The most obvious, though by far the least, of these,—indeed one which is displayed with such frankness and in a way so little delusive as to be hardly a fault at all, though it is certainly a drawback,—is a sort of audacious sciolism—acquiescence in ignorance, indifference about “satisfying the examiners”—for half a dozen different names would be required to bring out all the sides of it.
His surface and occasional faults: Imperfect knowledge and method.
His almost entire ignorance of all literatures but his own gives him no trouble, though it cannot be said that it does him no harm. In treating of comic writers, not in English only but generally, he says[[479]] (with perfect truth) that Aristophanes and Lucian are two of the four chief names for comic humour, but that he shall say little of them, for he knows little. Would all men were as honest! but one cannot say, “Would all critics were as ignorant!” In his Lectures on the English Poets he is transparently, and again quite honestly, ignorant of mostly all the earlier minorities, with some not so minor. He almost prided himself upon not reading anything in the writing period of his life; and he seems to have carried out his principles so conscientiously that, if anything occurred in the course of a lecture which was unknown to him, he never made the slightest effort to supply the gap. His insouciance in method was equal to that in regard to material; and when we find[[480]] Godwin and Mrs Radcliffe included, with no satiric purpose, among “The English Comic Writers,” they are introduced so naturally that the absurdity hardly strikes us till some accident wakes us up to it. If inaccuracies in matters of fact are not very common in him, it is because, like a true critic, he pays very little attention to such matters, and is wholly in opinion and appreciation and judgment, and other things where the free spirit is kept straight, if at all, by its own instinct. But he does commit such inaccuracies, and would evidently commit many more if he ran the risk of them oftener.
Extra-literary prejudice.
The last and gravest of his drawbacks has to be mentioned, and though it may be slurred over by political partisanship, those who admire and exalt him in spite of and not because of his politics, are well entitled to call attention to it. To the unpleasantness of Hazlitt’s personal temper we have the unchallengeable testimony of his friends Lamb, who was the most charitable, and Hunt, who with all his faults was one of the most good-natured, of mortals. But what we may call his political temper, especially when it was further exasperated by his personal, is something of the equal of which no time leaves record. Whenever this east wind blows, the true but reasonable Hazlittian had better, speaking figuratively, “go to bed till it is over,” as John Hall Stevenson is said to have done literally in the case of the literal Eurus. Not only does Hazlitt then cease to be a critic,—he ceases to be a rational being. Sidney and Scott are the main instances of its effect, because Sidney could not have annoyed, and Scott we know did not in any way annoy, Hazlitt personally. Gifford is not in this case, and he was himself so fond of playing at the roughest of bowls that nobody need pity him for the rubbers he met. But Hazlitt’s famous Letter to him, which some admire, always, I confess, makes me think of the Doll’s-dressmaker’s father’s last fit of the horrors in Our Mutual Friend, and of the way in which the luckless “man talent” fought with the police and “laid about him hopelessly, fiercely, staringly, convulsively, foamingly.” Fortunately the effect was not so fatal, and I know no other instance in which Hazlitt actually required the strait waistcoat.[[481]] But he certainly did here: and in a considerable number of instances his prejudices have made him, if not exactly non compos mentis, yet certainly non compos judicii.
His radical and usual excellence.
Fortunately, however, the wind does not always blow from this quarter with him, and when it does the symptoms are so unmistakable that nobody can be deceived unless he chooses to be, or is so stupid that it really does not matter whether he is deceived or not. Far more usually it is set in a bracing North or fertilising West, not seldom even in the “summer South” itself. And then you get such appreciations, in the best, the most thorough, the most delightful, the most valuable sense, as had been seldom seen since Dryden, never before, and in him not frequently. I do not know in what language to look for a parallel wealth. Systematic Hazlitt’s criticism very seldom is, and, as hinted above, still seldomer at its best when it attempts system. But then system was not wanted; it had been overdone; the patient required a copious alterative. He received it from Hazlitt as he has—virtue and quantity combined—received it from no one else since: it is a “patent medicine” in everything but the presence of quackery. Roughly speaking, Hazlitt’s criticism is of two kinds. The first is very stimulating, very interesting, but, I venture to think, the less valuable of the two. In it Hazlitt at least endeavours to be general, and takes a lesson from Burke in “prodigious variation” on his subject. The most famous, the most laboured, and perhaps the best example is the exordium of the Lectures on the English Poets, with its astonishing “amplification” on what poetry in general is and what it is not. A good deal of this is directly Coleridgean. I forget whether this is the lecture which Coleridge himself, when he read it, thought that he remembered “talking at Lamb’s”; but we may be quite sure that he had talked things very like it. Much in the “Shakespeare and Milton” has the same quality, and may have been partly derived from the same source: the critical character of Pope[[482]] is another instance, and probably more original. For Hazlitt had not merely learnt the trick from his master but had himself a genius for it; and he adorned these disquisitions with more phrase than Coleridge’s recalcitrant pen usually allowed him, though there seems to have been plenty in his speech.