he abused, a doctrine which may be true of others than Hazlitt. The true
distinction is rather that Hazlitt, though always unsafe as a judge, is
admirable as an advocate in his own cause, and poor when merely speaking
from his brief. Of Mrs. Inchbald I must say what Hazlitt shocked his
audience by saying of Hannah More; that she has written a good deal
which I have not read, and I therefore cannot deny that her novels might
have been written by Venus; but I cannot admit that Wycherley's brutal
'Plain-dealer' is as good as ten volumes of sermons. 'It is curious to
see,' says Hazlitt, rather naïvely, 'how the same subject is treated by
two such different authors as Shakespeare and Wycherley.' Macaulay's
remark about the same coincidence is more to the point. 'Wycherley
borrows Viola,' says that vigorous moralist, 'and Viola forthwith
becomes a pander of the basest sort.' That is literally true. Indeed,
Hazlitt's love for the dramatists of the Restoration is something of a
puzzle, except so far as it is explained by early associations. Even
then it is hard to explain the sympathy which Hazlitt, the lover of
Rousseau and sentiment, feels for Congreve, whose speciality it is that
a touch of sentiment is as rare in his painfully-witty dialogues as a
drop of water in the desert. Perhaps a contempt for the prejudices of
respectable people gave zest to Hazlitt's enjoyment of a literature,
representative of a social atmosphere, most propitious to his best
feelings. And yet, though I cannot take Hazlitt's judgment, I would
frankly admit that Hazlitt's enthusiasm brings out Congreve's real
merits with a force of which a calmer judge would be incapable. His warm
praises of 'The Beggar's Opera,' his assault upon Sidney's 'Arcadia,'
his sarcasms against Tom Moore, are all excellent in their way, whether
we do or do not agree with his final result. Whenever Hazlitt writes
from his own mind, in short, he writes what is well worth reading.
Hazlitt learnt something in his later years from Lamb. He prefers, he
says, those papers of Elia in which there is the least infusion of
antiquated language; and, in fact, Lamb never inoculated him with his
taste for the old English literature. Hazlitt gave a series of lectures
upon the Elizabethan dramatists, and carelessly remarks some time
afterwards that he has only read about a quarter of Beaumont and
Fletcher's plays, and intends to read the rest when he has a chance. It
is plain, indeed, that the lectures, though written at times with great
spirit, are the work of a man who has got them up for the occasion. And
in his more ambitious and successful essays upon Shakespeare the same
want of reading appears in another way. He is more familiar with
Shakespeare's text than many better scholars. His familiarity is proved
by a habit of quotation of which it has been disputed whether it is a
merit or a defect. What phrenologists would call the adhesiveness of
Hazlitt's mind, its extreme retentiveness for any impression which has
once been received, tempts him to a constant repetition of familiar
phrases and illustrations. He has, too, a trick of working in patches of
his old essays, which he expressly defends on the ground that a book
which has not reached a second edition may be considered by its author
as manuscript. This self-plagiarism sometimes worries us, as we are
worried by a man whose conversation runs in ruts. But his quotations
from other authors, where used in moderation, often give a pleasant
richness to his style. Shakespeare, in particular, seems to be a
storehouse into which he can always dip for an appropriate turn of
phrase, and his love of Shakespeare is of a characteristic kind. He has
not counted syllables nor weighed various readings. He does not throw a
new light upon delicate indications of thought and sentiment, nor
philosophise after the manner of Coleridge and the Germans, nor regard
Shakespeare as the representative of his age according to the sweeping
method of M. Taine. Neither does he seem to love Shakespeare himself as
he loves Rousseau or Richardson. He speaks contemptuously of the Sonnets
and Poems, and, though I respect his sincerity, I think that such a
verdict necessarily indicates indifference to the most Shakespearian
parts of Shakespeare. The calm assertion that the qualities of the Poems
are the reverse of the qualities of the plays is unworthy of Hazlitt's
general acuteness. That which really attracts Hazlitt is sufficiently
indicated by the title of his book; he describes the characters of
Shakespeare's plays. It is Iago, and Timon, and Coriolanus, and Anthony,
and Cleopatra, who really interest him. He loves and hates them as if
they were his own contemporaries; he gives the main outlines of their
character with a spirited touch. And yet one somehow feels that Hazlitt
is not at his best in Shakespearian criticism; his eulogies savour of
commonplace, and are wanting in spontaneity. There is not that warm glow
of personal feeling which gives light and warmth to his style whenever
he touches upon his early favourites. Perhaps he is a little daunted by
the greatness of his task, and perhaps there is something in the
Shakespearian width of sympathy and in the Shakespearian humour which
lies beyond Hazlitt's sphere. His criticism of Hamlet is feeble; he does
not do justice to Mercutio or to Jaques; but he sympathises more
heartily with the tremendous passion of Lear and Othello, and finds
something congenial to his taste in Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. It
is characteristic, too, that he evidently understands Shakespeare better
on the stage than in the closet. When he can associate Iago and Shylock
with the visible presence of Kean, he can introduce that personal
element which is so necessary to his best writing.
The best, indeed, of Hazlitt's criticisms--if the word may be so far
extended--are his criticisms of living men. The criticism of
contemporary portraits called the 'Spirit of the Age' is one of the
first of those series which have now become popular, as it is certainly
one of the very best. The descriptions of Bentham, and Godwin, and
Coleridge, and Horne Tooke are masterpieces in their way. They are, of
course, unfair; but that is part of their charm. One would no more take
for granted Hazlitt's valuation of Wordsworth than Timon's judgment of
Alcibiades. Hazlitt sees through coloured glasses, but his vision is not
the less penetrating. The vulgar satirist is such a one as Hazlitt
somewhere mentioned who called Wordsworth a dunce. Hazlitt was quite
incapable of such a solecism. He knew, nobody better, that a telling
caricature must be a good likeness. If he darkens the shades, and here
and there exaggerates an ungainly feature, we still know that the shade
exists and that the feature is not symmetrical. De Quincey reports the
saying of some admiring friend of Hazlitt, who confessed to a shudder
whenever Hazlitt used his habitual gesture of placing his hand within
his waistcoat. The hand might emerge armed with a dagger. Whenever, said
the same friend (Heaven preserve us from our friends!), Hazlitt had been
distracted for a moment from the general conversation, he looked round
with a mingled air of suspicion and defiance, as though some
objectionable phrase might have evaded his censure in the interval. The
traits recur to us when we read Hazlitt's descriptions of the men he had
known. We seem to see the dark sardonic man, watching the faces and
gestures of his friends, ready to take sudden offence at any affront to
his cherished prejudices, and yet hampered by a kind of nervous timidity
which makes him unpleasantly conscious of his own awkwardness. He
remains silent, till somebody unwittingly contradicts his unspoken
thoughts--the most irritating kind of contradiction to some people!--and
perhaps heaps indiscriminating praise on an old friend, a term nearly
synonymous with an old enemy. Then the dagger suddenly flashes out, and
Hazlitt strikes two or three rapid blows, aimed with unerring accuracy
at the weak points of the armour which he knows so well. And then, as he
strikes, a relenting comes over him; he remembers old days with a
sudden gush of fondness, and puts in a touch of scorn for his allies or
himself. Coleridge may deserve a blow, but the applause of Coleridge's
enemies awakes his self-reproach. His invective turns into panegyric,
and he warms for a time into hearty admiration, which proves that his
irritation arises from an excess, not from a defect, of sensibility; but
finding that he has gone a little too far, he lets his praise slide into
equivocal description, and, with some parting epigram, he relapses into
silence. The portraits thus drawn are never wanting in piquancy nor in
fidelity. Brooding over his injuries and his desertions, Hazlitt has
pondered almost with the eagerness of a lover upon the qualities of his
intimates. Suspicion, unjust it may be, has given keenness to his
investigation. He has interpreted in his own fashion every mood and
gesture. He has watched his friends as a courtier watches a royal
favourite. He has stored in his memory, as we fancy, the good retorts
which his shyness or unreadiness smothered at the propitious moment, and
brings them out in the shape of a personal description. When such a man
sits at our tables, silent and apparently self-absorbed, and yet shrewd
and sensitive, we may well be afraid of the dagger, though it may not be
drawn till after our death, and may write memoirs instead of piercing
flesh. And yet Hazlitt is no mean assassin of reputations; nor is his
enmity as a rule more than the seamy side of friendship. Gifford,
indeed, and Croker, 'the talking potato,' are treated as outside the
pale of human rights.
Excellent as Hazlitt can be as a dispenser of praise and blame, he seems
to me to be at his best in a different capacity. The first of his
performances which attracted much attention was the Round Table,
designed by Leigh Hunt (who contributed a few papers), on the old
'Spectator' model. In the essays afterwards collected in the volumes
called 'Table Talk' and the 'Plain Speaker,' he is still better, because
more certain of his position. It would, indeed, be difficult to name any
writer, from the days of Addison to those of Lamb, who has equalled
Hazlitt's best performances of this kind. Addison is too unlike to
justify a comparison; and, to say the truth, though he has rather more
in common with Lamb, the contrast is much more obvious than the
resemblance. Each wants the other's most characteristic vein; Hazlitt
has hardly a touch of humour, and Lamb is incapable of Hazlitt's caustic
scorn for the world and himself. They have indeed in common, besides
certain superficial tastes, a love of pathetic brooding over the past.
But the sentiment exerted is radically different. Lamb forgets himself
when brooding over an old author or summing up the 'old familiar faces.'
His melancholy and his mirth cast delightful cross-lights upon the
topics of which he converses, and we do not know, until we pause to
reflect, that it is not the intrinsic merit of the objects, but Lamb's
own character, which has caused our pleasure. They would be dull, that
is, in other hands; but the feeling is embodied in the object described,
and not made itself the source of our interest. With Hazlitt, it is the
opposite. He is never more present than when he is dwelling upon the
past. Even in criticising a book or a man, his favourite mode is to tell
us how he came to love or to hate him; and in the non-critical Essays he
is always appealing to us, directly or indirectly, for sympathy with his
own personal emotions. He tells us how passionately he is yearning for
the days of his youth; he is trying to escape from his pressing
annoyances; wrapping himself in sacred associations against the fret
and worry of surrounding cares; repaying himself for the scorn of women
or Quarterly Reviewers by retreating into some imaginary hermitage; and
it is the delight of dreaming upon which he dwells more than upon the
beauty of the visions revealed to his inward eye. The force with which
this sentiment is presented gives a curious fascination to some of his
essays. Take, for example, the essay in 'Table Talk,' 'On Living to
One's self,'--an essay written, as he is careful to tell us, on a mild
January day in the country, whilst the fire is blazing on the hearth and
a partridge getting ready for his supper. There he expatiates in happy
isolation on the enjoyments of living as 'a silent spectator of the
mighty scheme of things;' as being in the world, and not of it; watching
the clouds and the stars, poring over a book, or gazing at a picture
without a thought of becoming an author or an artist. He has drifted
into a quiet little backwater, and congratulates himself in all
sincerity on his escape from the turbulent stream outside. He drinks in
the delight of rest at every pore; reduces himself for the time to the
state of a polyp drifting on the warm ocean stream, and becomes a
voluptuous hermit. He calls up the old days when he acted up to his
principles, and found pleasure enough in endless meditation and quiet
observation of nature. He preaches most edifyingly on the
disappointments, the excitements, the rough impacts of hard facts upon
sensitive natures, which haunt the world outside, and declares, in all
sincerity, 'this sort of dreaming existence is the best; he who quits it
to go in search of realities generally barters repose for repeated
disappointments and vain regrets.' He is sincere, and therefore
eloquent; and we need not, unless we please, add the remark that he
enjoys rest because it is a relief from toil; and that he will curse the
country as heartily as any man if doomed to entire rest. This meditation
on the phenomena of his own sensations leads him often into interesting
reflections of a psychological kind. He analyses his own feelings with
constant eagerness, as he analyses the character of his enemies. A good
specimen is the essay 'On Antiquity' in the 'Plain Speaker,' which
begins with some striking remarks on the apparently arbitrary mode in
which some objects and periods seem older to us than others, in defiance
of chronology. The monuments of the Middle Ages seem more antique than
the Greek statues and temples with their immortal youth. 'It is not the
full-grown, articulated, thoroughly accomplished periods of the world
that we regard with the pity or reverence due to age, so much as those
imperfect, unformed, uncertain periods which seem to totter on the verge
of non-existence, to shrink from the grasp of our feeble imagination, as
they crawl out of, or retire into the womb of time, of which our utmost
assurance is to doubt whether they ever were or not.' And then, as
usual, he passes to his own experience, and meditates on the changed
aspect of the world in youth and maturer life. The petty, personal
emotions pass away, whilst the grand and ideal 'remains with us
unimpaired in its lofty abstraction from age to age.' Therefore, though
the inference is not quite clear, he can never forget the first time he
saw Mrs. Siddons act, or the appearance of Burke's 'Letter to a Noble
Lord.' And then, in a passage worthy of Sir Thomas Browne, he describes
the change produced as our minds are stereotyped, as our most striking
thoughts become truisms, and we lose the faculty of admiration. In our
youth 'art woos us; science tempts us with her intricate labyrinths;
each step presents unlooked-for vistas, and closes upon us our backward
path. Our onward road is strange, obscure, and infinite. We are
bewildered in a shadow, lost in a dream. Our perceptions have the
brightness and indistinctness of a trance. Our continuity of
consciousness is broken, crumbles, and falls to pieces. We go on
learning and forgetting every hour. Our feelings are chaotic, confused,
strange to each other and ourselves.' But in time we learn by rote the
lessons which we had to spell out in our youth. 'A very short period
(from 15 to 25 or 30) includes the whole map and table of contents of
human life. From that time we may be said to live our lives over again,
repeat ourselves--the same thoughts return at stated intervals, like the
tunes of a barrel-organ; and the volume of the universe is no more than
a form of words, a book of reference.'
From such musings Hazlitt can turn to describe any fresh impression
which has interested him, in spite of his occasional weariness, with a
freshness and vivacity which proves that his eye had not grown dim, nor
his temperament incapable of enjoyment. He fell in love with Miss Sarah
Wilson at the tolerably ripe age of 43; and his desire to live in the
past is not to be taken more seriously than his contempt for his
literary reputation. It lasts only till some vivid sensation occurs in
the present. In congenial company he could take a lively share in
conversation, as is proved not only by external evidence, but by his
very amusing book of conversations with Northcote--an old cynic out of
whom it does not seem that anybody else could strike many sparks,--or
from the essay, partly historical, it is to be supposed, in which he
records his celebrated discussion with Lamb, on persons whom one would
wish to have seen. But perhaps some of his most characteristic
performances in this line are those in which he anticipates the modern
taste for muscularity. His wayward disposition to depreciate ostensibly
his own department of action, leads him to write upon the 'disadvantages
of intellectual superiority,' and to maintain the thesis that the glory
of the Indian jugglers is more desirable than that of a statesman. And
perhaps the same sentiment, mingled with sheer artistic love of the
physically beautiful, prompts his eloquence upon the game of fives--in
which he praises the great player Cavanagh as warmly, and describes his
last moments as pathetically, as if he were talking of Rousseau--and
still more his immortal essay on the fight between the Gasman and Bill
Neate. Prize-fighting is fortunately fallen into hopeless decay, and we
are pretty well ashamed of the last flicker of enthusiasm created by
Sayers and Heenan. We may therefore enjoy without remorse the prose-poem
in which Hazlitt kindles with genuine enthusiasm to describe the fearful
glories of the great battle. Even to one who hates the most brutalising
of amusements, the spirit of the writer is impressibly contagious. We
condemn, but we applaud; we are half disposed for the moment to talk the
old twaddle about British pluck; and when Hazlitt's companion on his way
home pulls out of his pocket a volume of the 'Nouvelle Héloïse,' admit
for a moment that 'Love of the Fancy is,' as the historian assures us,
'compatible with a cultivation of sentiment.' If Hazlitt had thrown as
much into his description of the Battle of Waterloo, and had taken the
English side, he would have been a popular writer. But even Hazlitt
cannot quite embalm the memories of Cribb, Belcher, and Gully.
It is time, however, to stop. More might be said by a qualified writer
of Hazlitt's merits as a judge of pictures or of the stage. The same
literary qualities mark all his writings. De Quincey, of course,
condemns Hazlitt, as he does Lamb, for a want of 'continuity.' 'No man
can be eloquent,' he says, 'whose thoughts are abrupt, insulated,
capricious, and nonsequacious.' But then De Quincey will hardly allow
that any man is eloquent except Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, and
Thomas De Quincey. Hazlitt certainly does not belong to their school;
nor, on the other hand, has he the plain homespun force of Swift and
Cobbett. And yet readers who do not insist upon measuring all prose by
the same standard, will probably agree that if Hazlitt is not a great
rhetorician, if he aims at no gorgeous effects of complex harmony, he
has yet an eloquence of his own. It is indeed an eloquence which does
not imply quick sympathy with many moods of feeling, or an intellectual
vision at once penetrating and comprehensive. It is the eloquence
characteristic of a proud and sensitive nature, which expresses a very
keen if narrow range of feeling, and implies a powerful grasp of one, if
only one side of the truth. Hazlitt harps a good deal upon one string;
but that string vibrates forcibly. His best passages are generally an
accumulation of short, pithy sentences, shaped in strong feeling, and
coloured by picturesque association; but repeating, rather than
corroborating, each other. The last blow goes home, but each falls on
the same place. He varies the phrase more than the thought; and
sometimes he becomes obscure, because he is so absorbed in his own
feelings that he forgets the very existence of strangers who require
explanation. Read through Hazlitt, and this monotony becomes a little
tiresome; but dip into him at intervals, and you will often be
astonished that so vigorous a writer has not left some more enduring
monument of his remarkable powers.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] In the excellent Essay prefixed to 'Hazlitt's Literary Remains.'
_DISRAELI'S NOVELS_[4]
It is a commonplace with men of literary eminence to extol the man of
deeds above the man of words. Scott was half ashamed of scribbling
novels whilst Wellington was winning battles; and, if Carlyle be a true
prophet, the most brilliant writer is scarcely worthy to unloose the
shoe's latchet of the silent heroes of action. Perhaps it is graceful in
masters of the art to depreciate their own peculiar function. People who
have less personal interest in the matter need not be so modest. I will
confess, at any rate, to preferring the men who have sown some new seed
of thought above the heroes whose names mark epochs in history. I would
rather make the nation's ballads than give its laws, dictate principles
than carry them into execution, and leaven a country with new ideas than
translate them into facts, inevitably mangling and distorting them in
the process. And therefore I would rather have written 'Hamlet' than
defeated the Spanish Armada; or 'Paradise Lost,' than have turned out
the Long Parliament; or 'Gray's Elegy,' than have stormed the heights of
Abram; or the Waverley Novels, than have won Waterloo or even Trafalgar.
I would rather have been Voltaire or Goethe than Frederick or Napoleon;
and I suspect that when the poor historian of the nineteenth century
begins his superhuman work, he will, as a thorough philosopher,
attribute more importance to two or three recent English writers than to
all the English statesmen who have been strutting and fretting their
little hour at Westminster. And therefore, too, I wish that Disraeli
could have stuck to his novels instead of rising to be Prime Minister of
England. This opinion is, of course, entirely independent of any
judgment which may be passed upon Disraeli's political career. Granting
that his cause has always been the right one, granting that he has
rendered it essential services, I should still wish that his brilliant
literary ability had been allowed to ripen undisturbed by all the
worries and distractions of parliamentary existence. Persons who think
the creation of a majority in the House of Commons a worthy reward for
the labours of a lifetime will, of course, differ from this conclusion.
Disraeli, at any rate, ought to have agreed. No satirist has ever struck
off happier portraits of the ordinary British legislator, or been more
alive to the stupefying influences of a parliamentary career. We have
gone through a peaceful revolution since Disraeli first sketched Rigby
and Taper and Tadpole from the life; but the influences which they
embodied are still as powerful, and a parliamentary atmosphere as little
propitious to the pure intellect, as ever. Coningsby, if he still
survives, must have lost many illusions; he must have herded with the
Tapers and Tadpoles, and prompted Rigby to write slashing articles on
his behalf in the quarterlies. He must have felt that his intellect was
cruelly wasted in talking claptrap and platitude to suit the thick
comprehensions of his party; and the huge dead weight of the invincible
impenetrability to ideas of ordinary mankind must have lain heavy upon
his soul. How many Tadpoles, one would like to know, still haunt the
Carlton Club, or throng the ministerial benches, and how many Rigbys
have forced their way into the Cabinet? That is one of the state secrets
which will hardly be divulged by the only competent observer. But at any
rate it is sad that the critic, who applied the lash so skilfully,
should have been so unequally yoked with the objects of his contempt.
Disraeli's talents for entertaining fiction may not indeed have been
altogether wasted in his official career; but he at least may pardon
admirers of his writing, who regret that he should have squandered
powers of imagination, capable of true creative work, upon that
alternation of truckling and blustering which is called governing the
country.