II
The complexity of Hazlitt’s temperament was especially emphasized by the two strong, opposing tendencies that called for no ordinary power of co-ordination. I mean the austere, individualistic, Puritan strain that came from his Presbyterian forefathers; and a sensuous, voluptuous strain that often ran athwart his Puritanism and occasioned him many a mental struggle. The general effect of these two dements in his nature was this: In matters of the intellect the Puritan was uppermost; in the realm of the emotions you felt the dominant presence of the opposing element.
In his finest essays one feels the presence at once of the Calvinist and the Epicurean; not as two incompatibles, but as opposing elements that have blent together into a noble unity; would-be rivals that have co-ordinated so that from each the good has been extracted, and the less worthy sides eliminated. Thus the sweetness of the one and the strength of the other have combined to give more distinction and power to the utterance.
Take this passage from one of his lectures:—
“The poet of nature is one who, from the elements of beauty, of power, and of passion in his own breast, sympathises with whatever is beautiful, and grand, and impassioned in nature, in its simple majesty, in its immediate appeal to the senses, to the thoughts and hearts of all men; so that the poet of nature, by the truth, and depth, and harmony of his mind, may be said to hold communion with the very soul of nature; to be identified with, and to foreknow, and to record, the feelings of all men, at all times and places, as they are liable to the same impressions; and to exert the same power over the minds of his readers that nature does. He sees things in their eternal beauty, for he sees them as they are; he feels them in their universal interest, for he feels them as they affect the first principles of his and our common nature. Such was Homer, such was Shakespeare, whose works will last as long as nature, because they are a copy of the indestructible forms and everlasting impulses of feature, welling out from the bosom as from a perennial spring, or stamped upon the senses by the hand of their Maker. The power of the imagination in them is the representative power of all nature. It has its centre in the human soul, and makes the circuit of the universe.”
And this:—
“The child is a poet, in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or repeats the story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd boy is a poet when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the countryman when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city apprentice when he gazes after the Lord Mayor’s show; the miser when he hugs his gold; the courtier who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage who paints his idol with blood; the slave who worships a tyrant, or the tyrant who fancies himself a god; the vain, the ambitious, the proud, the choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king, the rich and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of their own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all the others think and act.”
“Poetry is not a branch of authorship; it is the stuff of which our life is made.”
The artist is speaking in Hazlitt, but beneath the full, rich exuberance of the artist, you can detect an under-note of austerity.
Then again, his memorable utterance about the Dissenting minister from one of his essays on “Court Influence.”
“A Dissenting minister is a character not so easily to be dispensed with, and whose place cannot be well supplied. It is a pity that this character has worn itself out; that that pulse of thought and feeling has ceased almost to beat in the heart of a nation, who, if not remarkable for sincerity and plain downright well-meaning, are remarkable for nothing. But we have known some such, in happier days, who had been brought up and lived from youth to age in the one constant belief in God and of His Christ, and who thought all other things but dross compared with the glory hereafter to be revealed. Their youthful hopes and vanity had been mortified in them, even in their boyish days, by the neglect and supercilious regards of the world; and they turned to look into their own minds for something else to build their hopes and confidence upon. They were true priests. They set up an image in their own minds—it was truth; they worshipped an idol there—it was justice. They looked on man as their brother, and only bowed the knee to the Highest. Separate from the world, they walked humbly with their God, and lived in thought with those who had borne testimony of a good conscience, with the spirits of just men in all ages. . . . Their sympathy was not with the oppressors, but the oppressed. They cherished in their thoughts—and wished to transmit to their posterity—those rights and privileges for asserting which their ancestors had bled on scaffolds, or had pined in dungeons, or in foreign climes. Their creed, too, was ‘Glory to God, peace on earth, goodwill to man.’ This creed, since profaned and rendered vile, they kept fast through good report and evil report. This belief they had, that looks at something out of itself, fixed as the stars, deep as the firmament; that makes of its own heart an altar to truth, a place of worship for what is right, at which it does reverence with praise and prayer like a holy thing, apart and content; that feels that the greatest Being in the universe is always near it; and that all things work together for the good of His creatures, under His guiding hand. This covenant they kept, as the stars keep their courses; this principle they stuck by, for want of knowing better, as it sticks by them to the last. It grows with their growth, it does not wither in their decay. It lives when the almond-tree flourishes, and is not bowed down with the tottering knees. It glimmers with the last feeble eyesight, smiles in the faded cheek like infancy, and lights a path before them to the grave!”
Here is a man of Puritan lineage speaking; but is it the voice of Puritanism only? Surely it is a Puritanism softened and refined, a Puritanism which is free of those harsh and unpleasing elements that have too often obscured its finer aspects. I know of no passage in his writings which for spacious eloquence, nobleness of thought, beauty of expression, can rival this. It was written in 1818, when Hazlitt was forty years old, and in the plenitude of his powers.