A Little English Gallery

by Louise Imogen Guiney

The events of his life count for so little that they are hardly worth recording. He was born into a high-principled and intelligent family, at Mitre Lane, Maidstone, Kent, on the 10th of April, in the year 1778. His infancy was passed there and in Ireland, his boyhood in New England and in Shropshire. Prior to a long visit to Paris, where he made some noble copies of Titian, he came in 1802 to Bloomsbury, where his elder brother John, an advanced Liberal in politics and an excellent miniature-painter, had a studio; and here he worked at art for several joyous years, finally abandoning it for literature. The portraits he painted, utterly lacking in grace, are fraught with power and meaning; few of these are extant, thanks to the fading and cracking pigments of the modern schools. The old Manchester woman in shadow, done in 1803, and the head of his father, dating from a twelvemonth later (two things to which Hazlitt makes memorable reference in his essays), are no longer distinguishable, save to a very patient eye, upon the blackened canvases in his grandson’s possession. The picture of the child Hartley Coleridge, begun at the Lakes in 1802, has perished from the damp; that of Charles Lamb in the Venetian doublet survives since 1804, in its serious and primitive browns,[61] as the best-known example of an English artist not in the catalogues. Its historic value, however, is not superior to that of two portraits of Hazlitt himself: one a study in strong light and shade, with a wreath upon the head, now very much time-eaten; and another representing him at about the age of twenty-five, with a three-quarters front face looking over the right shoulder, which appeals to the spectator like spoken truth. It is all but void of the beauty characterizing the striking Bewick head (especially as retouched and reproduced in Mr. Alexander Ireland’s valuable book of 1889, which is a sort of Hazlitt anthology), and characterizing, no less, John Hazlitt’s charming miniatures of William at five and at thirteen; therefore it can deal in no self-flattery. Fortunately, we have from the hand which knew him best the lank, odd, reserved youth in whom great possibilities were brewing; thought and will predominate in this portrait, and it expresses the sincere soul. It would be idle to criticise the technique of a work disowned by its author. Hazlitt had, as we know from much testimony, a most interesting and perplexing face, with the magnificent brow almost belied by shifting eyes, and the petulance and distrust of the mouth and chin; but a face prepossessing on the whole from the clear marble of his complexion,[62] remarkable in a land of ruddy cheeks. His lonely and peculiar life lent him its own hue; the eager look of one indeed a sufferer, but with the light full upon him of visions and of dreams:

“Chi pallido si fece sotto l’ombra

Sì di Parnaso, o bevve in sua cisterna?”

In 1798 Hazlitt had his immortal meeting at Wem with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He described himself at this period as “dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the wayside,” striving in vain to put on paper the thoughts which oppressed him, shedding tears of vexation at his inability, and feeling happy if in eight years he could write as many pages. The abiding influence of his First Poet he has acknowledged in an imperishable chapter. For a long while he still kept in “the o’erdarkened ways” of Malthus and Tucker, or in the shadow, dear to him, of Hobbes; but in 1817 the floodgates broke, the pure current gushed out; and in the Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays we have the primal pledge of Hazlitt as we know him, “such as had never been before him, such as will never be again.” From a “dumbness” and diffidence extreme, he developed into the readiest of writers; his sudden pages, year after year, transcribed in his slant large hand, went to the printers rapidly and at first draft. The longer he used his dedicated pen, the freer, the brighter, the serener it grew. In the fourteen or fifteen of his books which deal with genius and the conduct of life, there is, throughout, an indescribable unaffected zest, a self-same and unwavering certitude of handling. Once he learned his trade, he gave himself a large field and an easy rein. He never warmed towards a subject chosen for him. His conversation was non-professional. He considered a discussion as to the likelihood of the weather’s holding up for to-morrow as “the end and privilege of a life of study.”

In London, as soon as he had abandoned painting, he became a parliamentary reporter, and began to lecture on the English philosophers and metaphysicians. He furnished his famous dramatic criticisms to The Morning Chronicle, The Champion, The Examiner, and The Times, and he acted later as home editor of The Liberal. He married, on May-day of 1808, Miss Sarah Stoddart, who owned the property near Salisbury where he afterwards spent melancholy years alone. He fulfilled one human duty perfectly, for he loved and reared his son. A most singular infatuation for the unlovely daughter of his landlady; a second inauspicious marriage in 1824 with a Mrs. Isabella Bridgwater; a prolonged journey on the Continent; the failure of the publishers of his Life of Napoleon, which thus in his needful days brought him no competence; a long illness heroically borne, and a burial in the parish churchyard of St. Anne’s, under a headstone raised, in a romantic remorse after an estrangement, by Charles Wells, the author of Joseph and his Brethren,—these round out the meagre details of Hazlitt’s life. He died in the arms of his son and of his old friend Charles Lamb,[63] on the 18th of September, 1830, at 6 Frith Street, Soho.

His domestic experiences, indeed, had been nearly as extraordinary as Shelley’s. Sarah Walker, of No. 9 Southampton Buildings, is a sort of burlesque counterpart of that other “spouse, sister, angel,” Emilia Viviani. Nothing in literary history is much funnier than Mr. Hazlitt’s kind assistance to Mrs. Hazlitt in securing her divorce, going to visit her at Edinburgh, and supplying funds and advice over the teacups, while the process was pending, unless it be Shelley’s ingenuous invitation to his deserted young wife to come and dwell forever with himself and Mary! The silent dramatic withdrawal of the second Mrs. Hazlitt, the well-to-do relict of a colonel, who is henceforth swallowed up in complete oblivion, is a feature whose like is missing in Shelley’s romance. Events in Hazlitt’s path were not many, and his inner calamities seem somehow subordinated to exterior workings. It is not too much to say that to the French Revolution and the white heat of hope it diffused over Europe he owed the renewal of the very impetus within him: his moral probity, his mental vigor, and his physical cheer. His measure of men and things was fixed by its standard. Other enthusiasts wavered and went back to the flesh-pots of Egypt, but not he. Et cuncta terrarum subacta præter atrocem animum Catonis. Towards the grandest inconsistency this world has seen, he bore himself with a consistency nothing less than touching. Everywhere, always, as a friend who understood him well reminds a later generation, “Hazlitt was the only man of letters in England who dared openly to stand by the French Revolution, through good and evil report, and who had the magnanimity never to turn his back upon its child and champion.” The ruin of Napoleon, and the final news that “the hunter of greatness and of glory was himself a shade,” meant more to him than the relinquishment of his early and cherished art, or the fading of the long dream that his heart “should find a heart to speak to.” On his last autumn afternoon, he said what no one else would have dared to say for him: “I have had a happy life.” Such it was, if we are to compute happiness by souls, and not by the incidents which befall them. What were the things which atoned to this reformer for the curse of a mind too sentient, a heart never far from breaking? Over and above all amended and amending abuses, the memory of the Rembrandts on the walls of Burleigh House; the waving crest of the Tuderley woods; the sky, the turf, “a winding road, and a three-hours’ march to dinner”; the impersonator of Richard III. most to his mind, who lighted the stage, “and fought as if drunk with wounds”; and the figure (how pastoral and tender!) of the shepherd-boy bringing a nest for his young mistress’s sky-lark, “not doomed to dip his wings in the dappled dawn.” What heresy to the ancients would be this creed of poetic compensation! Montesquieu adhered to it; but hardly from baffled and impassioned Hazlitt, dying in his prime, would the avowal have been expected. Yet he had written almost always, as Jeffrey saw, in “a happy intoxication.” Like the sundial, in one of the most charming among his miscellaneous essays, he kept count only of the hours of joy.

Hazlitt’s erratic levees among coffee-house wits and politicians, his slack dress, his rich and fitful talk, his beautiful fierce head, go to make up any accurate impression of the man. Mr. P. G. Patmore has drawn him for us; a strange portrait from a steady hand: in certain moods “an effigy of silence,” pale, anxious, emaciated, with an awful look ever and anon, like the thunder-cloud in a clear heaven, sweeping over his features with still fury.[64] He was so much at the mercy of an excitable and extra-sensitive organization that an accidental failure to return his salute upon the street, or, above all, the gaze of a servant as he entered a house, plunged him into an excess of wrath and misery. Full, at other times, of scrupulous good faith and generosity, he would, under the stress of a fancied hurt, say and write malicious things about those he most honored. He must have been a general thorn in the flesh, for he had no tact whatever. “I love Henry,” said one of Thoreau’s friends, “but I cannot like him.” Shy, splenetic, with Dryden’s “down look,” readier to give than to exchange, Hazlitt was a riddle to strangers’ eyes. His deep voice seemed at variance with his gliding step and his glance, bright but sullen; his hand felt as if it were the limp, cold fin of a fish, and was an unlooked-for accompaniment to the fiery soul warring everywhere with darkness, and drenched in altruism. His habit of excessive tea-drinking, like Dr. Johnson’s, was to keep down sad thoughts. For sixteen years before he died, from the day on which he formed his resolution, Hazlitt never touched spirits of any kind. Profuse of money when he had it, he lacked heart, says Mr. Patmore, to live well. Wherever he dwelt there was what Carlyle, in Hunt’s case, called “tinkerdom”; his marriage, and his residence under the august roof which had been Milton’s,[65] did not mend matters for him. He covered the walls and mantel-pieces of London landladies, after the fashion of the French bohemian painters, with samples of his noblest style; and the savor of yesterday’s potions of strong tea exhaled into their curtains. Never was there, despite his confessional attitude, so non-communicative a soul. He never corresponded with anybody; he never would walk arm in arm with anybody; he never, perhaps from horror of the “patron” bogie, dedicated a book to anybody. De Quincey knew a man warmly disposed towards Hazlitt who learned to shudder and dread daggers when poor Hazlitt, with a gesture habitual to him, thrust his right hand between the buttons of his waistcoat! And he once cheerfully requested of a cheerful colleague: “Write a character of me for the next number. I want to know why everybody has such a dislike to me.” As a social factor he was something atrocious.[66] The most humane of men, his suspicions and shyings cut him off completely from humanity. The base war waged upon him by the great Tory magazines could not have affected him so deeply that it changed his demeanor towards his fellows; for he had the mettle of a paladin, which no invective could break. But, alas! he had “the canker at the heart,” which is no fosterer of “the rose upon the cheek.”

With all this fever and heaviness in Hazlitt’s blood, he had a hearty laugh, musical to hear. Haydon, in his exaggerated manner, reports an uncharitable conversation held with him once on the subject of Leigh Hunt in Italy, during which the two misconstruing critics, in their great glee, “made more noise than all the coaches, wagons, and carts outside in Piccadilly.” His smile was singularly grave and sweet. Mrs. Shelley wrote, on coming back to England, in her widowhood, and finding him much changed: “His smile brought tears to my eyes; it was like melancholy sunlight on a ruin.” A man who sincerely laughs and smiles is somewhat less than half a cynic. If there be any alive at this late hour who questions the genuineness of Hazlitt’s high spirits, he may be referred to the essay On Going a Journey, with the pæan about “the gentleman in the parlor,” in the finest emulation of Cowley; but chiefly and constantly to The Fight, with its lingering De-Foe-like details, sprinkled, not in the least ironically, with gold-dust of Chaucer and the later poets: the rich-ringing, unique Fight,[67] predecessor of Borrow’s famous burst about the “all tremendous bruisers” of Lavengro; and not to be matched in our peaceful literature save with the eulogy and epitaph of Jack Cavanagh, by the same hand. Divers hints have been circulated, within sixty-odd years, that Mr. Hazlitt was a timid person, also that he had no turn for jokes. These ingenious calumnies may be trusted to meet the fate of the Irish pagan fairies, small enough at the start, whose punishment it is to dwindle ever and ever away, and point a moral to succeeding generations. Hazlitt’s paradoxes are not of malice prepense, but are the ebullitions both of pure fun and of the truest philosophy. “The only way to be reconciled with old friends is to part with them for good.” “Goldsmith had the satisfaction of good-naturedly relieving the necessities of others, and of being harassed to death with his own.” “Captain Burney had you at an advantage by never understanding you.” Scattered mention of “people who live on their own estates and on other people’s ideas”; of Jeremy Bentham, who had been translated into French, “when it was the greatest pity in the world that he had not been translated into English”; of the Coleridge of prose, one of whose prefaces is “a masterpiece of its kind, having neither beginning, middle, nor end”; and even of the “singular animal,” John Bull himself, since “being the beast he is has made a man of him”:—these are no ill shots at the sarcastic. Congreve, with all his quicksilver wit, could not outgo Hazlitt on Thieves, videlicet: “Even a highwayman, in the way of trade, may blow out your brains; but if he uses foul language at the same time, I should say he was no gentleman!” Hazlitt’s sense of humor has quality, if not quantity. How was it this same sense of humor, this fine-grained reticence, which wrote, nay, printed, in 1823, the piteous and ludicrous canticle of the goddess Sarah?

Hazlitt was a great pedestrian from his boyhood on, and, like Goldsmith, a fair hand at the game of fives, which he played by the day. Wherever he was, his pocket bulged with a book. It gave him keen pleasure to set down the hour, the place, the mood, and the weather of various ecstatic first readings. He became acquainted with Love for Love in a low wainscoted tavern parlor between Farnham and Alton, looking out upon a garden of larkspur, with a portrait of Charles II. crowning the chimney-piece; in his father’s house he fell across Tom Jones, “a child’s Tom Jones, an innocent creature”; he bought Milton and Burke at Shrewsbury, on the march; he looked up from Mrs. Inchbald’s Simple Story, when its pathos grew too poignant, to find “a summer shower dropping manna” on his head, and “an old crazy hand-organ playing Robin Adair.” And on April 10, 1798, his twentieth birthday, he sat down to a volume of the New Eloïse, a book which kept its hold upon him, “at the inn of Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken!” The frank epicurean catalogue, as of equal spiritual and corporeal delight, is worth notice. Do we not know that Mr. Hazlitt had wood-partridges for supper, in his middle age, at the Golden Cross, in Rastadt, near Mayence? Yet he failed to record what book lay by his plate, and distracted his attention from her who had been a widow, and who was already planning her respectable exit from his society. Evidence that he was an eater of taste is to be accumulated eagerly by his partisans, for eating is one of many engaging human characteristics which establish him as lovable—that is, posthumously lovable. Barry Cornwall was so jealously tender of his memory that he would have forbidden any one to write of Hazlitt who had not known him. As he did not warm miscellaneously to everybody, it followed that his friends were few. We do not forget which one of these, during their only difference, thought “to go to his grave without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion.”[68]