The Pope passage is specially interesting, because it leads us to the second and, as it seems to me, the chief and principal class of Hazlitt’s critical deliverances—those in which, without epideictic intention, without, or with but a moderate portion of, rhetoric and amplification and phrasemaking, he handles separate authors and works and pieces. I have said that I think him here unsurpassed, and perhaps unrivalled, in the quantity and number of his deliverances, and only surpassed, if so, in their quality, by the greatest things of the greatest persons. These deliverances are to be found everywhere in his extensive critical work, and it is of a survey of some of them, conditioned in the manner outlined above, that the main body of any useful historical account of his criticism must consist. The four main places are the Lectures on The English Poets (1818), on The English Comic Writers (1819), on Elizabethan Literature (1820), and the book on Characters of Shakespeare (1817). We may take them in the order mentioned, though it is not quite chronological, because the chronological dislocation, in the case of the second pair, is logically and methodically unavoidable.
The English Poets.
How thoroughly this examination of the greater particulars (as we may call it) was the work which he was born to do is illustrated by the sketches (at the end of the first Lecture on The English Poets[[483]]) of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, the Decameron, Homer, the Bible, Dante, and (O Groves of Blarney!) Ossian. Hazlitt’s faults (except prejudice, which is here fortunately silent) are by no means hidden in them—irrelevance, defect of knowledge, “casualness,” and other not so good things. But the gusto,[[484]] the spirit, the inspiriting quality, are present in tenfold measure. Here is a man to whom literature is a real and live thing, and who can make it real and alive to his readers—a man who does not love it or its individual examples “by allowance,” but who loves it “with personal love.” Even his Richardsonian digression[[485]]—horrible to the stop-watch man—is alive and real and stimulating with the rest. The Dante passage is a little false perhaps in parts, inadequate, prejudiced, what you will in others. But it is criticism—an act of literary faith and hope and charity too—a substance; something added to, and new-born in, the literary cosmos. He is better (indeed he is here almost at his very best) on Spenser than on Chaucer, but why? Because he knew more about Spenser, because he was plentifully read in sixteenth- and hardly read at all in fourteenth-century literature. And so always: the very plethora of one’s notes for comment warning the commentator that he is lost if he indulges rashly. Where Hazlitt is inadequate (as for instance on Dryden) he is more instructive than many men’s adequacy could be, and where he is not—on Collins, on the Ballads, and elsewhere—he prepares us for that ineffable and half-reluctant outburst—a very Balaam’s blessing—on Coleridge,[[486]] which stands not higher than this, not lower than that, but as an A-per-se, consummate and unique.
The Comic Writers.
In a sense the Comic Writers are even better. The general exordium on Wit and Humour belongs to the first class of Hazlitt’s critical performances as defined above, and is one of the cleverest of them; though it may perhaps have the faults of its class, and some of those of its author. That on Comedy—the general part of it—incurs this sentence in a heavier degree; for Aristotle or somebody else seems to have impressed Hazlitt too strongly with the necessary shadiness of Comedy, and it is quite clear that of the Romantic variety (which to be sure hardly anybody but Shakespeare has ever hit off) he had an insufficient idea. He is again inadequate on Jonson; it is indeed in his criticism, because of its very excellence, that we see—more than anywhere else, though we see it everywhere—the truth of his master’s denunciation of the “criticism which denies.” But his lecture or essay on the capital examples of the comedy which he really liked—that of the Restoration—is again an apex: and, as it happens, it is grouped for English students with others—the morally excellent and intellectually vigorous but rather purblind onslaught of Collier, the again vigorous but somewhat Philistine following thereof by Macaulay, the practical confession of Lamb’s fantastic and delightful apology, Leigh Hunt’s rather feeble compromise—after a fashion which shows it off to a marvel. While as to the chapter on the Eighteenth-century Novel it has, with a worthier subject, an equal supremacy of treatment. You may differ with much of it, but always agree to differ: except in that estimate of Lovelace which unfortunately shows us Hazlitt’s inability to recognise a cad in the dress and with the manners of a fine gentleman.[[487]]
The Age of Elizabeth.
The Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth (which succeeded the Comic Writers, as these had succeeded the Poets) maintain, if they do not even raise, the standard. Perhaps there is nothing so fine as the Coleridge passage in individual and concentrated expression; nor any piece of connected criticism so masterly as the chapter on the Novel. But the level is higher: and nowhere do we find better expression of that gusto—that amorous quest of literary beauty and rapturous enjoyment of it—which, has been noted as Hazlitt’s great merit. His faults are here, as always, with him and with us. Even the faithful Lamb was driven to expostulate[[488]] with the wanton and, as it happens, most uncritical belittlement of Sidney,[[489]] and (though he himself was probably less influenced by political partisanship or political feeling of any kind than almost any great writer of whom we know) to assign this to its true cause. It is odd[[490]] that a critic, and a great critic, should contrive to be inadequate both on Browne and on Dryden: and again one cannot but suspect the combination to be due to the fact that both were Royalists. But the King’s Head does not always come in: and it is only fair to Hazlitt to say that he is less biassed than Coleridge by the royalism itself of Beaumont and Fletcher, and the supposed republicanism of Massinger. And in by far the greater part of the book—nearly the whole of that part of it which deals with the dramatists—there is no disturbance of this kind. The opening, if somewhat discursive, is masterly, and with very few exceptions the lecturer or essayist carries out the admirable motto—in fact and in deed the motto of all real critics—“I have endeavoured to feel what was good, and to give a reason for the faith that was in me when necessary and when in my power.”[[491]] Two of his sentences, in dealing with Beaumont and Fletcher, not merely set the key-note of all good criticism but should open the stop thereof in all fit readers. “It is something worth living for to write or even read such poetry as this, or to know that it has been written.” Again, “And so it is something, as our poets themselves wrote, ‘far above singing.’”[[492]]