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William Hazlitt (10 April 1778 – 18 September 1830) was an English writer remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism. Hazlitt was a prominent English literary critic, grammarian and philosopher. He is considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in English, placed in the same company as Samuel Johnson and George Orwell, but his work is currently little-read.
Background
Hazlitt's family were Irish Protestants that in the early 18th century moved from the county of Antrim to Tipperary.
Discussion
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Quotations
A grave blockhead should always go about with a lively one — they shew one another off to the best advantage.
No. 376
A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man.
"On Nicknames"
Again, there is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have also their altars and their religion.
"On Cant and Hypocrisy"
An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may.
No. 387
As is our confidence, so is our capacity.
No. 89
But there is an unseemly exposure of the mind, as well as of the body.
"On Disagreeable People"
Encyclopedia
William Hazlitt (10 April 1778 – 18 September 1830) was an English writer remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism. Hazlitt was a prominent English literary critic, grammarian and philosopher. He is considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in English, placed in the same company as Samuel Johnson and George Orwell, but his work is currently little-read.
Background
Hazlitt's family were Irish Protestants that in the early 18th century moved from the county of Antrim to Tipperary. His father, also named William Hazlitt, attended the University of Glasgow (where he was contemporary with Adam Smith), receiving a master's degree in 1760. Not entirely content with his Presbyterian faith, he became a Unitarian minister in England. In 1764 he became pastor at Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, where in 1766 he married Grace Loftus, daughter of a recently deceased ironmonger. Of their many children, only three survived infancy. The first of these, John (later known as a portrait painter) was born in 1767 at Marshfield in Gloucestershire, where the Reverend William Hazlitt had accepted a new pastorate after his marriage. In 1770, the elder Hazlitt accepted yet another position and moved with his family to Maidstone, Kent, where his first and only surviving daughter, Margaret (usually known as "Peggy"), was born that year.
Childhood
William, the youngest of the surviving Hazlitt children, was born in Mitre Lane, Maidstone, in 1778. In 1780, when he was two, his family began a migratory existence that was to last several years. From Maidstone his father took them to Bandon, County Cork, Ireland; and from Bandon in 1783 to the United States, where Mr. Hazlitt preached, lectured, and founded the First Unitarian Church at Boston. In 1786–87 the family returned to England and lived at Wem, in Shropshire. William would remember little of his years in Bandon and Boston, save the taste of barberries.
Education
Hazlitt was educated at home and at a local school until 1793, when his father sent him to a Unitarian seminary on what was then the outskirts of London, the Unitarian New College at Hackney (commonly referred to as Hackney College). He stayed there for only about two years, but during that time the young Hazlitt read widely and formed habits of independent thought and respect for the truth that remained with him for life, the tutelage at Hackney having been strongly influenced by eminent Dissenting thinkers of the day like Richard Price and Joseph Priestley.
The curriculum at Hackney included a grounding in the Greek and Latin classics, mathematics, and, of course, religion. Priestley, whom he had read and who was also one of his teachers, was an impassioned commentator on political issues of the day. This, along with the turmoil in the wake of the French Revolution, sparked in Hazlitt and his classmates lively debates on these issues, as they saw their world being transformed around them. Hazlitt's thoughts on these political concerns stayed with him, becoming an important part of his thinking.
Other changes were taking place within the young Hazlitt as well. While, out of respect for his father, Hazlitt never openly broke with his religion, he suffered a loss of faith, and left Hackney before completing his preparation for the ministry.
The young philosopher
Returning home, around 1795, his thoughts were directed in more secular channels, encompassing not only politics but, increasingly, modern philosophy, which he had begun to read with fascination at Hackney. He spent much of his time in intensive study of English, Scottish, and Irish thinkers like John Locke, David Hartley, George Berkeley, and David Hume, and French thinkers like Claude Adrien Helvétius, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, the Marquis de Condorcet, and Baron d'Holbach. From then on Hazlitt's goal was to become a philosopher. His thoughts were focused on man as a social and political animal, and, even more intensely, on the philosophy of mind, what would later be called psychology.
In this period he discovered Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who became one of the most important influences on the budding philosopher's thought, and Edmund Burke, whose writing style impressed him enormously. He was painstakingly working out a treatise on the "natural disinterestedness of the human mind", meant to disprove the idea that man is naturally selfish, a fundamental concept in most of the philosophy of the day. Hazlitt's treatise would not be published for a number of years, after further reading, and after other changes had occurred to alter the course of his career, but to the end of his life he would think of himself as a philosopher.
Around 1796, Hazlitt was encouraged and inspired by a retired clergyman who had become a reformer of note, Joseph Fawcett. Hazlitt was awed by the enormous breadth of Fawcett's tastes. From Fawcett, in the words of biographer Ralph Wardle, he imbibed a love for "good fiction and impassioned writing," Fawcett being "a man of keen intelligence who did not scorn the products of the imagination or apologize for his tastes." They discussed the radical thinkers of their day, and, important for understanding the breadth and depth of Hazlitt's own taste in his later critical writings, everything literary from John Milton's Paradise Lost to Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy.
Somewhat earlier, he had also met William Godwin, the reformist thinker whose Political Justice took the thinking world by storm at this time. Hazlitt was never to feel entirely in sympathy with Godwin's philosophy, but it gave him much food for thought.
Besides residing with his father while trying to find his voice and work out his thoughts as a philosopher, he often in these years stayed with his older brother John, who had studied under Joshua Reynolds and was following a career as a portrait painter. He also spent delighted evenings at the theatre in London then, but did not yet know how this too would be important to his later writing. Mostly at this time he led a contemplative existence, still feeling frustrated in being unable to express on paper the thoughts and feelings that churned within him. The course of this existence was now to be interrupted by the single event that, with its aftermath, had an impact on his career greater than any other.
"First acquaintance with poets"
In January 1798, Hazlitt encountered, preaching at the Unitarian chapel in Shrewsbury, the minister Samuel Taylor Coleridge, soon much better known as a poet, critic, and philosopher. He was dazzled. "I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres", he wrote years later in his essay "My First Acquaintance with Poets". "Poetry and Philosophy had met together. Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction of religion."
Later still, long after they had parted ways, Hazlitt would speak of Coleridge as "the only person I ever knew who answered to the idea of a man of genius". That Hazlitt learned to express his thoughts "in motley imagery or quaint allusion", that his understanding "ever found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge", he later wrote. In conversation afterwards, Coleridge for his part expressed interest in the younger man's germinating philosophical ideas and offered encouragement.
In April he joined Coleridge at his residence in Nether Stowey, where they both spent time with the poet William Wordsworth. Again, Hazlitt was enraptured. While he was not immediately struck by Wordsworth's appearance, when he observed the look in Wordsworth's eye as he contemplated a sunset, he reflected, "With what eyes these poets see nature!" When he read his poetry he realized that this was something entirely new, and he began to see that Wordsworth's was the mind of a true poet. At that time, the three shared a passion for the ideas of liberty and rights of man. They tramped back and forth across the countryside, talking of poetry, philosophy, and the political movements that were changing the earth. This unity of spirit was not to last, but it gave Hazlitt, just twenty years old, validation of the idea that there is much to be learned and appreciated in poetry as well as the philosophy to which he was already devoted, and the encouragement to pursue his own thinking and writing.
The itinerant painter
Meanwhile, the fact remained that Hazlitt had chosen not to follow a pastoral career. Although he never abandoned his goal of writing a philosophical treatise on the disinterestedness of the human mind, it had to be put aside indefinitely. Still dependent on his father, he was now obliged to earn his own living. Artistic talent seemed to run on his mother's side of the family. Starting in 1798 he became increasingly fascinated by paintings. His brother, John, had by now become a successful painter of miniature portraits. So it occurred to William that he might earn a living similarly, and he began to take lessons from John.
Hazlitt also visited various picture galleries, and he began to get work doing portraits, painting somewhat in the style of Rembrandt. And so he managed to make something of a living for a time, travelling back and forth between London and the country, wherever he could get work. By 1802, his work was considered good enough that a portrait he had recently painted of his father was accepted for exhibition by the Royal Academy.
Later in 1802, Hazlitt was commissioned to travel to Paris and copy several works of the old masters hanging in the Louvre. This was one of the great opportunities of his life. Over a period of three months, he spent long hours in rapture studying the paintings. He later thought long and hard about what he had seen, and this provided substance for a considerable body of art criticism some years afterward. He also had an opportunity to see Napoleon (at a distance), whom he idolized as the rescuer of the common man from the oppression of royal "Legitimacy". Eighteen years later, Hazlitt reviewed nostalgically the "pleasure in painting, which none but painters know", and all the delight he found in this art, in his essay "On the Pleasure of Painting".
Back in England, Hazlitt again travelled up into the country, having obtained more work painting portraits. One commission again proved fortunate, as it brought him back in touch with Coleridge and Wordsworth. He painted portraits of both, as well as of Coleridge's son Hartley. Always endeavouring to paint the best pictures he could, even if they failed to flatter their subjects, he produced results not found satisfactory by either poet. (And yet Wordsworth and their friend Robert Southey thought his portrait of Coleridge a better likeness than one by the celebrated James Northcote.)
In this period also a mishap occurred that shadowed his life for many years. The young Hazlitt rarely felt comfortable in the society of women, especially those of the upper and middle classes. Tormented by sexual desires, he sought the company of prostitutes and "loose women" of lower social and economic strata. During his last stay in the Lake District with Coleridge, his actions led to a near disastrous blunder, as a misunderstanding of the intentions of one local woman led to an altercation, followed by Hazlitt's precipitous retreat from the town under cover of darkness. This strained his relationship with Coleridge and Wordsworth, which was already coming apart at the seams for other reasons.
Marriage, family, and friends
In 1803, Hazlitt met Charles Lamb and his sister Mary. There was an immediate sympathy between William and Charles, and they became fast friends. The friendship, though sometimes strained by Hazlitt's difficult ways, lasted until the end of Hazlitt's life. He was fond of Mary as well, and—ironically in view of her intermittent fits of insanity—he considered her the most reasonable woman he had ever met. (Coming from one whose view of women at times took a misogynistic turn, this was high praise indeed.)
Hazlitt frequented the society of the Lambs for the next several years. He was not getting much work as a painter, but now he finally found the opportunity to complete his philosophical treatise, which was published in 1805 as An Essay on the Principles of Human Action: Being an Argument in favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind. This gained him little notice as an original thinker, and no money. Hazlitt's outrage at events then taking place in English politics in reaction to Napoleon's wars led to his writing and publishing, at his own expense (though he had almost no money), a political pamphlet, Free Thoughts on Public Affairs (1806). Finally, he began to find enough work to support himself, if just barely. Although the treatise he valued above anything else he wrote was never, at least in his own lifetime, recognized for what he believed was its true worth, it brought him attention as one who had a grasp of contemporary philosophy. He therefore was commissioned to abridge and write a preface to a now obscure work of mental philosophy, The Light of Nature Pursued by Abraham Tucker (originally published in seven volumes from 1768 to 1777), which appeared in 1807 and may have had some influence on his own later thinking.
Hazlitt also contributed three letters to William Cobbett's Weekly Political Register at this time, scathing critiques of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population (1798 and later editions). Another project that came his way was a compilation of parliamentary speeches, released in 1807 as The Eloquence of the British Senate. In the prefaces to the speeches, he began to show a skill he would later develop to perfection, the art of the pithy character sketch. He was able to get more work as a portrait painter as well.
In 1808, Hazlitt married Sarah Stoddart, a friend of Mary Lamb's and sister of John Stoddart. Although incompatibilities would later drive the couple apart, at first the union seemed to work well enough. Miss Stoddart was an unconventional woman who would be accepted by one as unconventional in his way as Hazlitt, and would in turn tolerate his eccentricities. It was hardly a match of love, but at first there were signs of a certain playful, affectionate behaviour between them. They made an agreeable social foursome with the Lambs, who visited them when they set up a household in Winterslow, a village a few miles from Salisbury, Wiltshire, in southern England. The couple had three sons over the next few years, but only one who survived infancy, William, born in 1810 (to be the father of William Carew Hazlitt).
Now, as the head of a family, Hazlitt was more than ever in need of money. Through William Godwin, with whom he was frequently in touch, he obtained a commission to write an English grammar, published at the end of 1809 as A New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue. Another project that came his way was the work that was published as Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft, a compilation of autobiographical writing by the recently deceased playwright, novelist, and radical political activist, together with additional material by Hazlitt himself. Though completed in 1810, this work did not see the light of day until 1816, and so provided no financial gain to satisfy the needs of a young husband and father. But Hazlitt had not abandoned his ambitions as a painter. He found opportunities for landscape painting in the environs of Winterslow, and he spent considerable time in London getting commissions for portraits.
In January 1812 Hazlitt embarked on a sometime career as a lecturer, in this first instance in a series of talks on the British philosophers, at the Russell Institution in London. A central thesis of the talks was that Thomas Hobbes, rather than John Locke, had laid the foundations of modern philosophy. After a shaky beginning, Hazlitt gained some attention (as well as much-needed money) by these lectures, and they gave him an opportunity to expound some of his own ideas.
The year 1812 also seems to have been the last in which Hazlitt entertained serious ambitions to make a living as a painter. Although he had demonstrated some talent, the results of his most impassioned efforts never failed to fall far short of the standards he had set for himself by comparison with such masters as Rembrandt, Titian, and Raphael. Nor did his commissioned portraits often please their subjects, as he obstinately refused to sacrifice to flattery what he considered truth.
But other opportunities awaited him.
The journalist
In October 1812, Hazlitt was hired by The Morning Chronicle as a parliamentary reporter. Soon he met John Hunt, publisher of The Examiner, and his younger brother Leigh Hunt, the poet and essayist, who edited the weekly paper. Hazlitt admired both as champions of liberty, and befriended especially the younger Hunt, who found work for him. He began to contribute miscellaneous essays to The Examiner in 1813, and the scope of his work for the Chronicle was expanded to include drama criticism, literary criticism, and political essays. In 1814 The Champion was added to the list of periodicals that accepted Hazlitt's by-now profuse output of literary and political criticism. A critique of Joshua Reynolds' theories about art appeared there as well, one of Hazlitt's major forays into art criticism.
Having by 1814 become established as a journalist, Hazlitt had begun to earn a satisfactory living. A year earlier, with the prospect of a steady income, he had moved his family to a house at 19 York Street, Westminster, which had been occupied by the poet John Milton, whom Hazlitt admired above all other English poets except Shakespeare. As it happened, Hazlitt's landlord was the philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham. Hazlitt was to write considerably about both Milton and Bentham over the next few years.
His circle of friends expanded, though he never seems to have been particularly close with any but the Lambs and to an extent Leigh Hunt and the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon. His poor tolerance for any who, he thought, had abandoned the cause of liberty, along with his frequent outspokenness, even tactlessness, in social situations made it difficult for many to feel close to him, and at times he tried the patience of even Charles Lamb. His criticism of Wordsworth's poem The Excursion lavished extreme praise on the poet—and equally extreme censure. Wordsworth, who seems to have been unable to tolerate anything less than unqualified praise, was enraged, and relations between the two became cooler than ever.
Though Hazlitt continued to think of himself as a "metaphysician" (less often as a painter; he had by now given up his professional ambitions along those lines), he began to feel comfortable in the role of journalist. His self-esteem received an added boost when in early 1815 he began to contribute regularly to the quarterly The Edinburgh Review, the most distinguished periodical on the Whig side of the political fence (its rival The Quarterly Review occupied the Tory side). Writing for so highly respected a publication was considered a major step up from writing for weekly papers, and Hazlitt was proud of this connection.
On June 18, 1815, Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo. Having idolized Napoleon for years, Hazlitt took it as a personal blow. The event seemed to him to mark the end of hope for the common man against the oppression of "legitimate" monarchy. Profoundly depressed, he took up heavy drinking and was reported to have walked around unshaven and unwashed for weeks. He idolized and spoiled his son, William Jr., but in most respects his household grew increasingly disordered over the next year, his marriage deteriorated, and he spent more and more time away from home. As a part-time drama critic, he found an excuse to spend evening after evening at the theater. Afterwards he spent time among those friends who could tolerate his irascibility, the number of whom dwindled as a result of his sometimes outrageous behavior.
Hazlitt continued to produce articles on miscellaneous topics for The Examiner and other periodicals, including political diatribes against any whom he felt ignored or minimized the needs and rights of the common man. Defection from the cause of liberty had become easier in light of the oppressive political atmosphere in England at that time, in reaction to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Opposing this tendency, the Hunts were his primary allies. Lamb, who tried to remain uninvolved politically, tolerated his abrasiveness, and that friendship managed to survive, if only just barely in the face of Hazlitt's growing bitterness, short temper, and propensity for hurling invective at friends and foes alike.
For relief from all that weighed on his mind, Hazlitt became a passionate player at the game of Fives, a type of handball then sometimes played, as he did, with rackets. He played with savage intensity, dashing around the court like a madman, drenched in sweat, and was accounted a good player. More than just a distraction from his woes, this devotion led to musings on the value of competitive sports and on human skill in general, expressed in writings like his notice of the "Death of John Cavanagh" (a celebrated Fives player) in The Examiner on February 9, 1817, and the essay "The Indian Jugglers" in Table-Talk (1821).
Early in 1817, a series of Hazlitt's essays that had appeared in The Examiner in a regular column called "The Round Table" was collected in book form, including a few contributions by Leigh Hunt. Hazlitt's contributions to The Round Table were written somewhat in the manner of the periodical essays of the day, a genre defined by such eighteenth-century magazines as The Tatler and The Spectator.
The range of topics typified his output in succeeding years: Shakespeare ("On the Midsummer Night's Dream"), Milton ("On Milton's Lycidas"), art criticism ("On Hogarth's Marriage a-la-mode"), aesthetics ("On Beauty"), drama criticism ("On Mr. Kean's Iago"; Hazlitt was the first critic to champion the acting talent of Edmund Kean), social criticism ("On the Tendency of Sects", "On the Causes of Methodism", "On Different Sorts of Fame").
There was an article on The Tatler itself. Mostly his political commentary was reserved for other vehicles, but included was a "Character of the Late Mr. Pitt", a scathing characterization of the recently deceased former Prime Minister. Written in 1806, Hazlitt liked it well enough to have already had it printed twice before (and it would appear again in a collection of political essays in 1819).
Some essays blend Hazlitt's social and psychological observations in a way calculatedly thought-provoking, presenting to the reader the "paradoxes" of human nature. The first of the collected essays, "On the Love of Life", explains, "It is our intention, in the course of these papers, occasionally to expose certain vulgar errors, which have kept into our reasonings on men and manners.... The love of life is ... in general, the effect not of our enjoyments, but of our passions".
Again, in "On Pedantry", Hazlitt declares that "The power of attaching an interest to the most trifling or painful pursuits ... is one of the greatest happinesses of our nature". In "On Different Sorts of Fame", "In proportion as men can command the immediate and vulgar applause of others, they become indifferent to that which is remote and difficult of attainment". And in "On Good-Nature", "Good nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all the virtues...."
Many of the components of Hazlitt's style begin to take shape in these Round Table essays. Some of his "paradoxes" are so hyperbolic as to shock when encountered out of context: "All country people hate each other", for example, from the second part of "On Mr. Wordsworth's Excursion". He interweaves quotations from literature old and new. They help drive his points home, and (as some critics have felt) he used quotations as a device as well as anyone ever has, yet all too often he gets the quotes wrong. In one of his essays on Wordsworth he misquotes that very poet:
- Though nothing can bring back the hour
- Of glory in the grass, of splendour in the flower....
Though Hazlitt was still following the model of the older periodical essayists, these quirks, together with his keen social and psychological insights, began here to coalesce into a style very much his own.
Success—and trouble
In this period, Hazlitt's marriage was deteriorating; he was writing furiously for several periodicals to make ends meet; waiting so far in vain for the collection The Round Table to be issued as a book (which it finally was in February 1817); suffering bouts of illness; and making enemies by his venomous political diatribes. He found relief by a change of course, shifting his critical focus from the acting of Shakespeare's plays to the substance of them. The result was Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817), a collection of critical essays on the drama of William Shakespeare.
His approach was something new. There had been critics of Shakespeare before, but either they were not comprehensive or they were not aimed at the general reading public. As Ralph Wardle put it, before Hazlitt wrote this book, "no one had ever attempted a comprehensive study of all of Shakespeare, play by play, that readers could read and reread with pleasure as a guide to their understanding and appreciation". Somewhat loosely organized, and even rambling, the studies offer personal appreciations of the plays that are unashamedly enthusiastic. Hazlitt does not present a measured account of the plays' strengths and weaknesses, as did Dr. Johnson, or view them in terms of a "mystical" theory, as Hazlitt thought his contemporary A.W. Schlegel did (though he approves of many of Schlegel's judgements and quotes him liberally). Without apology, he addresses his readers as fellow lovers of Shakespeare and shares with them the beauties of what he thought the finest passages of the plays he liked best.
Readers took to it, the first edition selling out in six weeks. It received favourable reviews as well, not only by Leigh Hunt, a close friend who might have shown bias, but by Francis Jeffrey, the editor of The Edinburgh Review, a notice that Hazlitt greatly appreciated. (Hazlitt had contributed to that quarterly, had exchanged business correspondence with Jeffrey, and held him in great respect, but they had never met and were in no sense personal friends.) Jeffrey saw the book not as a learned study of Shakespeare's plays but rather as a loving appreciation of them, and an insightful and eloquent one at that, "a book of considerable originality and genius".
Now looking at the prospect of being out of debt, and enjoying critical and popular acclaim, Hazlitt could relax a bit and bask in the light of his growing fame.
Meanwhile, however, Hazlitt's reputation in literary circles had become tarnished, apparently by retaliatory rumours spread by such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, whom he had continued to criticize openly for their personal failings in contrast to their earlier actual or potential accomplishments. And the worst was yet to come.
But Hazlitt soon found a new source of satisfaction, along with escape from his financial woes, in a return to the lecture hall. In early 1818 he delivered a series of talks on "the English Poets", from Chaucer to his own time. His presentation was uneven in quality, but ultimately the lectures were judged a success. In making the arrangements for the lectures, he also met Peter George Patmore, Secretary of the Surrey Institution, where the lectures were presented, and soon to become a friend and confidant of Hazlitt's in the most troubled period of the latter's life.
The Surrey Institution lectures were printed in book form, followed by a collection of his drama criticism, A View of the English Stage, and the second edition of Characters of Shakespear's Plays. Hazlitt's career as a lecturer gained some momentum, and his growing popularity allowed him to get a collection of his political writings published as well, Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters. Lectures on "the English Comic Writers" soon followed, and these as well were published in book form. After them came lectures on dramatists who were Shakespeare's contemporaries, published as Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. The latter did not go over so well as lectures, but were reviewed enthusiastically after they were published.
More trouble was brewing, however. Hazlitt was attacked brutally in the Tory The Quarterly Review, and Blackwood's Magazine. One Blackwood's article mocked him as "pimpled Hazlitt", accused him of ignorance, dishonesty, and obscenity, and incorporated vague physical threats. Though Hazlitt was rattled by these attacks, he sought legal advice and sued. The lawsuit against Blackwood's was finally settled out of court in his favour. Yet the attacks did not entirely cease. The Quarterly Review issued a review of Hazlitt's published lectures in which he was condemned as ignorant and his writing as unintelligible. Such partisan onslaughts brought spirited responses. One, unlike an earlier response to the Blackwood's attack that never saw the light of day, was published, as A Letter to William Gifford, Esq. (1819; Gifford was the editor of the Quarterly). In this pamphlet Hazlitt presented what amounted to an apologia for his life and work thus far and showed he was well able to defend himself. Yet Hazlitt's attackers had done their damage. Not only was he personally shaken, he found it more difficult to have his works published, and once more he had to struggle for a living.
Solitude and infatuation
His lecturing in particular had drawn to Hazlitt a small group of admirers. Best known today is the poet John Keats, but there were others, such as the diarist and chronicler Henry Crabb Robinson and the novelist Mary Russell Mitford. But the rumours that had been spread demonizing him, along with the vilifications of the Tory press, not only hurt his pride but seriously obstructed his ability to earn a living. Income from his lectures had also proved insufficient to keep him afloat.
His thoughts drifted to gloom and misanthropy. His mood was not improved by the fact that by now there was no pretense of keeping up appearances: his marriage had failed. Years earlier he had grown resigned to the lack of love between him and Sarah. He had been visiting prostitutes and displayed more idealized amorous inclinations toward a number of women whose names are lost to history. Now in 1819, he was unable to pay the rent on their rooms at 19 York Street and his family were evicted. That was the last straw for Sarah, who moved into rooms with their son and broke with Hazlitt for good, forcing him to find his own accommodations. He would sometimes see his son and even his wife, with whom he remained on speaking terms, but they were effectively separated.
For long periods, for solace and so he could concentrate on his writing, he frequently retreated to the country, staying at "The Hut", an inn at Winterslow, near where his wife had some property (he had come to love that countryside at the beginning of his marriage). He shut himself away like a hermit and returned to contributing to periodicals, including the recently reestablished (1820) London Magazine, to which he contributed drama criticism and miscellaneous essays.
One idea that particularly bore fruit was that of a series of articles called "Table-Talk". (Many were written expressly for inclusion in the book of the same name, Table-Talk; or, Original Essays, which appeared in different editions and forms over the next few years.) These were essays in the "familiar style" of the sort that had begun with Montaigne two centuries earlier, and were greatly admired by Hazlitt. Here he brought his essay writing much closer to the model of the "familiar essay" as distinct from the eighteenth-century periodical essay. The personal "I" was now substituted for the editorial "we". In a preface to a later edition of the book, Hazlitt explained that rather than being scholarly and precise, these essays attempted to combine the "literary and the conversational". As in a conversation between friends, the discussion would often branch off into topics related only in a general way to the main theme, "but which often threw a curious and striking light upon it, or upon human life in general".
Though the essays were structured in the loose manner of conversations held at a table, this was a time when Hazlitt frequently secluded himself in isolation at Winterslow. His motivation is explained in one of the Table-Talk essays, "On Living to One's-Self" (January 1821), as not wanting to withdraw completely but rather to become an invisible observer of society. Also here and elsewhere in the series he weaves personal material into more general reflections on life, frequently bringing in long recollections of happy days of his years as an apprentice painter (as in "On the Pleasure of Painting", written in December 1820) as well as other pleasurable recollections of earlier years, "hours ... sacred to silence and to musing, to be treasured up in the memory, and to feed the source of smiling thoughts thereafter" ("On Going a Journey", written January 1822).
Hazlitt also had to spend time in London in these years. In another violent contrast, a London lodging house was the stage on which the worst crisis of his life was to play itself out.
In August 1820, he rented a couple of rooms in 9 Southampton Buildings in London from a tailor named Micaiah Walker. Walker's 19-year-old daughter Sarah, who helped with the housekeeping, would bring the new lodger his breakfast. Immediately, Hazlitt became infatuated with Miss Walker, more than 22 years his junior. His brief conversations with Walker cheered him and alleviated the loneliness that he felt from his failed marriage. He dreamed of marrying Sarah Walker, but that would require a divorce from Sarah Hazlitt--no easy matter. Finally, his wife agreed to grant him a Scottish divorce, which would allow him to remarry (as he could not had he been divorced in England).
Sarah Walker was, as some of Hazlitt's friends could see, a fairly ordinary girl. She had aspirations to better herself, and a famous author seemed like a prize catch. But she never really understood Hazlitt; in her relative youth, she apparently did not know her own mind very well either. When another lodger named Tomkins came along, she entered into a romantic entanglement with him as well, leading each of her suitors to believe he was the sole object of her affection. With vague words, she evaded absolute commitment until she could decide which she liked better or was the more advantageous catch.
Hazlitt discovered the truth about Tomkins, and from then on his jealousy and suspicions of Sarah Walker's real character afforded him little rest. For months, during the preparations for the divorce and as he tried to earn a living, he alternated between rage and despair, on the one hand, and the comforting if unrealistic thought that she was really "a good girl" and would accept him at last. The divorce was finalized on July 17, 1822, and Hazlitt returned to London to see his beloved—only to find her cold and resistant. They then become involved in angry altercations of jealousy and recrimination. And it was over, though Hazlitt could not for some time persuade himself to believe so. His mind nearly snapped. At his emotional nadir, he contemplated suicide.
It was with some difficulty that he eventually recovered his equilibrium. In order to ascertain Sarah's true character, he persuaded an acquaintance to take lodgings in the Walkers' building and attempt to seduce Sarah. Hazlitt's friend reported that the attempt seemed to be about to succeed, but she prevented him from taking the ultimate liberty. Her behavior was as it had been with several other male lodgers, not only Hazlitt, who now concluded that he had been dealing with, rather than an "angel", an "impudent whore", an ordinary "lodging house decoy". Eventually, though Hazlitt could not know this, she had a child by Tomkins and moved in with him.
Also providing a cathartic outlet for his misery, besides his pouring out his tale of woe to anyone he happened to meet (as well as his friends Peter George Patmore and James Sheridan Knowles), was his recording the course of his love in a thinly disguised fictional account, published anonymously in May 1823 as Liber Amoris; or, The New Pygmalion. (Enough clues were present so that the identity of the writer did not remain hidden for long.) Critics have been divided as to the literary merits of Liber Amoris, quite unlike anything else Hazlitt ever wrote. Wardle suggests that it was compelling but marred by sickly sentimentality, and also considers that Hazlitt might even have been anticipating some of the experiments in chronology made by later novelists.
One or two positive reviews appeared, such as that in the Globe, June 7, 1823: "The Liber Amoris is unique in the English language; and as, possibly, the first book in its fervour, its vehemency, and its careless exposure of passion and weakness—of sentiments and sensations which the common race of mankind seek most studiously to mystify or conceal—that exhibits a portion of the most distinguishing characteristics of Rousseau, it ought to be generally praised".
Such views were in a very small minority. Whatever its ultimate merits, Liber Amoris provided ample ammunition for Hazlitt's detractors, and even some of his closest friends were scandalized. For months he did not even have contact with the Lambs. And the strait-laced Robinson found the book "disgusting", "nauseous and revolting", "low and gross and tedious and very offensive", believing that "it ought to exclude the author from all decent society". As ever, peace of mind proved elusive for William Hazlitt.
The philosopher, again
Unsurprisingly, there were times in this turbulent period when Hazlitt could not focus on his work. But often, as in his self-imposed seclusion at Winterslow, he was able to achieve a "philosophic detachment", and he continued to turn out essays of remarkable variety and literary merit, most of them making up the two volumes of Table-Talk. (A number were saved for later publication in The Plain Speaker in 1826, while others remained uncollected.)
Some of these essays were in large part retrospectives on the author's own life ("On Reading Old Books" [1821], for example, along with others mentioned above). In others, he invites his readers to join him in gazing at the spectacle of human folly and perversity ("On Will-making" [1821], or "On Great and Little Things" [1821], for example). At times he scrutinizes the subtle workings of the individual mind (as in "On Dreams" [1823]); or he invites us to laugh at harmless eccentricities of human nature ("On People with One Idea" [1821]).
Other essays bring into perspective the scope and limitations of the mind, as measured against the vastness of the universe and the extent of human history ("Why Distant Objects Please" [1821/2] and "On Antiquity" [1821] are only two of many). Several others scrutinize the manners and morals of the age (such as "On Vulgarity and Affectation", "On Patronage and Puffing", and "On Corporate Bodies" [all 1821]).
Many of these "Table-Talk" essays display Hazlitt's interest in genius and artistic creativity. There are specific instances of literary or art criticism (for example "On a Landscape of Nicholas Poussin" [1821] and "On Milton's Sonnets" [1822]) but also numerous investigations of the psychology of creativity and genius ("On Genius and Common Sense" [1821], "Whether Genius Is Conscious of Its Powers" [1823], and others). In his manner of exploring an idea by antitheses (for example, "On the Past and the Future" [1821], "On the Picturesque and Ideal" [1821]), he contrasts the utmost achievements of human mechanical skill with the nature of artistic creativity in "The Indian Jugglers" [1821].
Hazlitt's fascination with the extremes of human capability in any field led to his writing "The Fight" (published in the February 1822 New Monthly Magazine). This essay never appeared in the Table-Talk series or anywhere else in the author's lifetime. A direct, personal account of a prize fight, it was controversial in its time as depicting too "low" a subject, Written at a dismal time in his life—Hazlitt's divorce was pending, and he was far from sure of being able to marry Sarah Walker—the article shows scarcely a trace of his agony. Not quite like any other essay by Hazlitt, it proved to be one of his most popular and was frequently reprinted after his death.
Another article written in this period, "On the Pleasure of Hating" (1823; included in The Plain Speaker), is a pure outpouring of spleen, a distillation of all the bitterness of his life to that point. It concludes, "...have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough".
Not only do the "Table-Talk" essays frequently display "trenchant insights into human nature", they at times reflect on the vehicle of those insights and of the literary and art criticism that constitute some of the essays. "On Criticism" (1821) delves into the history and purposes of criticism itself; and "On Familiar Style" (1821 or 1822) reflexively explores at some length the principles behind its own composition, along with that of other essays of this kind by Hazlitt and some of his contemporaries, like Lamb and Cobbett.
In Table-Talk, Hazlitt had found the most congenial format for this thoughts and observations. A broad panorama of the triumphs and follies of humanity, an exploration of the quirks of the mind, of the nobility but more often the meanness and sheer malevolence of human nature, the collection was knit together by a web of self-consistent thinking, a skein of ideas woven from a lifetime of close reasoning on life, art, and literature. He illustrated his points with bright imagery and pointed analogies, among which were woven pithy quotations drawn from the history of English literature, primarily the poets, from Chaucer to his contemporaries Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats. Most often, he quoted his beloved Shakespeare and to a lesser extent Milton. As he explained in "On Familiar Style", he strove to fit the exact words to the things he wanted to express and often succeeded—in a way that would bring home his meaning to any literate person of some education and intelligence.
These essays were not quite like anything ever done before. They attracted some admiration during Hazlitt's lifetime, but it was only long after his death that their reputation achieved full stature, increasingly often considered among the best essays ever written in English. Nearly two centuries after they were written, for example, biographer Stanley Jones deemed Hazlitt's Table-Talk and The Plain Speaker together to constitute "the major work of his life", and critic David Bromwich called many of these essays "more observing, original, and keen-witted than any others in the language".
Recovery and Second Marriage
At the beginning of 1824, though worn out by thwarted passion and the venomous attacks on his character following Liber Amoris, Hazlitt was beginning to recover his equilibrium. Pressed for money as always, he continued to write for various periodicals, including The Edinburgh Review. To The New Monthly Magazine he supplied more essays in the "Table-Talk" manner, and he produced some art criticism, published in that year as Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries of England.
He also found relief, finally, from the Sarah Walker imbroglio. In 1823, Hazlitt had met Isabella Bridgwater (née Shaw), who married him in March or April 1824, of necessity in Scotland, as Hazlitt's divorce was not recognized in England. Little is known about this Scottish-born widow of a planter in the West Indies, or about her interaction with Hazlitt. She may have been attracted to the idea of marrying a well-known author. For Hazlitt, she offered an escape from loneliness and to an extent from financial worries, as she possessed an independent income. The arrangement seems to have had a strong element of convenience for both of them. Certainly Hazlitt nowhere in his writings suggests that this marriage was the love match he had been seeking, nor does he mention his new wife at all.
In any case, the union afforded the two of them the opportunity to travel. First, they toured parts of Scotland, then began a European tour lasting over two years.
The Spirit of the Age
Before Hazlitt and his new bride set off for the continent, he submitted, among the miscellany of essays that year, one to the New Monthly on "Jeremy Bentham", the first in a series entitled "Spirits of the Age". Several more of the kind followed over the next few months, at least one in the Examiner. Together with some newly written, and one brought in from the "Table-Talk" series, they were collected in book form as The Spirit of the Age: Or, Contemporary Portraits in 1825.
These sketches of twenty-five men, prominent or otherwise notable as characteristic of the age, came easily to Hazlitt. In his days as a political reporter he had observed many of them at close range. Others he knew personally, and for years their philosophy or poetry had been the subject of his thoughts and lectures.
There were philosophers, social reformers, poets, politicians, and a few who did not fall neatly into any of these categories. Bentham, Godwin, and Malthus, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron were some of the most prominent writers; Wilberforce and Canning were prominent in the political arena; and there were a few who did not fall neatly into any of these categories, such as The Rev. Edward Irving, the preacher, William Gifford, the satirist and critic, and the recently deceased Horne Tooke, a lawyer, politician, grammarian, and wit.
Many of the sketches presented their subjects to the reader as seen in daily life. We see, for example, Bentham "tak[ing] a turn in his garden" with a guest, espousing his plans for "a code of laws 'for some island in the watery waste'", or playing the organ as a relief from incessant musings on vast schemes to improve the lot of mankind. As Bentham's neighbor for some years, Hazlitt had had good opportunity to observe the reformer and philosopher at first hand.
He had already devoted years to pondering much of the thinking espoused by several of these figures. Thoroughly immersed in the Malthusian controversy, for example, Hazlitt had published A Reply to the Essay on Population as early as 1807, and the essay on Malthus is a distillation of Hazlitt's earlier criticisms.
Where he finds it applicable, Hazlitt brings his subjects together in pairs, setting off one against the other. So here he points out that, for all the limitations of Godwin's reasoning, as given in that essay, Malthus comes off worse: "Nothing...could be more illogical...than the whole of Mr. Malthus's reasoning applied as an answer...to Mr. Godwin's book". Most distasteful to Hazlitt was the application of "Mr. Malthus's 'gospel'", greatly influential at the time. Many in positions of power had used Malthus' theory to deny the poor relief in the name of the public good, to prevent their propagating the species beyond the means to support it; while on the rich no restraints whatsoever were imposed.
Yet, softening the asperities of his critique, Hazlitt rounds out his sketch by conceding that "Mr. Malthus's style is correct and elegant; his tone of controversy mild and gentlemanly; and the care with which he has brought his facts and documents together, deserves the highest praise".
His portraits of such Tory politicians as Lord Eldon are unrelenting, as might be expected. But elsewhere his characterisations are more balanced, more even-tempered, than similar accounts in past years. Notably, there are portraits of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, to an extent essences of his former thoughts about these poets—and those thoughts had been profuse. He had earlier directed some of his most vitriolic attacks against them for having replaced the humanistic and revolutionary ideas of their earlier years with staunch support of the Establishment. Now he goes out of his way to qualify his earlier assessments.
In "Mr. Wordsworth", for example, Hazlitt notes that "it has been said of Mr. Wordsworth, that 'he hates conchology, that he hates the Venus of Medicis.'..." (Hazlitt's own words in an article some years back). Indirectly apologizing for his earlier tirade, Hazlitt here brings in a list of writers and artists, like Milton and Poussin, for whom Wordsworth did show appreciation.
Coleridge, whom Hazlitt had once idolized, gets special attention, but, again, with an attempt to moderate earlier criticisms. At an earlier time Hazlitt had dismissed most of Coleridge's prose as "dreary trash". Much of The Friend was "sophistry". The Statesman's Manual was not to be read "with any patience". A Lay Sermon was enough to "make a fool...of any man". For betraying their earlier liberal principles, both Coleridge and Southey were "sworn brothers in the same cause of righteous apostacy".
Now, again, the harshness is softened, and the focus shifts to Coleridge's positive attributes. One of the most learned and brilliant men of the age, Coleridge may not be its greatest writer—but he is its "most impressive talker". Even his "apostacy" is somewhat excused by noting that in recent times, when "Genius stopped the way of Legitimacy...it was to be...crushed", regrettably but understandably leading many former liberals to protect themselves by siding with the powers that be.
Southey, whose political about-face was more blatant than that of the others, still comes in for a measure of biting criticism: "not truth, but self-opinion is the ruling principle of Mr. Southey's mind". Yet Hazlitt goes out of his way to admire where can. For example, "Mr. Southey's prose-style can scarcely be too much praised", and "In all the relations and charities of private life, he is correct, exemplary, generous, just".
Hazlitt contrasts Scott and Byron; he skewers his nemesis Gifford; he praises—not without his usual strictures—Jeffrey; and goes on to portray, in one way or another, such notables as Mackintosh, Brougham, Canning, and Wilberforce.
His praise of the poet Thomas Campbell has been cited as one major instance where Hazlitt's critical judgment proved wrong. Hazlitt can scarcely conceal his enthusiasm for such poems as Gertrude of Wyoming, but neither the poems nor Hazlitt's judgment of them have withstood the test of time. His friends Hunt and Lamb get briefer coverage, and—Hazlitt was never one to mince words—they come in for some relatively gentle chiding amid the praise. One American author makes an appearance, Washington Irving, under his pen name of Geoffrey Crayon.
In this manner twenty-five character sketches combine to "form a vivid panorama of the age". Through it all, the author reflects on the Spirit of the Age as a whole, as, for example, "The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and doat on past achievements".
Some critics have thought the essays in The Spirit of the Age highly uneven in quality and somewhat hastily thrown together, at best "a series of perceptive but disparate and impressionistic sketches of famous contemporaries". It has also been noted, however, that the book is more than a mere portrait gallery. A pattern of ideas ties them together. No thesis is overtly stated, but some thoughts are developed consistently throughout.
Roy Park has noted in particular Hazlitt's critique of excessive abstraction as a major flaw in the period’s dominant philosophy and poetry. ("Abstraction", in this case, could be that of religion or mysticism as well as science.) This is the reason, according to Hazlitt, why neither Coleridge, nor Wordsworth, nor Byron could write effective drama. More representative of the finer spirit of the age was poetry that turned inward, focusing on individual perceptions, projections of the poets' sensibilities. The greatest of this type of poetry was Wordsworth's, and that succeeded as far as any contemporary writing could.
Even if it took a century and a half for many of the book's virtues to be realized, enough was recognized at the time to make the book Hazlitt's most successful. Unsurprisingly the Tory Blackwood's Magazine lamented that the pillory had fallen into disuse and wondered what "adequate and appropriate punishment there is that we can inflict on this rabid caitiff". But the majority of the reviewers were enthusiastic. For example, the Eclectic Review marveled at his ability to "hit off a likeness with a few artist-like touches" and The Gentleman's Magazine, with a few reservations, found his style "deeply impregnated with the spirit of the masters of our language, and strengthened by a rich infusion of golden ore...".
Adulthood
Yet more of Hazlitt's finest work was to come, but most of it in the form of essays collected only after his death.
Hazlitt is credited with having created the denomination Ultracrepidarianism to describe one who gives opinions on matters beyond one's knowledge.
Hazlitt put forward radical political thinking which was proto-socialist and well ahead of his time and was a strong supporter of Napoleon Bonaparte, writing a four-volume biography of him. He had his admirers, but was so against the institutions of the time that he became further and further disillusioned and removed from public life. He died in poverty on 18 September 1830 and is buried in St. Anne’s Churchyard, Soho, London.
Posthumous reputation
His works having fallen out of print, Hazlitt underwent a small decline, though in the late 1990s his reputation was reasserted by admirers and his works reprinted. Two major works then appeared,The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style by Tom Paulin in 1998 and Quarrel of the Age: the life and times of William Hazlitt by A. C. Grayling in 2000.
In 2003, following a lengthy appeal, Hazlitt's gravestone was restored in St. Anne's Churchyard, unveiled by Michael Foot . A was then inaugurated.
One of Soho's fashionable hotels is named after the writer. Hazlitt's hotel located on Frith Street is one of the homes William lived in and today still retains much of the interior he would have known so well.
Works
- An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805)
- Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth and Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817)
- Lectures on the English Poets (1818)
- Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819)
- Table-Talk; or, Original Essays (1821–22; "Paris" edition, with somewhat different contents, 1825)
- Liber Amoris: Or, The New Pygmalion (1823)
- "On The Pleasure of Hating" (written 1823; published 1826)
- The Spirit of the Age (1825)
Quotes
- The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.
- Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
- The essence of poetry is will and passion.
- Rules and models destroy genius and art.
- Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
- The Tory is one who is governed by sense and habit alone. He considers not what is possible, but what is real; he gives might the preference over right. He cries long life to the conqueror, and is ever strong upon the stronger side – the side of corruption and prerogative.
--from Introduction to Political Essays, 1817.
- Hazlitt writes about Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- "I had no notion then that I should ever be able to express my admiration to others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, till the light of his genius shone into my soul, like the sun's rays glittering in the puddles of the road. I was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the way-side, crushed, bleeding lifeless; but now, bursting from the deadly bands that 'bound them,
'With Styx nine times round them,'
- "my ideas float on winged words, and as they expand their plumes, catch the golden light of other years. My soul has indeed remained in its original bondage, dark, obscure, with longing infinite and unsatisfied; my heart, shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge."
--from the essay "My First Acquaintance with Poets"
- "For if no man can be happy in the free exercise of his reason, no wise man can be happy without it."
--from the essay "On the Periodical Essayists"
Further reading
- Wu, Duncan. William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
External links
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