We read and admire Hazlitt because they never brought him to his knees; he was a born fighter, a true adventurer; he neither asked nor gave quarter.
Most of us have wondered why a nation so sports-mad as we are should have been content for so long with such inept accounts of mighty conflicts by field and river as we get in our newspapers. Bernard Shaw did his best to portray a boxing contest, but Hazlitt alone among writers has succeeded in expounding the philosophy of sport and making us live through every moment of a bygone fight as if we had actually witnessed it:
"Neate just then made a tremendous lunge at him, and hit him full in the face. It was doubtful whether he would fall backwards or forwards; he hung suspended for a second or two, and then fell back, throwing his hands in the air, and with his face lifted up to the sky. I never saw anything more terrific than his aspect just before he fell. All traces of life, of natural expression, were gone from him. His face was like a human skull, a death's head spouting blood. The eyes were filled with blood, the nose streamed with blood, the mouth gaped blood. He was not like an actual man, but like a preternatural, spectral appearance, or like one of the figures in Dante's Inferno."
It is worthy of notice that he dedicates this description to the ladies: "nor let it seem out of character for the fair to notice the exploits of the brave."
Hazlitt is pre-eminently a fresh-air man. His essay On Going a Journey, as R. L. Stevenson said, "is so good that there should be a tax levied on all who have not read it." "Give me the clear blue sky over my head" (what joy it gives one merely to transcribe the well-known words), "and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner—and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy." He brings just this naïve, fresh-air, healthy enthusiasm into all his critical work, and it is this quality that calls forth that noble panegyric of Professor Saintsbury which shows once and for all the reason for reading Hazlitt:
"To anyone who has made a little progress in criticism himself, to anyone who has either read for himself or is capable of reading for himself, of being guided by what is helpful and of neglecting what is not, there is no greater critic than Hazlitt in any language ... he is the critics' critic as Spenser is the poets' poet."
That this is a bare statement of truth can be seen in the opening lecture on the English poets:
"Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions. It relates to whatever gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human mind. It comes home to the bosoms and businesses of men; for nothing but what so comes home to them in the most general and intelligible shape can be a subject for poetry. Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry cannot have much respect for himself or for anything else ... it is not a branch of authorship: it is 'the stuff of which our life is made.'"
These are brave words and, as we should expect from so alert a pugilist, straight from the shoulder.
His Characters of Shakespeare's Plays is studded with gems of criticism. "It is the peculiar excellence of Shakespeare's heroines that they seem to exist only in their attachment to others. They are pure abstractions of the affections." He is the least derivative of all critics and quotes from one authority alone, himself: hence his conclusions are not those of the academic professors, and it delights our hearts to listen to him trouncing Henry V., that false idol of the mob, and extolling Falstaff at his royal master's expense: "Falstaff is the better man of the two."