old opinions better. Hazlitt is speaking in the character of Timon,
which indeed fits him rather too easily. But elsewhere the same strain
of cynicism comes out in more natural and less extravagant form. Take,
for example, the Essay on the 'Conduct of Life.' It is a piece of _bonâ
fide_ advice addressed to his boy at school, and gives in a sufficiently
edifying form the commonplaces which elders are accustomed to address to
their juniors. Honesty, independence, diligence, and temperance are
commended in good set terms, though with an earnestness which, as is
often the case with Hazlitt, imparts some reality to outworn formulæ.
When, however, he comes to the question of marriage, the true man breaks
out. Don't trust, he says, to fine sentiments: they will make no more
impression on these delicate creatures than on a piece of marble. Love
in women is vanity, interest, or fancy. Women care nothing about talents
or virtue--about poets or philosophers or politicians. They judge by the
eye. 'No true woman ever regarded anything but her lover's person and
address.' The author has no chance; for he lives in a dream, he feels
nothing spontaneously, his metaphysical refinements are all thrown away.
'Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the colour in your cheek and the
fire in your eye; adorn your person; maintain your health, your beauty,
and your animal spirits; for if you once lapse into poetry and
philosophy you will want an eye to show you, a hand to guide you, a
bosom to love--and will stagger into your grave old before your time,
unloved and unlovely.' 'A spider,' he adds, 'the meanest creature that
crawls or lives, has its mate or fellow, but a scholar has no mate or
fellow.' Mrs. Hazlitt, Miss Sarah Walker, and several other ladies,
thought Hazlitt surly and cared nothing for his treatise on human
nature. Therefore (it is true Hazlittian logic) no woman cares for
sentiment. The sex which despised him must be despicable. Equally
characteristic is his profound belief that his failure in another line
is owing to the malignity of the world at large. In one of his most
characteristic Essays he asks whether genius is conscious of its powers.
He writes what he declares to be a digression about his own experience,
and we may believe as much as we please of his assertion that he does
not quote himself as an example of genius. He has spoken, he declares,
with freedom and power, and will not cease because he is abused for not
being a Government tool. He wrote a charming character of Congreve's
Millamant, but it was unnoticed because he was not a Government tool.
Gifford would not relish his account of Dekkar's Orlando
Friscobaldo--because he was not a Government tool. He wrote admirable
table-talks--for once, as they are nearly finished, he will venture to
praise himself. He could swear (were they not his) that the thoughts in
them were 'founded as the rock, free as the air, the hue like an Italian
picture.' But, had the style been like polished steel, as firm and as
bright, it would have availed him nothing, for he was not a Government
tool. The world hated him, we see, for his merits. It is a bad world, he
says; but don't think that it is my vanity which has taken offence, for
I am remarkable for modesty, and therefore I know that my virtues are
faults of which I ought to be ashamed. Is this pride or vanity, or
humility, or cynicism, or self-reproach for wasted talents, or an
intimate blending of passions for which there is no precise name? Who
can unravel the masks within masks of a cunning egotism?
To one virtue, however, that of political constancy, Hazlitt lays claim
in the most emphatic terms. If he quarrels with all his friends--'most
of the friends I have seen have turned out the bitterest enemies, or
cold, uncomfortable acquaintance'--it is, of course, their fault. A
thoroughgoing egotist must think himself the centre of gravity of the
world, and all change of relations must mean that others have moved away
from him. Politically, too, all who have given up his opinions are
deserters, and generally from the worst of motives. He accuses Burke of
turning against the Revolution from--of all motives in the
world!--jealousy of Rousseau; a theory still more impossible than Mr.
Buckle's hypothesis of madness. Court favour supplies in most cases a
simpler explanation of the general demoralisation. Hazlitt could not
give credit to men like Southey and Coleridge for sincere alarm at the
French Revolution. Such a sentiment would be too unreasonable, for he
had not been alarmed himself. His constancy, indeed, would be admirable
if it did not suggest doubts of his wisdom. A man whose opinions at
fifty are his opinions at fourteen has opinions of very little value. If
his intellect has developed properly, or if he has profited by
experience, he will modify, though he need not retract, his early views.
To claim to have learnt nothing from 1792 to 1830 is almost to write
yourself down as hopelessly impenetrable. The explanation is, that what
Hazlitt called his opinions were really his feelings. He could argue
very ingeniously, as appears from his remarks on Coleridge and Malthus,
but his logic was the slave, not the ruler, of his emotions. His
politics were simply the expression, in a generalised form, of his
intense feeling of personality. They are a projection upon the modern
political world of that heroic spirit of individual self-respect which
animated his Puritan forefathers. One question, and only one question,
he frequently tells us, is of real importance. All the rest is mere
verbiage. The single dogma worth attacking or defending is the divine
right of kings. Are men, in the old phrase, born saddled and bridled,
and other men ready booted and spurred, or are they not? That is the
single shibboleth which distinguishes true men from false. Others, he
says, bowed their heads to the image of the beast. 'I spit upon it, and
buffeted it, and pointed at it, and drew aside the veil that then half
concealed it.' This passionate denial of the absolute right of men over
their fellows is but vicarious pride, if you please to call it so, or a
generous recognition of the dignity of human nature translated into
political terms. Hazlitt's character did not change, however much his
judgment of individuals might change; and therefore the principles which
merely reflected his character remained rooted and unshaken. And yet his
politics changed curiously enough in another sense. The abstract truth,
in Hazlitt's mind, must always have a concrete symbol. He chose to
regard Napoleon as the antithesis to the divine right of kings. That was
the vital formula of Napoleon, his essence, and the true meaning of his
policy. The one question in abstract politics was typified for Hazlitt
by the contrast between Napoleon and the Holy Alliance. To prove that
Napoleon could trample on human rights as roughly as any legitimate
sovereign was for him mere waste of time. Napoleon's tyranny meant a
fair war against the evil principle. Had Hazlitt lived in France, and
come into collision with press laws, it is likely enough that his
sentiments would have changed. But Napoleon was far enough off to serve
as a mere poetical symbol; his memory had got itself entwined in those
youthful associations on which Hazlitt always dwelt so fondly; and,
moreover, to defend 'Boney' was to quarrel with most of his countrymen,
and even of his own party. What more was wanted to make him one of
Hazlitt's superstitions? No more ardent devotee of the Napoleonic legend
ever existed, and Hazlitt's last years were employed in writing a book
which is a political pamphlet as much as a history. He worships the
eldest Napoleon with the fervour of a corporal of the Old Guard, and
denounces the great conspiracy of kings and nobles with the energy of
Cobbett; but he had none of the special knowledge which alone could give
permanent value to such a performance. He seems to have consulted only
the French authorities; and it is refreshing for once to find an
Englishman telling the story of Waterloo entirely from the French side,
and speaking, for example, of left and right as if he had been--as in
imagination he was--by the side of Napoleon instead of Wellington. Even
M. Victor Hugo can see more merit in the English army and its commander.
A radical, who takes Napoleon for his polar star, must change some of
his theories, though he disguises the change from himself; but a change
of a different kind came over Hazlitt as he grew older.
The enthusiasm of the Southeys and Wordsworths for the French Revolution
changed--whatever their motives--into enthusiasm for the established
order. Hazlitt's enthusiasm remained, but became the enthusiasm of
regret instead of hope. As one by one the former zealots dropped off he
despised them as renegades, and clasped his old creed the more firmly to
his bosom. But the change did not draw him nearer to the few who
remained faithful. They perversely loved the wrong side of the right
cause, or loved it for the wrong reason. He liked the Whigs no better
than the Tories; the 'Edinburgh' and the 'Quarterly' were opposition
coaches, making a great dust and spattering each other with mud, but
travelling by the same road to the same end. A Whig, he said, was a
trimmer who dared neither to be a rogue nor an honest man, but was 'a
sort of whiffling, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning
negation of the two.' And the true genuine radical reformers? To them,
as represented by the school of Bentham, Hazlitt entertained an aversion
quite as hearty as his aversion for Whigs and Tories. If, he says, the
Whigs are too finical to join heartily with the popular advocates, the
Reformers are too cold. They hated literature, poetry, and romance;
nothing gives them pleasure that does not give others pain;
utilitarianism means prosaic, hard-hearted, narrow-minded dogmatism.
Indeed, his pet essay on the principles of human nature was simply an
assault on what he took to be their fundamental position. He fancied
that the school of Bentham regarded man as a purely selfish and
calculating animal; and his whole philosophy was an attempt to prove the
natural disinterestedness of man, and to indicate for the imagination
and the emotions their proper place beside the calculating faculty. Few
were those who did not come under one or other clause of this sweeping
denunciation. He assailed Shelley, who was neither Whig, Tory, nor
Utilitarian, so cuttingly as to provoke a dispute with Leigh Hunt, and
had some of his sharp criticisms for his friend Godwin. His general
moral, indeed, is the old congenial one. The reformer is as unfit for
this world as the scholar. He is the only wise man, but, as things go,
wisdom is the worst of follies. The reformer, he says, is necessarily a
marplot; he does not know what he would be at; if he did, he does not
much care for it; and, moreover, he is 'governed habitually by a spirit
of contradiction, and is always wise beyond what is practicable.' Upon
this text Hazlitt dilates with immense spirit, satirising the crotchety
and impracticable race, and contrasting them with the disciplined
phalanx of Toryism, brilliantly and bitterly enough to delight Gifford;
and yet he is writing a preface to a volume of radical Essays. He is
consoling himself for being in a minority of one by proving that two
virtuous men must always disagree. Hazlitt is no genuine democrat. He
hates 'both mobs,' or, in other words, the great mass of the human race.
He would sympathise with Coriolanus more easily than with the Tribunes.
He laughs at the perfectibility of the species, and holds that 'all
things move, not in progress but in a ceaseless round.' The glorious
dream is fled:
The radiance which was once so bright
Is now for ever taken from our sight;
and his only consolation is to live over in memory the sanguine times of
his youth, before Napoleon had fallen and the Holy Alliance restored the
divine right of kings; to cherish eternal regret for the hopes that have
departed, and hatred and scorn equally enduring for those who blasted
them. 'Give me back,' he exclaims, 'one single evening at Boxhill, after
a stroll in the deep empurpled woods, before Bonaparte was yet beaten,
with "wine of Attic taste," when wit, beauty, friendship presided at
the board.' The personal blends with the political regret.
Hazlitt, the politician, was soured. He fed his morbid egotism by
indignantly chewing the cud of disappointment, and scornfully rejecting
comfort. He quarrelled with his wife and with most of his friends, even
with the gentle Lamb, till Lamb regained his affections by the brief
quarrel with Southey. Certainly, he might call himself, with some
plausibility, 'the king of good haters.' But, after all, Hazlitt's
cynicism is the souring of a generous nature; and when we turn from the
politician to the critic and the essayist, our admiration for his powers
is less frequently jarred by annoyance at their wayward misuse. His
egotism--for he is still an egotist--here takes a different shape. His
criticism is not of the kind which is now most popular. He lived before
the days of philosophers who talk about the organism and its
environment, and of the connoisseurs who boast of an eclectic taste for
all the delicate essences of art. He never thought of showing that a
great writer was only the product of his time, race, and climate; and he
had not learnt to use such terms of art as 'supreme,' 'gracious,'
'tender,' 'bitter,' and 'subtle,' in which a good deal of criticism now
consists. Lamb, says Hazlitt, tried old authors 'on his palate as
epicures taste olives;' and the delicacy of discrimination which makes
the process enjoyable is perhaps the highest qualification of a good
critic. Hazlitt's point of view was rather different, nor can we ascribe
to him without qualification that exquisite appreciation of purely
literary charm which is so rare and so often affected. Nobody, indeed,
loved some authors more heartily or understood them better; his love is
so hearty that he cannot preserve the true critical attitude. Instead of
trying them on his palate, he swallows them greedily. His judgment of
an author seems to depend upon two circumstances. He is determined in
great measure by his private associations, and in part by his sympathy
for the character of the writer. His interest in this last sense is, one
may say, rather psychological than purely critical. He thinks of an
author not as the exponent of a particular vein of thought or emotion,
nor as an artistic performer on the instrument of language, but as a
human being to be loved or hated, or both, like Napoleon or Gifford or
Southey.
Hazlitt's favourite authors were, for the most part, the friends of his
youth. He had pored over their pages till he knew them by heart; their
phrases were as familiar to his lips as texts of Scripture to preachers
who know but one book; the places where he had read them became sacred
to him, and a glory of his early enthusiasm was still reflected from the
old pages. Rousseau was his beloved above all writers. They had a
natural affinity. What Hazlitt says of Rousseau may be partly applied to
himself. Of Hazlitt it might be said almost as truly as of Rousseau,
that 'he had the most intense consciousness of his own existence. No
object that had once made an impression upon him was ever after
effaced.' In Rousseau's 'Confessions' and 'Nouvelle Héloïse,' Hazlitt
saw the reflections of his own passions. He spent, he declares, two
whole years in reading these two books; and they were the happiest years
of his life. He marks with a white stone the days on which he read
particular passages. It was on April 10, 1798--as he tells us some
twenty years later--that he sat down to a volume of the 'New Héloïse,'
at the inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken. He
tells us which passage he read and what was the view before his bodily
eyes. His first reading of 'Paul and Virginia' is associated with an inn
at Bridgewater; and at another old-fashioned inn he tells how the rustic
fare and the quaint architecture gave additional piquancy to Congreve's
wit. He remembers, too, the spot at which he first read Mrs. Inchbald's
'Simple Story;' how he walked out to escape from one of the tenderest
parts, in order to return again with double relish.
'An old crazy hand-organ,' he adds, 'was playing "Robin Adair," a summer
shower dropped manna on my head, and slaked my feverish thirst of
happiness.' He looks back to his first familiarity with his favourites
as an old man may think of his honeymoon. The memories of his own
feelings, of his author's poetry, and of the surrounding scenery, are
inextricably fused together. The sight of an old volume, he says,
sometimes shakes twenty years off his life; he sees his old friends
alive again, the place where he read the book, the day when he got it,
the feeling of the air, the fields, the sky. To these old favourites he
remained faithful, except that he seems to have tired of the glitter of
Junius. Burke's politics gave him some severe twinges. He says, in one
place, that he always tests the sense and candour of a Liberal by his
willingness to admit the greatness of Burke. He adds, as a note to the
Essay in which this occurs, that it was written in a 'fit of extravagant
candour,' when he thought that he could be more than just to an enemy
without betraying a cause. He oscillates between these views as his
humour changes. He is absurdly unjust to Burke the politician; but he
does not waver in his just recognition of the marvellous power of the
greatest--I should almost say the only great--political writer in the
language. The first time he read a passage from Burke, he said, This is
true eloquence. Johnson immediately became shelved, and Junius 'shrunk
up into little antithetic points and well-tuned sentences. But Burke's
style was forked and playful like the lightning, crested like the
serpent.' He is never weary of Burke, as he elsewhere says; and, in
fact, he is man enough to recognise genuine power when he meets it. To
another great master he yields with a reluctance which is an involuntary
compliment. The one author whom he admitted into his Pantheon after his
youthful enthusiasm had cooled was unluckily the most consistent of
Tories. Who is there, he asks, that admires the author of 'Waverley'
more than I do? Who is there that despises Sir Walter Scott more? The
Scotch novels, as they were then called, fairly overpowered him. The
imaginative force, the geniality and the wealth of picturesque incident
of the greatest of novelists, disarmed his antipathy. It is curious to
see how he struggles with himself. He blesses and curses in a breath. He
applies to Scott Pope's description of Bacon, 'the greatest, wisest,
meanest of mankind,' and asks--
Who would not laugh if such a man there be?
Who would not weep if "Waverley" were he?
He crowns a torrent of abuse by declaring that Scott has encouraged the
lowest panders of a venal press, 'deluging and nauseating the public
mind with the offal and garbage of Billingsgate abuse and vulgar slang;'
and presently he calls Scott--by way, it is true, of lowering
Byron--'one of the greatest teachers of morality that ever lived.' He
invents a theory, to which he returns more than once, to justify the
contrast. Scott, he says, is much such a writer as the Duke of
Wellington (the hated antithesis of Napoleon, whose 'foolish face' he
specially detests) is a general. The one gets 100,000 men together, and
'leaves it to them to fight out the battle, for if he meddled with it
he might spoil sport; the other gets an innumerable quantity of facts
together, and lets them tell their story as they may. The facts are
stubborn in the last instance as the men are in the first, and in
neither case is the broth spoiled by the cook.' Both heroes show modesty
and self-knowledge, but 'little boldness or inventiveness of genius.' On
the strength of this doctrine he even compares Scott disadvantageously
with Godwin and Mrs. Inchbald, who had, it seems, more invention though
fewer facts. Hazlitt was not bound to understand strategy, and devoutly
held that Wellington's armies succeeded because their general only
looked on. But he should have understood his own trade a little better.
Putting aside this grotesque theory, he feels Scott's greatness truly,
and admits it generously. He enjoys the broth, to use his own phrase,
though he is determined to believe that it somehow made itself.