Self-portrait by William Hazlitt, who was born on this day in 1778.
“We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves, and have neither thoughts nor feelings to impart to them. Give a man a topic in his head, a throb of pleasure in his heart, and he will be glad to share it with the first person he meets.:
— William Hazlitt, “The Fight”
Hazlitt was born into a time of revolution, first the American Revolution and then the French Revolution, two seismic events which would form his mind and his philosophy. His father was a Unitarian minister. It was expected he would go into the clergy as well, and sent to a Unitarian seminary. Although he didn’t end up being a minster, the seminary changed Hazlitt’s life. He only went for two years but it was enough to launch him as a thinker and a philosopher. The writers he was introduced to, all those dissenters, of which the Unitarians had many, seasoned with the overriding idea that man was an individual, and that the rights of man were paramount in the field of human life… all of this swirled through the entirety of his work.
He was a fierce believer in human liberty. He read John Locke, David Hume, Rousseau was huge for him. He believed man was inherently good, and if his mind was activated, if he was learned enough in the sciences and the arts, his worst tendencies would be quelled naturally. (Hazlitt had a difficult life, with much hardship, and his philosophy would develop and change over the years.) His studies were so rigorous and in-depth that he basically lost his faith in God in the process, one of the reasons why he left the seminary. His belief was in Man, not God. Hazlitt was forward-thinking but very much of his day and age.
Much much more after the jump:
What was a budding philosopher to do? How could you make a living? Hazlitt didn’t have an easy time. His brother was a portrait painter, and Hazlitt had some aptitude in the same area. He spent a lot of time in galleries, and hiring himself out as a portrait painter. For many years, he got intermittent work painting people’s portraits. His stuff is dark and moody, and he was known for not flattering his subjects (this caused him some trouble when he painted some famous folks). He spent a lot of time going to the theatre and attending lectures. But he was being supported by his father. He wasn’t standing on his own yet.
One night, he went to hear Samuel Taylor Coleridge speak, and it was a life-changing event for Hazlitt. He felt he was close to the source of something essential when listening to the great poet speak. The two men met. Coleridge invited him to come visit, which Hazlitt did (Hazlitt was around 20). While visiting Coleridge, Hazlitt met William Wordsworth, and the three men would take long walks together. Hazlitt was impressionable and in awe of these two gentlemen. He began to think about maybe trying to write. Meeting Coleridge and Wordsworth, he saw that poetry was as vibrant a force as philosophy. Coleridge and Wordsworth were very impressed by their young protege.
Hazlitt had ideas of things he wanted to write about, mainly the “natural disinterestedness of the human mind”: this topic haunted him for years.
In the early 1800s, he met Charles Lamb (and Lamb’s mentally ill sister Mary). It would become a lifelong friendship. Hazlitt painted a gorgeous portrait of Charles Lamb.
Charles Lamb, painted by William Hazlitt
At this time, politics began to interest him. He admired Napoleon, saw him as the liberator of France. You can see the influence of Edmund Burke in some of Hazlitt’s stuff. Hazlitt read Burke very closely. He began to publish pamphlets on the philosophical/political ideas he had been turning over in his head for years. Hazlitt got married at some point along the way. He struggled to make ends meet. He was a difficult friend, experiencing huge flame-outs with many of his circle, including fallings-out with Coleridge and Wordsworth. Only Lamb tolerated him (Here’s an amusing quote about Hazlitt in a letter Lamb wrote to Wordsworth). Hazlitt starting working as a political journalist, hired by The Examiner to report on Parliament. His stuff was impressive. He also wrote literary criticism, theatre criticism … To me, he is one of the best models of a well-rounded journalist out there. A real critic’s critic.
Hazlitt had a regular column at The Examiner called “The Round Table”, his subject matter is diverse. Many of these essays were brought out in book-form. He wrote in the first person – against the trend of the time – he wrote a lot about competitive sports, a subject which was seen as low-brow at the time. He wrote about Shakespeare, Milton. He wrote about acting and actors. He wrote about Hogarth and Methodists. He wrote about religion and politics. All of the essay titles begin with the word “On”. Philosophy plays a part: “On the Love of Life”, “On Good Nature”. His prose is muscular, often funny, and he has a talent for memorable epigrams.
He lectured widely on Chaucer, Shakespeare. Meanwhile, though, his life fell apart. His marriage deteriorated. He lost many of his friends. He drank to excess. His association with the Whig party was problematic, and he was constantly attacked by Tory publications. He sued sometimes. It was increasingly difficult for him to get his work published. Doors closed. He had his defenders, John Keats being one of them (as well as the always-loyal Charles Lamb). Hazlitt lost his position and thought about writing a four-volume biography of Napoleon.
His “late” essays are some of his best: contemplative, ruminative, nostalgic. He looked through old books and wrote about them. He wrote about Milton’s sonnets. He wrote about the future and the art of criticism. Some of these essays are among his best, and some were not even published during his lifetime.
Hazlitt died in 1830 at the age of 52.
His essays and books fell out of print. His reputation did not travel to the next generation. He was not, say, Thomas Paine, who has never been out of print. Hazlitt’s writing is subtler than Paine’s, and takes on a broader aspect. He was a passionate advocate for the writers he loved best.
‘The Fight’ describes Hazlitt traveling to a country town where there was going to be a boxing match in the middle of a field. It’s a striking essay. He wrote about an experience HE had had, the people he met, the conversations, the lodgings. It takes him 6 or 7 pages to even GET to the fight. Writing like this can be a great risk, because if the readers do not care for the “I” of the pieces, you’re screwed. If people find your voice irritating, they won’t tolerate listening to you. This is the revolution behind Hazlitt’s essays: HE is so much in them, and when you read them it is as though he jumps back to life.
For example, in the opening paragraph of ‘The Indian Jugglers’, he watches a man juggle four balls at one time. He is amazed at the skill and specificity of timing. But listen to where his mind goes:
The hearing a speech in Parliament, drawled or stammered out by the Honourable Member or the Noble Lord, the ringing the changes on their common-places, which any one could repeat after them as well as they, stirs me not a jot, shakes not my good opinion of myself: but the seeing the Indian Jugglers does. It makes me ashamed of myself. I ask what there is that I can do as well as this! Nothing. What have I been doing all my life!
More from ‘The Indian Jugglers’ on “greatness” and “power”:
Greatness is great power, producing great effects. It is not enough that a man has great power in himself, he must shew it to all the world in a way that cannot be hid or gainsaid. He must fill up a certain idea in the public mind. I have no other notion of greatness than this two-fold definition, great results springing from great inherent energy. The great in visible objects has relation to that which extends over space: the great in mental ones has to do with space and time. No man is truly great, who is great only in his life-time. The test of greatness is the page of history. Nothing can be said to be great that has a distinct limit, or that borders on something evidently greater than itself. Besides, what is short-lived and pampered into mere notoriety, is of a gross and vulgar quality in itself. A Lord Mayor is hardly a great man. A city orator or patriot of the day only shew, by reaching the height of their wishes, the distance they are at from any true ambition. Popularity is neither fame nor greatness. A king (as such) is not a great man. He has great power, but it is not his own. He merely wields the lever of the state, which a child, an idiot, or a madman can do. It is the office, not the man we gaze at. Any one else in the same situation would be just as much an object of abject curiosity. We laugh at the country girl who having seen a king expressed her disappointment by saying, ‘Why, he is only a man!’ Yet, knowing this, we run to see a king as if he was something more than a man. – To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness. To throw a barley-corn through the eye of a needle, to multiply nine figures by nine in the memory, argues infinite dexterity of body and capacity of mind, but nothing comes of either. There is a surprising power at work, but the effects are not proportionate, or such as take hold of the imagination. To impress the idea of power on others, they must be made in some way to feel it. It must be communicated to their understandings in the shape of an increase of knowledge, or it must subdue and overawe them by subjecting their wills. Admiration, to be solid and lasting, must be founded on proofs from which we have no means of escaping; it is neither a slight nor a voluntary gift. A mathematician who solves a profound problem, a poet who creates an image of beauty in the mind that was not there before, imparts knowledge and power to others, in which his greatness and his fame consists, and on which it reposes. Jedediah Burton will be forgotten; but Napier’s bones will live. Lawgivers, philosophers, founders of religion, conquerors and heroes, inventors and great geniuses in arts and sciences, are great men; for they are great public benefactors, or formidable scourges to mankind. Among ourselves, Shakespear, Newton, Bacon, Milton, Cromwell, were great men; for they shewed power by acts and thoughts, which have not yet been consigned to oblivion. They must needs be men of lofty stature, whose shadows lengthen out to remote posterity. A great farce-writer may be a great man; for Moliere was but a great farce-writer. In my mind, the author of Don Quixote was a great man. So have there been many others. A great chess-player is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it. No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness. This will apply to all displays of power or trials of skill, which are confined to the momentary, individual effort, and construct no permanent image or trophy of themselves without them. Is not an actor then a great man, because ‘he dies and leaves the world no copy?’ I must make an exception for Mrs. Siddons, or else give up my definition of greatness for her sake. A man at the top of his profession is not therefore a great man. He is great in his way, but that is all, unless he shews the marks of a great moving intellect so that we trace the master-mind, and can sympathise with the springs that urge him on. The rest is but a craft or mystery. Hunter was a great man – that any one might see without the smallest skill in surgery. His style and manner shewed the man. He would set about cutting up the carcass of a whale with the same greatness of gusto that Michael Angelo would have hewn a block of marble. Lord Nelson was a great naval commander; but for myself, I have not much opinion of a sea-faring life. Sir Humphry Davy is great chemist, but I am not sure that he is a great man. I am not a bit the wiser for any of his discoveries, nor I never met with any one that was. But it is in the nature of greatness to propagate an idea of itself, as wave impels wave, circle without circle. It is a contradiction in terms for a coxcomb to be a great man. A really great man has always an idea of something greater than himself. I have observed that certain sectaries and polemical writers have no higher compliment to pay their most shining lights than to say that ‘Such a one was a considerable man in his day.’ Some new elucidation of a text sets aside the authority of the old interpretation, and a ‘great scholar’s memory outlives him half a century,’ at the utmost. A rich man is not a great man, except to his dependants and his steward. A lord is a great man in the idea we have of his ancestry, and probably of himself, if we know nothing of him but his title. I have heard a story of two bishops, one of whom said (speaking of St. Peter’s at Rome) that when he first entered it, he was rather awe-struck, but that as he walked up it, his mind seemed to swell and dilate with it, and at last to fill the whole building – the other said that as he saw more of it, he appeared to himself to grow less and less every step he took, and in the end to dwindle into nothing. This was in some respects a striking picture of a great and little . mind – for greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself. The one might have become a Wolsey; the other was only fit to become a Mendicant Friar – or there might have been court-reasons for making him a bishop. The French have to me a character of littleness in all about them; but they have produced three great men that belong to every country, Moliere, Rabelais, and Montaigne.
Reminder: this is from an essay about a couple of jugglers.
As a British subject, Hazlitt lived in a constitutional monarchy. At least the king was halted (supposedly) by things like the Bill of Rights, as well as Parliament and the Houses. In his essay “On Monarchy,” Hazlitt threw a bone in England’s direction, but his tone is almost sarcastic:
A constitutional king, on the other hand, is a servant of the public, a representative of the people’s wants and wishes, dispensing justice and mercy according to law. Such a monarch is the King of England! Such was his late, and such is his present Majesty George IVth! [Phew!]–
Hazlitt had no love for kings. Nor do I. NO KINGS. Hazlitt, as a man steeped in the Age of Reason, could not stand the idea that we worshiped people (kings) who were not worthy of worship. We worship the role, not the man. The man himself could be moronic or crazed with power. Heredity put him on the throne, though and so we bow to him.
Hazlitt made the excellent point that those brought up in pomp and circumstance, knowing they were destined for the throne, are not inclined to sympathize/empathize with their subjects. More likely, they will look upon them as a “lower” breed of humanity. Wickedness results from this impasse. (Still does.) Hazlitt suggested it was a glorified mirror we were looking for. We want a king to be glorious and splendid because it makes us feel good about ourselves, and we can lose ourselves in beautiful fantasies, ie: “If things were only slightly different, that could be me.”
Originally published in 1817, ‘What is the People?’ shows Hazlitt’s radical background of dissent. Edmund Burke, famously, tore the French Revolution a new one. Here, Hazlitt seems to be saying, at least in the final section, that the majority (meaning, the people) will always work together towards that which is good. (I disagree, but who cares what I think.) Hazlitt distrusts monarchies and absolute power. (I agree with him.) Again, Hazlitt looks at power, what it is, how it operates. When one has power, it is not natural to say, “Okay, that’s it. I have enough power now.” Nobody in power says “Okay, I have enough now.” The nature of power makes one hungry for more. Anyone in power, therefore, must be watched like a hawk, must be held back by checks and balances, must never be trusted to look out for the people’s interests. Hazlitt’s belief in the inherent goodness of the people sounds almost Marxist (in the classic sense, not in the ignorant boneheaded sense of today’s usage): If the people were in charge, we all know they would not be tempted by power, because Man is Good, and when a bunch of men get together, filled with virtue and honor, we all know they will want what is best. This was a common belief of the time (the Russian Revolution and the Great Terror was a century away), and had obviously been played out in the American Revolution (which Edmund Burke had famously defended). The men of the American Revolution were the elites of their own community, but neither was their political power “inherited”. Heredity had nothing to do with who rose to the top.
Remember, that George III, when he heard George Washington was planning to retire as Commander in Chief, said: “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”
A man walking away from power? When he already had it in his hands?
From Hamilton, King George III:
They say George Washington’s yielding his power and stepping away
Is that true?
I wasn’t aware that was something a person could do
I’m perplexed
Are they going to keep on replacing whoever’s in charge?
Hazlitt concludes his essay “On Reason and Imagination” with a blistering critique of the institution of slavery. If we can “imagine” what it would be like to be locked up in the hold of a ship for months at a time, then we know slavery is wrong, because our GUT tells us it is wrong. You don’t need a pie chart to show why it is wrong. It doesn’t matter what the Bible says. There will always be people who distrust those who stand up in the face of injustice and scream “THIS IS WRONG.” It is thought you need to have less passion to get things done, to see things clearly. This is obviously not always the case. Hazlitt is disgusted by slavery, not because he uses his Reason, and builds a case for why it is wrong, backed up with Bible passages and philosophical quotes. He is disgusted by slavery because he can put himself into the Black man’s shoes and feel the horror that the Black man must feel. Hazlitt proposes it is through our imagination that we know, in our guts, what is right and wrong. In this, he is a true Romantic.
From ‘Reason and Imagination’:
Those evils that inflame the imagination and make the heart sick, ought not to leave the head cool.
One of his most famous essays is called “On the Pleasure of Hating”.
Hazlitt’s essay on is about how everything good in this life eventually goes sour (friendships deteriorate, we dislike books we once adored, etc.), and he wonders why. Why can’t things STAY good? (Remember the Rousseau influence. Hazlitt really believed people were inherently good. “On the Pleasure of Hating” could be seen as an admission of the failure of his philosophy.) He comes to the conclusion that hatred exists because humanity finds great pleasure in “hating” things, and the pleasure in hating is greater than the pleasure in pleasure. This is why things are the way they are. This is one of the most sour things he ever wrote. He clearly wrote from his own personal experience, which included a disastrous first marriage, passionate male friendships eventually destroyed. By the time he wrote the essay on hating, his friend group had dissolved and he was sidelined, with diminished publishing opportunities.
Humanity, according to Hazlitt, clearly preferred being angry and hateful. Otherwise we would stop.
The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others. What have the different sects, creeds, doctrines in religion been but so many pretexts set up for men to wrangle, to quarrel, to tear one another in pieces about, like a target as a mark to shoot at? Does any one suppose that the love of country in an Englishman implies any friendly feeling or disposition to serve another bearing the same name? No, it means only hatred to the French or the inhabitants of any other country that we happen to be at war with for the time. Does the love of virtue denote any wish to discover or amend our own faults? No, but it atones for an obstinate adherence to our own vices by the most virulent intolerance to human frailties. This principle is of a most universal application. It extends to good as well as evil: if it makes us hate folly, it makes us no less dissatisfied with distinguished merit. If it inclines us to resent the wrongs of others, it impels us to be as impatient of their prosperity. We revenge injuries: we repay benefits with ingratitude. Even our strongest partialities and likings soon take this turn. “That which was luscious as locusts, anon becomes bitter as coloquintida;” and love and friendship melt in their own fires. We hate old friends: we hate old books: we hate old opinions; and at last we come to hate ourselves.
I love him.
QUOTES:
Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth, June 26, 1806:
“William Hazlitt owned that he could not bear young girls; they drove him mad. So I took him home to my old nurse, where he recovered perfect tranquility.”
William Hazlitt:
“Coleridge has told me that he himself liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel-walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his voice met with no collateral interruption.”
William Hazlitt on Wordsworth’s swing away from his radical youth:
Liberty (the philosopher’s and the poet’s bride) had fallen a victim, meanwhile, to the murderous practices of the hag, Legitimacy. Proscribed by court-hierlings, too romantic for the herd of vulgar politicians, our enthusiast stood at bay, and at last turned on the pivot of a subtle casuistry to the unclean side: but his discursive reason would not let him trammel himself into a poet-laureate or stamp-distributor, and he stopped, ere he had quite passed that well-known ‘bourne from which no traveller returns’ – and so has sunk into torpid, uneasy repose, tantalised by useless resources, haunted by vain imaginings, his lips idly moving, but his heart for ever still, or, as the shattered chords vibrate of themselves, making melancholy music to the ear of memory!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge on William Hazlitt, letter to a friend, September 16, 1803:
His manners are 99 in a 100 singularly repulsive.
William Hazlitt, on going to hear Coleridge speak in 1798:
A poet and a philosopher getting up into a Unitarian pulpit to preach the Gospel was a romance in these degenerate days, a sort of revival of the primitive spirit of Christianity, which was not to be resisted … When I got there, the organ was playing the 100th psalm, and, when it was done, Mr Coleridge rose and gave out his text. ‘And he went up into the mountain to pray HIMSELF, ALONE.’ As he gave out his text, his voice ‘rose like a steam of rich distilled perfumes,’ and when he came to the last two words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe. The preacher then launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind … There was to me a strange wilderness in his aspect, a dusky obscurity, and I thought him pitted with the smallpox. His forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with large projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a sea with darkened lustre … His mouth was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin good-humoured and round; but his nose, the rudder of his face, the index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing — like what he has done.
William Hazlitt on Coleridge:
His mind was clothed with wings.
William Hazlitt on Coleridge:
If Mr Coleridge had not been the most impressive talker of his age, he would probably have been the finest writer; but he lays down his pen to make sure of an auditor, and mortgages the admiration of posterity for the stare of an idler.
William Hazlitt on the Lake Poets:
But the poets, the creatures of sympathy, could not stand the frowns both of king and people. They did not like to be shut out when places and pensions, when the critic’s praises, and the laurel-wreath were about to be distributed. They did not stomach being sent to Coventry, and Mr Coleridge sounded a retreat for them by the help of casuistry, and a musical voice.
William Hazlitt on Coleridge:
He busied himself for a year or two with vibrations and vibratiuncles and the great law of association that binds all things in its mystic chain, and the doctrine of Necessity (the mild teacher of Charity) and the Millenium, anticipative of a life to come – and he plunged deep into the controversy of Matter and Spirit, and, as an escape from Dr Priestley’s Materialism, where he felt himself imprisoned by the logician’s spell, like Ariel in the cloven pine-tree, he became suddenly enamoured of Bishop Berkeley’s fairy-world, and used in all companies to build the universe, like a brave poetical fiction, of fine words … But poetry redeemed him from this spectral philosophy, and he bathed his heart in beauty. Alas! ‘Frailty, thy name is Genius!’ –What is become of all this mighty heap of hope, of thought, of learning, and humanity? It has ended in swallowing doses of oblivion and in writing paragraphs in the Courier. — Such, and so little is the mind of man!
William Hazlitt on Coleridge:
All that he has done of moment, he had done twenty years ago: since then he may be said to have lived on the sound of his own voice.
William Hazlitt on Byron’s “Don Juan”:
A mind preying upon itself.
William Hazlitt on Lord Byron:
He hangs the cloud, the film of his existence over all outward things–sits in the centre of his thoughts, and enjoys dark night, bright day, the glitter and the gloom “in cell monastic”–we see the mournful pall, the crucifix, the death’s heads, the faded chaplet of flowers, the gleaming tapers, the agonized growl of genius, the wasted form of beauty–but we are still imprisoned in a dungeon, a curtain intercepts our view, we do not breathe freely the air of nature or of our own thoughts.
William Hazlitt’s first impressions of William Wordsworth:
He was gaunt and Don Quixote-like. He was quaintly dressed (according to the costume of that unconstrained period) in a brown fustian jacket and striped pantaloons. There was something of a roll, a lounge in his gait, not unlike his own Peter Bell. There was a severe, worn presence of thought about his temples, a fire in the eye (as if he saw something in objects more than the outward appearance), an intense high narrow forehead, a Roman nose, cheeks furrowed by strong purpose and feeling, and a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth, a good deal at variance with the solemn, stately expression of the rest of his face… He sat down and talked very naturally and freely, with a mixture of clear gushing accents in his voice, a deep guttural intonation, and a strong tincture of the northern burr, like the crust on wine.
William Hazlitt on Wordsworth:
His poetry is founded on setting up an opposition (and pushing it to the utmost length) between the natural and the artificial, between the spirit of humanity, and the spirit of fashion and of the world … The political changes of the day were the model on which he formed and conducted his poetical experiments … His Muse is a levelling one.
William Hazlitt, who knew Wordsworth, wrote of going to visit and finding WW not at home:
Wordsworth himself was from home, but his sister kept house, and set before us a frugal repast; and we had free access to her brother’s poems, the Lyrical Ballads, which were still in manuscript, or in the form of Syballine Leaves. I dipped into a few of these with great satisfaction, and with the faith of a novice. I slept that night in an old room with blue hangings, and covered with the round-faced family-portraits of the age of George I, and II, and from the wooded declivity of the adjoining park that overlooked my window, at the dawn of day, could ‘–hear the loud stag speak.’
William Hazlitt:
Mr. Wordsworth’s mind is obtuse, except as it is the organ and the receptacle of accumulated feelings; it is not analytic, but synthetic; it is reflecting, rather than theoretical. The personages, for the most part, were low, the fare rustic, the plan raised expectations which were not fulfilled, and the effect was like being ushered into a stately hall and invited to sit down to a splendid banquet in the company of clowns, and with nothing but successive courses of apple-dumplings served up. It was not even toujours perdrix!
