Born at Maidstone on 10 April, 1778, Hazlitt was the son of a distinguished Nonconformist minister. After visiting America, which was not tolerant of his doctrines, the elder Hazlitt returned, to England, where the son resided from 1788 to 1802. In 1798 he met Coleridge preaching in a blue coat and white waistcoat. The great and peculiar merit of Hazlitt's essays is his power of expressing and communicating the zest of his enjoyment of nature, human nature, preaching, juggling performances, prize-fighting, painting, fiction, sculpture, and the game of fives. In his description of the voice, the manner, the personal magic of Coleridge, then in his glorious youth, Hazlitt outshines himself, as he does in his criticism of Cavanagh's style in the fives-court. Hazlitt visited Coleridge at Stowey, and heard Wordsworth read his "Peter Bell"; heard Coleridge speak with contempt of Gray, and with intolerance of Pope, and express a dislike of Dr. Johnson!
These were divine days; but politics crossed the friendships of Hazlitt. The others had been enthusiasts, like himself, for the French Revolution, but not for Napoleon, as objecting to be emancipated by a hero who subdued hereditary kings, and supplied to conquered nations his own brothers and captains to be their princes. Hazlitt, on the other hand, rejoiced in the superb genius of Napoleon as he did in that of Shakespeare and in the sunlight. Bonaparte he could no more keep out of his essays on Poetry than Mr. Dick could banish "that comely head" of Charles I. from his memorial. To Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other friends became anathema, as renegades; and it is when we read his odious attack on Coleridge's poetry, in "The Edinburgh Review," that we understand "why everybody has such a dislike of me".
People who have read his "Liber Amoris," still more they who have studied the original letters partly published in that book, perceive other ways in which Hazlitt became antipathetic to human nature. He was, in the Scots phrase, "thrawn," and as he could seldom avoid exhibiting his temper in his writings, he may be and is admired for his generous qualities, and power of interpreting poetry and art, of elevating and enlivening the appreciative powers of his readers; but he can never be liked without reserve. His course of life, after he abandoned the study of metaphysics and the art of painting for the lecture-room and the pen of the ready essayist, put him too much in the way of temptation. He was too free to bring his personal and political animosities into his work, "it is such easy writing". He was also unskilled in the management of his life, and both his marriages (not to mention the unsuccessful passion of his "Liber Amoris") were fountains of bitterness. Living in London (1812-1820), Hazlitt gave his lectures on "English Poetry," and "Comic Writers" (1818-1819). Of 1817 are his "Characters of Shakespeare's Plays," and his "Round Table," essays on all sorts of subjects reprinted from Leigh Hunt's paper "The Examiner". In the work on poetry it is surprising to find him ranking Ossian with Homer, the Bible, and Dante, but when he gives his reasons it is natural to envy his powers of appreciation and enjoyment. To read him on Chaucer and Spenser is to desire to read Spenser and Chaucer themselves, so nobly does he recommend them, and Shakespeare, and so on, till, over Burns, he falls into a quarrel with Wordsworth, and then lashes "The Lake School," sniffs at Scott, and discovers but "one fine passage" in "Christabel". His politics prevent him from appreciating what is excellent in the Cavalier poets, and even when writing of Milton, Satan suggests to him Bonaparte, and he goes off full-mouthed on that trail. Among the novelists he is as much at home, and as convincingly right in his criticisms, especially of Richardson, as he is lost in a mist when he touches on Racine and Molière. Over Scott's novels he first breaks into a passion of admiration, and then, remembering politics, pelts the author (who never gave a thought to him) in the manner of Gulliver's Yahoos.
Hazlitt, unhappily, lived at a time when both parties in the State carried, with inconceivable rancour and stupidity, their politics into the field of literary criticism. His "Characters of Shakespeare" was slandered by Gifford in "The Quarterly Review," and he keeps telling us the sale of the book was stopped. Why members of his own party did not continue to buy it, he does not ask. In "Blackwood's Magazine" (1817-1818) he was styled "pimply-faced Hazlitt," a leader of "the Cockney School," and he says that Keats died of being called a Cockney. In fact, these stupidities did not affect Keats more than any other man of sense, while Hazlitt never ceased to avenge on people perfectly innocent, and on the guilty Gifford, the insults which he ought to have disregarded. For these reasons, and because he wrote so much, his essays are unequal, though when he is at his best, and he is often at his best, he is in the foremost rank of critics. He died in 1830. "Well, I have had a happy life," was among his latest words, and his finest works are reflections of his happiest hours.
Thomas de Quincey.
An essayist whose works are probably more read than those of Leigh Hunt is Thomas de Quincey, one of the extraordinary men whose boyhood was in the eighteenth, and whose works were produced in the first half of the nineteenth century. Born in Manchester in 1785, and dying in Edinburgh in 1859, De Quincey was precisely the contemporary of Hunt. His father, dying young, left his children adequately provided for, and, to judge by De Quincey's Autobiography, they were extraordinary children. William, the invincibly amusing, died young, and De Quincey's first great sorrow was the death of Elizabeth, when he himself was 6 and she was not 10 years of age. His description of the vision and the mysterious music which attended his visit to her as she lay dead, is one of the most remarkable and characteristic passages in his writings. Sixty-nine years later, "his very last act was to throw up his arms and utter, as if with a cry of surprised recognition, 'Sister! Sister! Sister!'" He was, indeed, a born seer; and probably other persons, if so ill-advised as to follow his example in taking quantities of laudanum, would not behold the visions which first charmed and then tormented "The English Opium Eater".
De Quincey was a wanderer and a fugitive from his school days, at least such he became after receiving an accidental stroke on the head from a cane, which prostrated him for weeks, and quite conceivably was one cause of his eccentricities. As he has told us he ran away, quite needlessly, from school at 16 or 17, tramped, a sentimental traveller, in North Wales, starved, lurked, and walked the midnight streets of London with Ann, ran away from Oxford (Worcester College) when his papers had astonished and delighted the examiners, and, generally, flew in the face of common sense. He came into his little fortune, behaved to Coleridge with the generosity of Shelley, settled long near Wordsworth at Grasmere, made the acquaintance of John Wilson (Christopher North), married a country girl, and fell into the miseries of the opium eater. Poverty ensued, De Quincey returned to his fugitive life of lurking in London, and, in 1821, astonished the world of readers by "The Confessions of an English Opium Eater," published in "The London Magazine," for which Lamb and Hazlitt used to write. De Quincey was acquainted with Lamb, and Wordsworth and Coleridge he knew well. But he belonged to none of the rival sets of writers, "Cockneys" or Edinburgh wits; and, in his freakish moods of schoolboy-like high spirits, he wrote personal banter of his best friends, deriding Coleridge's corpulence and "large expanse of cheek"; the retort, as to cheek, was obvious. In 1830 De Quincey moved to Edinburgh; and in lodgings there, and at a cottage near Lasswade on the Esk, he mainly passed the rest of his strange, industrious, eccentric life. He wrote alternately for Blackwood's and Tait's magazines: almost the whole matter of his sixteen volumes appeared originally in magazines, and was written with the wolf and the printer's boy at the door. His vast store of reading, accumulated before 1821, embraced the old English writers and the new German philosophers, magic, political economy, and the records of police trials.
That sketch for a murder with a pair of dumb-bells, by the murderer Thurtell, "the same who was generally censured for murdering the late Mr. Weare," occurs, not only in the essay on "Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," but in the long essay on "Style". The story of the very mysterious murder, at noon-day, of Mrs. Ruscombe in Bristol, is very well told in "Autobiographic Sketches" ("The Priory"). Confessedly some essays, such as "Dream-fugue" in "The English Mail Coach," are records of visions inspired by opium: "the Dream knows best; and the Dream, I say again, is the responsible party". These essays on the Mail Coach, then the marvel of rapidity of travel, offer, in miniature, the type of De Quincey's style, with its sonorous poetic cadences, its quaint colloquial familiarities,—with his insatiable intellectual curiosity, and his digressiveness—he discusses the origin of the word "snob". Finally the Dream has its way, after the wonderful description of the laurelled coach bearing news of Wellington's and Blücher's victory to England, and to two lovers the sudden face of death.
De Quincey, with his wide reading, with the songless poet in his nature, and with his strange freakish habits, his following a chance association of ideas far beyond the field of his essay, is, naturally, one of the most unequal of writers. His prose is, on occasion, "aureate" or ornate, in a manner which has, perhaps, had its day; and again he deals in schoolboy slang. Only parts of his famous essay on Jeanne d'Arc are excellent: taste has moved away from, and may return to, the mystic eloquence of "The Three Ladies of Sorrow". But in De Quincey there is variety enough for all tastes, and he is perhaps especially inspiring and delightful to young readers. He died at Edinburgh on 8 December, 1859.