And so you again ask me in one sentence why we should read Hazlitt and the answer is, in the words of George Sampson: "A fondness for Hazlitt is a fondness for health in literature" ... and there is room for health in the literature of to-day.
"Though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt."
If you want to prove this, turn again to The Ignorance of the Learned. If only we could write like that!
VI
SAMUEL PEPYS
All girls in their teens and most boys keep what they call a diary, just as most undergraduates and all young unmarried women write what they imagine to be a novel: the value of each of these forms of expression would be considerably enhanced if the writers of either took any pains to learn the technique of their art. Of the ideal diarist two things are pre-eminently required: an all-round interest in life and a complete self-candour which is poles removed from the anæmic sickness of self-love and an effective antidote against it. No one should dare to keep a diary before reading Pepys from end to end, and few people will dare to do so after reading him.
The question is not why we should read Pepys, but why we cannot help reading Pepys. The answer is simple: No novelist would have the audacity to ask us to believe in a hero who was at the same time Secretary to the Admiralty, regenerator of the navy, Master of the Trinity House, master of a city company, Member of Parliament, President of the Royal Society, the friend and counsellor of kings and princes, and yet spent his spare time "picking up" girls in church or behind the counter, making love to his own maids and actresses, hiding his gold in the garden and digging it up again, expressing "mighty content" at the spectacle of men being hanged, drawn and quartered, alternately sulking with his wife and soothing her suspicions about his amours, continually making oaths not to get drunk and breaking them, gloating over his clothes like a peacock, lamenting every expense in the way of entertainment like a miser, frightened to death by fear of ghosts, burglars and the plague, chronicling the details of every delectable dinner that he ate, and every delectable wench that he saw or kissed—in short, expressing all the undignified weaknesses our flesh is heir to.
"No man," says the philosopher, "was ever written down but by himself."