[230]
[231]

THE titles of William Hazlitt’s first books bear witness to the ethic spirit in which he began life. From his beloved father, an Irish dissenting minister, he inherited his unworldliness, his obstinacy, his love of inexpedient truth, and his interest in the emancipation and well-being of his fellow-creatures. Bred in an air of seriousness and integrity, the child of twelve announced by post that he had spent “a very agreeable day” reading one hundred and sixty pages of Priestley, and hearing two good sermons. A year later he appeared, under a Greek signature, in The Shrewsbury Chronicle, protesting against sectarian injustice; an infant herald in the great modern movement towards fair play. The roll of the portentous periods must have made his father weep for pride and diversion. William’s young head was full of moral philosophy and jurisprudence, and he had what is the top of luxury for one of his temperament: perfect license of mental growth. Alone with his parents (one of whom was always a student and a recluse), and for the most part without the school-fellows who are likely to adjust the perilous effects of books, he became choked with theories, and thought more of the needful repeal of the Test Act than of his breakfast. He found his way at fourteen into the Unitarian College at Hackney, but eventually broke from his traces, saving his fatherland from the spectacle of a unique theologian. During the year 1795 he saw the pictures at Burleigh House, and began to live. Desultory but deep study, at home and near home, took up the time before his first leisurely choice of a profession. His lonely broodings, his early love for Miss Railton, his four enthusiastic months at the Louvre, his silent friendship with Wordsworth and with Coleridge; the country walks, the pages and prints, the glad tears of his youth,—these were the fantastic tutors which formed him; nor had he ever much respect for any other kind of training. The lesson he prized most was the lesson straight from life and nature. He comments, tartly enough, on the sophism that observation in idleness, or the growth of bodily skill and social address, or the search for the secret of honorable power over people, is not in any wise to be accounted as learning. Montaigne, who was in Hazlitt’s ancestral line, was of this mind: “Ce qu’on sÇait droictement, on en dispose sans regarder au patron, sans tourner les yeulx vers son livre.” Hazlitt insists, too, that learned men are but “the cisterns, not the fountain-heads, of knowledge.” He hated the schoolmaster, and has said as witty things of him as Mr. Oscar Wilde. Yet his little portrait-study of the mere book-worm, in The Conversation of Authors, has a never-to-be-forgotten sweetness. His mental nurture was serviceable; it was of his own choosing; it fitted him for the work he had to do. Like Marcus Aurelius, he congratulated himself that he did not squander his youth “chopping logic and scouring the heavens.” Hazlitt once entered upon an Inquiry whether the Fine Arts are promoted by Academies; the answer, from him, is readily anticipated.

he might have added,—and it is a wonder that he did not,

Mr. Matthew Arnold made a famous essay on the same topic, and some readers recollect distinctly that his verdict, for England, would be in the affirmative, whereas it was no such matter. Now, no man can conceive of Hazlitt presenting both sides of a case so impartially as to be misunderstood, especially upon so vital a subject. He pastured, he was not trained; and therefore he would have you and your children’s children scoff at universities. Indeed, though the boy’s lack of discipline told on him all through life, his reader regrets nothing else which a university could have given him, except, perhaps, milder manners. Hazlitt was perfectly aware that he had too little general knowledge; but general knowledge he did not consider so good a tool for his self-set task in life as a persistent, passionate study of one or two subjects. Again, he is pleased to conjecture, with bluntness, that if he had learned more he would have thought less. (Perhaps he was the friend cited by Elia, who gave up reading to improve his originality! He was certainly useful to Elia in delicate and curious ways: a whole vein of rich eccentricity ready for that sweet philosopher’s working.) Hear him pronouncing upon himself at the very end: “I have, then, given proof of some talent and more honesty; if there is haste and want of method, there is no common-place, nor a line that licks the dust. If I do not appear to more advantage, I at least appear such as I am.” Divorce that remark and the truth of it from Hazlitt, and there is no Hazlitt left. He stood for individualism. He wrote from what was, in the highest degree for his purpose, a full mind, and with that blameless conscious superiority which a full mind must needs feel in this empty world. His whole intellectual stand is taken on the positive and concrete side of things. He has a fine barbaric cocksureness; he dwells not with althoughs and neverthelesses, like Mr. Symonds and Mr. Saintsbury. “I am not one of those,” he says, concerning Edmund Kean’s first appearance in London, “who, when they see the sun breaking from behind a cloud, stop to inquire whether it is the moon.” And he takes enormous interest in his own promulgation, because it is inevitably not only what he thinks, but what he has long thought. He delivers an opinion with the air proper to a host who is master of a vineyard, and can furnish name and date to every flagon he unseals.

None of Hazlitt’s energies went to waste: he earned his soul early, and how proud he was of the possession! Retrospection became his forward horizon. He was all aglow at the thought of that beatific yesterday; in his every mood “the years that are fled knock at the door, and enter.” He struggled no more thereafter, having fixed his beliefs and found his voice. He saw no occasion to change. “As to myself,” he wrote at fifty, referring to Lamb’s well-known “surfeits of admiration” concerning some objects once adored, “as to myself, any one knows where to have me!” He adds: “In matters of taste and feeling, one proof that my conclusions have not been quite shallow or hasty is the circumstance of their having been lasting. . . . This continuity of impression is the only thing on which I pride myself.” A fine saying in the Boswell Redivivus, attributed to Opie, is as clearly expressed elsewhere by Hazlitt’s self: that a man in his lifetime can do but one thing; that there is but one effort and one victory, and all the rest is as machinery in motion. “What I write costs me nothing, but it cost me a great deal twenty years ago. I have added little to my stock since then, and taken little from it.” His sensations, latterly, were “July shoots,” graftings on the old sap. It is his boast in almost his final essay that his tenacious brain holds fast while the planets are turning. He can look at a child’s kite in heaven, to the last, with the eyes of a child: “It pulls at my heart.”

His conservative habit, however, seemed to teach him everything by inference. In 1821, familiar with none of the elder dramatists save Shakespeare, he borrowed their folios, and shut himself up for six weeks at Winterslow Hut on Salisbury Plain. He returned to town steeped in his theme, and with the beautiful and authoritative Lectures written. Appreciation of the great Elizabethans is common enough now; seventy years ago, propagated by Lamb’s Specimens, 1808, it was the business only of adventurers and pioneers. Here is a critic indeed who, without a suspicion of audacity, can arise as a stranger to arraign the Arcadia, and “shake hands with Signor Orlando Friscobaldo as the oldest acquaintance” he has! The thing, exceptional as it was, proves that William Hazlitt knew his resources. His devoted friend Patmore attributes his “unpremeditated art,” terse, profound, original, and always moving at full speed, to two facts: “first, that he never, by choice, wrote on any topic or question in which he did not, for some reason or other, feel a deep personal interest; and, secondly, because on all questions on which he did so feel, he had thought, meditated, and pondered, in the silence and solitude of his own heart, for years and years before he ever contemplated doing more than thinking of them.” Unlike a distinguished historian, who, according to Horace Walpole, “never understood anything until he had written of it,” Hazlitt brought to his every task a mind violently made up, and a vocation for special pleading which nothing could withstand.

Sure as he is, he means to be nobody’s hired guide: a resolve for which the general reader cannot be too grateful. In wilful and mellow study of what chance threw in his way his strength grew, and his limitations with it. It is small wonder that he hated schoolmasters, and the public which expected of him schoolmaster platitudes. He had a pride of intellect not unlike Rousseau’s, and he seems to have had ever in mind Rousseau’s cardinal declaration that if he were no better than other men, he was at least different from them. Hazlitt defined his own functions with proper haughtiness, in the amusing apology of Capacity and Genius. “I was once applied to, in a delicate emergency, to write an article on a difficult subject for an encyclopÆdia; and was advised to take time, and give it a systematic and scientific form; to avail myself of all the knowledge that was to be obtained upon the subject, and arrange it with clearness and method. I made answer that, as to the first, I had taken time to do all that I ever pretended to do, as I had thought incessantly on different matters for twenty years of my life; that I had no particular knowledge of the subject in question, and no head for arrangement; that the utmost I could do, in such a case, would be, when a systematic and scientific article was prepared, to write marginal notes upon it, to insert a remark or illustration of my own (not to be found in former encyclopÆdias!) or to suggest a better definition than had been offered in the text.”[58] Such independence nobly became him, and none the less because it kept him poor. But in the course of time, he had to work, and keep on working, under wretched disadvantages. He had spurts of revolt, after long experience of compulsory composition; his darling wish in 1822 (confided to his wife, of all persons) being that he “could marry some woman with a good fortune, that he might not be under the necessity of writing another line!”

There was in him absolutely nothing of the antiquary and the scholar, as the modern world understands those most serviceable gentlemen. He was a “surveyor,” as he said, erroneously, of Bacon. He was continuously drawn into the byway, and ever in search of the accidental, the occult; he lusted, like Sir Thomas Browne, to find the great meanings of minor things. The “pompous big-wigs” of his day, as Thackeray called them, hated his informality, his boldly novel methods, his vivacity and enthusiasm. He had, within proscribed bounds, an exquisite and affectionate curiosity, like that of the Renaissance. “The invention of a fable is to me the most enviable exertion of human genius: it is the discovery of a truth to which there is no clew, and which, when once found out, can never be forgotten.” “If the world were good for nothing else, it would be a fine subject for speculation.” It is his deliberate dictum that it were “worth a life” to sit down by an Italian wayside, and work out the reason why the Italian supremacy in art has always been along the line of color, not along the line of form.

He depended so entirely upon his memory that those who knew him best say that he never took notes, neither in gallery, library, nor theatre; yet his inaccuracies are few and slight,[59] and he must have secured by this habit a prodigious freedom and luxury in the act of writing. He would rather stumble than walk according to rule; and he was so pleasantly beguiled with some of his own images (that, for instance, of immortality the bride of the youthful spirit, and of the procession of camels seen across the distance of three thousand years) that he reiterates them upon every fit occasion. He cites, twice and thrice, the same passages from the Elizabethans. He is a masterly quoter, and lingers like a suitor upon the borders of old poesy. His infallibility, like the Pope’s, is of narrow scope and nicely defined. When he steps beyond his accustomed tracks, which is seldom, his vagaries are entertaining. You may account for his declaration that Thomas Warton’s sonnets rank as the very best in the language, by reflecting that he dealt not in sonnets and knew nothing of them; if he prefer Hercules Raging to any other Greek tragedy, it is collateral proof that he was no wide-travelled Grecian, nor even Euripideian; when he gives his distinguished preference to Shakespeare’s Helena, there is small need of adding that Mr. Hazlitt, albeit with an affectionate friendship for Mary Lamb, with a mother, a sister, a dynasty of sweethearts, and two wives, was notoriously unlearned in women.[60]

The events of his life count for so little that they are hardly worth recording. He was born into a high-principled and intelligent family, at Mitre Lane, Maidstone, Kent, on the 10th of April, in the year 1778. His infancy was passed there and in Ireland, his boyhood in New England and in Shropshire. Prior to a long visit to Paris, where he made some noble copies of Titian, he came in 1802 to Bloomsbury, where his elder brother John, an advanced Liberal in politics and an excellent miniature-painter, had a studio; and here he worked at art for several joyous years, finally abandoning it for literature. The portraits he painted, utterly lacking in grace, are fraught with power and meaning; few of these are extant, thanks to the fading and cracking pigments of the modern schools. The old Manchester woman in shadow, done in 1803, and the head of his father, dating from a twelvemonth later (two things to which Hazlitt makes memorable reference in his essays), are no longer distinguishable, save to a very patient eye, upon the blackened canvases in his grandson’s possession. The picture of the child Hartley Coleridge, begun at the Lakes in 1802, has perished from the damp; that of Charles Lamb in the Venetian doublet survives since 1804, in its serious and primitive browns,[61] as the best-known example of an English artist not in the catalogues. Its historic value, however, is not superior to that of two portraits of Hazlitt himself: one a study in strong light and shade, with a wreath upon the head, now very much time-eaten; and another representing him at about the age of twenty-five, with a three-quarters front face looking over the right shoulder, which appeals to the spectator like spoken truth. It is all but void of the beauty characterizing the striking Bewick head (especially as retouched and reproduced in Mr. Alexander Ireland’s valuable book of 1889, which is a sort of Hazlitt anthology), and characterizing, no less, John Hazlitt’s charming miniatures of William at five and at thirteen; therefore it can deal in no self-flattery. Fortunately, we have from the hand which knew him best the lank, odd, reserved youth in whom great possibilities were brewing; thought and will predominate in this portrait, and it expresses the sincere soul. It would be idle to criticise the technique of a work disowned by its author. Hazlitt had, as we know from much testimony, a most interesting and perplexing face, with the magnificent brow almost belied by shifting eyes, and the petulance and distrust of the mouth and chin; but a face prepossessing on the whole from the clear marble of his complexion,[62] remarkable in a land of ruddy cheeks. His lonely and peculiar life lent him its own hue; the eager look of one indeed a sufferer, but with the light full upon him of visions and of dreams:

In 1798 Hazlitt had his immortal meeting at Wem with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He described himself at this period as “dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the wayside,” striving in vain to put on paper the thoughts which oppressed him, shedding tears of vexation at his inability, and feeling happy if in eight years he could write as many pages. The abiding influence of his First Poet he has acknowledged in an imperishable chapter. For a long while he still kept in “the o’erdarkened ways” of Malthus and Tucker, or in the shadow, dear to him, of Hobbes; but in 1817 the floodgates broke, the pure current gushed out; and in the Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays we have the primal pledge of Hazlitt as we know him, “such as had never been before him, such as will never be again.” From a “dumbness” and diffidence extreme, he developed into the readiest of writers; his sudden pages, year after year, transcribed in his slant large hand, went to the printers rapidly and at first draft. The longer he used his dedicated pen, the freer, the brighter, the serener it grew. In the fourteen or fifteen of his books which deal with genius and the conduct of life, there is, throughout, an indescribable unaffected zest, a self-same and unwavering certitude of handling. Once he learned his trade, he gave himself a large field and an easy rein. He never warmed towards a subject chosen for him. His conversation was non-professional. He considered a discussion as to the likelihood of the weather’s holding up for to-morrow as “the end and privilege of a life of study.”

In London, as soon as he had abandoned painting, he became a parliamentary reporter, and began to lecture on the English philosophers and metaphysicians. He furnished his famous dramatic criticisms to The Morning Chronicle, The Champion, The Examiner, and The Times, and he acted later as home editor of The Liberal. He married, on May-day of 1808, Miss Sarah Stoddart, who owned the property near Salisbury where he afterwards spent melancholy years alone. He fulfilled one human duty perfectly, for he loved and reared his son. A most singular infatuation for the unlovely daughter of his landlady; a second inauspicious marriage in 1824 with a Mrs. Isabella Bridgwater; a prolonged journey on the Continent; the failure of the publishers of his Life of Napoleon, which thus in his needful days brought him no competence; a long illness heroically borne, and a burial in the parish churchyard of St. Anne’s, under a headstone raised, in a romantic remorse after an estrangement, by Charles Wells, the author of Joseph and his Brethren,—these round out the meagre details of Hazlitt’s life. He died in the arms of his son and of his old friend Charles Lamb,[63] on the 18th of September, 1830, at 6 Frith Street, Soho.

His domestic experiences, indeed, had been nearly as extraordinary as Shelley’s. Sarah Walker, of No. 9 Southampton Buildings, is a sort of burlesque counterpart of that other “spouse, sister, angel,” Emilia Viviani. Nothing in literary history is much funnier than Mr. Hazlitt’s kind assistance to Mrs. Hazlitt in securing her divorce, going to visit her at Edinburgh, and supplying funds and advice over the teacups, while the process was pending, unless it be Shelley’s ingenuous invitation to his deserted young wife to come and dwell forever with himself and Mary! The silent dramatic withdrawal of the second Mrs. Hazlitt, the well-to-do relict of a colonel, who is henceforth swallowed up in complete oblivion, is a feature whose like is missing in Shelley’s romance. Events in Hazlitt’s path were not many, and his inner calamities seem somehow subordinated to exterior workings. It is not too much to say that to the French Revolution and the white heat of hope it diffused over Europe he owed the renewal of the very impetus within him: his moral probity, his mental vigor, and his physical cheer. His measure of men and things was fixed by its standard. Other enthusiasts wavered and went back to the flesh-pots of Egypt, but not he. Et cuncta terrarum subacta prÆter atrocem animum Catonis. Towards the grandest inconsistency this world has seen, he bore himself with a consistency nothing less than touching. Everywhere, always, as a friend who understood him well reminds a later generation, “Hazlitt was the only man of letters in England who dared openly to stand by the French Revolution, through good and evil report, and who had the magnanimity never to turn his back upon its child and champion.” The ruin of Napoleon, and the final news that “the hunter of greatness and of glory was himself a shade,” meant more to him than the relinquishment of his early and cherished art, or the fading of the long dream that his heart “should find a heart to speak to.” On his last autumn afternoon, he said what no one else would have dared to say for him: “I have had a happy life.” Such it was, if we are to compute happiness by souls, and not by the incidents which befall them. What were the things which atoned to this reformer for the curse of a mind too sentient, a heart never far from breaking? Over and above all amended and amending abuses, the memory of the Rembrandts on the walls of Burleigh House; the waving crest of the Tuderley woods; the sky, the turf, “a winding road, and a three-hours’ march to dinner”; the impersonator of Richard III. most to his mind, who lighted the stage, “and fought as if drunk with wounds”; and the figure (how pastoral and tender!) of the shepherd-boy bringing a nest for his young mistress’s sky-lark, “not doomed to dip his wings in the dappled dawn.” What heresy to the ancients would be this creed of poetic compensation! Montesquieu adhered to it; but hardly from baffled and impassioned Hazlitt, dying in his prime, would the avowal have been expected. Yet he had written almost always, as Jeffrey saw, in “a happy intoxication.” Like the sundial, in one of the most charming among his miscellaneous essays, he kept count only of the hours of joy.

Hazlitt’s erratic levees among coffee-house wits and politicians, his slack dress, his rich and fitful talk, his beautiful fierce head, go to make up any accurate impression of the man. Mr. P. G. Patmore has drawn him for us; a strange portrait from a steady hand: in certain moods “an effigy of silence,” pale, anxious, emaciated, with an awful look ever and anon, like the thunder-cloud in a clear heaven, sweeping over his features with still fury.[64] He was so much at the mercy of an excitable and extra-sensitive organization that an accidental failure to return his salute upon the street, or, above all, the gaze of a servant as he entered a house, plunged him into an excess of wrath and misery. Full, at other times, of scrupulous good faith and generosity, he would, under the stress of a fancied hurt, say and write malicious things about those he most honored. He must have been a general thorn in the flesh, for he had no tact whatever. “I love Henry,” said one of Thoreau’s friends, “but I cannot like him.” Shy, splenetic, with Dryden’s “down look,” readier to give than to exchange, Hazlitt was a riddle to strangers’ eyes. His deep voice seemed at variance with his gliding step and his glance, bright but sullen; his hand felt as if it were the limp, cold fin of a fish, and was an unlooked-for accompaniment to the fiery soul warring everywhere with darkness, and drenched in altruism. His habit of excessive tea-drinking, like Dr. Johnson’s, was to keep down sad thoughts. For sixteen years before he died, from the day on which he formed his resolution, Hazlitt never touched spirits of any kind. Profuse of money when he had it, he lacked heart, says Mr. Patmore, to live well. Wherever he dwelt there was what Carlyle, in Hunt’s case, called “tinkerdom”; his marriage, and his residence under the august roof which had been Milton’s,[65] did not mend matters for him. He covered the walls and mantel-pieces of London landladies, after the fashion of the French bohemian painters, with samples of his noblest style; and the savor of yesterday’s potions of strong tea exhaled into their curtains. Never was there, despite his confessional attitude, so non-communicative a soul. He never corresponded with anybody; he never would walk arm in arm with anybody; he never, perhaps from horror of the “patron” bogie, dedicated a book to anybody. De Quincey knew a man warmly disposed towards Hazlitt who learned to shudder and dread daggers when poor Hazlitt, with a gesture habitual to him, thrust his right hand between the buttons of his waistcoat! And he once cheerfully requested of a cheerful colleague: “Write a character of me for the next number. I want to know why everybody has such a dislike to me.” As a social factor he was something atrocious.[66] The most humane of men, his suspicions and shyings cut him off completely from humanity. The base war waged upon him by the great Tory magazines could not have affected him so deeply that it changed his demeanor towards his fellows; for he had the mettle of a paladin, which no invective could break. But, alas! he had “the canker at the heart,” which is no fosterer of “the rose upon the cheek.”

With all this fever and heaviness in Hazlitt’s blood, he had a hearty laugh, musical to hear. Haydon, in his exaggerated manner, reports an uncharitable conversation held with him once on the subject of Leigh Hunt in Italy, during which the two misconstruing critics, in their great glee, “made more noise than all the coaches, wagons, and carts outside in Piccadilly.” His smile was singularly grave and sweet. Mrs. Shelley wrote, on coming back to England, in her widowhood, and finding him much changed: “His smile brought tears to my eyes; it was like melancholy sunlight on a ruin.” A man who sincerely laughs and smiles is somewhat less than half a cynic. If there be any alive at this late hour who questions the genuineness of Hazlitt’s high spirits, he may be referred to the essay On Going a Journey, with the pÆan about “the gentleman in the parlor,” in the finest emulation of Cowley; but chiefly and constantly to The Fight, with its lingering De-Foe-like details, sprinkled, not in the least ironically, with gold-dust of Chaucer and the later poets: the rich-ringing, unique Fight,[67] predecessor of Borrow’s famous burst about the “all tremendous bruisers” of Lavengro; and not to be matched in our peaceful literature save with the eulogy and epitaph of Jack Cavanagh, by the same hand. Divers hints have been circulated, within sixty-odd years, that Mr. Hazlitt was a timid person, also that he had no turn for jokes. These ingenious calumnies may be trusted to meet the fate of the Irish pagan fairies, small enough at the start, whose punishment it is to dwindle ever and ever away, and point a moral to succeeding generations. Hazlitt’s paradoxes are not of malice prepense, but are the ebullitions both of pure fun and of the truest philosophy. “The only way to be reconciled with old friends is to part with them for good.” “Goldsmith had the satisfaction of good-naturedly relieving the necessities of others, and of being harassed to death with his own.” “Captain Burney had you at an advantage by never understanding you.” Scattered mention of “people who live on their own estates and on other people’s ideas”; of Jeremy Bentham, who had been translated into French, “when it was the greatest pity in the world that he had not been translated into English”; of the Coleridge of prose, one of whose prefaces is “a masterpiece of its kind, having neither beginning, middle, nor end”; and even of the “singular animal,” John Bull himself, since “being the beast he is has made a man of him”:—these are no ill shots at the sarcastic. Congreve, with all his quicksilver wit, could not outgo Hazlitt on Thieves, videlicet: “Even a highwayman, in the way of trade, may blow out your brains; but if he uses foul language at the same time, I should say he was no gentleman!” Hazlitt’s sense of humor has quality, if not quantity. How was it this same sense of humor, this fine-grained reticence, which wrote, nay, printed, in 1823, the piteous and ludicrous canticle of the goddess Sarah?

Hazlitt was a great pedestrian from his boyhood on, and, like Goldsmith, a fair hand at the game of fives, which he played by the day. Wherever he was, his pocket bulged with a book. It gave him keen pleasure to set down the hour, the place, the mood, and the weather of various ecstatic first readings. He became acquainted with Love for Love in a low wainscoted tavern parlor between Farnham and Alton, looking out upon a garden of larkspur, with a portrait of Charles II. crowning the chimney-piece; in his father’s house he fell across Tom Jones, “a child’s Tom Jones, an innocent creature”; he bought Milton and Burke at Shrewsbury, on the march; he looked up from Mrs. Inchbald’s Simple Story, when its pathos grew too poignant, to find “a summer shower dropping manna” on his head, and “an old crazy hand-organ playing Robin Adair.” And on April 10, 1798, his twentieth birthday, he sat down to a volume of the New EloÏse, a book which kept its hold upon him, “at the inn of Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken!” The frank epicurean catalogue, as of equal spiritual and corporeal delight, is worth notice. Do we not know that Mr. Hazlitt had wood-partridges for supper, in his middle age, at the Golden Cross, in Rastadt, near Mayence? Yet he failed to record what book lay by his plate, and distracted his attention from her who had been a widow, and who was already planning her respectable exit from his society. Evidence that he was an eater of taste is to be accumulated eagerly by his partisans, for eating is one of many engaging human characteristics which establish him as lovable—that is, posthumously lovable. Barry Cornwall was so jealously tender of his memory that he would have forbidden any one to write of Hazlitt who had not known him. As he did not warm miscellaneously to everybody, it followed that his friends were few. We do not forget which one of these, during their only difference, thought “to go to his grave without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion.”[68]

Hazlitt would have set himself down, by choice, as a metaphysician. Up to the time when his Life of Napoleon was well in hand, he used to affirm that the anonymous Principles of Human Action, which he completed at twenty, in the literary style of the azoic age, was his best work. He was rather proud, too, of the Characteristics in the Manner of Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, his one dreary book, which contains a couple of inductions worthy of Pascal, some sophistries and hollow cynicisms not native to Hazlitt’s brain, and a vast number of the very professorisms which he scouted. Maxims, indeed, are sown broadcast over his pages, which Alison the historian classified as better to quote than to read; but they gain by being incidental, and embedded in the body of his fancies. His vein of original thought comes nowhere so perfectly into play as in its application to affairs. His pen is anything but abstruse,

He did not recognize that to display his highest power he needed deeds and men, and their tangible outcome to be criticised. His preferences were altogether wed to the past. In his essay on Envy he excuses, with a wise reflection, his comparative indifference to living writers: “We try to stifle the sense we have of their merit, not because they are new or modern, but because we are not sure they will ever be old.” Or, as Professor Wilson said of him, with tardy but winning kindness: “In short, if you want Hazlitt’s praise, you must die for it . . . and it is almost worth dying for.”[69] Yet what an eye he has for the idiosyncrasy at his elbow, be it in the individual or in the race! Every contemporary of his, every painter, author, actor, and statesman of whom he cared to write at all, stands forth under his touch in delicate and aggressive outlines from which a wind seems to blow back the mortal draperies, like a figure in a triumphal procession of Mantegna’s. His manner is essentially pictorial. His sketches of Cobbett and of Northcote, in The Spirit of Obligations; of Johnson, in The Periodical Essayists; of Sir Thomas Browne and Bishop Taylor; and of Coleridge and Lamb, drawn more than once, with great power, from the life, will never be excelled. His philippic on The Spirit of Monarchy, or that on The Regal Character, is a pure vitriol flame, to scorch the necks of princes. His comments upon English and Continental types, if gathered from the necessarily promiscuous Notes of a Journey, would make a most diverting and illuminating duodecimo; the indictment of the French is especially masterly. The Spirit of the Age, The Plain Speaker, the Northcote book, The English Comic Writers, and the noble and little-read Political Essays are packed with vital personalities. So is The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, full of beautiful metaphysical analysis, as well as of vivifying criticism. This lavish accumulation of material, never put to use according to modern methods, must appear to some as a collection of interest awaiting the broom and the hanging committee; but until the end of time it will be a place of delight for the scholar and the lover of virtue. Hazlitt’s genius for assortment and sense of relative values were not developed; he was in no wise a constructive critic. Mr. R. H. Hutton complained once of Mr. Matthew Arnold that he ranked his men, but did not portray them. Now Hazlitt, whose search is all for character, irrespective of the historic position, falls into the opposite extreme: he portrays his men, but does not rank them. An attempt to break up into single file the merit which, with him, marches abreast, he would look upon as a bit of arrogance and rank impiety. He has nothing to say of the quality which stamps Bavius as the best elegiac poet between Gray and Tennyson, or of the irony of MÆvius, which would place his dramas, were it not for their loose construction, next to MoliÈre’s. He does not care a fig for comparisons; or, rather, he wishes them left to the gods, and to his perceiving reader. Meanwhile, one face after another shines clear upon the wall, and breathes enchantment on a passer-by.

It is very difficult to be severe with William Hazlitt, who was towards himself so outspokenly severe. Every stricture upon him, as well as every defence to be urged for it, may be taken out of his own mouth. Even the Liber Amoris, as must always have been discerned, demonstrates not only his weakness, but his essential uprightness and innocence. His vindication is written large in Depth and Superficiality, in The Pleasures of Hating, in The Disadvantage of Intellectual Superiority. His “true Hamlet” is as faithful a sketch of the author as is Newman’s celebrated definition of a gentleman. Hazlitt says a tender word for Dr. Johnson’s prejudices which covers and explains many of his own. Who can call him irritable, recalling the splendid exposition of merely selfish content, in the opening paragraphs of the essay on Good Nature? Yet, with all his lofty and endearing qualities, he had a warped and soured mind, a constitutional disability to find pleasure in persons or in conditions which were quiescent. He would have every one as mettlesome and gloomily vigilant as he was himself. His perfectly proper apostrophe to the lazy Coleridge at Highgate to “start up in his promised likeness, and shake the pillared rottenness of the world,” is somewhat comic. Hazlitt’s nerves never lost their tension; to the last hour of his last sickness he was ready for a bout. Much of his personal grief arose from his refusal to respect facts as facts, or to recognize in existing evil, including the calamitous perfumed figure of Turveydrop gloriously reigning, what Vernon Lee calls “part of the mechanism for producing good.” He bit at the quietist in a hundred ways, and with choice venom. “There are persons who are never very far from the truth, because the slowness of their faculties will not suffer them to make much progress in error. These are ‘persons of great judgment.’ The scales of the mind are pretty sure to remain even when there is nothing in them.” He was a natural snarler at sunshiny people with full pockets and feudal ideas, like Sir Walter, who got along with the ogre What Is, and even asked him to dine. In fact, William Hazlitt hated a great many things with the utmost enthusiasm, and he was impolite enough to say so, in and out of season. The Established Church and all its tenets and traditions were only less monstrous in his eyes than legendry, mediÆvalism, and “the shoal of friars.” He knew, from actual experience, the loyalty and purity of the early Unitarians, and he praised these with all his heart and tongue. As far as one can make out, he had not the remotest conception of the breadth and texture of Christianity as a whole. His theory, for he practised no creed except the cheap one of universal dissent, was a faint-colored local Puritanism; and that, as the Merry Monarch (an excellent judge of what was not what!) reminds us, is “no religion for a gentleman.” But more than this, Hazlitt had no apprehension of the supernatural in anything; he was very unspiritual. It is curious to see how he sidles away from the finer English creatures whom he had to handle. Sidney almost repels him, and he dismisses Shelley, on one occasion, with an inadequate but apt allusion to the “hectic flutter” of his verse. Living in a level country with no outlook upon eternity, and no deep insight into the human past, nor fully understanding those who had wider vision and more instructed utterance than his own, it follows that beside such men as those just named, then as now, Hazlitt has a crude villageous mien. He had his refined sophistications; chief among them was a surpassing love of natural beauty. But he relished, on the whole, the beef and beer of life. The normal was what he wrote of with “gusto”; a word he never tired of using, and which one must use in speaking of himself. While he is an admirable arbiter of what is or is not truly intellectual, he is all at sea when he has to discuss, for instance, emotional poetry, or, what is yet more difficult to him, poetry purely poetic; its inevitable touch of the fantastic, the mystical, puts his wits completely to rout. The stern, lopsided, and magnificent article on Shelley’s Posthumous Poems in the Edinburgh Review for July, 1824, and his impatience with Coleridge at his best, perfectly exemplify this limitation. Despite his partiality for Rousseau and certain of the early Italian painters, most of the men whose genius he seizes upon and exalts with unerring success are the men who display, along with enormous acumen and power, nothing which betokens the morbid and exquisite thing we have learned to call modern culture. Hazlitt, fortunately for us, was not over-civilized, had no cinque-cento instincts, and would have groaned aloud over such hedonism as Mr. Pater’s. Homespun and manly as he is, who can help feeling that his was but an imperfect development? that, as Mr. Arnold said so paternally of Byron, “he did not know enough”? He lacked both mental discipline and moral governance. He has the wayward and appealing Celtic utterance; the manner made of largeness and simpleness, all shot and interwoven with the hues of romanticism. Prodigal that he is, he cannot stoop to build up his golden piecemeal, or to clinch his generalizations, thrown down loosely, side by side. Esoteric thrift is not in him, nor the spirit of co-operation, nor the sweetest of artistic anxieties, that of marching in line. He has a knight-errant pen; his glad and chivalrous services to literature resemble those of an outlaw to the commonwealth. Despite his personal value, he stands detached; he is episodic, and represents nothing.

He misses the white station of a classic; for the classics have equipoise, and inter-relationship. But it is great cause for thankfulness that William Hazlitt cannot be made other than he is. Time can not take away his height and his red-gold garments, bestow on him the “smoother head of hair” which Lamb prayed for, and shrivel him into one of several very wise and weary prÉcieux. No: he stalks apart in state, the splendid Pasha of English letters.

Hazlitt boasts, and permissibly, of genuine disinterestedness: “If you wish to see me perfectly calm,” he remarks somewhere, “cheat me in a bargain, or tread on my toes.”[70] But he cannot promise the same behavior for a sophism repeated in his presence, or a truth repelled. In his sixth year he had been taken, with his brother and sister, to America, and he says that he never afterwards got out of his mouth the delicious tang of a frost-bitten New England barberry. It is tolerably sure that the blowy and sunny atmosphere of the young republic of 1783-7 got into him also. Liberalism was his birthright. He flourishes his fighting colors; he trembles with eagerness to break a lance with the arch-enemies; he is a champion, from his cradle, against class privilege, of slaves who know not what they are, nor how to wish for liberty. But he cannot do all this in the laughing Horatian way; he cannot keep cool; he cannot mind his object. If he could, he would be the white devil of debate. There are times when he speaks, as does Dr. Johnson, out of all reason, because aware of the obstinacy and the bad faith of his hearers. Morals are too much in his mind, and, after their wont, they spoil his manners. Like the Caroline Platonist, Henry More, he “has to cut his way through a crowd of thoughts as through a wood.” His temper breaks like a rocket, in little lurid smoking stars, over every ninth page; he lays about him at random; he raises a dust of side-issues. Hazlitt sometimes reminds one of Burke himself gone off at half-cock. He will not step circumspectly from light to light, from security to security. Some of his very best essays, as has been noted, have either no particular subject, or fail to follow the one they have. Nor is he any the less attractive if he be heated, if he be swearing

or scornfully settling accounts of his own with the asinine public. When he is not driven about by his moods, Hazlitt is set upon his fact alone; which he thinks is the sole concern of a prose-writer. Grace and force are collateral affairs. “In seeking for truth,” he says proudly, in words fit to be the epitome of his career, “I sometimes found beauty.”

The Edinburgh Review, in an article written while Hazlitt was in the full of his activity, summed up his shortcomings. “There are no great leading principles of taste to give singleness to his aims, nor any central points in his mind around which his feelings may revolve and his imaginations cluster. There is no sufficient distinction between his intellectual and his imaginative faculties. He confounds the truths of imagination with those of fact, the processes of argument with those of feeling, the immunities of intellect with those of virtue.” Here is an admirable arraignment, which goes to the heart of the matter. Hazlitt himself corroborates it in a confession of gallant directness: “I say what I think; I think what I feel.” It is this fatal confusion which makes his course now rapid and clear, anon clogged with vagaries, as if his rudder had run into a mesh of sea-weed; it is this which deflects his judgments, and leads him, in the shrewd phrase of a modern critic, to praise the right things for the wrong reasons. Hazlitt’s prejudices are very instructive, even while he bewails Landor’s or Cobbett’s, and tells you, as it were, with a tear in his eye, when he has done berating the French, that, after all, they are Catholics; and as for manners, “Catholics must be allowed to carry it, all over the world!” His exquisite treatment of Northcote, a winning old sharper for whom he cared nothing, is all due to his looking like a Titian portrait. So with the great Duke: Hazlitt hated the sight of him, “as much for his pasteboard visor of a face as for anything else.” One of his justifications for adoring Napoleon was, that at a levee a young English officer named Lovelace drew from him an endearing recognition: “I perceive, sir, that you bear the name of the hero of Richardson’s romance.” If you look like a Titian portrait, if you read and remember Richardson, you may trust a certain author, who knows a distinction when he sees it, to set you up for the idol of posterity. Hazlitt thought Mr. Wordsworth’s long and immobile countenance resembled that of a horse; and it is not impossible that this conviction, twin-born with that other that Mr. Wordsworth was a mighty poet, is responsible for various gibes at the august contemporary whose memory owes so much to his pen in other moods.

He is the most ingenuous and agreeable egoist we have had since the seventeenth-century men. It must be remembered how little he was in touch outwardly with social and civic affairs; how he was content to be the always young looker-on. There was nothing for him to do but fall back, under given conditions, upon his own capacious entity. The automaton called William Hazlitt is to him a toy made to his hand, to be reached without effort; the digest of all his study and the applicable test of all his assumptions. He knew himself; he could, and did, with decorum, approve or chastise himself in open court. “His life was of humanity the sphere.” His “I” has a strong constituency in the other twenty-five initials. In this sense, and in our current cant, Hazlitt is nothing if not subjective, super-personal. His sort of sentimentalism is an anomaly in Northern literature, even in the age when nearly every literary Englishman of note was variously engaged in baring his breast. Whether he would carp or sigh, he will still hold you by the button, as he held host and guest, master and valet, to pour into their adjacent ears the mad extravagances of the Liber Amoris. He gets a little tired at his desk, after battling for hours with the slow and stupid in behalf of the beauty ever-living; he wants fresh air and a reverie; he must digress or die. And from abstractions bardic as Carlyle’s, he runs gladly to his own approved self. This very circumstance, which lends Hazlitt’s pages their curious blur and stain, is the same which stamps his individuality, and gives those who are drawn towards him at all an unspeakably hearty relish for his company. What shall we call it?—the habit, not maudlin in him, of speaking out, of draining his well of emotion for the benefit of the elect; nay, even of delicate lyric whimperings, beside which

take on a tinsel glamour. As the dancing-girl carries her jewels, every one in sight as she moves, so our “Faustus, that was wont to make the schools ring with Sic probo,” steps into the forum jingling and twinkling with personalia. He is quite aware of the figure he may cut: he does not stumble into an intimacy with you because he is absent-minded, or because he is liable to an attack of affectation. He is as conscious as Poussin’s giants, whom he once described as “seated on the tops of craggy mountains, playing idly on their Pan’s pipes, and knowing the beginning and the end of their own story.” Many sentences of his, from their structure, might be attributed to Coleridge, the single person from whom Hazlitt admits to have learned anything;[71] but there is no mistaking his note Émue: that is as obvious as the syncopations in a Scotch tune, or the long eyes of Orcagna’s saints.

He wishes you to know, at every breathing-space, “how ill’s all here about my heart; but ’tis no matter.” Laying by or taking up an old print or folio, he loosens some fond confidence to that surprised novice, the common reader. Like Shelley here, as in a few other affectionate absurdities, the prince of prose, turning from his proper affairs, assures you that he, too, is human, hoping, unhappy; he also has lived in Arcadia. It is in such irrelevancies that he is fully himself, Hazlitt freed, Hazlitt autobiographic, “his chariot-wheels hot by driving fast.”[72] Who can forget the parentheses in his advices to his little son, about the scholar having neither mate nor fellow, and the god of love clapping his wings upon the river-bank to mock him as he passes by? Or the noble and moving passage in The Pleasures of Painting, beginning with “My father was willing to sit as long as I pleased,” and ending with the longing for the revolution of the great Platonic year, that those times might come over again! He freshens with his own childhood the garden of larkspur and mignonette at Walworth, and “the rich notes of the thrush that startle the ear of winter . . . dear in themselves, and dearer for the sake of what is departed.” You care not so much for the placid stream by Peterborough as for his own wistful pilgrimage to the nigh farmhouse gate, where the ten-year-old Grace Loftus (his much-beloved mother, who survived him) used to gaze upon the setting sun. And in a choric outburst of praise for Mrs. Siddons, the splendor seems to culminate less in “her majestic form rising up against misfortune, an antagonist power to it” (what a truly Shakespearean breadth is in that description!); less in the sight of her name on the play-bill, “drawing after it a long trail of Eastern glory, a joy and felicity unutterable,” than in the widening dream of the happy lad in the pit, in his sovereign vision “of waning time, of Persian thrones and them that sat on them”; in the human life which appeared to him, of a sudden, “far from indifferent,” and in his “overwhelming and drowning flood of tears.” He can beautify the evening star itself, this innovator, who records that after a tranced and busy day at the easel, the day of Austerlitz, he watched it set over a poor man’s cottage with other thoughts and feelings than he shall ever have again. There is nothing of le moi haÏssable in all this. It is deliberate naturalism; the rebellion against didactics and “tall talk,” the milestone of a return, parallel with that of Wordsworth, to the fearless contemplation of plain and near things. But in a professing logician, is it not somewhat peculiar? When has even a poet so centred the universe in his own heart, without offence?

Hazlitt threw away his brush, as a heroic measure, because he foresaw but a middling success. Many canvases he cut into shreds, in a fury of dissatisfaction with himself. Northcote, however, thought his lack of patience had spoiled a great painter. He was too full of worship of the masters to make an attentive artisan. The sacrifice, like all his sacrifices, great or small, left nothing behind but sweetness, the unclouded love of excellence, and the capacity of rejoicing at another’s attaining whatever he had missed. But the sense of disparity between supreme intellectual achievement and that which is only partial and relative, albeit of equal purity, followed him like a frenzy. Comparison is yet more difficult in literature than in art, and Hazlitt could take some satisfaction in the results of his second ardor. He felt his power most, perhaps, as a critic of the theatre. English actors owe him an incalculable debt, and their best spirits are not unmindful of it. He was reasonably assured of the duration and increase of his fame. Has he not, in one of his headstrong digressions, called the thoughts in his Table-Talk “founded as rock, free as air, the tone like an Italian picture?” Even there, however, the faint-heartedness natural to every true artist troubled him. He went home in despair from the spectacle of the Indian juggler, “in his white dress and tightened turban,” tossing the four brass balls. “To make them revolve round him at certain intervals, like the planets in their spheres, to make them chase one another like sparkles of fire, or shoot up like flowers or meteors, to throw them behind his back, and twine them round his neck like ribbons or like serpents; to do what appears an impossibility, and to do it with all the ease, the grace, the carelessness imaginable; to laugh at, to play with the glittering mockeries, to follow them with his eye as if he could fascinate them with its lambent fire, or as if he had only to see that they kept time to the music on the stage—there is something in all this which he who does not admire may be quite sure he never really admired anything in the whole course of his life. It is skill surmounting difficulty, and beauty triumphing over skill. . . . It makes me ashamed of myself. I ask what there is that I can do as well as this? Nothing.” A third person must give another answer. The whole passage offers a very exquisite parallel; for in just such a daring, varied, and magical way can William Hazlitt write. The astounding result, “which costs nothing,” is founded, in each case, upon the toil of a lifetime. Hazlitt’s style is an incredible thing. It is not, like Lamb’s, of one warp and woof. It soars to the rhetorical sublime, and drops to hard Saxon slang. It is for all the world, and not only for specialists. Its range and change incorporate the utmost of many men. The trenchant sweep, the simplicity and point of Newman at his best, are matched by the pages on Cobbett, on Fox, and On the Regal Character; and there is, to choose but one opposite instance, in the paper On the Unconsciousness of Genius, touching Correggio, a fragment of pure eloquence of a very ornate sort, whose onward bound, glow, and volley can give Mr. Swinburne’s Essays and Studies a look as of sails waiting for the wind. The same hand which fills a brief with epic cadences and invocations overwrought, throws down, often without an adjective, sentence after sentence of ringing steel: “Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity, and afraid of being overtaken by it.” “It is not the omission of individual circumstance, but the omission of general truth, which constitutes the little, the deformed, and the short-lived in art.” The man’s large voice in these aphorisms is Hazlitt’s unmistakably. If it be not as novel to this generation as if he were but just entering the lists of authorship, it is because his fecundating mind has been long enriching at second-hand the libraries of the English world. He comes forth, like another outrider, Rossetti, so far behind his heralds and disciples, that his mannered utterance seems familiar, and an echo of theirs. For it may be said at last, thanks to the numerous reprints of the last seven years, and thanks to a few competent critics, whom Mr. Stevenson leads, that Hazlitt’s robust work is in a fair way to be known and appraised, by a public which is a little less unworthy of him than his own. His method is entirely unscientific, and therefore archaic. If we can profit no longer by him, we can get out of him cheer and delight: and these profit unto immortality. Meanwhile, what mere “maker of beautiful English” shall be pitted against him there where he sits, the despair of a generation of experts, continually tossing the four brass balls?

It has been said often by shallow reviewers, and is said sometimes still, that Hazlitt’s style aims at effect; as if an effect must not be won, without aiming, by a “born man of letters,” as Mr. Saintsbury described him, “who could not help turning into literature everything he touched.”[73] The “effect,” under given conditions, is manifest, unavoidable. Once let Hazlitt speak, as he speaks ever, in the warmth of conviction, and what an intoxicating music begins!—wild as that of the gypsies, and with the same magnet-touch on the sober senses: enough to subvert all “criticism and idle distinction,” and to bring back those Theban times when the force of a sound, rather than masons and surveyors, sent the very walls waltzing into their places.

In the face of diction so joyously clear as his, so sumptuous and splendid, it is well to endorse Mr. Ruskin, that “no right style was ever founded save out of a sincere heart.” It can never be said of William Hazlitt, as Dean Trench well said of those other “great stylists,” Landor and De Quincey, that he had a lack of moral earnestness. What he was determined to impress upon his reader, during the quarter-century while he held a pen, was not that he was knowing, not that he was worthy of the renown and fortune which passed him by, but only that he had rectitude and a consuming passion for good. He declares aloud that his escutcheon has no bar-sinister: he has not sold himself; he has spoken truth in and out of season; he has honored the excellent at his own risk and cost; he has fought for a principle and been slain for it, from his youth up. His sole boast is proven. In a far deeper sense than Leigh Hunt, for whom he forged the lovely compliment, he was “the visionary in humanity, the fool of virtue,” and the captain of those who stood fast, in a hostile day, for ignored and eternal ideals. The best thing to be said of him, the thing for which, in Haydon’s phrase, “everybody must love him,” is that he himself loved justice and hated iniquity. He shared the groaning of the spirit after mortal welfare with Swift and Fielding, with Shelley and Matthew Arnold, with Carlyle and Ruskin; he was corroded with cares and desires not his own. Beside this intense devotedness, what personal flaw will ultimately show? The host who figure in the Roman martyrology hang all their claim upon the fact of martyrdom, and, according to canon law, need not have been saints in their lifetime at all. So with such souls as his: in the teeth of a thousand acknowledged imperfections in life or in art, they remain our exemplars. Let them do what they will, at some one stroke they dignify this earth. It is not Hazlitt, “the born man of letters” alone, but Hazlitt the born humanist, who bequeaths us, from his England of coarse misconception and abuse, a memory like a loadstar, and a name which is a toast to be drunk standing.

A fascinating career, truly, and here most exquisitely chronicled. The little book, in its ardor of appreciation, vivacity of portraiture, and grace and spontaneity of style, is a masterpiece of concise narration, and by those who read it once will be sought with unfailing delight again and again.—Boston Beacon.

Miss Guiney writes with a love for her subject which makes her fine discrimination all the finer, and shows an insight into history all the more admirable for the research which it has compelled. This tiny volume gives evidence of as thorough study as would fit out a post-octavo, as some authors understand the writing of history.—Evangelist, N. Y.

Miss Guiney has written La Rochejaquelein’s life on a small scale, but with spirit and enthusiasm, and her little book is very interesting.—N. Y. Tribune.

A spirited, vivid, and felicitously phrased account of that dramatic side-issue of the French Revolution, the VendÉe War. . . . Miss Guiney’s literary touch is always admirable and, not infrequently, inspired.—Hartford Courant.

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One of the most remarkable qualities of Miss Woolson’s work was its intense picturesqueness. Few writers have shown equal beauty in expressing the poetry of landscape.—Springfield Republican.

Characterization is Miss Woolson’s forte. Her men and women are original, breathing, and finely contrasted creations.—Chicago Tribune.

Delightful touches justify those who see many points of analogy between Miss Woolson and George Eliot.—N. Y. Times.

Miss Woolson’s power of describing natural scenery and strange, out-of-the-way phases of American life is undoubted. One cannot well help being fascinated by her stories.—Churchman, N. Y.

Miss Woolson is one of the few novelists of the day who know how to make conversation, how to individualize the speakers, how to exclude rabid realism without falling into literary formality.—N. Y. Tribune.

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