WILLIAM HAZLITT
Greatest of English Essayists and Critics
C. L. R. SASTRI
“Hazlitt compelled
a renewal of an old respect: his humanity, his instinct for essentials, his
cool detection of pretence and
cant, however finely disguised, and his English with its frank love for the
embodying noun and the active verb, make reading very like the hard, bright,
vigorous weather of the downs when the wind is up Channel. It is bracing,”
–H. M. Tomlinson (Old
Junk)
The author of The Spirit of the Age was
no ordinary man: he was a genius, if ever there was one. Now, that word has
lost much of its original force: it has become a sort of rubbed coin. At
present there is a general abuse of words. They do not stand singly for an
idea, as the late Mr. Edmund Candler has said somewhere, but have become
clotted in the mosaic of a formula which may mean anything but which generally
does not mean anything at all. They indicate more the absence of thought than
the presence of it. Genius is a very rare phenomenon; almost as rare as the
flowering of the aloe or the laying of the phoenix’s egg.
Hazlitt himself has given us an illuminating
description of it in one of his memorable essays:
“Talent differs from genius as voluntary
differs from involuntary power …. A clever or ingenious man is one who
can do anything well, whether it is worth doing or not; a great man is one who
can do that which, when done, is of the greatest importance. Themistocles said he could not play on the flute but that
he could make-of a small city a great one. This gives us a pretty good idea of
the distinction in question.” (Table
Talk: “The Indian Jugglers.”)
Try him by what test you will, the man who gave us his invaluable criticisms of Shakespeare’s plays and of the Elizabethan dramastists, who gave us The Plain Speaker and Table Talk and Winter slow and those inimitable personal sketches of some of his distinguished contemporaries that are gathered together in The Spirit of the Age, the man who was the friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth and Lamb – he certainly was a genius in the most exalted sense of the term. But we are apt to forget the fact amid the plethora of geniuses that we have amongst us in these fearfully flourishing times. As the late Mr. G. K. Chesterton said beautifully!
“In the beginning of the twentieth century
you could not see the ground for clever men. They were so common that a stupid
man was quite exceptional.” (Napoleon of Nottil
Hill)
The first thing, then, that we have to bear
in, mind in regard to Hazlitt is that he was a writer
of rare distinction; a writer that has almost no parallel in the annals of
English prose literature. There are those, of course, who like to belittle him,
who grudge him his due, who “damn him with faint
praise.”
Hazlitt, certainly, was not a favourite
of fortune. He was not born to attract men: his gifts lay rather the other way.
Be lacked those more delicate charities, those petites morales,
which, according to Boswell, Dr. Johnson also was deficient in, and the
want of which his best friends could not fully justify. He was not one of your
polite and smooth-tongued men. In his own day, as well as now (but to a much
smaller extent), malicious critics have followed him, like bandogs,
at his heels, ready to bark if he but deviated ever so slightly from the straightline. Not only have they railed at him openly, but
they have tried to injure him in subtler ways. One of these has been the
institution of sundry invidious comparisons between him and his dearest friend,
Charles Lamb, with, needless to say, everything in favour
of Lamb. Now, I am not here concerned with the doubtless, excruciatingly
interesting question as to who, of the two, was the superior writer. There are
fashions even in literary sympathies and antipathies, just as there are in
trunk-hose and top-bats, and it is positive hardihood on one’s part to ignore
them and to follow the bent of one’s own mind. It is simply asking for trouble.
It is meat and drink to be with those who
prefer Lamb to Hazlitt: it is the line of least
resistance: it is to swim with the current. There are cults whose creed is the
worshipping of Lamb. But the danger in such insensate enthusiasm is that, however worthy the object of our idolatry may
be, we are apt to love, not wisely, but too well.
There is a curious instance of the fury that is possible to rise
in one’s breast by another’s holding an opposite opinion. It is well-known that
Walter Bagehot – a man who, as the late
Mr. Augustine Birrell has remarked somewhere, carried
away with him to his grave more originality of thought than anybody else – was an unabashed admirer of Hazlitt and preferred him, as a writer, to Lamb immensely. When that
indefatigable literary diarist, Henry Crabb Robinson,
heard this he could not control his righteous indignation and began raving like
a mad man: “You, Sir, you prefer the works of that scoundrel, that
odious, that malignant writer, to the exquisite essays of that angelic
creature!” Bagehot protested that “there was no evidence
that angels could write particularly well.” (Literary Studies: Vol. 3)
Apart from the question of who,
as between the two, was the greater writer this incident gives one an idea of
the inexplicable fog of prejudice in which Hazlitt
has been enveloped. In fact, the very first difficulty that one encounters in
writing of him is this same unmeaning and exasperating prejudice.
Hazlitt the man is too often mixed up with Hazlitt the writer when one is judging the merits of his
books. This is, manifestly, unfair. As long as biographies have their vogue, of
course, an author’s private life cannot, it is obvious, he completely
overlooked; but, surely, it ought not to weigh with one overmuch. Moreover,
meeting his detractors on their own ground, he was not, let me respectfully
suggest, the frightful ogre they uniformly represent him to be. Doubtless, he
was not perfect: I may even concede that he was, perhaps, not exactly the kind
of man to model one’s life upon. We cannot, indeed, go to him for the homely
virtues. For that matter, if we turned our scrutinising
eye on those around us, we should, I am confident, find hardly a dozen among
them who could be said to satisfy the canons as laid down in the Sermon on
the Mount. Further, we should not have been aware of some of Hazlitt’s foibles had he not himself,
with disarming candour, revealed them to us: he was
his own accuser. He had a fatal predilection for sitting for his own portrait,
and the figure that emerges from his canvas is not always a very flattering
one: there are too many shadows.
The utmost that the Devil’s Advocate can say
against Hazlitt is that he lacked prudence and
foresight. He was not, in other
words, well-versed in the devious ways of the world. He was, however, honest to
the backbone and carried independence of thought to a degree that had rarely
been attained before nor, probably, ever will be. He was a Radical in politics;
and never changed his party or his principles, come what might. As Sir Leslie
Stephen has said:
“Among politicians he
was a faithful Abdiel when all others had deserted
the cause.” – (Hours in a Library. Vol. II)
He was so thorough-going, indeed, in his
views that he even did not mind, on occasion, sacrificing his best friends for
the sake of his opinions. He was an admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte when it was a
point of good breeding to hold him in utter detestation. He admired Napoleon so
much that, in the end, he wrote a Life of him. Whatever his feelings, he
expressed them most fearlessly. As he himself has recorded proudly, he had
considerable intellectual courage: he
“Dared to be a Daniel
Dared to stand alone.”
He was one of those who are born to be in a
minority and, very often, in a minority of one. But that never made him
unhappy. He was thrice fortified as one who knew his cause to be absolutely
right. In fact, this was one of his most pleasing traits; and one to which we
should give the fullest meed of praise. A thoroughly
honest and independent man is born but once in a while and we should, instead
of reviling him, regard his arrival as a portent.
Hazlitt was a man of quick sympathies, and it is
interesting to learn of the beginnings of his passionate adoration of Napoleon.
When Napoleon was a First Consul he was, we are informed, introduced to an
officer named “Lovelace.” “Why,” he exclaimed with extraordinary emotion, “that
is the name of the man in Clarissa!” When Hazlitt
heard of this incident he, in Mr. Birrell’s memorable
words, “fell in love with Napoleon on the spot and subsequently wrote his Life
in four volumes.”
There is another instance. Hazlitt relates in his famous essay, “The Fight,” his
meeting, at an inn, a tall English yeoman who let fall the observation that to
him “Shakespeare, Hogarth and Nature were just enough
to know.” He immediately set himself to cultivate that yeoman’s acquaintance.
He, certainly, had an eager spirit.
Hazlitt was, essentially, a solitary man. In spite
of his nomadic way of life and love of conversation he shut himself up within
himself; he was self-immersed to the point of morbidity. He was thoughtful from
early boyhood. His first readings were in philosophy and metaphysics; and his
first writings, too. He set inordinate store by these youthful effusions: he
recurred to them often in his essays. But they were the least part of his
literary work: I have mentioned them only to indicate the early bent of his
mind. Not only was he immensely thoughtful, he thought on his own lines. His
mind was untrammelled by what had been said and
thought before: he always struck out a path for himself. He was fully justified
in saying: “I have written no commonplace, nor a line
that licks the dust.” As Coleridge wrote to him, “He said things in his own
way.”
He felt the first impulse to write on coming
across Burke’s Letter to a Noble Lord. For the first time he began to
wonder what a fine thing it would be “to be able to convey the slightest
conception of my meaning to others in words.” He knew the tortures of
expression. Though he was an exquisite writer the gift came to him only late in
life. If Burke initially led him to appreciate the art of writing, of
self-expression, it fell to the lot of Coleridge to encourage him to join the
literary brotherhood. Hazlitt describes in his
well-known essay, “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” his meeting with
Coleridge at his father’s house, the interest that that great man evinced in
him, his being invited to Nether Stowey, and his
accompanying Coleridge on his way back for six miles and being held entranced
by the poet’s endless discourse.
“I would swear that the very milestones had
ears; and that Harmer-hill stooped, with all its pines, to listen to a poet as
he passed.”
In his writings, it will be noticed, Hazlitt often refers to Coleridge–even where there would
appear to be no readily ascertainable
reason for it – but with ever-diminishing enthusiasm: the hero-worshipper had gradually given place
to the stern and unbending critic. After enumerating Coleridge’s innumerable
gifts in a characteristically eloquent passage in his portrait of him in The
Spirit of the Age he ends thus:
“Alas! ‘Frailty, thy name is Genius!’ What
has become of all this mighty heap of hope, of thought, of learning and
humanity? It has ended in swallowing doses of oblivion and in writing
paragraphs in the Courier...Such and so little is the mind of
man!”
A Conservative in his Literary
Tastes
Hazlitt
was no book-worm: to him reading was not an end in itself: he had no vanity of
knowledge. He read few books – and those of old authors; and to these he
returned again and again. He did not care for contemporary literature. With the
exception of Sir Walter Scott he did not allow new writers a place on his shelves.
He was as conservative in his literary tastes as he was radical in politics. He
says somewhere: “Women judge of books as they do of fashions or complexions
which are admired only ‘in their newest gloss’. In his
essay, “On Reading Old Books,” he offers a reason for his antipathy to new
authors:
“I hate to read new
books ..... Contemporary writers may generally be divided into two classes –
one’s friends or one’s foes. Of the
first we are compelled to think too well, and of the last we are disposed to
think too ill, to receive much genuine pleasure from the perusal or to judge
fairly of the merits of either. One candidate for literary fame who happens to
be our acquaintance writes finely and like a man of genius, but unfortunately
has a foolish face, which spoils a delicate passage; and another inspires us
with the highest respect for his personal talents and character, but does not
come up to our expectations in print. All these contradictions and petty
details interrupt the calm current of our reflections.”
(The Plain Speaker)
Oil Sir Walter Scott
Hazlitt
made an exception, as I have hinted, in the case of Sir Walter Scott. He simply
revelled in his novels. He, indeed, had no
exaggerated notions of Scott’s intrinsic genius: in fact, he was reluctant to
concede him the title of an original thinker: he regarded him only as an
unsurpassed and unsurpassable collector and compiler of interesting facts, as a
sort of “human documentarian”, if I may coin a
phrase. He had an unerring eye for essentials and often hit the bull’s eye in
his criticisms. He summed up Scott’s merits as follows:
“His (Scott’s) worst
is better than any other person’s best.....His works taken together’ are almost
like a new edition of human nature. This is, indeed, to be an author!” (The
Spirit of the Age)
Hazlitt
tried his hand at painting in his early days and spent much time at his
brother’s studio. He dabbled in the art for a few years but (the fates
intervening) gave it up later for the more arduous profession of letters. It was
not that he did not do moderately well in it: he had, however, the wit to recognise that he was not born to wield the brush but to
ply the pen. But that early love never altogether forsook him and he turned his
knowledge of painting to literary ends. A not inconsiderable body of his
writings is devoted to the criticism of pictures. He wrote like one that knew
what was going on behind the scenes. Among painters Titian occupied the
foremost place in his heart; and one comes across his name frequently in his
books.
One of the Earliest of Dramatic
Critics
Hazlitt
was one of the earliest of dramatic critics. He loved play-going and loved more
the writing upon it. He has given us unforgettable descriptions of some of the
finest actors of his day: be has pointed out, with remarkable penetration,
their respective merits and defects. This is on Edmund Kean:
“He treads close upon the genius of his author (Shakespeare).” In his beautiful
essay, “On Actors and Acting,” he shows us the nobility of the profession and attacks
those who spoke of it disdainfully: “Players are only not so
respectable as they might be because their profession is not respected as it
ought to be.” This essay is one of his very best. This one and “On Going a
Journey” and “The Fight” and “My First Acquaintance with Poets” and “The
Feeling of Immortality in Youth” and “The Indian Jugglers” would have been quite sufficient, in my
opinion, to ensure his fame even if he had not written anything else. It is in
speaking of the second of these essays that Stevenson was moved to declare: “We
are mighty fine fellows but we cannot write like William Hazlitt.
“In fact, Stevenson was so enamoured of Hazlitt’s writings that he once nearly decided to write his
biography; but, as ill-luck would have it, he was deterred (at the last minute,
so to speak) by a perusal of the latter’s Libor Amoris.
His omission thus to write is, I have no hesitation in saying, one of the
major misfortunes of English literature, besides, of course, being an unmerited
disaster to Hazlitt himself. Hazlitt
has been uniformly unfortunate in his biographers with the exception of the most
recent of them, Mr. P. Howe, in mentioning whose name in the context of our
immortal author we shall not be honouring it so much.
“As giving it a hope
that there
It could not witber’d be.”
If Stevenson had not, on such a flimsy ground, fought shy of the experiment we should have had not only the best but the most sympathetic biography of Hazlitt that has up to now been written – again excepting Mr. P. P. Howe’s.
Hazlitt’s
Shakespearean Criticism
Hazlitt’s
Shakespearean criticisms are, perhaps, the finest of their kind. Nor am I to be
understood as forgetting the august name of Coleridge in this connection. It here and now, disclaim any
wish to take sides in the matter. It ia
possible that Coleridge’s Shakespearean criticism is, taken as a whole, much
the profounder of the two. In amplitude of mind Coleridge, among English
critics, takes the cake. The co-author of the Lyrical Ballads was a philosopher and a metaphysician of no mean calibre; nor was he, in his literary criticisms,
appreciably less of either. Hazlitt also, as I have
noted earlier, was both a philosopher and a metaphysician in his early days and
like his own Indian jugglers, loved to toss a multiplicity of dialectical balls
into the air without failing to catch them again on their downward journey. But
when he took to literature he took care to be strictly literary; and it may well
be that to this parting of the ways must be attributed the absence in his Shakesperean criticisms of those grand sweeps and lofty circlings that characterise the
movement of Coleridge’s mind with respect to the same. In retrospect it seems
to me that Hazlitt made a wise choice in that he was
enabled thereby to escape the danger of being exasperatingly woolly on occasion
in the manner of his eminent friend and colleague. Hazlit
had the twin virtues of knowing his own mind definitely on any subject and of
communicating it to his readers in the most unambiguous form possible. Unlike
Coleridge he did not “gyre and gimble in the wabe.” His literary criticism might thus have been
deficient in the virtues of what I may call the Higher Moonshine. It made up
for that deficiency, however, by having its feet firmly planted on the solid
ground. If it did not ascend too high to the empyrean it did not descend too
low into the nether regions either. It is my firm conviction that, taking it by
and large, Hazlitt has no reason to hang his head
down in shame before the name and fame of his one-time mentor. In Shakeapearean criticism he has (let, it be said without any
beating about the bush) the honour of holding it as
high as, if not higher than, the latter.
Specimens
Of Hamlet he writes:
“Hamlet is a name; his
speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet’s brain. What, then, are
they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the
reader’s mind. It is we who are Hamlet.”
He says of Romeo:
“Romeo is Hamlet in love.” In speaking of Shakespeare’s insight into Nature he
writes:
“Other dramatic
writers give us very fine versions and paraphrases of Nature; but Shakespeare,
together with his own comments, gives us the original text that we may judge
for ourselves.”
Can the following passage on Falstaff be bettered?
“This is perhaps the
most substantial comic character that ever was invented. Sir John carries a
most portly presence in the mind’s eye; and in him, not to speak of it
profanely, “we behold the fullness of the spirit of wit and humour
bodily.” We are as well acquainted with his person as with his mind, and his
jokes come upon us with double force and relish from the quantity of flesh
through which they make their way as he shakes his fat sides with laughter, or
“lards the lean earth as he walks along.” Other comic characters seem, if we
approach and handle them, to resolve themselves into air, “into thin air”; but
this is embodied and palpable to the grossest apprehension; it lies “three
fingers deep upon the ribs,” it plays about the lungs and the diaphragm with
all the force of animal enjoyment. His body is like a good estate to his mind,
from which he receives rents and revenues of profit and pleasure in kind,
according to its extent, and the richness of the soil. Wit is often a meagre substitute
for pleasurable sensation; an effusion of spleen and petty spite at the
comforts of others, from feeling none in itself. Falstaff’s wit is an emanation
of a fine constitution; an exuberance of good humour
and good nature; an overflowing of his love of laughter and good fellowship; a
giving vent to his heart’s ease, and over-contentment with himself and others.”
(Characters of Shakespeare’s plays: “Henry IV”)
His entire essay on Falstaff
merits quotation, but I shall stop here. Nor is a passage of this superlative
excellence a mere flash in the pan, an isolated affair. Hazlitt’s
writings, no less than (according to himself) Falstaff’s jokes, have a “cut and
come again” quality about them.
His “gusto”
Hazlitt’s
works are thickly strewn with quotations from Shakespeare. When dissertating on
Hazlitt’s critical acumen we shall do well to
remember that he had no formal training of any kind, that he was his own guide
in the intricate paths of literature, that, in short, whatever his views, he
spun them, spiderlike, entirely out of himself. He
was indebted to no one, living or dead, for them. His thoughts were his own and
bore the impress of strong originality.
“This phonenix built the phoenix’s nest,
His architecture was
his own.”
In his literary
criticism he did not so much instruct his readers as guide them along what he
considered were wholesome channels. He pointed out the choicest passages of
each of his authors and contrived to kindle his own enthusiasm in the breasts
of his readers or hearers. He was, broadly speaking, a much more reliable
teacher than many so-called professors of literature. He was never dry or
uninteresting. As the late Mr. Charles Whibley wrote of
him: “He read with the taste of the connoisseur and he wrote with the fury of
the enthusiast.” The chief quality of his writings is “gusto”. He had an
instinctive love for literature–he lived and moved and had his being in it. He
read his favourite authors as lovers scan the faces
of their beloveds. He was so in all matters. Whatever he took to, he took to it
with his whole heart and soul, he did not believe in half measures. With all
his fervent love for books, however, he was not that nauseating creature – a
pedant. He bustled about the world as much as anyone else; and (very properly)
he interpreted the books he read in the light of the facts of life, or as many
of them as he managed to grasp. Literature was to him a relaxation, not a toil; and anything is a relaxation that “comes home to the
bosoms and businesses of men.” As Professor Oliver Elton says:
“Literature gives him
perhaps the least alloyed element of his happiness, and good words are like a
glass of wine to him.”
As for the weight of
his criticisms he proceeds:
“By the time he has
done them (that is, his Lectures on the English Poets at the Surrey
institution in 1818) he has managed to present a body of critical writings more
than equal in mass to all that has been saved from the pens of lamb and
Coleridge put together; more panoramic on range, and more connected in view,
and, at its best, as rate and revealing in its own fashion as theirs.”
A Survey of English Literature, Vol. II
In the opinion of another eminent judge, the late Professor George Saintsbury:
“You get such
appreciation in the best, the most delightful, the most valuable sense,
as had been seldom seen since Dryden, never before, and in him not frequently, I
do not know in what language to look for a parallel wealth.” (My italics) A
History of Criticism and Taste., Vol. III)
As an Essayist
It is as an essayist,
however, that Hazlitt is popularly known. He wrote
about a hundred essays in all; and I can affirm that not one of these is dull.
There may, sometimes, be no system or method in them; but it is my conviction
that system or method would have been their undoing. There are some writers who
cannot, if only to save their souls, write to order: ideas come to them impromptu
and not according to any previous arrangement. Nothing, indeed, gives them
greater delight than defying rules. Not a few of the very greatest writers have
trusted to inspiration rather than to premeditation; and though that way of
setting about the business may not be wholesome from a theoretical point of view, it cannot be
gainsaid that it often works well in practice. It is not that they are lacking
in the power of cerebration; there is, not seldom, a
larger amount of it in their writings than in those of the more methodical
essayists. The important consideration, surely, is not whether one has
meticulously thought out one’s line of procedure beforehand, but whether, when
the whole essay is finished, it is eminently readable; that is all that any of
us has a right to ask of a writer. Nobody judges an actor by going into the
greenroom and examining the devices of his “make up”, we judge him after he has
come before the footlights and by the manner of his acting. The same is true of the essayist. It is the
cumulative result that we want and not the various steps by which the thing has
been accomplished. Hazlitt, then, lacked system. In
one of his essays he has himself confessed:
“After I begin them
(the essays, that is) I am only anxious to get to the end of them, which I am
not sure I shall do, for I seldom see my way a page or even a sentence
beforehand; and when I have, as by a miracle, escaped, I trouble myself little
more about them.”
A Born Writer
In spite of this,
however, Hazlitt was a born writer. He could write on
anything and could write that marvellously well. It
was with him no matter what he wrote – it was at once imbued
with a form of its own and was
stamped with the unmistakable mark of genius. Writing came naturally to him and
the subject was only of secondary importance; sometimes, it must be conceded,
the subsidiary swallows up the primary and the captain’s luggage all but sinks
the ship and cargo. But the thing works well in his hands and his essays give
unending delight. In a phrase immortallsed by Charles
Lamb, they belong to the class of “perpetually self-reproductive volumes – Great Nature’s Stereotypes.”
His Style
I
must now discuss the question of his style. De Quincey,
it is well-known, could not abide it:
being at the opposite pole to his own it gave him, we may conjecture, a pain on
the neck. But, before coming to the Opium Eater’s view of Hazlitt’s
style, let me remind my readers of what our one and only “G. K. C.” deemed it
fit to say of De Quincey’s own sentences. Chesterton
described them in the happy phrase that “They lengthen out like nightmare
corridors or rise higher and higher like impossible eastern pagodas.”
(The Victorian Age in Literature.)
By an irony of fate it
fell to the lot of this same perverse stylist to fall foul of Hazlitt’s unexceptionable mode of writing. He condemned it as being “discontinuous,” and
his thoughts as being “abrupt, insulated, capricious and non-sequacious.” He continued:
“Hazlitt’s
brilliancy is seen chiefly in separate splinterings
of phrase or image which throw upon the eye a vitreous scintillation for a
moment, but spread no deep suffusion of colour and
distribute no masses of mightly shadow. A flash, a solitary flash, and all is
gone.”
I suppose this rhodomontade means something, though, for the moment, it
passes such comprehension as the Almighty has bestowed upon me. The fact,
however, is that De Quincey win never known to have
been guilty of giving anyone credit for writing well excepting Jeremy Taylor and
Sir Thomas Browne and well, not to put too fine a point upon it, himself. It
was almost an obsession with him that his own style was the finest in the
heavens above, the earth below, and the waters underneath the earth, and that
all others must, perforce, write badly: his geese were all swans while other
writers’ swans were, inevitably, apt to be only geese. I do not pretend to be
able to analyse Hazlitt’s
style too minutely. But I venture to assert that it was as perfect a prose
style as ever was written: at its very best it was nothing short of being
superb. As Prof. Elton puts it:
“Hazlitt
is in the ranks of the classic English writers whom he knows well. He has read
Bacon and Dryden and Earle and Addison and has got something from most of them;
for one thing, his manly strength and remarkably undefiled purity of diction,
which cannot well be described, for it is not strange or mannered, and for this
reason defies parody. It is good to go to school to him for vocabulary and
idiom; the great distillers of language, the Elizabethan re-incarnate, like
Charles Lamb, may produce something more rare and wonderful, but they are not
such good models. Hazlitt simply uses right
English, and the only way to profit by him is to do
the same.” (My italics.) A
Survey of the English Literature – Vol. II.
Hazlitt
is fond of simple but forceful sentences where every word tells. He is fond of
variation. At the end of a couple of sentences we may remain at the same point
of thought but, with each sentence, the sense of it is brought home to us in
ever-increasing measure and at the end of them all, we are left in no doubt
whatever of the author’s meaning. He is fond of images; and he flings them at
our heads one after another without the least betrayal of effort. Quotations
abound; sometimes in the most unexpected places. He applies them in his own
fashion. Nor does he mind repeating them as often as the fancy takes him. After
reading him for a while we become as familiar with them as he himself.
We can know the man
from his writings. There is an unmistakable ring of sincerity in his words. He feels
every syllable be writes and makes us feels too. He plunges unto his
subject headlong; and every word that he utters is a blow aimed at the heart.
Further, he indulges in astonishing comparisons. This is how, for instance, he
chooses to describe the play of Cavanagh, the famous
fives’ player:
“His blows were not
undecided and ineffectual, lumbering like Mr. Wordsworth’s epic poetry, nor
wavering like Mr. Coleridge’s lyric prose, nor short of the mark like Mr.
Brougham’s speeches, nor wide of it like Mr. Canning’s
wit, nor foul like the Quarterly, nor let balls like the Edinburgh
Review. Cobbet and Junius
together would have made a Cavanagh.” (Table Talk: “The Indian
Jugglers.”)
Was ever a player
described like this before? No wonder W. E. Henley was impelled to
conclude his celebrated essay on Hazlitt with the
ever-memorable sentence: “Hazlitt is ever Hazlitt; and at his highest moments Hazlitt
is hard to beat and has not these many years been beaten.”