By C. L. R. SASTRI, B. Sc.

"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." – Mr. H. M. Tomlinson in Old Junk. (Cape, 1925: p. 206).

I

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 a description of it:

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 highest 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.

Try him by what test you will, the man who gave us his valuable criticisms of Shakespeare's plays and of the Elizabethan dramatists, who gave us the Plain Speaker and Table Talk and Winterslow and those inimitable personal sketches of some of his distinguished contemporaries that are gathered together in the pages of 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 most flourishing times. As Mr. Chesterton says 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." ¹

II

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 gift lay rather the other way. But, as he himself puts it somewhere, "If the truth were known, the most disagreeable people are the most amiable." He lacked those more delicate charities, those petites morales, which, according to Boswell, Johnson also was deficient in, and the want of which his best friends could not fully justify. He was not one of your politic and smooth-tongued men. In his own day, as well as now (but to a much lesser extent), malicious critics have followed him, like ban-dogs, at his heels, ready to bark if he but deviated ever so slightly from the straight line. Not only have they railed at him openly: they have tried to injure him in subtler ways. One of these has been the institution of invidious comparisons between him and his dearest friend, Charles Lamb, with, of course, everything in favour of Lamb. Now, I am not here concerned with the interesting question as to who, of the two, was the superior writer. There are fashions even in literary likings and dislikings, just as there are in trunk-hose and top-hats, and it is positive hardihood on one's part to ignore them and 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 cases 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 raise in one's breast by the holding of an opposite opinion. It is well-known that Bagehot–a man who, as Mr. Birrell says, carried away with him to his grave more originality of thought than anybody else–was a great admirer of Hazlitt and preferred him, as a writer, to Lamb. When Crabb Robinson heard this he could not control his righteous indignation and raved 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." ² Apart from the question of who, as between the two, was the greater writer, this incident gives one an idea of the fog of prejudice in which Hazlitt has been enveloped. In fact, the first difficulty that one encounters in writing of him is this same unmeaning and very unjust prejudice.

III

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. The man was thoughtful from early boyhood. His first readings were in philosophy and metaphysics; and his first writings, too. He set much store by these youthful effusions: he recurred to them often in his writing. But they were the least part of his literary work; and I mention them only to indicate the bent of his mind. Not only was he thoughtful; he thought on his own lines. His mind was untrammelled by what was 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 of 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 it struck him what a fine thing it was "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 first led him to appreciate the art of writing, of self-expression, it was Coleridge who encouraged 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 which 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 ceaseless 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 Hazlitt often recurs to Coleridge even where there would appear to be no reason for it–but with ever-diminishing enthusiasm: the hero-worshipper gradually gave p-lace to the stern critic.

IV

Hazlitt was one of the earliest of dramatic critics. He loved play-going and loved more the writing, upon it. He has given us descriptions of some of the best actors of his day: he has pointed out, with a keen eye, their respective merits and defects. This is of Edmund Kean: "He treads close upon the genius of his author (Shakespeare)." In his essay, "On Actors and Acting", he has shown, us the nobility of the profession and criticised 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 best. This one, and that "On Going a Journey," and "The Fight," and "My First Acquaintance with poets," and "The Feeling of Immortality in Youth," and "The Indian Jugglers," are, if Hazlitt had not written anything else, quite sufficient to ensure his fame. It is in speaking of the second of these essays that Stevenson declared: "We are mighty fine fellows but we cannot write like William Hazlitt." In fact, Stevenson was so enamoured of Hazlitt's writing that he even wanted to write his biography, but was deterred from doing so by the author's Liber Amoris: his omission thus to write is a misfortune both to Hazlitt and to the world of letters. Hazlitt has been unfortunate in his biographers (except the most recent of them, Mr. P. P. Howe, who is the greatest living authority on Hazlitt, even as Mr. E. V. Lucas is the greatest living authority on Charles Lamb), and if Stevenson had not fought shy of the experiment, we should have had not only the best but the most sympathetic biography of our author that has up to now been written (again excepting Mr. P. P. Howe's).

Hazlitt's Shakespearean criticisms are perhaps the best of their kind. 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." Hazlitt's writings are thickly strewn with quotations from Shakespeare. When speaking of Hazlitt in his critical capacity, we should remember that he had no formal training of any kind, that he was his own guide in the intricate paths of literature, that, whatever his views, he spun them, spider-like, entirely out of himself. He was indebted to nobody. His thoughts were his own and bore the impress of strong originality.

He did not so much instruct his readers as guide them along wholesome channels. He pointed out the best passages of each of his authors, and helped to kindle his own enthusiasm in the breasts of his readers or hearers. He was, taken in the lump, a much better 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." The man was fond of literature from the very bottom of his soul–he lived and moved and had his being in it. He read his favorite authors as lovers read the faces of their beloveds. He was so in all things. Whatever he took to, he took to it with his whole heart: he did not like half-measures. With all his love of books, however, he was not that hateful thing–a pedant. He loved the things of the world and bustled about it as much as anybody else; and he interpreted his books in the light of the facts of life, or so many of them as he managed to grasp. Literature to him was a relaxation, not a toil; and anything is a relaxation that "comes home to the bosoms and businesses of men." As Prof. 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 value of his criticisms, the same writer proceeds:

"By the time he has done (his lectures at the Surrey Institution, that is), he has managed to present a body of critical writing more than equal in mass to all that is saved from the pens of Lamb and Coleridge put together; more panoramic in range, and more connected in view, and, at its best, as fare and revealing in its own fashion as theirs" ³

In the opinion of Prof. Saints bury:

"You get such appreciation, in the best, the most thorough, 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."⁴

V

It is as an essayist, however, that Hazlitt is chiefly known. He wrote about a hundred essays in all; and not one of these is dull. To be sure, there is no system or method in them; but system would have been the undoing of Hazlitt. There are some writers who cannot write to order: things come to them impromptu and not according to arrangement. It almost looks as if nothing gives them greater delight than defying rules. Some of the greatest writers have trusted to inspiration rather than to premeditation; and, though it is not a wholesome thing from a theoretical point of view, it does often work well in practice. It is not that they are lacking in powers of thought: there is a greater body of thought in some of their writings than in those of the methodical essayists. What is method, after all? Everyone has his own method; and some there are who have no method at all: that is their method. The important thing is, not whether one has thought out one's line of procedure beforehand, but whether, when the whole essay is finished, it is readable: that is all that we ask of a writer, and leave his principles of work to himself. Nobody judges an actor by going into the green-room 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; not the steps by which a thing has been completed. Hazlitt, then, lacked system. He has himself told us:

"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 before hand; and when I have as by a miracle escaped, I trouble myself little more about them."

In spite of this, however, Hazlitt was a born writer. He could write upon 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 natural to him, and the subject was only of secondary importance: sometimes, it must be allowed, 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 immortalized by Charles Lamb, they belong to, the class of "perpetually self-reproductive volumes–Great Nature's Stereotypes".

Something, must be said about Hazlitt's style. De Quincey, is well-known, did not like it. He condemned it as being "discontinuous," and his thoughts as being "abrupt, insulated, capricious and non-sequacious." He continues:

"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 suffusions of colour, and distribute no masses of mighty shadow. A flash, a solitary flash, and all is gone." ⁵

This may be so. But, then, De Quincey was never known to have been guilty of giving anybody credit for writing well excepting Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne and himself. He was saturated with the idea that his own style was the finest in the heavens above, the earth below, and the waters beneath the earth; and that all others must perforce write badly: his geese were all swans, while other writers’ swans were geese. I do not pretend to be able to analyse Hazlitt's style too minutely: but I venture to say that it is as perfect a prose-style as ever was written: at its very best, it is superb. As Prof. Oliver Elton says:

"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 Swift, and has got something from most of them; for one thing, his manly strength and remarkably undefined 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 Elizabethans 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."⁶

Hazlitt is fond of simple but forcible sentences, where every word tells. He is fond of variation. At the end of a couple of sentences we 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. He is fond of images; and he hurls them at our heads one after another without the least betrayal of effort. Quotations abound; sometimes in the most innocent places. He applies them in his own way: he does not mind repeating them as often as he pleases; and, after reading him for some time, 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. The man feels every syllable he writes, and makes us feel too. He plunges into his subject headlong; every word that he utters is a blow aimed at the heart. And then he is fond of beautiful comparisons. He is describing 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. Cobbett and Junius together would have made a Cavanagh. ⁷

Was ever a player described like this before?

W. E. Henley concludes his essay on Hazlitt with this memorable sentence: "Hazlitt is ever Hazlitt; and at his highest moments Hazlitt is hard to beat, and has not these many years been beaten."

VI

Hazlitt excelled even more as a talker. He loved good talk and good company. If he was a good talker, he was even a better listener and has recorded in imperishable language the conversational peculiarities of his friends, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Haydon and Lamb. The passage is so beautiful that I must be excused if I cannot resist the temptation of quoting it in full:

Wordsworth sometimes talks like a man inspired on subjects of poetry (his own out of the question)–Coleridge well on every subject, and Godwin on none. Mrs. Montague's conversation is as fine-cut as her features and I like to sit in the room with that sort of coronet face. What she says leaves a flavor, like fine green tea. Hunt's is like champagne and Northcote's like anchovy sandwiches. Haydon's is like a game at trapball, Lamb's like snap-dragon; and my own (if I do not mistake the matter) is not much unlike a game at nine-pins.

Here, however, is Lamb’s certificate of Hazlitt's prowess as a talker. He writes to Wordsworth: "In spite of all, there is something tough in my attachment to Hazlitt, which these violent strainings cannot quite dislocate or sever asunder. I get no conversation in London that is absolutely worth attending to but his."⁸

Talfourd writes: "In argument he was candid and liberal there was nothing about him pragmatical or exclusive j he never drove a principle to its utmost possible consequences, but, like Locksley, ‘allowed for the wind’. ⁹ If anybody used a bright and impressive phrase, it was at once locked up in Hazlitt's memory, and he recurred to it long after it was uttered. He was generous in appreciation of others and un stinted in his generosity. He always gave everybody his due. He loved more to dwell on the merits of others than to lose himself in admiration of his own. Unlike Hal o' th' Wynd, he never "fought for his own hand" in literary honours. It is Mr. Birrell who says, "A life more free from greed of gain, or taint of literary vanity is not to be found in the records of English literature." In Sir Leslie Stephen's words, "Still less was he selfish in the sense of preferring solid bread and butter to the higher needs of mind and spirit. His sentiments are always generous, and if scorn is too familiar a mood, it is scorn for the base and servile." (Hours in a Library. Vol. II. Murray: 1920: Essay on Hazlitt.)

VII

I shall now conclude my article; and, in doing so, shall content myself with a few general observations. Most writers have judged Hazlitt rather too harshly. The world has been one too many for him, as Mr. Tulliver (Senior) in The Mill on the Floss would have said. All of us have vices and none is so pure that he can, with impunity, throw stones at others. The only difference is that the vices of some have the sanction of fashion and pass unnoticed or unreproved. Most often the so-called saint is nothing of the kind: he is only a whited sepulchre. His virtue is only skin-deep. And even if Hazlitt was a bad man, that fact has absolutely nothing to do with his books. The two are quite separate things. The worst fault in Hazlitt was his temper: but the man has been dead nearly a century, and we, at any rate, do not stand to suffer anything at his hands. It is much more desirable that we try to understand the causes of his unusual bitterness than that we lash ourselves into fury at it. Let us first ‘scan’ the man aright, and only afterwards lay the whip of Zabern across his shoulders, if we still persist in our opinion of him. Let us rather emulate Lamb's charitable disposition: Lamb who had often reason to be angry with Hazlitt: when he (knowing all the circumstances) could forgive him, it is, surely, much less difficult for us to forgive him, too. Here is what Lamb says:

"Protesting against much that he has written, and some things which he chooses to do; judging him by his conversation which I enjoyed so long, and relished so deeply; or by his books, in those places where no clouding passion intervenes, I should belie my own conscience if I said less than that I think W. H. to be, in his natural and healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing. So far from being ashamed of that intimacy which was betwixt us, it is my boast that I was able for so many years to have preserved it entire; and I think I shall go to my grave without finding or expecting to find such another companion." ¹⁰