down at night nor rise up of
a morning in peace, nor even behold his little boy's face with pleasure,
unless he is restored to her favour. And Mrs. Hazlitt reports, after
acknowledging the receipt of £10, that Mr. Hazlitt was so much
'enamoured' of one of these letters that he pulled it out of his pocket
twenty times a day, wanted to read it to his companions, and ranted and
gesticulated till people took him for a madman. The 'Liber Amoris' is
made out of these letters--more or less altered and disguised, with some
reports of conversations with the lovely Sarah. 'It was an explosion of
frenzy,' says De Quincey; his reckless mode of relieving his bosom of
certain perilous stuff, with little care whether it produced scorn or
sympathy. A passion which urges its victim to such improprieties should
be, at least, deep and genuine. One would have liked him better if he
had not taken his frenzy to market. The 'Liber Amoris' tells us
accordingly that the author, Hazlitt's imaginary double, died abroad,
'of disappointment preying on a sickly frame and morbid state of mind.'
The hero, in short, breaks his heart when the lady marries somebody
else. Hazlitt's heart was more elastic. Miss Sarah Walker married, and
Hazlitt next year married a widow lady 'of some property,' made a tour
with her on the Continent, and then--quarrelled with her also. It is not
a pretty story. Hazlitt's biographer informs us, by way of excuse, that
his grandfather was 'physically incapable'--whatever that may mean--'of
fixing his affection upon a single object.' He 'comprehended,' indeed,
'the worth of constancy' and other virtues as well as most men, and
could have written about them better than most men; but somehow 'a
sinister influence or agency,' a periphrasis for a sensuous temperament,
was perpetually present, which confined his virtues to the sphere of
theory. An apology sometimes is worse than a satire. The case, however,
seems to be sufficiently plain. We need not suspect that Hazlitt was
consciously acting a part and nursing his 'frenzy' because he thought
that it would make a startling book. He was an egotist and a man of
impulse. His impressions were for the time overpowering; but they were
transient. His temper was often stronger than his passions. A gust of
anger would make him quarrel with his oldest friends. Every emotion
justified itself for the time, because it was his. He always did well,
whether it pleased him for the moment to be angry, to be in love, to be
cynical, or to be furiously indignant. The end, therefore, of his life
exhibits a series of short impetuous fits of passionate endeavour,
rather than devotion to a single overruling purpose; and all his
writings are brief outbursts of eloquent feeling, where neither the
separate fragments nor the works considered as a whole obey any law of
logical development. And yet, in some ways, Hazlitt boasted, and boasted
plausibly enough, of his constancy. He has the same ideas to the end of
his life that he had at fourteen. He would, he remarks, be an excellent
man on a jury; he would say little, but would starve the eleven other
obstinate fellows out. Amongst politicians he was a faithful Abdiel,
when all others had deserted the cause. He loved the books of his
boyhood, the fields where he had walked, the gardens where he had drunk
tea, and, to a rather provoking extent, the old quotations and old
stories which he had used from his first days of authorship. The
explanation of the apparent paradox gives the clue to Hazlitt's singular
character.
What I have called Hazlitt's egotism is more euphemistically and perhaps
more accurately described by Talfourd,[3] 'an intense consciousness of
his own individual being.' The word egotism in our rough estimates of
character is too easily confounded with selfishness. Hazlitt might have
been the person who, as one making a strange confession, assured a
friend that he took a deep interest in his own concerns. He was, one
would say, decidedly unselfish, if by selfishness is meant a disposition
to feather one's own nest without regard for other people's wants. Still
less was he selfish in the sense of preferring solid bread and butter to
the higher needs of mind and spirit. His sentiments are always generous,
and if scorn is too familiar a mood, it is scorn of the base and
servile. But his peculiarity is that these generous feelings are always
associated with some special case. He sees every abstract principle by
the concrete instance. He hates insolence in the abstract, but his
hatred flames into passion when it is insolence to Hazlitt. He resembles
that good old lady who wrote on the margin of her 'Complete Duty of Man'
the name of that neighbour who most conspicuously sinned against the
precept in the opposite text. Tyranny with Hazlitt is named Pitt, party
spite is Gifford, apostasy is Southey, and fidelity may be called
Cobbett or Godwin; though he finds names for the vices much more easily
than for the virtues. And thus, if he cannot be condemned for
selfishness, one must be charitable not to put down a good many of his
offences to its sister jealousy. The personal and the public sentiments
are so invariably blended in his mind that neither he nor anybody else
could have analysed their composition. He was apt to be the more moody
and irritable because his resentments clothed themselves spontaneously
in the language of some nobler emotion. If his friends are cold, he
bewails the fickleness of humanity; if they are successful, it is not
envy that prompts his irritation, but the rarity of the correspondence
between merit and reward. Such a man is more faithful to his dead than
to his living friends. The dead cannot change; they always come back to
his memory in their old colours; their names recall the old tender
emotion placed above all change and chance. But who can tell that our
dearest living friend may not come into awkward collision with us before
he has left the room? It is as well to be on our guard! It is curious
how the two feelings alternate in Hazlitt's mind in regard to the
friends who are at once dead and living; how fondly he dwells upon the
Coleridge of Wem and Nether Stowey where he first listened to the
enchanter's voice, and with what bitterness, which is yet but soured
affection, he turns upon the Coleridge who defended war-taxes in the
'Friend.' He hacks and hews at Southey through several furious Essays,
and ends with a groan. 'We met him unexpectedly the other day in St.
Giles's,' he says, 'were sorry we had passed him without speaking to an
old friend, turned and looked after him for some time as to a tale of
other days--sighing, as we walked on, Alas, poor Southey!' He fancies
himself to be in the mood of Brutus murdering Cæsar. It is patriotism
struggling with old associations of friendship; if there is any personal
element in the hostility, no one is less conscious of it than the
possessor. To the whole Lake school his attitude is always the
same--justice done grudgingly in spite of anger, or satire tempered by
remorse. No one could say nastier things of that very different egotist,
Wordsworth; nor could anyone, outside the sacred clique, pay him
heartier compliments. Nobody, indeed, can dislike egotism like an
egotist. 'Wordsworth,' says Hazlitt, 'sees nothing but himself and the
universe; he hates all greatness and all pretensions to it but his own.
His egotism is in this respect a madness, for he scorns even the
admiration of himself, thinking it a presumption in anyone to suppose
that he has taste or sense enough to understand him. He hates all
science and all art: he hates chemistry, he hates conchology, he hates
Sir Isaac Newton, he hates logic, he hates metaphysics,' and so on
through a long list of hatreds, ending with the inimitable Napoleon,
whom Wordsworth hates, it seems, 'to get rid of the idea of anything
greater, or thought to be greater, than himself.' Hazlitt might have
made out a tolerable list of his own antipathies; though, to do him
justice, of antipathies balanced by ardent enthusiasm, especially for
the dead or the distant.
Hazlitt, indeed, was incapable of the superlative self-esteem here
attributed to Wordsworth. His egotism is a curious variety of that
Protean passion, compounded as skilfully as the melancholy of Jaques. It
is not the fascinating and humorous egotism of Lamb, who disarms us
beforehand by a smile at his own crotchets. Hazlitt is too serious to be
playful. Nor is it like the amusing egotism of Boswell, combined with a
vanity which evades our contempt, because it asks so frankly for
sympathy. Hazlitt is too proud and too bitter. Neither is it the
misanthropic egotism of Byron, which, through all its affectation,
implies a certain aristocratic contempt of the world and its laws.
Hazlitt has not the sweep and continuity of Byron's passion. His
egotism--be it said without offence--is dashed with something of the
feeling common amongst his dissenting friends. He feels the awkwardness
which prevails amongst a clique branded by a certain social stigma, and
despises himself for his awkwardness. He resents neglect and scorns to
ask for patronage. His egotism is a touchy and wayward feeling which
takes the mask of misanthropy. He is always meditating upon his own
qualities, but not in the spirit of the conceited man who plumes himself
upon his virtues, nor of the ascetic who broods over his vices. He
prefers the apparently self-contradictory attitude (but human nature is
illogical) of meditating with remorse upon his own virtues. What in
others is complacency, becomes with him, ostensibly at least,
self-reproach. He affects--but it is hard to say where the affectation
begins--to be annoyed by the contemplation of his own merits. He is
angry with the world for preferring commonplace to genius, and rewarding
stupidity by success; but in form at least, he mocks at his own folly
for expecting better things. If he is vain at bottom, his vanity shows
itself indirectly by depreciating his neighbours. He is too proud to
dwell upon his own virtues, but he has been convinced by impartial
observation that the world at large is in a conspiracy against merit.
Thus he manages to transform his self-consciousness into the semblance
of proud humility, and extracts a bitter and rather morbid pleasure from
dwelling upon his disappointments and failures. Half-a-dozen of his best
Essays give expression to this mood, which is rather bitter than
querulous. He enlarges cordially on the 'disadvantages of intellectual
superiority.' An author--Hazlitt, to wit--is not allowed to relax into
dulness; if he is brilliant he is not understood, and if he professes an
interest in common things it is assumed that then he must be a fool. And
yet in the midst of these grumblings he is forced to admit a touch of
weakness, and tells us how it pleases him to hear a man ask in the Fives
Court, 'Which is Mr. Hazlitt?' He, the most idiosyncratic of men, and
most proud of it at bottom, declares how 'he hates his style to be
known, as he hates all idiosyncrasy.' At the next moment he purrs with
complacency at the recollection of having been forced into an avowal of
his authorship of an article in the 'Edinburgh Review.' Most generally
he eschews these naïve lapses into vanity. He dilates on the old text of
the 'shyness of scholars.' The learned are out of place in competition
with the world. They are not and ought not to fancy themselves fitted
for the vulgar arena. They can never enjoy their old privileges. 'Fool
that it (learning) was, ever to forego its privileges and loosen the
strong hold it had on opinion in bigotry and superstition!' The same
tone of disgust pronounces itself more cynically in an Essay 'on the
pleasure of hating.' Hatred is, he admits, a poisonous ingredient in all
our passions, but it is that which gives reality to them. Patriotism
means hatred of the French, and virtue is a hatred of other people's
faults to atone for our own vices. All things turn to hatred. 'We hate
old friends, we hate old books, we hate old opinions, and at last we
come to hate ourselves.' Summing up all his disappointments, the broken
friendships, and disappointed ambitions, and vanished illusions, he
asks, in conclusion, whether he has not come to hate and despise
himself? 'Indeed, I do,' he answers, 'and chiefly for not having hated
and despised the world enough.'