The Round Table, &c.
Nor is the interesting “omnibus” volume, which takes its general title from The Round Table, of the most fertile. The collection of short papers, properly so called, was written earlier (1817) than most of the books hitherto discussed, and therefore has some first drafts or variants of not a little that is in them. In a note of it[[509]] occurs the passage on Burke, which, with that on Scott in the Spirit of the Age, is Hazlitt’s nearest approach to the sheer delirium tremens of the Gifford Letter: but he is not often thus. “The Character of Milton’s Eve” is a fine critical paper of its kind, and “takes the taste out” well after the passage on Burke. The long handling of The Excursion is very interesting to compare with that in the English Poets, as is the earlier “Midsummer Night’s Dream” with similar things elsewhere. “Pedantry” and others give something: and though no human being (especially no human being who knows both books) has ever discovered what made Hazlitt call John Buncle “the English Rabelais,” the paper on Amory’s queer novel is a very charming one. “On the Literary Character” does somewhat deceive us: “Commonplace Critics” less so: but to “Poetical Versatility” we must return. Of the remaining contents of the volume, the well-known Conversations with Northcote (where the painter plays Hazlitt’s idea of an Advocatus Diaboli on Hazlitt) gives less still. But there is a striking passage on Wordsworth,[[510]] a paradox (surely?) on Tom Paine[[511]] as “a fine writer” (you might as well call a good getter of coal at the face “a fine sculptor”), an interesting episode[[512]] on early American nineteenth-century literature; and not a few others, especially the profound self-criticism (for no doubt Northcote had nothing to do with it) on Hazlitt’s abstinence from society.[[513]] In Characteristics, one of the few notable collections of the kind in English, CCXC, a most curious and pretty certainly unconscious echo of Aristotle,[[514]] is our best gleaning; while the 52d “Commonplace,” on Byron and Wordsworth, and the 12th and 11th “Trifles light as air,” on Fielding and on “modern” critics, play the same part there.
The Spirit of the Age.
On the other hand, The Spirit of the Age (with the exception of some political and philosophical matter) is wholly literary; and may rank with the three sets of Lectures and the Characters of Shakespeare as the main storehouse of Hazlitt’s criticism. Here, too, there is much repetition, and here, at the end of the Scott article, is the almost insane outburst more than once referred to. But the bulk of the book is at Hazlitt’s very best pitch of appreciative grasp. If he is anywhere out of focus, it is in reference to Godwin’s novels—the setting of which in any kind of comparison with Scott’s (though Hazlitt was critic enough from the first to see that Godwin could by no possibility be the “Author of Waverley”) is a remarkable instance of the disadvantage of the contemporary, and, to some extent, the sympathiser. But the book certainly goes far to bear out the magnificent eulogy of Hazlitt for which Thackeray[[515]] took it as text, quite early in his career.
Sketches and Essays.
The Sketches and Essays are again very rich, where they are rich; and advertise the absence of riches most frankly where they are not. “On Reading New Books”; not a little of “Merry England”; the whole of “On Taste” and “Why the Heroes of Romances are insipid” speak for themselves, and do not bewray their claim. “Taste,” especially, contains[[516]] one of Hazlitt’s own titles to critical supremacy in his fixing on Perdita’s primrose description as itself supreme, when “the scale of fancy, passion, and observation of nature is raised” high enough. Winterslow. And as for Winterslow, its first and its last papers are “things enskied” in criticism, for the one is “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” and the last “The Farewell to Essay Writing.”