384 WILLIAM HAZLITT 66 [July, old age are words without a meaning, a fie tality in Youth," a season when death and tion with which we have nothing to do, and when we are too much dazzled by the gor geousness and novelty of the bright waking dreams about us to discern the dim shadow lingering for us in the distance," like a rustic at a fair, we are full of amazement and rapture, and have no thought of going home, pitched in the same key, on the "Love of or that it will soon be night;" that, again, Life," which teaches that we nurse our exist ence with the greatest tenderness, according to the pain it has cost us; that on "The Past and Future," and others similarly invested with an extrinsic interest, derived from the egotism of the writer, which pervades and colors them-a writer with an idiosyn crasy worth the studying, and frankly exposed (though without morbid motive, or arriere pensée) for the avail of the studious. and Unitarian College, Hackney, he began to give | Helvetius; that "On the Feeling of Immor his mind to metaphysics, and to methodize his researches in mental philosophy into such a system as might look well on paper and in penmanship of his own. The result he forwarded to his father, in the shape of preliminary Essays-none of which are extant. A maturer essay found, and still finds, readers; that, namely, on the Principles of Human Action, composed in a style which Talfourd calls as dry and hard as a mathematical demonstration. There is, however, one burst (and only one) of "enthusiastic recollection," that Southey said at the time was something between the manner of Milton's prose-works and Jeremy Taylor. This little treatise, and another, of polemical tone, "Against the Hartleian Theory," can, at the best, in the opinion of a distinguished living metaphysician, be received only as evidences of ingenuity and a natural turn for philosophizing but are satisfactory proofs that Hazlitt was without any systematic education or regular course of reading in philosophy. When his theme is some point of modern whatever gleams of wandering truth might son and Steele, he is not always, perhaps very And, manners, to be treated in the style of Addiflash at times upon his mind, he was at the seldom, successful. He lacks the grace mercy of every random impulse; had no bonhomie which the best essayists in this principles upon any subject; was eminently genre have accustomed us to look for; he is one-sided; and viewed all things under the not playful in his satire, not genial in his angle which chance circumstances presented, laughter, not fluent in his mode of indictment, never from a central station." Of his sub-in a word, he is usually, on such occasions, sequent contributions to the same department ill at ease, and seems to be cudgelling his own of thought, the essay Necessity" is noticeable on several grounds; He has essayed "Footmen," "On Liberty and brains as well as the proposed victim's back. one of them, the honor due it emphatically fluttering, and lounging behind the coronet. awards to Jonathan Edwards, for his treatise clustering, People," with the pathology of the Cockney; coach of beauty; Londoners and Country "Nicknames," which, he says, for the most part, govern the world, and act by mechani cal sympathy on the nerves of society; "The Look of a Gentleman," decided to consist in of Lords;" the "Letter-Bell;" the "Indian a habitual self-possession; the "Conversation Jugglers;" "The Fight;" "Will-making," &c. Palpable enough is the inferiority of his efforts (for efforts they generally are, or, which to the reader is the same thing, seem) in this playful mood of gossip and good-fellowship, to the cheery flow of Leigh Hunt, of love as most will allow who have turned so thoroughly in his element at these labors from the one causeur to the other, in their cosession at the "Round Table." on the Will-a work which has suffered in general repute, from the particular fact-accidental not essential-that the author was theologically a Calvinist; but which, in spite of that fact, or rather independently of it, is pronounced by Hazlitt to be one of the most closely reasoned, elaborate, serious, acute, and sensible, among modern productions. The lectures on Hobbes and Locke present nothing new or striking of the lecturer's own; if they may be thought to disparage the force and originality of the latter philosopher, the balance is carried over to the credit of the former, in whose praise the critic descants with admiring sympathy. In the class of essays which discuss, as it were, abstracted views of our nature-the hopes and fears, the tendencies and anomalies of poor humanity-its normal functions, and its conventional excrescences-may be named that on Self-Love," directed against the school of See also the Dialogue on Self-Love and Benevolence, in Sketches and Essays, by W. Hazlitt. 1839. A prominent place should be accorded to Those who have read Mr. Patmore's Reminis horror of liveried flunkies, "sleek and wanton, cences, will appreciate the peculiarity of Hazlitt's saucy and supple." such essays, often gems in their way, and in satisfactory; indeed, if a demagogue, Hazlitt writing which Hazlitt took evident and un- had a sorry respect for the demos. His conforced pleasure, as those on Reason and Im-tempt for the demos was, in sooth, only secagination-with its hearty protest in limine ond to his hatred of the tyrannos. Let our against people who have no notion of anything view of him as Critic be taken on less hostile but generalities, and forms, and naked pro- territory. positions, and who, if you proceed to add color or relief from individuality, demur to the use of rhetoric as an illogical thing; on Taste-simply defined as sensibility to the different degrees and kinds of excellence in the works of Nature or Art--the power of being properly affected by the achievements of genius-mere sensibility not being true taste, though sensibility to real excellence is; -on the question, Whether Genius is conscious of its powers?-on Genius and Common Sense-on Paradox and Common-Place. According to Mr. Patmore, Hazlitt would write one of the deepest and best of these droppings of "Table-Talk," or "Round Table" discourses, or "Plain Speaker" deliverances, in two or three sittings; about a week being his average time for finishing off a long and brilliant article for the Edinburgh Review. More than once, nevertheless, Hazlitt has expressed his contempt for speed in composition, and fecundity of production; but when he was writing to live, from hand to mouth; and he wanted his evenings clear from that dingy little coffee-room of the Southampton Arms, where, if he had accomplished an article long and showy, he might have had a debauch of pheasant or partridges -or, if only short and flimsy, make the best of "a pound or so"* of rump-steak, and apple-tart. Of a less abstract and philosophical, and of a more popular and practical kind, are the very numerous and highly miscellaneous sketches, of which may be named, as representative of the class in general, those on "People of Sense "-the self-conceited wise, some of whom would pull down Stonehenge to build pig-sties, and convert Westminster Abbey into a central House of Correction; on "Respectable People "-the respectability consisting, as words go, and the world goes, in a man's situation and success in life, not in his character or conduct; on "Prejudice," on "Knowledge of the World," on "Fashion," on "People with one Idea," on "Vulgarity and Affectation," on the "Want of Money." The essayist's political papers we are fain to pass over with a non nobis. If they are clever, they are very crabbed, very splenetic, and even to radicals very un * P. G. Patmore. VOL. XXXV.-NO. III. Hazlitt's own motto, deliberately selected and prominently expressed, was-"For I am nothing if not CRITICAL." That he was a Critic, Sir Bulwer Lytton considers his peculiar predominant distinction, and claims for him the critical faculty in its noblest degree not the mechanical work of squaring and measuring out his judgments by the "pedantries of dry and lifeless propositions"-but inspired by a taste that was not the " creature of schools and canons," but "begotten of Enthusiasm by Thought."* And like his friend Joseph Fawcett ("the person," says he, "of the most refined and least contracted taste I ever knew "), he had a critical relish for widely diverse styles, and gave a welcome to "all sorts, provided they were the best of their kind." He rated Lamb for sticking so tenaciously to one book-shelf, and Coleridge for always preferring the unknown to the known, and Wordsworth for allowing no excellences to Dryden and Pope, because they had been supposed to have all the possible excellences of poetry. Preferences of his own he had, and strong ones,—especially in favor of old authors; but the range of his sympathies was wide enough to include Rousseau as well as Bacon, Goethe as well as Sir Thomas Browne, Schiller together with Heywood, Scott with Richardson, St. Pierre and Godwin, Congreve and Jeremy Taylor, Montaigne and Milton, Shakspeare and Sheridan, Addison and Burke, Molière and Mackenzie, Hobbes and Cervantes, Wordsworth and Voltaire. The Lectures on the Elizabethan Literature exemplify at once the leaning Hazlitt had towards olden authorship, and the independent, discriminating spirit with which he meted out their dues, to the different worthies of a ven * "He felt intensely ;-he imbued-he saturated himself with the genius he examined; it became a part of him, and he reproduced it in science. He took in pieces the work he surveyed, and reconstructed the fabric in order to show the process by which it had been built. His criticisms are there fore eminently scientific; to use his own expression, his art lifts the veil from nature.' It was the wonderful subtlety with which he possessed himself of the intentions of the author, which enabled him not only to appreciate in his own person, but to make the world appreciate, the effect those intentions had produced." SIR E. B. LYTTON: Some Thoughts on the Genius of William Hazlitt. 25 386 men. rhyme; and it comments on four of the world's "principal works of poetry "-Homer, in whom is predominant the principle of action or life,-the Bible, instinct with the principle of faith and the idea of Providence, erated epoch. He loved the time and the But he loved them not with an undistinguishing passion. In each case he could give a reason for the love that was in him, and show cause why it was more or less. Accordingly, the most effective and remunera--Dante, a personification of blind will,—and tive portions of this series are probably those in which he sets forth objections, or points out demerits, in the instance of particular authors, usually admired without stint by thorough-bred Elizabethans: upon these portions he bestows more abundant pains, and as a critic is thus seen to more advantage than where he sails with the stream, in comparatively vague and indolent acquiescence. Whether he convinces us, in such cases, or not, he then and there best approves himself capable of thought, analytical skill, and vigorous expression. His appraisement of Beaumont and Fletcher is evidence of this-especially in his strictures on their tampering with morality, like an experiment tried in corpore vili; and so is his estimate of Ford, to be read per contra along with Lamb's; and, again, the abating process he maliciously applies to Sir Philip Sydney, that "complete intellectual coxcomb "-and, with more of sympathy, however, to Sir Thomas Browne, in whose sublimity he but recognizes the "sublime of indifference." The Lectures on the English Poets are prefaced by a glowing discourse on poetry in general-as the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself, existing wherever there is a sense of power, or beauty, or harmony-its materials lying deeper than those of that "grave study," History, for it is no mere branch of authorship, but the very "stuff of which our life is made "-the fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies, refines, raises our whole being, without which "man's life is poor as beast's." If poetry, says Hazlitt, is a dream, the business of life is much the same: if it is a fiction, made up of what we wish things to be, and fancy that they are, because we wish them so, there is yet no other, no better reality. This discourse is richly starred with golden glories from the poets of imagination all compact; it scornfully repudiates the notion of reducing the language of poetry to the standard of common sense and reason, according to the vile accommodation theory of 'frigid and pedantie critics;" it foresees in the necessary advances of civilization a blight on the spirit of song ("there can never be another Jacob's dream. Since that time the heavens have farther off, and grown astronomical"); gone it touches on the philosophy of rhythm and Ossian, representing the decay of life, and the legend of the world, living only in the recollection and regret of the past, and giving us more entirely than all other poets, the sense of privation, the loss of all things, of friends, of good name, of country, and even of God.* Then Chaucer and Spenser are introduced, compared, and contrasted; both equally engaged in public affairs, and mixing equally in the great world, but the latter showing a poetical temperament as effeminate as Chaucer's was stern and masculine-Spenser delighting in luxurious enjoyment, Chaucer in severe activity of mind-Spenser the most romantic and visionary, Chaucer the most practical of all the poets, the most a man of business and of the world. Of Chaucer it is happily said, that if he is prolix, it is from the number of points on which he touches, without being diffuse on any one; and is sometimes tedious from the fidelity with which he adheres to his subjects, as other writers are from the frequency of their digressions from it."The chain of his story is composed of a number of fine links, closely connected together, and riveted by a single blow." And his muse, no "blabbing gossip of the air," fluent and redundant, is finely likened to a stammerer, or a dumb person, that having just found the use of speech, crowds many things together with eager haste, with anxious pauses, and fond repetitions, to prevent mistakes. Spenser's strength, again, is well defined to be a strength not of will or action, of bone and muscle, of aught that is coarse and palpable-but the vis derived from a character of vastness and sublimity, seen through a visionary medium, and blended with the appalling associations of preternatural agency. Shakspeare and Milton follow:-Shakspeare, "all that others were, or that they could become"-having only to think of anything in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it-in the world of whose imagination everything has a life, and The feeling of cheerless desolation, of the loss of the pith and sap of existence, of the annihilation of the substance, and the incorporating the shadow of all things as in a mock-embrace, is here perfect.” -Lecture I. † The description of the Cave of Mammon, the "grisly house of Plutus," is referred to, as unrivale led for the portentous massiveness of the forms, the splendid chiaroscuro, and shadowy horror. place, and being of its own;-Milton, devoting himself with the same sense of duty to the cultivation of his genius, as he did to the exercise of virtue, or the cause of liberty writing not from casual impulse, but after severe and searching self-appraisal-laboring always, and almost always succeeding-striving hard to say the finest things in the world, and saying them-the sound of his lines moulded into the expression of the sentiment, almost of the very image. Dryden is somewhat carelessly treated, Pope more honorably and inquiringly; Butler's fault is justly said to be, not too much wit, but an inadequate proportion of other things; to Thomson is doled out no chary modicum of praise, for his power of transferring, fresh and unimpaired to the imagination of his readers, the vivid impression made by views of nature on his own, and for the power of moving and infusing the warmth of his own mind into that of the reader, -while Cowper is described as looking at nature over his clipped hedges, and from his well-swept garden walks; Swift is accepted as one of the most sensible, and yet most nonsensical of the poets, than whom (Swift) no man has written more lack-a-daisical, slip-shod, tedious, trifling, foolish, fantastical verses, which are so little an imputation on the wisdom of the writer,"-but whose bitter genius was his spleen, and whose other faculties were sharpened by the biting acrimony of his temper; Collins-the only one of the minor poets of whom, if he had lived, it cannot be said that he might not have done the greatest things, and whose Ode on the Poetical Character is encrusted in a "honeyed paste of poetic diction, like the candied coat of the auricola;" Gray, penning lyrics in a kind of methodical borrowed frenzy, yet ever turning a trembling, watchful ear to the still sad music of humanity; Shenstone, a finished literary coquette; Chatterton, not extraordinary for power of genius,* but only for precocity; Burns, holding plough or pen with the same firm manly grasp as much of a man, though not a twentieth part as much of a poet, as Shakspeare; Rogers, elegant but feeble, enwrapping obvious thoughts in a cover of fine words, and refining and frittering away his meaning into an appearance of the most evanescent brilliancy and tremulous imbecility; Campbell, tutus nimius, timidus que procellarum, starving his genius to death from a needless apprehension of a plethora ; Moore, on the other hand, faulty from mere exuberance of involuntary power, oppressive by his very facility and levity, exhausting at tention by being inexhaustible, and cloying by variety itself; Byron, whose "indignant apophthegms are like oracles of misanthropy," but uniting beauty with strength, and tenderness sometimes with the frenzy of despair; Scott, picturesque and vivid, but without moral force; Wordsworth, the poet of pure sentiment, opening a deeper vein of thought and feeling than any modern bardwholly deficient in all the machinery of poetry, but giving forth, with inconceivable beauty, perfect originality, and pathos, the fine tones of thought, drawn from his own mind by accident or nature, like the sounds drawn from the Eolian harp by the wandering gale. We here pause not, en passant, to question, to dissent, or to applaud. 66 por The "Spirit of the Age" is perhaps the best known and most generally relished of Hazlitt's works. Freely and without respect of persons he there canvasses his contemporaries, literary and political; takes their measure, and reports it without fear or favor; nothing extenuates, where they have bad or weak points, and sets down a good deal in malice, whether they have or not. Here his keenness of scrutiny, his talent for traiture, (which looks so like," that one disregards the exaggeration, the frequent distortion, the heightened coloring), his skill in comparative anatomy, his biting ridicule, hist enthusiasm of admiration and of hate, the peculiarities of his style, sharply sententious, eagerly iterative,--are seen to the best advantage. A procession stalks before us, of peers and poets, preachers and politicians; and the cicerone calls them all by name sc familiarly, and describes their natures and their arts so vivaciously, that we cannot choose but see them out to a man, whatever we may think of his manner of appraising them. There is the detested if not dreaded Gifford, "a retainer to the Muses, a doorkeeper to learning, a lackey in the state,"--Wilberforce, "anxious to do all the good he can without hurting himself or his fair fame,"-Bentham, meditating the coming age," and Lamb, ever turning pensive to the past,"-Eldon plods on through the street, with the best "Nor do I believe he would have written bet-natured face in the world, and an umbrella unter had he lived. He knew this himself, or he would have lived..... He had done his best; and, like another Empedocles, threw himself into Etna, to ensure immortality. The brazen slippers alone remain !"-Lecture VII. der his arm, his only fault the inability to say Nay to power,--Byron is seen making man after his own image, woman after his own heart, Wordsworth, reading his own poetry, 66 while at favorite passages his eye beams with preternatural lustre-Moore converts the wild harp of Erin into a musical snuff-box,-Godwin strives, in vain, to pass the Arctic Circle of moral science, and its Frozen Regions, where the understanding is no longer warmed by the affections, nor fanned by the breeze of fancy, Coleridge's fauclties are watched gossipping away their time, and gadding about from house to house,-Brougham screams with high unmitigated voice,"--Jeffrey writes like "one accustomed to public speaking,"-Southey, with "peaked austerity of countenance," sits "upright in his chair," turning from reading to writing, by a stop. watch,-Scott issues what is "almost like a new edition of human nature," as the "only amanuensis of truth and history,"-and Chal. mers is seen, in "prophetic fury in the pulpit," like Balfour of Burley in his cave, when he contended with the imaginary Satan, gasping for breath, and the cold moisture running down his face. The "Spirit of the Age" is the best voucher for Coleridge's description of its writer, long years before it was written, as a "thinking, observant, original man; of great power as a painter of character-portraits," and skilled to "send wellfeathered thoughts straightforward to the mark with the twang of the bowstring." It abounds with proofs of these straightforward missives, with echoes of the twang, and with sometimes easternly killing marks, of the bowstring. The "Characters of Shakspeare's Plays" is a text-book with Shakspearian students. It is a vade mecum with all who would graduate in the university of that myriad-mind; that alma mater of philosophy, imagination, and wit. It has deeps where senior wranglers may swim, but shallows also which wooden spoons may ford. For excellent as it is, there is not a sustained altitude in the excellence. It is not along a table-land that our guide conducts us, to view that mighty ocean, whether tumultuating with Atlantic storms, a very sea of troubles, or dimpled with the avnpilμov yeλaoμa of pacific repose; rather he tracks his way over coasts only now and then elevated into grandeur by some abrupt mountain height, luxuriant with vegetation, or bleakly and gloomily sublime. Frequently the comments on the characters* are Constantly there recur such common-places in matter and manner as the following: "The character of Hector is made very amiable;"-"The characters of Cressida and Pandarus are very amusing and instructive;"--Ulysees deals in “very stately and spirited declamation;"—Antony and Cleopatra "is more feeble than forcible in thought, and, at the best, forcible feeble in expression; if not weary, they are stale; if not flat, they are unprofitable. But then at intervals there comes a vision of delight, and the seer's eye kindles, and his spirit burns within him, and glowing are the words he speaks with his tongue. The power furtively secreted in some passages, the beauty latent in others, he elucidates, brings to light, with triumph, and without toil; for he had insight into Shakspeare's mind and will, and in such a case a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous keen as well as kind. Yet, compared with such a work as Horn's (however inferior Horn might be to Hazlitt in natural gifts), not a few students of Shakspeare's art will agree with Julius Hare in thinking, that, from the want of a proper intellectual discipline and method, and also of "moral discipline and principle," through which want his talents went to rack," Hazlitt is signally inferior to the German as an analytical expositor of the principles and structure of Shakspeare's plays, in tracing and developing the "hidden labyrinthine working of his all-vivifying, all-unifying genuis." It is in summing up the details of a Character that Hazlitt shines-and this indeed is, on his own showing, the top of his bent. Hamlet and Falstaff are the most finished of these sketches; but some minor powers are hit off in their degree with equal felicity. It is matter of regret that even into his criticisms on the impartial, catholicminded Poet of all souls as well as all time, the critic should have allowed himself to introduce his party-spirit, and to sneer at aristocracy, and denounce Toryism, in the very place and season where he could do so to least advantage. Hazlitt's essay on the Congreve and Wycherley group is pronounced by Leigh Hunt almost equal to Lamb's-almost in point of style, and even superior in hearty relish; with the advantage of leaving a far truer impression respecting them, as well as contain. ing the best and most detailed criticism on their individual plays. Hazlitt has none of the "misgivings of Lamb," nor even thinks it necessary to notice them. 'He takes the whole tribe, as nature and society (short of 66 |