How eloquent he grows! “Slips and scions stolen from that bed of memory!” The very words, simple as they are, and homely as is their theme, throb with emotion, and move as if to music. “Most eloquent of English essayists,” his latest biographer pronounces him; and, whether we agree with the judgment or not (sweeping assertions cost little, and contribute to readability), at least we recognize the quality that the biographer has in mind.
A sentimentalist, of all men, knows how to live his good days over again. Pleasure, to his thrifty way of thinking, is not a thing to be enjoyed once, and so done with. He will eat his cake and have it too. Nor shall it be the mere shadow of a feast. Nay, if there is to be any difference to speak of, the second serving shall be better and more substantial than the first. To him nothing else is quite so real as the past. He rejoices in it as in an unchangeable, indefeasible possession. “The past at least is secure.” If the present hour is dark and lonely and friendless, he has only to run back and walk again in sunny, flower-bespangled fields, hand in hand with his own boyhood.
Such was Hazlitt’s practice as a sentimental economist, and it would take an unusually bold Philistine, we think, to maintain that it was altogether a bad one. The words that he wrote of Rousseau are applicable to himself: “He seems to gather up the past moments of his being like drops of honey-dew to distil a precious liquor from them.” To vary a phrase of Mr. Pater’s, he is a master in the art of impassioned recollection.
It makes little difference where he is, or what circumstance sets him going. He may be among the Alps. “Clarens is on my left,” he says, “the Dent de Jamant is behind me, the rocks of Meillerie opposite: under my feet is a green bank, enamelled with white and purple flowers, in which a dewdrop here and there glitters with pearly light. Intent upon the scene and upon the thoughts that stir within me, I conjure up the cheerful passages of my life, and a crowd of happy images appear before me.” Or he is in London, and hears the tinkle of the “Letter-Bell” as it passes. “It strikes upon the ear, it vibrates to the brain, it wakes me from the dream of time, it flings me back upon my first entrance into life, the period of my first coming up to town, when all around was strange, uncertain, adverse,—a hubbub of confused noises, a chaos of shifting objects,—and when this sound alone, startling me with the recollection of a letter I had to send to the friends I had lately left, brought me as it were to myself, made me feel that I had links still connecting me with the universe, and gave me hope and patience to persevere. At that loud-tinkling, interrupted sound, the long line of blue hills near the place where I was brought up waves in the horizon, a golden sunset hovers over them, the dwarf oaks rustle their red leaves in the evening breeze, and the road from Wem to Shrewsbury, by which I first set out on my journey through life, stares me in the face as plain, but, from time and change, as visionary and mysterious, as the pictures in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’”
“When a man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect,” says Keats, “any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post towards all ‘the two-and-thirty Palaces.’” Yes, and some men will go a good way on the same royal road, with no more spiritual incitement than the passing of the postman.
How fondly Hazlitt recalls the day of days when he met Coleridge, and walked with him six miles homeward; when “the very milestones had ears, and Hamer Hill stooped with all its pines, to listen to a poet as he passed.” At the sixth milepost man and boy separated. “On my way back,” says Hazlitt, “I had a sound in my ears—it was the voice of Fancy; I had a light before me—it was the face of Poetry.” A second meeting had been agreed upon, and meanwhile the boy’s soul was possessed by “an uneasy, pleasurable sensation,” thinking of what was in store for him. “During those months the chill breath of winter gave me a welcoming; the vernal air was balm and inspiration to me. The golden sunsets, the silver star of evening, lighted me on my way to new hopes and prospects. I was to visit Coleridge in the spring.”
Verily, the words of the dying man begin to sound less paradoxical. He had been happy. If his buffetings and disappointments had been more than fall to the lot of average humanity, so had been his joys and his triumphs. He had more capacity for joy. Therein, in great part, lay his genius. To borrow a good word from Jeremy Taylor, all his perceptions were “quick and full of relish.” Even his sorrows, once they were far enough behind him, became only a purer and more ethereal kind of bliss. So he tells us, in one of his later essays, how he loved best of all to lie whole mornings on a sunny bank on Salisbury Plain, with no object before him, neither knowing nor caring how the time passed, his thoughts floating like motes before his half-shut eyes, or some image of the past rushing by him—“Diana and her fawn, and all the glories of the antique world.” “Then,” he adds, “I start away to prevent the iron from entering my soul, and let fall some tears into that stream of time which separates me farther and farther from all I once loved.” Whether the tears were physical or metaphorical, whether they wet the cheek or only the printed page, the man who shed them is not, on their account, to be regarded as an object of commiseration. Sadness that can be thus described, in words so like the fabled nightingale’s song, “most musical, most melancholy,” is more to be desired than much that goes by the name of pleasure, and the deeper and more poignant the emotion, the more precious are its returns.
Nobody ever understood this better than Hazlitt. His sentimentalism, as we call it, was no ignorant, superficial gift of young-ladyish sensibility. It had intellectual foundations. He felt because he knew. He had been intimate with himself; he had cherished his own consciousness. He remarks somewhere that the three perfect egotists of the race were Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Benvenuto Cellini. He would defy the world, he said, to name a fourth. But he might easily enough have named the fourth himself, had not modesty—or something else—prevented. If he had lived longer, he would perhaps have written the fourth man’s autobiography; his formal autobiography, that is to say. In fact, though not in name, he had already written it; some might be ready to maintain (but they would be wrong) that he had written little else. By “egotism” he meant not selfishness in the more ordinary, mercantile acceptation of the word,—a lack of benevolence, an extravagant desire to be better off than others in the way of worldly “goods,”—but the very quality we have been trying to show forth: absorption in one’s own mind, a profound and perpetual consciousness of one’s own being, the habit of interfusing self and outward things till distinctions of spirit and matter, finite and infinite, self and the universe, are for the moment almost done away with, and feeling is all in all.
This, or something like this, was Hazlitt’s secret. This is the breath of life that throbs in the best of his pages. Whatever subject he handled, a prize-fight, a game of fives, a juggler’s trick, a play of Shakespeare, a picture of Titian, the pleasure of painting, he did it not simply con amore, or, as his newer critics say, with gusto (the word is Hazlitt’s own—he wrote an essay about it), but as if the thing were for the time being part and parcel of himself. And so, oftener than is commonly to be expected of essay-writers, his sentences are not so much vivid as alive.
More than most men, he was alive himself. In Keats’s phrase, he felt existence. There was no telling its preciousness to him. The essay “On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth,” though at the end it breaks out despairingly into something like the old cry, Vanitas vanitatum, is filled to the brim with a passionate love of this present world. The idea of leaving it is abhorrent to him. To think what he has been, and what he has enjoyed, in those good days of his; days when he “looked for hours at a Rembrandt without being conscious of the flight of time;” days of the “full, pulpy feeling of youth, tasting existence and every object in it.” What a bliss to be young! Then life is new, and, for all we know of it, endless. As for old age and death, they are no concern of ours. “Like a rustic at a fair, we are full of amazement and rapture, and have no thought of going home, or that it will soon be night.” Sentences like this must have been what Keats had in mind when he spoke so lovingly of “distilled prose;” prose that bears repetition and brooding over, like exquisite verse. Some sentences, indeed, are better than whole books, and this of Hazlitt’s is one of them; as fine, almost,—as purely “distilled,”—as that famous kindred one of Sir William Temple: “When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humored a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.”