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 for 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 the 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.’