V
It is told of him that he was dark-eyed and dark-haired, slim in figure, rather slovenly in his habit; that he valued himself on his effect in evening dress; that his manners were rather ceremonious than easy; that he had a wonderfully eloquent face, with a mouth as expressive as Kean’s, and a frown like the Giaour’s own[[23]]—that Giaour whom he did not love. He worshipped women, but was awkward and afraid with them; he played a good game of fives, and would walk his forty to fifty miles a day; he would lie a-bed till two in the afternoon, then rise, dally with his breakfast until eight without ever moving from his tea-pot and his chair, and go to a theatre, a bite at the Southampton, and talk till two in the morning.[[24]] That he excelled in talk is beyond all doubt. Witness after witness is here to his wit, his insight, his grip on essentials, his beautiful trick of paradox, his brilliancy in attack, his desperate defence, his varying, far-glancing, inextinguishable capacity for expression. And he was himself—Hazlitt: a man who borrowed nobody’s methods, set no limits to the field of discussion, nor made other men wonder if this were no talk but a lecture. He bore no likeness to that ‘great but useless genius,’ Coleridge: who, beginning well as few begin, lived ever after ‘on the sound of his own voice’; none to Wordsworth, whose most inspiring theme was his own poetry; none to Sheridan, who ‘never oped his mouth but out there flew’ a jest; none to Lamb, who——But no; I cannot imagine Lamb in talk. Hazlitt himself has plucked out only a tag or two of Lamb’s mystery; and I own that, even in the presence of the notes in which he sets down Lamb as Lamb was to his intimates, I am divided in appreciation between the pair. Lamb for the unexpected, the incongruous, the profound, the jest that bred seriousness, the pun that was that and a light upon dark places, a touch of the dread, the all-disclosing Selene, besides; Hazlitt for none of these but for himself; and what that was I have tried to show. Well; Lamb, Coleridge, Sheridan, Hazlitt, Hunt, Wordsworth—all are dead, tall men of their tongues as they were. And dead is Burke, and Fox is dead, and Byron, most quizzical of lords! And of them all there is nothing left but their published work; and of those that have told us most about some of them, ‘in their habit as they lived,’ the best and the strictest-seeing, the most eloquent and the most persuasive, is assuredly Hazlitt. And, being something of an expert in talk,[[25]] I think that, if I could break the grave and call the great ghosts back to earth for a spell of their mortal fury, I would begin and end with Lamb and Hazlitt: Lamb as he always was;[[26]] Hazlitt in one of his high and mighty moods, sweeping life, and letters, and the art of painting, and the nature of man, and the curious case of woman (especially the curious case of woman!) into a rapture of give-and-take, a night-long series of achievements in consummate speech.