Hazlitt and Hallam.
Another noticeable author of this period, whose cynicism kept him very much by himself, was William Hazlitt;[53] he was the son of a clergyman and very precocious—hearing Coleridge preach in his father’s pulpit at Wem in Shropshire, and feeling his ambition stirred by the notice of that poet, who was attracted by the shrewd speech and great forehead of the boy. Young Hazlitt drifts away from such early influences to Paris and to painting—he thinking to master that art. But in this he does nothing satisfying; he next appears in London, to carve a way to fame with his pen. He is an acute observer; he is proud; he is awkward; he is shy. Charles Lamb and sister greatly befriend him and take to him; and he, with his hate of conventionalisms, loves those Lamb chambers and the whist parties, where he can go, in whatever slouch costume he may choose; poor Mary Lamb, too, perceiving that he has a husband-ish hankering after a certain female friend of hers—blows hot and cold upon it, in her quaint little notelets, with a delighted and an undisguised sense of being a party to their little game. It ended in a marriage at last; not without its domestic infelicities; but these would be too long, and too dreary for the telling. Mr. Hazlitt wrote upon a vast variety of topics—upon art, and the drama, upon economic questions, upon politics—as wide in his range as Leigh Hunt; and though he was far more trenchant, more shrewd, more disputatious, more thoughtful, he did lack Hunt’s easy pliancy and grace of touch. Though a wide reader and acute observer, Hazlitt does not contend or criticise by conventional rules; his law of measurement is not by old syntactic, grammatic, or dialectic practices; there’s no imposing display of critical implements (by which some operators dazzle us), but he cuts—quick and sharp—to the point at issue. We never forget his strenuous, high-colored personality, and the seething of his prejudices—whether his talk is of Napoleon (in which he is not reverent of average British opinion), or of Sir Joshua Reynolds, or of Burke’s brilliant oratorical apostrophes. But with fullest recognition of his acuteness, and independence, there remains a disposition (bred by his obstinacies and shortcomings) to take his conclusions cum grano salis. He never quite disabuses our mind of the belief that he is a paid advocate; he never conquers by calm; and, upon the whole, impresses one as a man who found little worth the living for in this world, and counted upon very little in any other.
The historian, Henry Hallam,[54] on the other hand, who was another notable literary character of this epoch, was full of all serenities of character—even under the weight of such private griefs as were appalling. He was studious, honest, staid—with a great respect for decorum; he would have gravitated socially—as he did—rather to Holland House than to the chambers where Lamb presided over the punch-bowl. In describing the man one describes his histories; slow, calm, steady even to prosiness, yet full; not entertaining in a gossipy sense; not brilliant; scarce ever eloquent. If he is in doubt upon a point he tells you so; if there has been limitation to his research, there is no concealment of it; I think, upon the whole, the honestest of all English historians. In his search for truth, neither party, nor tradition, nor religious scruples make him waver. None can make their historic journey through the Middle Ages without taking into account the authorities he has brought to notice, and the path that he has scored.
And yet there is no atmosphere along that path as he traces it. People and towns and towers and monarchs pile along it, clearly defined, but in dead shapes. He had not the art—perhaps he would have disdained the art—to touch all these with picturesque color, and to make that page of the world’s history glow and palpitate with life.
Among those great griefs which weighed upon the historian, and to which allusion has been made, I name that one only with which you are perhaps familiar—I mean the sudden death of his son Arthur, a youth of rare accomplishments—counted by many of more brilliant promise than any young Englishman of his time—yet snatched from life, upon a day of summer’s travel, as by a thunderbolt. He lies buried in Clevedon Church, which overhangs the waters of Bristol Channel; and his monument is Tennyson’s wonderful memorial poem.
I will not quote from it; but cite only the lines “out of which” (says Dr. John Brown), “as out of the well of the living waters of Love, flows forth all In Memoriam.”
“Break—break—break
At the foot of thy crags, O sea:
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.