Merchant of Venice, Act III. Scene 2.
[1]. Hazlitt has glanced at him in his notes on dissenters and dissent in the Political Essays, and has given a further taste of him in that very notable and gracious piece, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets.’
[2]. In 1805 he produced his essay on the Principles of Human Action. Being no metaphysician, I have never read this work; but Mr. Leslie Stephen, who is a very competent person in these matters, I am told, assures me (D. N. B.) that it is ‘scrupulously dry,’ though ‘showing great acuteness.’ This, I take leave to say—this is Hazlitt all over. None has written of the workaday elements in life and time with a rarer taste, a finer relish, a stronger confidence in himself and them. Yet, in dealing with absolutes in life and time, he is ‘scrupulously dry.’ This, I take it, is to be a man of letters.
[3]. Or rather bedgown: unction-soiled and laudanum-stained.
[4]. John Hazlitt had been a pupil of Reynolds, and his miniatures were welcome at the Academy.
[5]. Dans l’art il faut donner sa peau.
[6]. He had a painter in him, whether imperfectly developed or not; for he would condescend upon none but Guido, Raphael, Titian.
[7]. One was a likeness of his father, of which he has written in eloquent and engaging terms; another, a Wordsworth, which he destroyed; a third, the picture of Elia, ‘as a Venetian senator,’ now in the National Portrait Gallery; yet another, the presentment of an Old Woman, which is likened to a Rembrandt. Having seen none of these things, all I can say about them is that Hazlitt seems to have been passionately interested in colour; that he loved a picture because it was a piece of painting; and, if he knew not always bad (or rather third and fourth rate) work when he saw it, was as contemptuous of it, when he realised its status, as Fuseli himself.
[8]. There is an immense, even an insuperable difference between the two sorts of sensualists. To take an immediate instance: Lamb loved Hogarth, and found emotions in him, because he (Hogarth) was a novelist in paint; while Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne touched his sense of letters, and, as Mr. Ainger has noted, suggested to him so much literature, or, at all events, so many literary possibilities, that Titian could not but be an arch-painter. Hazlitt felt his painter first, and thought not of the man-of-letters in his painter till his interest in his painter’s painting was—I won’t say extinguished but—allayed.