INTRODUCTION

Hazlitt’s father, a minister in the Unitarian Church, was the son of an Antrim dissenter, who had removed to Tipperary; Hazlitt’s mother was the daughter of a Cambridgeshire yeoman; so that there is small room for wonder if Hazlitt were all his life distinguished by a fine pugnaciousness of mind, a fiery courage, an excellent doggedness of temper, and (not to crack the wind of the poor metaphor) a brilliancy in the use of his hands unequalled in his time, and since his time, by any writing Englishman. Of course, he was very much else; or this monument to his genius would scarce be building, this draft to his credit would have been drawn for To-Morrow on To-Day. But, while he lived, his fighting talent was the sole thing in his various and splendid gift that was evident to the powers that were; and, inasmuch as he loved nothing so dearly as asserting himself to the disadvantage of certain superstitions which the said powers esteemed the very stuff of life, they did their utmost to dissemble his uncommon merits, and to present him to the world

at large as a person whose morals were deplorable, whose nose was pimpled, whose mind was lewd, whose character would no more bear inspection than his English, whose heart and soul and taste were irremediable, and who, as he persisted in regarding ‘the Corsican fiend’ as a culmination of human genius and character, must for that reason especially—(but there were many others)—be execrated as a public enemy, and stuck in the pillory whenever, in the black malice of his corrupt and poisonous heart, he sought, by feigning an affection for Shakespeare, or an interest in metaphysics, to recommend his vulgar, mean, pernicious personality to the attention of a loyal, God-fearing, church-going, tax-paying, Pope-and-Pretender-hating British Public. I cannot say that I regret the very scandalous attacks that were made on Hazlitt: since, if they had not been, we viiishould have lacked some admirable pages in the Political Essays and The Spirit of the Age, nor should we now be privileged to rejoice in the dignified and splendid savagery of the Letter to William Gifford.

And, if I do not regret them for myself and the many who think with me, still less can I wish them wanting for Hazlitt’s sake; for if they had been, who shall say how dull and how profitless, how weary and flat and stale, some years of what he described, in his last words to his kind, as ‘a happy life’—how mean and beggarly may not some days in these years have seemed? But there is, after all, a reason for being rather sorry than not that Hazlitt’s polemic was so brilliant, his young conviction so unalterably constant, his example so detestable as it seemed to the magnificent ruffian in Blackwood and the infinitely spiteful underling in The Quarterly. The British Public of those days was a good, hard-hitting, hard-drinking, hard-living lot; and, in the matter of letters, there was no guile in it. It read its Campbell, its Rogers, its Moore, its Hook and Egan and Jon Bee; it accepted its convinced and pedantic sycophant in Southey, its gay, light-hearted protestant in Leigh Hunt; it nibbled at its Wordsworth, knew not what to make of its Coleridge,

swallowed its Cobbett (that prince of pugilists) as its morning rasher and toast; it made much of Hone, yet was far from contemptuous of Westmacott; it laid itself open to its Scott and its Byron, Michael and Satan, the Angel of Acceptance and the Angel of Revolt. Withal it was essentially a Tory Public: a public long practised in fearing God and honouring the King; with half an ear for Major Cartwright and his like, and a whole mind for the story of Randal and Cribb; honestly and jovially proud of Nelson and ‘The Duke,’ but neither loving the Emperor nor seeking to understand him. Now, to Hazlitt the Revolution was humanity in excelsis, while the Emperor, being democracy incarnate, and so a complete expression of character and human genius, was as his god. Gifford, then, and Wilson, had small difficulty in blasting Hazlitt’s fame, and in so far ruining Hazlitt’s chance that ’tis but now, after some seventy years, that he takes his place in literary history as the hero of a Complete Edition. In the meanwhile he has had praise, and praise again.

But it has come ever from the few, and he has yet to be considered of the general as a critic of many elements in human activity, a ixmaster of his mother-tongue, and one, and that one not the least, in an epoch illustrious in the achievement of Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth, the inimitable Cobbett, Byron and Sir Walter, Coleridge, the Arch-Potency (who, ‘prone on the flood’ of failure, ever ‘lies floating many a rood’), and the thrice-beloved Lamb.

I

The elder Hazlitt was trained in Glasgow. A man of spirit and understanding, an active and a vigilant minister, he married Grace Loftus, the Wisbech yeoman’s daughter, in 1766; and in 1778 (he being much older than she), the last of their children, their son William, was born to them at Maidstone. Five years later this son accompanied his parents to Philadelphia. There the elder Hazlitt preached and lectured for some fifteen months; but in 1786–87, having meanwhile established the earliest Unitarian church in America, he returned to England, and settled at Wem, in Shropshire, which was practically Hazlitt’s first taste of native earth. A precocious youngster, well grounded by his father, himself a man of parts and reading,[1] he was responsible as early as 1792 for a New Theory of Criminal and Civil Jurisprudence, and at fifteen he went to the Unitarian College at Hackney, there to study for the ministry. But his mind changed. In the meantime he learned something of literature, something of metaphysics, something of painting, something (I

doubt not) of life; the Revolution blazed out, Bonaparte fell falconwise upon Austrian Italy, and approved himself the greatest captain since Marlborough; there was a strong unrest in time and the destiny of man; the ambitions of life were changed, the possibilities and conditions of life transformed. The skies thrilled with the dawn of a new day, and Hazlitt: already, it is fair to conjecture, at grips with that potent and implacable devil of sex which possessed him so vigorously for so many years; already, too, the devout and militant Radical, the fanatic of Bonaparte, he remained till the end: was no longer for the pulpit. And at this moment existence was transfigured xfor him also. In the January of 1798, Coleridge, that embodied Inspiration, visited the elder Hazlitt at Wem, and preached his last (Unitarian) sermon in the chapel there. He was at his best, his freshest, his most copious, his most expressive and persuasive; he had the poet’s eye, the poet’s mouth, the poet’s voice, impulse, authority, style; he had already ‘fed on honey-dew, and drunk the

milk of Paradise’; and he carried Hazlitt clean off his legs. To the sombre, personal, scarce lettered but very thoughtful youth this voluble and affecting Apparition was the bearer of a revelation. He listened to Coleridge as to a John Baptist. He dared to talk metaphysics, and was so far rewarded for his valour as to be encouraged to persevere.[2] What was of vastly greater importance, he was asked to Stowey in the spring of the same year: an event from which he dated the true beginnings of his intellectual life.

In that centre of enchantment he stayed three weeks. It was a Golden Year. Hazlitt was drunk throughout with what I should like to call Neophytism. Coleridge was magnificent—elusive, archimagian, irresistible; Wordsworth was opinionated but sublime; at intervals, as in Sir Richard Burton’s Thousand Nights and a Night, they ‘repeated the following verses.’ It was a time—O, but it was a time! A time of ecstasy: ‘When proud-pied April was in all his trim,’ and even ‘heavy Saturn’ must have laughed, if only to keep his yoke-fellow, Wordsworth, in company; Wordsworth with his thick airs, and his luminous Belt, and his dull but steady-going group of Moons! A time of gold, I say; yet had it a most strange outcome. In 1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth were Revolutionaries in everything: they looked to France for liberty, for change, for a shining and enduring example. Hazlitt was with them now and here: his also was a revolutionary soul, he also was of a mind with Danton, he also looked to France for leading and light, he also held

xithe assault delivered upon France for an assault against Freedom. But Coleridge and Wordsworth changed their minds, and readjusted their points of view; and he did not. They loved not Bonaparte; and he did. And the end of it was that, so far as I know, he never wrote with so ripe and sensual a gust: not even, to my mind, when he was merely annihilating Gifford: as when, long years after Nether-Stowey, he broke in upon the strong, solid hold of Wordsworth’s egotism, and tore to tatters—tatters which he flung upon the wind—the old, greasy prophet’s mantle,[3] which Coleridge had sported to so little purpose for so many years. To Hazlitt, the dissenter born, the deeply brooding, the inflexible—to Hazlitt, I say, these Twin-Stars of the Romantic Movement were common turn-coats; and he dealt with them on occasion as he thought fit. But he never lost his interest in them; and when it comes to a comparison between Wordsworth, the renegade, and Byron, the leader of storming-parties, the captain of forlorn-hopes, then is his idiosyncrasy revealed.

He hacks and stabs, he jibes and sneers and denies, till there is no Byron left, and the sole poet of the century is the ‘gentlemanly creature—reads nothing but his own poetry, I believe,’—whose best passages, in a moment of supreme geniality, he once likened, not to their advantage, to those of ‘the classic Akenside.’

II

It was from Nether-Stowey that Hazlitt dated his regard for poetry. But if literature came late to him, as (his father’s office and his own metaphysical inklings aiding) it did, he ever cherished a pure and ardent passion for it, once it had come. Yet he was by no means widely read, and in his last years seldom finished a new book. First and last, indeed, he was a man of few books and fewer authors. Shakespeare, Burke, Cervantes, Rabelais, Milton, the Decameron, the Nouvelle Héloïse and the Confessions, Richardson’s epics of the parlour and Fielding’s epics of the road—these things and their kind he read intensely; and, when it pleased him to speak of them, it was ever in the terms of understanding and regard. Yet it was long ere he had any thought of writing; and it was necessity alone that made him a xiiman of letters. In the beginning, the Pulpit proving impossible, he turned to painting for a career, and, after certain studies, presumably under his elder brother John,[4] and possibly under Northcote, he went to the Paris of the First Consul, and painted there for some

four months in a Louvre which the thrift of Bonaparte had stored with the choicest plunder in Italian Art. I know not whether or no he could ever have been a painter. Haydon, who neither loved nor understood him, and was, besides, a man who could greatly dare and ‘toil terribly’—Haydon says that he was at once too lazy and too timid ever to succeed in painting: an art in which, as Haydon showed, and as Millet was presently to say, ‘You must flay yourself alive, and give your skin.’[5] I do not think that Hazlitt was daunted by what may be called the painfulness of painting; for in letters he was soon enough to prove that he had in him to face a world in arms, and to tincture his writings, if need were, with the best blood of his heart. In any case, after divers essays at copying in the Louvre,[6] and certain attempts at portraiture on his return to England,[7] he found that he could not excel; that, in fact, he was neither Titian nor Rembrandt, nor could he even be Sir Joshua. So he painted no more, but went on reading certain painters: very much, I

assume, as he went on taking certain authors; because he loved them for themselves, and found emotions—and not only emotions, but sensations[8]—in them.

xiiiHis ideals are Claude, Rembrandt, Raphael, Poussin, Titian; he gives you very gentlemanly and intelligent estimates of Watteau and Velasquez; he has an eye—a right one—for Rubens and Van Dyck; he exults in Jan Steen, has words of worth for Ruysdael and Hobbima, and gives Turner as neat a croc-en-jambe as you could wish to see. But, despite his training and his gift, he is no more in advance of his age than the best of us here and now. To him the Carraccis and Salvator are sommités of a kind; if, so far as I remember, he will have nought to do with Carlo Dolci, he will not do without his Guido; I have read no word of his on Lawrence, no word of his on Constable, none on Morland; on Hogarth he is chiefly literary, on Turner not much more than diabolically ingenious. Wisely or not, he took pictures as he took books: they might be few, but they must be good; and, not only good but, of (as he believed) the best. If they were not, or if they were new, he drew them not to his heart, nor adorned the chambers of his mind with

them. Those chambers were filled with good things long since done. To him, then, what were the best things doing? It was his habit to take the good thing on; savour its excellences to their last sucket; meditate it strictly, jealously, privily, longingly; say, if it must be so, a few last words about it—some for the painter, more for the man of letters;[9] and then...? Well, then he accepted the situation. I do not know that he cared much for Keats; I do know that he found Shelley impossible, that he was never an exalted Wordsworthian, and that he hesitated—(ever so little, but he hesitated!)—even at Charles Lamb. Politics and all, in truth, he was a prophet who adored the past, and had but an infidel eye for xivthe promise of the years. He was interested only in the highest achievement; and to be the highest even that must lie behind him. Thus, Fielding was good, and Rubens; Sir Joshua was good, and so were Richardson and Smollett; so, likewise, Shakespeare was good, and Raphael and Titian were good—these with Milton and

Rembrandt, and Burke and Rousseau and Boccaccio; and it was well. Well with them, and well—especially well!—with him: they had achieved, and here was he, the perfect lover, to whom their achievement was as an enchanted garden, a Prospero’s Island abounding in romantic and inspiring chances, unending marvels, miracles of vision and solace and pure, perennial delight. And if these, the ‘Thrones, Dominations, Powers,’ had done their work, and were venerable in it, so also in their degrees and sorts had Congreve and Watteau, Sir Thomas Browne and Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Wycherley and Jordaens; so had even Salvator and John Buncle. In dealing with painters, and with purely painters’ pictures, Hazlitt generally strikes a right note.[10] But the man of letters in him is inevitably first; and ’tis not insignificant that some of the ‘crack passages’ in his writings about pictures are rhapsodies about places—Burleigh or Oxford—or pieces of pure literature like that very human and ingenious essay ‘On the Pleasures of Painting,’ which

is one of the best good things in Table Talk.

III

So Hazlitt the painter was gathered to his fathers, and in his stead a Hazlitt reigned about whom the world knows little worth the telling: a Hazlitt who abridged philosophers, and made grammars, and compiled anthologies; a married and domesticated Hazlitt; a Hazlitt with a son and heir, and a wife who seems to have cared as little for his works and him as, in the long run, he assuredly cared for her company and her. The lady’s name was Stoddart; she was a brisk, inconsequent, unsexual sort of person—a friend of Mary xvLamb; and, like the only Mrs. Pecksniff, ‘she had a small property.’ It was situate at Winterslow, certain miles from Salisbury, and Hazlitt, who loved the neighbourhood, and clung to it till the end, has so far illustrated the name that, if there could ever be a Hazlitt Cult, the place would instantly become a shrine. It was a cottage, within easy walking distance of Wilton and Stonehenge; and in 1812 the Hazlitts, who were made one in 1808, departed it—it and the well-beloved woods of Norman Court—for 19 York Street, Westminster.[11] Hence it was that he

issued to deliver his first course of lectures;[12] and here it was that he entertained those friends he had, made himself a reputation by writing in papers and magazines, drank hard, and cured himself of drinking, and long ere the end came found his wife insufferable. In the beginning he worked in the Reporters’ Gallery, where he made notes (in long hand) for The Morning Chronicle, and learned to take more liquor than was good for him.[13] In this same journal he printed some of his best political work, and broke ground as a critic of acting; and he left it only because he could not help quarrelling with its proprietors.

Another stand-by of his was The Champion, to his work in which he owed a not unprofitable connexion with The Edinburgh; yet another, The Examiner, to which, with much dramatic criticism, he contributed, at Leigh Hunt’s suggestion, the set of essays reprinted as The Round Table, and in which he may therefore be said to have discovered his avocation, and given the measure of his best quality. xviThen, in 1817, he published his Characters of Shakespeare, which he dedicated to Charles Lamb; in 1818 he reprinted a series of lectures (at the Surrey Institute) on the English poets;[14] in 1819–20 he delivered from the same platform two courses more—on the Comic Writers and the Age of Elizabeth. He wrote for The Liberal, The Yellow Dwarf, The London Magazine—(to which he may very well have introduced the unknown Elia)—Colburn’s New Monthly; he returned to the Chronicle in 1824; in 1825 he published The Spirit of the Age, in 1826 The Plain Speaker, the Boswell Redivivus in 1827; and in this last year he set to work, at Winterslow, on a

life of Napoleon. That was the beginning of the end. He had no turn for history, nor none for research; his methods were personal, his results singular and brief; he was as it were an accidental writer, whose true material was in himself. His health broke, and worsened; his publishers went bankrupt; he lost the best part of the £500 which he had hoped to earn by his work; and though, consulting none but anti-English authorities, he lived to complete a book containing much strong thinking and not a few striking passages, it was a thing foredoomed to failure: a matter in which the nation, still hating its tremendous enemy, and still rejoicing in the man and the battle which had brought him to the ground, would not, and could not take an interest. Two volumes were published in 1828 (Sir Walter’s Napoleon appeared in 1827), and two more in 1830; but the work of writing them killed the writer.[15] His digestion, always feeble, was xviiruined; and in the September of 1830 he died. He was largely, I should say, a sacrifice to tea, which he drank, in vast quantities, of

extraordinary strength. However this be, his ending was (as he’d have loved to put it) ‘as a Chrissom child’s.’[16]

IV