Page images
PDF
EPUB

HAZLITT AS A CRITIC.

William Hazlitt, 1778-1830, was an ethical philosopher, a political writer, an economic essayist, an historian, a theatrical critic, a painter and a critic of paintings, an essayist upon men and manners, and a literary critic both as an essayist and as a lecturer. It is only by giving a list of his works-and it would be a long one-that we could convey a just conception of their number and variety. He used to say, himself, "I am nothing if not critical;" and it is his literary criticisms that we purpose here to consider, and his other writings and his life only as they illustrate his criticism.

Hazlitt cannot be pronounced to have been either a wise, or a virtuous, or an amiable man; his conduct was marked by a spontaneous contrariness that rose to every occasion; but like many another man who has made himself, and others, miserable about trifles, he bore a severe illness with patience; and he said, on the day of his death, "Well, I have had a happy life." He did not always nor often remember that spirits are not finely touched but for fine issues; yet it is no more than justice to say that he had a strong and keen understanding, a hearty relish for the beauties of literature, nature and art, and a generous ambition to win an honourable place in the ranks of men of letters. Coleridge, in that severe and dignified castigation which he administered for Hazlitt's "rhapsody of predetermined insult" against his first "Lay Sermon " (On the Bible as a guide to Statesmen) says: "And under the single condition that he should have written what he himself really thought, and have criticized the work as he would have done had its author been indifferent to him, I should have chosen that man, myself, both from the vigour and the originality of his mind, and from his particular acuteness in speculative reasoning, before all others." 1

Lamb,

'See the Biographia Literaria, ch. XXIV. (Harper's edition, vol. 3. p.

588.)

while calmly and loftily rebuking his suspiciousness, quarrelsomeness, and spite, declared that Hazlitt "in his natural and healthy state" was "one of the finest and wisest spirits breathing," and that he thought he himself should go to his grave "without finding such another companion." 2

3

Hazlitt's earliest idol in literature was Rousseau, and he tells us himself that he spent "two whole years" of his youth, "the happiest years of my life," in reading and in "shedding tears over" the Confessions and the New Eloise. In later years, he lost his relish for the New Eloise, and was (6 very much mortified by my change of taste;" but he never wearied of the Confessions. It was a calamity for the young man that such reading should have fallen in his way. Nothing could have been more adapted to confirm all the morbid tendencies of his disposition. For Hazlitt had a mind akin to that of Rousseau, self-conscious, sensitive, craving for recognition, suspicious of slights, oscillating from ardent and extravagant admiration and attachment into bitter aversion, and in general expecting " finer bread than is made of wheat." He learned sense enough, in later life, to wish that he had "never read the 'Emilius,' or had read it with less implicit faith," because it encouraged him in taking want of manners for a virtue-a mistake to which (as Matthew Arnold remarks) the sect and class in which Hazlitt was born are sufficiently prone. But this was the only point in which he acknowledged the influence of Rousseau to have been pernicious; and his indignation against Moore for his censure upon Rousseau in the " Rhymes on the Road" Rhymes on the Road" may be seen in

'See Lamb's open Letter to Robert Southey, Esq., in the London Magazine, Oct., 1823; altered afterwards into an essay entitled The Tombs in the Abbey, and published in the second series of Elia's Essays. The original is given in Routledge's Lamb (edited by Ch. Kent.)

'For Hazlitt's feelings about Rousseau, see The Round Table, on The Character of Rousseau (Essay XXI); and The Plain Speaker, on Reading Old Books. When Hazlitt in the essay on The Character of Rousseau classes Wordsworth with Rousseau, this is only dishonest and impudent hostility to the poet; and when he says that Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Ben enuto Cellini are the three greatest egotists, and " we defy the world to furnish a fourth," he has tongue in his cheek; for he well knew what "the world" thought of himself.

* On Reading Old Books (in The Plain Speaker.)

the essay on The Jealousy and Spleen of Party. All this egoistic sentimentality was corroborated when he began to read German literature: "How eagerly I slaked my thirst of German sentiment,' as the hart that panteth for the water-springs; how I bathed, and revelled, and added my flood of tears to Goethe's Sorrows of Werther and to Schiller's Robbers." 6

[ocr errors]

In literary style. Hazlitt's first model was Junius. It may be supposed that he was attracted as much by the political spirit and stern malevolence as by the artificial concentration and polish of that very unequal writer. Junius, indeed, though bitterly hostile to the Court, was no Radical like Hazlitt's friends, but an old Whig of the most rigid type. But it is the most ordinary of political fallacies to mistake a common enmity for a mutual friendship. If, in a theoretical question, the thought were to occur that two things, because they differ from a third, agree with one another, the absurdity would be apparent; but in practical affairs even highly intelligent people are prone to assume that the opponent of what they oppose is therefore the friend of what they would promote. There are fairly decent people who from mere hatred of the Papacy, or of religious persecution, honor such a man as Giordano Bruno; there are historians, who from mere hatred of republicanism, admire Cæsar; as there are politicians who, from hatred of something or other, admire Cromwell. And this same fallacy beset Hazlitt in the last years of his life, when, from indignation at the restoration of the French monarchy, he fell into a fixed determination to defend the military despot who had trampled out the French republic, and who had tried to convert his own autocracy into an hereditary monarchy, as well as to destroy the independence of all surrounding nations. And in a similar way

he adds to the praise of Pope, in order to oppose other critics. In spite of the attractions of Junius for the young political zealot, Hazlitt's admiration for his style waned and at last died

5 In The Plain Speaker.

'On Reading Old Books, ibid.

'If any further proof be needed that Junius was Philip Francis, it may be found in the fact that, while the Letters were appearing, Francis systematically directed suspicion against Burke.

out when he fell under the influence of a far greater master of English composition. One day in his eighteenth year he read in a newspaper some extracts from the Letter to a Noble Lord— Burke's Apologia pro Vita Sua; and he said to himself: "This

is true eloquence; this is a man pouring out his mind upon paper." From that hour he never ceased to delight in the writings of the great orator. His political antipathy, his exasperation against the principles of Burke, became at one time so acrid that he seems to have persuaded himself-he certainly tried to persuade others—that Burke had opposed the French Revolution, because he was jealous of Rousseau and because his vanity was wounded when the framers of the French constitution did not consult him. But even then Hazlitt's mind could not become insensible to the charm of Burke's style. "It has always appeared to me," he says, "that the most perfect prose style, the most powerful, the most dazzling, the most daring, that which went nearest to the verge of poetry and yet never fell over, was Burke's." Hostile to the statesman as he was, hostile to monarchy as he was, he never grew weary of the magnificent passage in which Burke compares the British monarchy with the Parliament and the National Church, to "the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers." "I never pass Windsor, but I think of this passage in Burke, and I hardly know to which I am indebted most for enriching my moral sense, that, or the fine stanza of Gray beginning:

"From Windsor's heights, the expanse below
Of mead, of lawn, of wood, survey, etc."

"If such is my admiration of this man's misapplied powers," he says elsewhere, "what must it have been when I myself was in vain trying, year after year, to write a single essay, nay, a single page or sentence; when I regarded the wonders of his pen with the longing eyes of one who was dumb and a changeling."

On the Prose Style of Poets (in The Plain Speaker.)

"Junius's style with all his terseness shrunk up into little antithetic points and well-trimmed sentences." 9

The sweep of Burke's eloquence, indeed, was altogether beyond Hazlitt's imitation. He has neither the sustained strength of passion nor the continuity and train of reflections requisite to support such a style as that. But it cannot be doubted that his own composition derived great benefit from this worship of Burke's eloquence. If Burke only delivered him from Junius, that alone would have been a great advantage. For, there is one thing which no one could learn from Junius, and which anyone may learn from Burke; and that is, to be natural, to be oneself. Such as Hazlitt's style is, it is his own. And a very good style, in truth, it is. The diction is pure; the construction is clear; the march of the sentences is unconstrained, rapid, and energetic; the flow of the language is musical; and occasionally, he rises into fervid eloquence. The writer whose manner he most reminds us of. is Macaulay. But in this case there was no possibility of imitation on the part of Hazlitt, and if Macaulay learned his style from Hazlitt, the disciple in his passion for perfection carried the art further than his master.

If Burke was the writer whose prose composition Hazlitt most admired, the teacher from whom he learned most was Coleridge; the only man, in fact, from whom Hazlitt would admit that he had ever learned anything. It was in 1798, when Hazlitt was completing his nineteenth year, that he made the acquaintance of the poet. That was Coleridge's annus mirabilis; he was then in the zenith of his poetic power, and of his disposition to use it; it was then that he composed the Ancient Mariner and the first part of the Christabel and the Kubla Khan. He came to Shrewsbury in January, to try how he should suit the Unitarians there as a preacher; and Hazlitt, who lived at the town of Wem (in Shropshire) heard of his arrival.

"A poet and a philosopher getting up in an Unitarian

'On Reading Old Books (in The Plain Speaker). It is a pity that Hazlitt's preference of Burke to Junius could not have been made known to Philip Francis, who after reading the Reflections on the French Revolution, wrote to Burke: "Once for all, I wish you would let me teach you to write English.”

« ՆախորդըՇարունակել »