A Little English Gallery

by Louise Imogen Guiney

THE titles of William Hazlitt’s first books bear witness to the ethic spirit in which he began life. From his beloved father, an Irish dissenting minister, he inherited his unworldliness, his obstinacy, his love of inexpedient truth, and his interest in the emancipation and well-being of his fellow-creatures. Bred in an air of seriousness and integrity, the child of twelve announced by post that he had spent “a very agreeable day” reading one hundred and sixty pages of Priestley, and hearing two good sermons. A year later he appeared, under a Greek signature, in The Shrewsbury Chronicle, protesting against sectarian injustice; an infant herald in the great modern movement towards fair play. The roll of the portentous periods must have made his father weep for pride and diversion. William’s young head was full of moral philosophy and jurisprudence, and he had what is the top of luxury for one of his temperament: perfect license of mental growth. Alone with his parents (one of whom was always a student and a recluse), and for the most part without the school-fellows who are likely to adjust the perilous effects of books, he became choked with theories, and thought more of the needful repeal of the Test Act than of his breakfast. He found his way at fourteen into the Unitarian College at Hackney, but eventually broke from his traces, saving his fatherland from the spectacle of a unique theologian. During the year 1795 he saw the pictures at Burleigh House, and began to live. Desultory but deep study, at home and near home, took up the time before his first leisurely choice of a profession. His lonely broodings, his early love for Miss Railton, his four enthusiastic months at the Louvre, his silent friendship with Wordsworth and with Coleridge; the country walks, the pages and prints, the glad tears of his youth,—these were the fantastic tutors which formed him; nor had he ever much respect for any other kind of training. The lesson he prized most was the lesson straight from life and nature. He comments, tartly enough, on the sophism that observation in idleness, or the growth of bodily skill and social address, or the search for the secret of honorable power over people, is not in any wise to be accounted as learning. Montaigne, who was in Hazlitt’s ancestral line, was of this mind: “Ce qu’on sçait droictement, on en dispose sans regarder au patron, sans tourner les yeulx vers son livre.” Hazlitt insists, too, that learned men are but “the cisterns, not the fountain-heads, of knowledge.” He hated the schoolmaster, and has said as witty things of him as Mr. Oscar Wilde. Yet his little portrait-study of the mere book-worm, in The Conversation of Authors, has a never-to-be-forgotten sweetness. His mental nurture was serviceable; it was of his own choosing; it fitted him for the work he had to do. Like Marcus Aurelius, he congratulated himself that he did not squander his youth “chopping logic and scouring the heavens.” Hazlitt once entered upon an Inquiry whether the Fine Arts are promoted by Academies; the answer, from him, is readily anticipated.

“If arts and schools reply,”

he might have added,—and it is a wonder that he did not,

“Give arts and schools the lie!”

Mr. Matthew Arnold made a famous essay on the same topic, and some readers recollect distinctly that his verdict, for England, would be in the affirmative, whereas it was no such matter. Now, no man can conceive of Hazlitt presenting both sides of a case so impartially as to be misunderstood, especially upon so vital a subject. He pastured, he was not trained; and therefore he would have you and your children’s children scoff at universities. Indeed, though the boy’s lack of discipline told on him all through life, his reader regrets nothing else which a university could have given him, except, perhaps, milder manners. Hazlitt was perfectly aware that he had too little general knowledge; but general knowledge he did not consider so good a tool for his self-set task in life as a persistent, passionate study of one or two subjects. Again, he is pleased to conjecture, with bluntness, that if he had learned more he would have thought less. (Perhaps he was the friend cited by Elia, who gave up reading to improve his originality! He was certainly useful to Elia in delicate and curious ways: a whole vein of rich eccentricity ready for that sweet philosopher’s working.) Hear him pronouncing upon himself at the very end: “I have, then, given proof of some talent and more honesty; if there is haste and want of method, there is no common-place, nor a line that licks the dust. If I do not appear to more advantage, I at least appear such as I am.” Divorce that remark and the truth of it from Hazlitt, and there is no Hazlitt left. He stood for individualism. He wrote from what was, in the highest degree for his purpose, a full mind, and with that blameless conscious superiority which a full mind must needs feel in this empty world. His whole intellectual stand is taken on the positive and concrete side of things. He has a fine barbaric cocksureness; he dwells not with althoughs and neverthelesses, like Mr. Symonds and Mr. Saintsbury. “I am not one of those,” he says, concerning Edmund Kean’s first appearance in London, “who, when they see the sun breaking from behind a cloud, stop to inquire whether it is the moon.” And he takes enormous interest in his own promulgation, because it is inevitably not only what he thinks, but what he has long thought. He delivers an opinion with the air proper to a host who is master of a vineyard, and can furnish name and date to every flagon he unseals.

None of Hazlitt’s energies went to waste: he earned his soul early, and how proud he was of the possession! Retrospection became his forward horizon. He was all aglow at the thought of that beatific yesterday; in his every mood “the years that are fled knock at the door, and enter.” He struggled no more thereafter, having fixed his beliefs and found his voice. He saw no occasion to change. “As to myself,” he wrote at fifty, referring to Lamb’s well-known “surfeits of admiration” concerning some objects once adored, “as to myself, any one knows where to have me!” He adds: “In matters of taste and feeling, one proof that my conclusions have not been quite shallow or hasty is the circumstance of their having been lasting. . . . This continuity of impression is the only thing on which I pride myself.” A fine saying in the Boswell Redivivus, attributed to Opie, is as clearly expressed elsewhere by Hazlitt’s self: that a man in his lifetime can do but one thing; that there is but one effort and one victory, and all the rest is as machinery in motion. “What I write costs me nothing, but it cost me a great deal twenty years ago. I have added little to my stock since then, and taken little from it.” His sensations, latterly, were “July shoots,” graftings on the old sap. It is his boast in almost his final essay that his tenacious brain holds fast while the planets are turning. He can look at a child’s kite in heaven, to the last, with the eyes of a child: “It pulls at my heart.”

His conservative habit, however, seemed to teach him everything by inference. In 1821, familiar with none of the elder dramatists save Shakespeare, he borrowed their folios, and shut himself up for six weeks at Winterslow Hut on Salisbury Plain. He returned to town steeped in his theme, and with the beautiful and authoritative Lectures written. Appreciation of the great Elizabethans is common enough now; seventy years ago, propagated by Lamb’s Specimens, 1808, it was the business only of adventurers and pioneers. Here is a critic indeed who, without a suspicion of audacity, can arise as a stranger to arraign the Arcadia, and “shake hands with Signor Orlando Friscobaldo as the oldest acquaintance” he has! The thing, exceptional as it was, proves that William Hazlitt knew his resources. His devoted friend Patmore attributes his “unpremeditated art,” terse, profound, original, and always moving at full speed, to two facts: “first, that he never, by choice, wrote on any topic or question in which he did not, for some reason or other, feel a deep personal interest; and, secondly, because on all questions on which he did so feel, he had thought, meditated, and pondered, in the silence and solitude of his own heart, for years and years before he ever contemplated doing more than thinking of them.” Unlike a distinguished historian, who, according to Horace Walpole, “never understood anything until he had written of it,” Hazlitt brought to his every task a mind violently made up, and a vocation for special pleading which nothing could withstand.

Sure as he is, he means to be nobody’s hired guide: a resolve for which the general reader cannot be too grateful. In wilful and mellow study of what chance threw in his way his strength grew, and his limitations with it. It is small wonder that he hated schoolmasters, and the public which expected of him schoolmaster platitudes. He had a pride of intellect not unlike Rousseau’s, and he seems to have had ever in mind Rousseau’s cardinal declaration that if he were no better than other men, he was at least different from them. Hazlitt defined his own functions with proper haughtiness, in the amusing apology of Capacity and Genius. “I was once applied to, in a delicate emergency, to write an article on a difficult subject for an encyclopædia; and was advised to take time, and give it a systematic and scientific form; to avail myself of all the knowledge that was to be obtained upon the subject, and arrange it with clearness and method. I made answer that, as to the first, I had taken time to do all that I ever pretended to do, as I had thought incessantly on different matters for twenty years of my life; that I had no particular knowledge of the subject in question, and no head for arrangement; that the utmost I could do, in such a case, would be, when a systematic and scientific article was prepared, to write marginal notes upon it, to insert a remark or illustration of my own (not to be found in former encyclopædias!) or to suggest a better definition than had been offered in the text.”[58] Such independence nobly became him, and none the less because it kept him poor. But in the course of time, he had to work, and keep on working, under wretched disadvantages. He had spurts of revolt, after long experience of compulsory composition; his darling wish in 1822 (confided to his wife, of all persons) being that he “could marry some woman with a good fortune, that he might not be under the necessity of writing another line!”

There was in him absolutely nothing of the antiquary and the scholar, as the modern world understands those most serviceable gentlemen. He was a “surveyor,” as he said, erroneously, of Bacon. He was continuously drawn into the byway, and ever in search of the accidental, the occult; he lusted, like Sir Thomas Browne, to find the great meanings of minor things. The “pompous big-wigs” of his day, as Thackeray called them, hated his informality, his boldly novel methods, his vivacity and enthusiasm. He had, within proscribed bounds, an exquisite and affectionate curiosity, like that of the Renaissance. “The invention of a fable is to me the most enviable exertion of human genius: it is the discovery of a truth to which there is no clew, and which, when once found out, can never be forgotten.” “If the world were good for nothing else, it would be a fine subject for speculation.” It is his deliberate dictum that it were “worth a life” to sit down by an Italian wayside, and work out the reason why the Italian supremacy in art has always been along the line of color, not along the line of form.

He depended so entirely upon his memory that those who knew him best say that he never took notes, neither in gallery, library, nor theatre; yet his inaccuracies are few and slight,[59] and he must have secured by this habit a prodigious freedom and luxury in the act of writing. He would rather stumble than walk according to rule; and he was so pleasantly beguiled with some of his own images (that, for instance, of immortality the bride of the youthful spirit, and of the procession of camels seen across the distance of three thousand years) that he reiterates them upon every fit occasion. He cites, twice and thrice, the same passages from the Elizabethans. He is a masterly quoter, and lingers like a suitor upon the borders of old poesy. His infallibility, like the Pope’s, is of narrow scope and nicely defined. When he steps beyond his accustomed tracks, which is seldom, his vagaries are entertaining. You may account for his declaration that Thomas Warton’s sonnets rank as the very best in the language, by reflecting that he dealt not in sonnets and knew nothing of them; if he prefer Hercules Raging to any other Greek tragedy, it is collateral proof that he was no wide-travelled Grecian, nor even Euripideian; when he gives his distinguished preference to Shakespeare’s Helena, there is small need of adding that Mr. Hazlitt, albeit with an affectionate friendship for Mary Lamb, with a mother, a sister, a dynasty of sweethearts, and two wives, was notoriously unlearned in women.[60]